6,729 research outputs found

    An American Knightmare: Joker, Fandom, and Malicious Movie Meaning-Making

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    This monograph concerns the long-standing communication problem of how individuals can identify and resist the influence of unethical public speakers. Scholarship on the issue of what Socrates & Plato called the “Evil Lover” – i.e., the ill-intended rhetor – began with the Greek philosophers, but has carried into [post]Modern anxieties. For instance, the study of Nazi propaganda machines, and the rhetoric of Hitler himself, rejuvenated interest in the study of speech and communication in the U.S. and Europe. Whereas unscrupulous sophists used lectures and legal forums, and Hitler used a microphone, contemporary Evil Lovers primarily draw on new, internet-related tools to share their malicious influence. These new tools of influence are both more far-reaching and more subtle than the traditional practices of listening to a designated speaker appearing at an overtly political event. Rhetorician Ashley Hinck has recently noted the ways that popular culture – communication about texts which are commonly accessible and shared – are now significant sites through which citizens learn moral and political values. Accordingly, the talk of internet influencers who interpret popular texts for other fans has the potential to constitute strong persuasive power regarding ethics and civic responsibility. The present work identifies and responds to a particular case example of popular culture text that has been recently, and frequently, leveraged in moral and civic discourses: Todd Phillips’ Joker. Specifically, this study takes a hermeneutic approach to understanding responses, especially those explicitly invoking political ideology, to Joker as a method of examining civic meaning-making. A special emphasis is placed on the online film criticisms of Joker from white nationalist movie fans, who clearly exemplify ways that media responses can be leveraged by unethical speakers (i.e., Evil Lovers) and subtly diffused. The study conveys that these racist movie fans can embed values related to “trolling,” incelism, and xenophobia into otherwise seemingly innocuous talk about film. While the sharing of such speech does not immediately mean its positive reception, this kind of communication yet constitutes a new and understudied attack on democratic values such as justice and equity. The case of white nationalist movie fan film criticism therefore reflects a particular brand of communicative strategy for contemporary Evil Lovers in communicating unethical messages under the covert guise of mundane movie talk

    Comparative Multiple Case Study into the Teaching of Problem-Solving Competence in Lebanese Middle Schools

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    This multiple case study investigates how problem-solving competence is integrated into teaching practices in private schools in Lebanon. Its purpose is to compare instructional approaches to problem-solving across three different programs: the American (Common Core State Standards and New Generation Science Standards), French (Socle Commun de Connaissances, de Compétences et de Culture), and Lebanese with a focus on middle school (grades 7, 8, and 9). The project was conducted in nine schools equally distributed among three categories based on the programs they offered: category 1 schools offered the Lebanese program, category 2 the French and Lebanese programs, and category 3 the American and Lebanese programs. Each school was treated as a separate case. Structured observation data were collected using observation logs that focused on lesson objectives and specific cognitive problem-solving processes. The two logs were created based on a document review of the requirements for the three programs. Structured observations were followed by semi-structured interviews that were conducted to explore teachers' beliefs and understandings of problem-solving competence. The comparative analysis of within-category structured observations revealed an instruction ranging from teacher-led practices, particularly in category 1 schools, to more student-centered approaches in categories 2 and 3. The cross-category analysis showed a reliance on cognitive processes primarily promoting exploration, understanding, and demonstrating understanding, with less emphasis on planning and executing, monitoring and reflecting, thus uncovering a weakness in addressing these processes. The findings of the post-observation semi-structured interviews disclosed a range of definitions of problem-solving competence prevalent amongst teachers with clear divergences across the three school categories. This research is unique in that it compares problem-solving teaching approaches across three different programs and explores underlying teachers' beliefs and understandings of problem-solving competence in the Lebanese context. It is hoped that this project will inform curriculum developers about future directions and much-anticipated reforms of the Lebanese program and practitioners about areas that need to be addressed to further improve the teaching of problem-solving competence

    Endogenous measures for contextualising large-scale social phenomena: a corpus-based method for mediated public discourse

