A lexico-semantic analysis of EkeGusii circumcision social varieties

The study is based on the lexical choices in the social context of EkeGusii circumcision and the meaning of the various lexical items used in the social context of circumcision and gender differentiation in the choice of the lexicon of EkeGusii circumcision. This special variety is also used within EkeGusii standard variety but when used in the context of circumcision, the meaning of the lexical items is understood based on context. It is believed that language embodies traditional values and that these values are socially conditioned. This study considers the social conditioning of the circumcision social varieties. Linguistic traditional values of EkeGusii language are reflected in, among others, gender differentiation in the choice of the lexicon in the social context of circumcision. The study was based on two theories; the social theory and contrastive lexico-semantic theory. Social theory was useful in analyzing language in society and what language means to its users while contrastive lexico-semantic theory was useful in analyzing EkeGusii culture-specific meaning which does not translate readily to English. Participatory observation, interview schedules, informers, questionnaires and introspection were used to collect data. Data was analyzed qualitatively in view of the choice of the lexicon within language variation. Findings showed that the sound plays an important role in postulating meaning of EkeGusii Circumcision Social Varieties (ECSV) through vowel lengthening. The lexicon of ECSV comprises nouns and verbs and that this lexicon is a style as well as register of EkeGusii. Gender differentiation in the language is a case of socialization rather than biological. Finally, meaning relations established by the lexicon of ECSV include synonymy, hyponymy, polysemy as well as antonymy. It is recommended in this study that teachers should be trained on Sociolinguistics, carry out classroom research to identify the learners’ sociolinguistic culture and integrate an individual learner with others in the same level especially since the school has taken the role of socialization of an individual.African LanguagesM.A. (African languages

Peer Language Use and Criminal Decision-Making: An Experimental Study Testing Framing Effects of Peer Messages

Criminal decision-making tends to occur in social contexts. There is evidence that the decision to commit a crime is often preceded by verbal communication, however, relatively little is known about the mechanisms through which conversations affect offending decisions. In this study, we applied rational choice theory, prospect theory, and need to belong theory to investigate the role of peer language use on offending decisions. We tested the hypothesis that peer messages framed as social gains and social losses would increase the likelihood and perceived worth of engaging in criminal activity. Moreover, based on prospect theory’s loss aversion principle, we hypothesized that this increase would be greater for peer messages framed as social losses. We recruited 313 North American young adults (ages 18-24) to participate in an online randomized experiment. We found that peer verbal prompts framed as social gains and social losses increased the likelihood of stealing. Although this increase was not larger for social loss framed messages, our results showed that social loss aversion, or the fear of losing belonging, significantly predicted all offending outcomes. Moreover, the effects of social loss framing on likelihood and perceived worth of stealing were significantly mediated by fear of losing acceptance. This study substantiates that peer language use plays a significant role in offending decisions and provides support for the social loss aversion principle. Implications and directions for future research are discussed

Why do women more often intend to study abroad than men?

In many Western countries, women are more likely to study abroad than men. At present, there is a lack of theory-guided empirical studies searching explanations for this pattern. We address this research gap by examining gender differences in study abroad intent among first-semester students in Germany. To derive a comprehensive theoretical framework, we draw on social role theory of sex differences, cognitive development theory, new home economics and statistical discrimination theory. Using data from the nationally representative 2010 DZHW School Leavers Survey, we test our hypotheses by estimating logistic regressions and non-linear effect decompositions. We find that women more often intend to study abroad primarily because of the gender-specific interest profiles they develop throughout their early life course: Related to their subject choice at school, women tend to acquire competences (e.g., language skills) that ease later stays abroad. To some extent, women’s better educational performance during school also explains their better chances to study abroad. Once in higher education, women tend to choose fields of study in which studying abroad is considered more valuable for competence acquisition. Losing time due to studying abroad is less of an obstacle for women but - against theoretical expectations - not because of a lower labour market orientation. Finally, the expectation to interrupt the professional career for taking care of the family deters women - especially those from a low social background - from studying abroad, but not men. We do not find evidence that women understand studying abroad as a strategy to counteract this anticipated discrimination. Overall, our results underscore the particular importance of social role and cognitive development theory for explaining gender differences in the spatial mobility of students

Nelson Goodman’s general theory of symbols: can it help characterise some educational concerns?