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    This work presents an interdisciplinary methodology for developing endogenous measures of group membership through analysis of pervasive linguistic patterns in public discourse. Focusing on political discourse, this work critiques the conventional approach to the study of political participation, which is premised on decontextualised, exogenous measures to characterise groups. Considering the theoretical and empirical weaknesses of decontextualised approaches to large-scale social phenomena, this work suggests that contextualisation using endogenous measures might provide a complementary perspective to mitigate such weaknesses. This work develops a sociomaterial perspective on political participation in mediated discourse as affiliatory action performed through language. While the affiliatory function of language is often performed consciously (such as statements of identity), this work is concerned with unconscious features (such as patterns in lexis and grammar). This work argues that pervasive patterns in such features that emerge through socialisation are resistant to change and manipulation, and thus might serve as endogenous measures of sociopolitical contexts, and thus of groups. In terms of method, the work takes a corpus-based approach to the analysis of data from the Twitter messaging service whereby patterns in users’ speech are examined statistically in order to trace potential community membership. The method is applied in the US state of Michigan during the second half of 2018—6 November having been the date of midterm (i.e. non-Presidential) elections in the United States. The corpus is assembled from the original posts of 5,889 users, who are nominally geolocalised to 417 municipalities. These users are clustered according to pervasive language features. Comparing the linguistic clusters according to the municipalities they represent finds that there are regular sociodemographic differentials across clusters. This is understood as an indication of social structure, suggesting that endogenous measures derived from pervasive patterns in language may indeed offer a complementary, contextualised perspective on large-scale social phenomena

    A Design Science Research Approach to Smart and Collaborative Urban Supply Networks

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    Urban supply networks are facing increasing demands and challenges and thus constitute a relevant field for research and practical development. Supply chain management holds enormous potential and relevance for society and everyday life as the flow of goods and information are important economic functions. Being a heterogeneous field, the literature base of supply chain management research is difficult to manage and navigate. Disruptive digital technologies and the implementation of cross-network information analysis and sharing drive the need for new organisational and technological approaches. Practical issues are manifold and include mega trends such as digital transformation, urbanisation, and environmental awareness. A promising approach to solving these problems is the realisation of smart and collaborative supply networks. The growth of artificial intelligence applications in recent years has led to a wide range of applications in a variety of domains. However, the potential of artificial intelligence utilisation in supply chain management has not yet been fully exploited. Similarly, value creation increasingly takes place in networked value creation cycles that have become continuously more collaborative, complex, and dynamic as interactions in business processes involving information technologies have become more intense. Following a design science research approach this cumulative thesis comprises the development and discussion of four artefacts for the analysis and advancement of smart and collaborative urban supply networks. This thesis aims to highlight the potential of artificial intelligence-based supply networks, to advance data-driven inter-organisational collaboration, and to improve last mile supply network sustainability. Based on thorough machine learning and systematic literature reviews, reference and system dynamics modelling, simulation, and qualitative empirical research, the artefacts provide a valuable contribution to research and practice

    Science and corporeal religion: a feminist materialist reconsideration of gender/sex diversity in religiosity

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    This dissertation develops a feminist materialist interpretation of the role the neuroendocrine system plays in the development of gender/sex differences in religion. Data emerging from psychology, sociology, and cognitive science have continually indicated that women are more religious than men, in various senses of those contested terms, but the factors contributing to these findings are little understood and disciplinary perspectives are often unhelpfully siloed. Previous scholarship has tended to highlight socio-cultural factors while ignoring biological factors or to focus on biological factors while relying on problematic and unsubstantiated gender stereotypes. Addressing gender/sex difference is vital for understanding religion and how we study it. This dissertation interprets this difference by means of a multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological approach. This approach builds upon insights from the cognitive and evolutionary science of religion, affect theory and affective neuroscience, and social neuroendocrinology, and it is rooted in the foundational insights of feminist materialism, including that cultural and micro-sociological forces are inseparable from biological materiality. The dissertation shows how a better way of understanding gender/sex differences in religion emerges through focusing on the co-construction of biological materiality and cultural meanings. This includes deploying a gene-culture co-evolutionary explanation of ultrasociality and an understanding of the biology of performativity to argue that religious behavior and temperaments emerge from the enactment and hormonal underpinnings of six affective adaptive desires: the desires for (1) bonding and attachment, (2) communal mythos, (3) deliverance from suffering, (4) purpose, (5) understanding, and (6) reliable leadership. By hypothesizing the patterns of hormonal release and activation associated with ritualized affects—primarily considering oxytocin, testosterone, vasopressin, estrogen, dopamine, and serotonin—the dissertation theorizes four dimensions of religious temperament: (1) nurturant religiosity, (2) ecstatic religiosity, (3) protective/hierarchical religiosity, and (4) antagonistic religiosity. This dissertation conceptualizes hormones as chemical messengers that enable the diversity emerging from the imbrication of physical materiality and socio-cultural forces. In doing so, it demonstrates how hormonal aspects of gender/sex and culturally constructed aspects of gender/sex are always already intertwined in their influence on religiosity. This theoretical framework sheds light on both the diversity and the noticeable patterns observed in gender/sex differences in religious behaviors and affects. This problematizes the terms of the “women are more religious than men” while putting in place a more adequate framework for interpreting the variety of ways it appears in human lives

    A Transcendent View of Things: The Persistence of Metaphysics in Modern German Lyric Poetry, 1771–1908

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    This dissertation explores the lyric poetry of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Eduard Mörike, and Rainer Maria Rilke, and it contends that these modern poets retain, albeit uneasily, a view of things as symbols of the transcendent divine. It thus disputes the secularization theory of post-Enlightenment aesthetics. This study specifically challenges the view of symbolism as mere metaphor—an image constructed of arbitrary signs (Nietzsche)—by showing how the epiphanies of modern lyric poetry remain grounded in the metaphysics of analogia, even where (as in Mörike) the writer seems to have left such entanglements behind. The modern poet’s desire to unveil a significant reality beyond subjective impression reveals that symbolic vision necessarily unfolds within the difference between the visible world and the transcendent divine. If signification entails likeness, yet lyric poetry always signifies in and through difference, then a constitutive analogy—that is, the simultaneity of likeness and even greater difference—emerges from within the dynamism of the lyric image itself. Part 1 begins by describing the symbolic image in Goethe’s lyric poetry to recover his view of things as expressing the “holy open mystery” of the cosmos. I show how his symbolism overcomes Enlightenment naturalism by depicting the antecedent order of analogia. Drawing primarily on Neoplatonic metaphysics, the Goethean symbol reveals the partial yet indisputable relatedness of things to the transcendent. Turning to Mörike, part 2 charts his transition to an equivocal understanding of symbol that would sever the image from its numinous source of significance by confining the image to the scope of the poet’s own gaze. Yet Mörike’s poetry also evinces a counter-veiling tendency to de-subjectivize the image, thus yielding a vision of things as they are prior to epistemic concerns, sentiment, and subjective preference. Part 3 contends that Rilke’s thing-poetry evinces a similar tendency to neutralize modernity’s biases against metaphysics. For his poetry recovers an apophatic understanding of symbolism as grounded in analogia that draws on Dionysian theology. His poems thus focus our attention on the thing’s unfathomable capacity for initiating a vision of the divine, of which the thing itself is a partial and fleeting manifestation.Doctor of Philosoph

    Corporate social responsibility rhetoric and legitimacy in Indonesian Islamic banking

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    The future of the Indonesian Islamic bank industry is promising; however, its market share is still small. Islamic banks should strive to be accepted by stakeholders to acquire organizational legitimacy. Therefore, the impact of banks' activities on society's welfare is a significant concern. To get attention, comprehension, and conviction from stakeholders, banks should communicate their corporate social responsibilities (CSR) activities to stakeholders. Consequently, CSR rhetoric is essential. Previous studies have been conducted in the Western setting, none in the Indonesian Islamic banking context. The primary question of this research is how CSR rhetoric can be used to achieve legitimacy in the Indonesian Islamic banking context. The study uses an Islamic perspective and employs qualitative case study. This was done by investigating the two biggest Indonesian Islamic banks, Bank Syariah Mandiri and Bank Muamalat Indonesia. Data collection was conducted by interviewing six managers in charge of this issue and by collecting documents. Data analysis was carried out by categorizing the codes that emerge from interview transcription and written documents by employing Atlas.ti 7 application. Subsequently, categories and sub-categories are logically connected to make a plausible explanation. To enhance trustworthiness, this study employs purposive sampling, triangulation, and peer review. As a result, this study (1) reveals the concept of Shariah legitimacy of the Indonesian Islamic bank, (2) offers a new Islamic CSR definition, and (3) explains how rhetoric CSR can enhance Shariah legitimacy. This study contributes to the study of CSR rhetoric. Theoretically, it introduces the term Shariah legitimacy and provides a new definition of Islamic CSR. Practically, it offers CSR rhetoric strategies to achieve Shariah legitimacy. Through these strategies, Islamic banks can strengthen their existence and expand their market share. Methodologically, unlike previous studies, it uses interpretivism paradigm. For future research, this study can be expanded to other Islamic banks, replicated to different contexts, involve more cases to gain more insights, expanded further to develop quantitative evaluation criteria, and extended by investigating stakeholders' perspectives