Nelson Goodman was active between 1941 and the end of the century. From 1968 he was Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. He died in 1998 at the age of 92 having made contributions in the field of logic and analytical philosophy. His unremitting nominalism led to a radical constructivist or irrealist position. He was a constructivist not only in the sense of acknowledging the constitutive nature of our classifications of things, ultimately amounting to versions of the world, but also in the way that, following Carnap, he saw it as part of the responsibility of philosophy to construct robust and consistent systems of statements that serve as correctives to the logical disarray of natural language. He also took to its logical conclusions another of Carnap’s principles namely that the truth of a statement is dependent on a particular frame of reference... In this paper I consider how Goodman's analysis of the forms of reference might fruitfully be applied to some educational concerns. He identifies two main species of reference, denotation and exemplification, and two main sub-species, representation and expression. Symbols may be labels or samples. I first present his theory of notation and then the operation of labels and samples in turn and consider how we might use them to describe teaching and learning. I further apply them to explain the role that experience plays in a teacher’s professional development and how they might help to characterise the personal dimension of teaching. I then present his theory of metaphor and expression and finally suggest ways in which these and his other concepts may help theorise parental choice of school as part of a re-conceptualised theory of social practice

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Courtroom Proceedings in Nigeria

Critical Discourse Analysis is a theory that examines and analyzes power asymmetry in discourse. It primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. This paper applied this theory to legal discourse with the aim of exposing how the question-answer sequences of a direct and cross examination, turn-taking, objections, and other legal proceedings create unequal relationship among participants. It draws its motivation from the enormous works on legal discourse in western world that have brought radical changes in their justice system. The data of the study are audio recordings and personal observations of courtroom interactions; Supreme Court Quarterly Report 1990, from the High Court Library. From the data analysis, it was discovered that, evidentiary rules empower those who assume the examiner’s role by placing them in control of topic choice and direction, and giving them the means to constrain the contributions of others. It was also learned that the Judge wields the ultimate power and dominates in the court. Witnesses are powerless participants in legal discourse and are subjected to various forms of control by examiners. The study concluded that there is an unequivocally legitimized inequality in the courtroom which manifests through language and that language is the most powerful natural weapon used to effectuate justice in societies.Key Words: Critical discourse analysis, courtroom, power, inequality, lawyers and Judge

Selection of Antenatal and Childbirth Care in Rejang Ethnic Group Based on Rational Choice Perspective

The focus of this research is the rationality of Rejang Ethnic community in the Pagar Jati subdistrict in Bengkulu Tengah Distric, Bengkulu Province in choosing antenatal care and birth attendants services according to the perspective of Coleman’s rational choice theory. The study used qualitative methods with ethnographic approach. The data was collected by participant-observation technique through direct observation and in-depth interview to obtain data that cannot be observed with participant-observation. In addition, to complete the data, documentation was done by using the camera. The data was analyzed inductively with an interactive model based on qualitative interpretation with emic approach. The study found that people still put TBAs (Traditional Birth Attendants) services for antenatal care and delivery assistance. The role of TBAs cannot be replaced completely by medical midwife personnel. Coleman’s rational choice theory says that the actor seeks to reduce costs and maximize the purpose. The endeavor is also determined by the resources and social institution, preferences and external conditions. The effort to take into account the costs in decision making raised by Coleman has been proven by the fact that more actors choose TBAs for antenatal care and childbirth assistance. However, the cost is not the major consideration, as people all have health insurance cards for the poor that can be used to obtain medical services. The rationality of the society considers TBAs to be the first choice because; trust in the TBAs are still very high, the type of service received more and more satisfying, lower costs, payment terms are not specified, the service time is not limited and can be adjusted in accordance with the wishes of pregnant women, examination and help always start with a prayer or mantra, comfort in speech in the local language, and the strong relational and kinship between TBAs and the community. While most of these considerations are not owned by the medical officers (midwives and village midwives). Resources, social institution, preferences and external conditions are necessary for the actors and taken into consideration in determining the service selection. While, the rational action of the community belongs to value oriented- rational action. Keywords: Traditional Birth Attendant, Medical Officer, Resource, Social Institutions,  Preferences, external conditions, Rational Choice