    Dispositiv-Erkundungen | Exploring Dispositifs

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    Will man die Linien eines Dispositivs entwirren, so muss man in jedem Fall eine Karte anfertigen, man muss kartographieren, unbekannte LĂ€nder ausmessen - eben das, was er [Foucault] als 'Arbeit im GelĂ€nde' bezeichnet hat", formulierte Gilles Deleuze 1988. Mit der vorliegenden Publikation soll ein kartographierendes Aus- und Vermessen eines komplexen, verzweigten, unĂŒbersichtlichen, zum Teil auch uneinsichtigen und ĂŒbercodierten GelĂ€ndes geleistet werden. Als Effekt könn(t)en fortgesetzte KlĂ€rungen von Begriffen, Konzepten und Operationsweisen dessen stattfinden, was als Kunst bezeichnet wird. 18 Autor*innen nehmen ihre Dispositiv-Erkundungen vor, so dass eine Anthologie von ausgewĂ€hlten Stimmen entsteht. Die Autor*innen und ihre Texte erkunden multiperspektivisch, disparat, forensisch und komplexierend, in verschiedenen Sprachen, in ihren Entstehungskontexten und Entstehungszeiten, mit ihren stilistischen Mitteln und in einigen FĂ€llen eng mit ihren frĂŒheren PublikationszusammenhĂ€ngen verbunden. Sie sind damit im besten Fall in der Lage, je eigene DenkrĂ€ume aufzufalten, die ermöglichen, Einzelbestandteile der beschriebenen oder analysierten Dispositive -- und dabei kann es sich offenbar um Einzeloperationen, Prozesse, Prozeduren, Blicke, LĂŒcken, Aufspaltungen, Implikationen, Vorbedingungen etc. handeln -- zu unterscheiden und in einem nĂ€chsten Schritt strategische Formationen dieser heterogenen Ensembles zu diagnostizieren. DarĂŒber hinaus ermöglichen die zusammengestellten Texte, unterschiedliche Varianten, Ausgangs-, Ansatz- und Schwerpunkte wie auch Stile von Dispositiv-Erkundungen nachvollziehen zu können. As Gilles Deleuze has argued in 1988, “[u]ntangling these lines within a social apparatus [dispositif] is, in each case, like drawing up a map, doing cartography, surveying unknown landscapes, and this is what he [Foucault] calls ‘working on the ground.’” This publication intends to provide a cartographic mapping of a complex, multi-branched, often obscure, sometimes inaccessible and overly encoded terrain. Such a mapping could and can lead to a further clarification of terms, concepts and modes of operation of that which is called art. This volume comprises 18 authors whose explorations of the dispositif have generated an anthology of select, distinct voices. Their texts are marked by multiple perspectives, they are disparate, forensic and complex, they are written in different languages, stem from different contexts and points in time, are endowed with different styles and, in some cases, also stand in close relationship with other, earlier publication contexts. This means that they are ideally positioned to unfold diverse spaces of thought, allowing them to differentiate between individual components of the dispositifs they discuss or dissect -- this may include individual operations, processes, procedures, glances, lacunae, splits, implications, preconditions, et cetera -- and allowing them, in a next step, to diagnose the strategic formations such heterogeneous ensembles might take. Beyond that, the texts assembled here allow us to discern the different variations, starting points, approaches and emphases as well as different styles of dispositif exploration. BeitrĂ€ge von / Contributions by: Elke Bippus, Luis Camnitzer, Ibou Coulibaly Diop, Thomas Oberender, Andrea Fraser, erwin GeheimRat, Siri Hustvedt, Silvia Jonas, Birte Kleine-Benne, Michael Lingner, Lucy Lippard, Adelheid Mers, Brian O’Doherty, Julia Pelta Feldman, Adrian Piper, Stefan Römer, Thorsten Schneider, Ruth Sonderegge

    Early Childhood Science Education: Research Trends in Learning and Teaching

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    This volume consists of a collection of articles that touch on very different research aspects within a broad scientific field known in recent years as Early Childhood Science Education. The field has gradually emerged from the interaction between three distinct scientific areas of theory and research: Early Childhood Education, Psychology, which is oriented towards the study of learning, and Science Education. At the center of the progress in this field are efforts to initiate children aged 4-8 years in the Physical and Biological Sciences. A wide range of research themes have developed around this main axis: children's mental representations of phenomena of the natural world and scientific concepts, the study of the implementation and effectiveness of specific teaching activities related to curricula or activities focusing on the specific characteristics of teaching processes such as reasoning, explanation, communication, interaction or argumentation, the issue of teachers' relevance to the teaching of science, the use of pecialized teaching materials, the emergence of the issue of scientific skills, the highly contemporary issue of the differentiation and inclusion of children in the world of science, important socio-scientific issues, the role of family-related factors etc. Within this context, this collective book aims to reflect contemporary research trends in the field of Early Childhood Science Education
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