What’s behind School Choice? Middle-Class Parents in France, Race, and Decisions over Public Middle Schools

This dissertation addresses the role of race in school choice among French middle-class parents. It finds that institutional policies and individual practices combine to foster school segregation, which among immigrants may only be seen as racism. This qualitative study involves semi-structured interviews of 29 parents at three typical schools in the Parisian suburbs where a confluence of geographic and policy factors grants school choice impetus despite official restrictions. In building on a model from Ball (2003), the parents fall into four qualitative types in actions on school choice. Conducted amid a period of terrorist, political, and economic incidents in 2016 and 2017, the study also inquired on the effects of global risk, drawing on an alternative theory of Beck (1992; 2002). Little in parental accounts indicate that class anxiety and risk are salient in school choice, however. The racial inquiry is framed by Omi and Winant (2015), Bonilla-Silva (2013), and Lamont and Molnár (2002). The study finds that ideology and conventions weigh heavily on how race is understood. Though parents see commonalities between the United States and France on segregation, they explain it as a social class effect, keeping with Marxian stratification. These accounts correspond more with Lamont and Molnár than with the critical theories of Bonilla-Silva and Omi and Winant. Nevertheless, by paying attention to racial ideas, language, and outcomes, as Bonilla-Silva urges, what emerges from parental accounts is a “how you see it, how you don’t” view of race rather than a “now you see it, now you don’t” view as in the United States. Moreover, instead of blaming the victim, the parents point to social and economic conditions, not personal failure. The model of school choice and race that emerges shows that race becomes obscured in the school choice process. The racial coin has two faces. On one face are the parents acting in the “best” interests of society and children. On the other face are the acted-upon, immigrants with their own racial scripts. On that face is what to immigrants may be readily understood from institutional policies and individual practices as racism

Poverty Knowledge, Coercion, and Social Rights: A Discourse Ethical Contribution to Social Epistemology

In today’s America the persistence of crushing poverty in the midst of staggering affluence no longer incites the righteous jeremiads it once did. Resigned acceptance of this paradox is fueled by a sense that poverty lies beyond the moral and technical scope of government remediation. The failure of experts to reach agreement on the causes of poverty merely exacerbates our despair. Are the causes internal to the poor – reflecting their more or less voluntary choices? Or do they emanate from structures beyond their control (but perhaps amenable to government remediation)? If both of these explanations are true (as I believe they are), poverty experts will need to shift their focus to a hitherto under-theorized concept: coercion. I defend this claim by appealing to distinct areas of philosophical inquiry: social epistemology and moral theory. Poverty knowledge is directly related to both of these inquiries. The aim of poverty knowledge is clearly moral: to reduce suffering and to empower the weak. While the former aim is grounded in utilitarian thinking, the latter aim is grounded in the social contractarian insight that poverty is unjustly coercive, imposing excessive limits on the opportunities and choices of the poor that render them vulnerable to domination by others. Equally obvious is the social nature of poverty knowledge. All knowledge depends on the reliable testimony of others. Poverty knowledge not only ostensibly offers us the most reliable, scientific beliefs about the causes and effects of poverty, thereby determining how we morally judge the poor and their poverty, but it reciprocally bases its understanding of poverty on what the poor themselves have to say about it. What unites both social epistemology and moral theory – at least the social contract variants I will be examining here – is concern about the limits and possibilities of rational choice. As poverty knowledge came of age in the fifties and sixties, it absorbed the language of rational choice prevalent in economics, especially the Keynesian economics whose moral underpinnings can be found in Rawlsian social contract theory. Echoing a different economic theory supported by a different, more libertarian, brand of social contract theory, poverty expertise in the eighties continued to use an abstract model of rational choice. I submit that, in both early and later epochs of poverty expertise, reliance on rational choice reasoning prevented poverty experts from appreciating the coercive impact of poverty on the poor. Social epistemology explains this failure by demonstrating the poverty of rational choice thinking and its mistaken reliance on inflated commonsense expectations about the capacity of individuals to calculate their long-term interests, free from the distortions of social bias. Social epistemology not only exhibits the dangers of not relying on expert testimony, but it also exhibits the dangers of relying on an unreliable source of expert testimony that has removed itself from its human subject matter. In order for poverty experts to become more reliable educators about poverty’s coercive impact on the poor they must return to their discipline’s social epistemological roots. Only a more descriptive and explanatory sociology can narrate a comprehensive story about how the lived experience of poverty relates to the larger social system. The social contractarian model best suited to underwriting this kind of poverty knowledge, I submit, is the discourse theoretic model that has been championed by Jürgen Habermas. When applied as a pedagogical method of dialog and not as a social contractarian model of rational normative consent, discourse theory highlights the unique epistemological advantages of empathetic understanding that are so essential to dispelling stereotypes about the poor. Dispelling these stereotypes is the first step toward respecting the poor as free agents who are nonetheless forced to make suboptimal choices. My defense of these claims proceeds as follows: Part One argues that poverty expertise rightly deserves the opprobrium critics have heaped on it. The charge – leveled by progressives and conservatives alike - that such expertise is ideological (unscientific) is true to the extent that poverty knowledge has all-too-easily accommodated the political aims of the agency that has funded it: the federal government. The shift from the war on poverty to the war on the poor – and the resulting shift from blaming poverty on economic structures to blaming it on the culture of poverty – would not have been possible without an increased emphasis on data gathering aimed at measuring poverty rather than describing it. Part Two assesses the consequences of turning away from qualitative research to statistical analysis: the coercive nature of poverty becomes invisible beneath the surface of aggregate individual choices. The failure to grasp how voluntary choices, ostensibly based on rational, self-interested calculations, can be coerced by social structures - and thereby lead to sub-optimizing behavior – invites the conclusion that the poor have only themselves to blame for their misery. Part Three suggests that this pathologization of the poor directly controverts the major aim of poverty research: to empower the poor as free and equal parties to the social contract. I argue that the different varieties of social contract theory that have justified poverty expertise over the last forty years – the welfarist (distributivist) model pioneered by Rawls and the market-based (libertarian) model defended by Nozick – embrace the same rational choice models favored by poverty experts and so conspire with the latter in neglecting important dimensions of poverty-related coercion. While the welfarist model conceals the coercive nature of bureaucratically administered entitlement programs and top-down urban renewal policies, the market-based model conceals the coercive nature of economic class structures. The discourse-theoretic alternative proposed by Habermas endorses a populist, democratic response to the overly abstract rational choice assumptions embedded in these other models. Despite this advance over its counterparts, the chief advantage of discourse theory for poverty knowledge, I submit, resides less in its proposed procedure of rational collective choice than in its heuristic as a dialogical method of social learning. I demonstrate this claim in Part Four, where I turn to the social epistemological insights of Allen Buchanan. Social epistemology offers a much needed corrective to theories of knowledge that rely on the reasoning capacities of isolated individuals. By stressing the connection between moral response and social belief, on one hand, and the dependence of social belief on epistemic authorities, on the other, social epistemologists suggest ways in which we can learn to distinguish reliable from unreliable authorities and become aware of our own error-prone cognitive proclivities. Their insights need to be supplemented by moral epistemologists who stress the affective dimension of knowledge, above all, the role that empathy plays in understanding the plight of others. Drawing from victim narratives, Diana Meyers shows that switching between first-person experiences of one\u27s own and third-person (imaginative) reconstructions of others\u27 experiences is essential to appreciating the gravity of human rights violations and the seriousness of human rights claims. It goes without saying that such empathy is just as essential to understanding the plight of the poor. Meyers mainly has in mind empathetic understanding that has been facilitated by third-person observation and literary encounter, but the importance of visceral and corporeal representation suggests that face-to-face dialog may sometimes be a more effective way to facilitate empathetic understanding

A Case study mapping literacy learning opportunities and identity construction among African immigrant youth in a Canadian Secondary School

Studies with immigrant and refugee youth highlight challenges, school failure and early push-out rates (Anisef, 2008; James, 2012; Roessingh, 2010). There is limited research about how immigrant students especially from continental Africa negotiate their identity at school for positive outcomes. The goal of this qualitative case study was to explore literacy learning opportunities afforded by the school for African youth who were learning to become literate in English as an additional language in a Canadian secondary school and the implications for the students’ communicative and identity options. The study utilized ethnographic tools, i.e., interview, classroom observation, mapping literacy activities and artefacts, students’ out-of school and school literacy practices across migratory ecologies over a period of three months with six students, two teachers, and a social worker at the school. Perspectives of literacy as social practices (Barton & Hamilton, 2000), multiliteracies theory (NLG, 1996), and critical post-colonial perspectives (Bhabha, 2004) provided a lens to explore the intersection of place, voice, identity, language and literacy learning. Study results highlighted students’ aspirations to a promising future in Canada and the nature of the school curriculum in responding to the aspirations, funds of knowledge, and the contextual challenges encountered by the students. The agentive role of choice artefacts to communicate interests, experiences, and knowledge of minoritized students. The study recommends that schools and community agencies map students’ experiences across migratory ecologies to adequately plan relevant supports. Reimagining school curriculum and high stakes testing to draw on minoritized students’ funds of knowledge, and intercultural learning and scaffolding to foster co-construction of knowledge. The study contributes to the knowledge base about literacy education for minoritized groups that draws on asset models rather that deficit ones, and advances equity and social justice in education and society

Space is the machine, part four: theoretical syntheses

Part IV of the book, ‘Theoretical Syntheses’, begins to draw together some of the questions raised in Part I, the regularities shown in Part II and the laws proposed in Part III, to suggest how the two central problems in architectural theory, namely the form-function problem and the form-meaning problem, can be reconceptualised. Chapter 10, ‘Space is the machine’, reviews the form-function theory in architecture and attempts to establish a pathology of its formulation: how it came to be set up in such a way that it could not be solved. It then proposes how the configuration paradigm permits a reformulation, through which we can not only make sense of the relation between form and function in buildings, but also we can make sense of how and why buildings, in a powerful sense are ‘social objects’ and in fact play a powerful role in the realisation and sustaining of human society. Finally, in Chapter 11, ‘The reasoning art’, the notion of configuration is applied to the study of what architects do, that is, design. Previous models of the design process are reviewed, and it is shown that without knowledge of configuration and the concept of the non-discursive, we cannot understand the internalities of the design process. A new knowledge-based model of design is proposed, with configuration at its centre. It is argued from this that because design is a configurational process, and because it is the characteristic of configuration that local changes make global differences, design is necessarily a top down process. This does not mean that it cannot be analysed, or supported by research. It shows however that only configurationally biased knowledge can really support the design Introduction Space is the machine | Bill Hillier Space Syntax Introduction process, and this, essentially, is theoretical knowledge. It follows from this that attempts to support designers by building methods and systems for bottom up construction of designs must eventually fail as explanatory systems. They can serve to create specific architectural identities, but not to advance general architectural understanding. In pursuing an analytic rather than a normative theory of architecture, the book might be thought by some to have pretensions to make the art of architecture into a science. This is not what is intended. One effect of a better scientific understanding of architecture is to show that although architecture as a phenomenon is capable of considerable scientific understanding, this does not mean that as a practice architecture is not an art. On the contrary, it shows quite clearly why it is an art and what the nature and limits of that art are. Architecture is an art because, although in key respects its forms can be analysed and understood by scientific means, its forms can only be prescribed by scientific means in a very restricted sense. Architecture is law governed but it is not determinate. What is governed by the laws is not the form of individual buildings but the field of possibility within which the choice of form is made. This means that the impact of these laws on the passage from problem statement to solution is not direct but indirect. It lies deep in the spatial and physical forms of buildings, in their genotypes, not their phenotypes. Architecture is therefore not part art, and part science, in the sense that it has both technical and aesthetic aspects, but is both art and science in the sense that it requires both the processes of abstraction by which we know science and the processes of concretion by which we know art. The architect as scientist and as theorist seeks to establish the laws of the spatial and formal materials with which the architect as artist then composes. The greater scientific content of architecture over art is simply a function of the far greater complexity of the raw materials of space and form, and their far greater reverberations for other aspects of life, than any materials that an artist uses. It is the fact that the architect designs with the spatial stuff of living that builds the science of architecture into the art of architecture. It may seem curious to argue that the quest for a scientific understanding of architecture does not lead to the conclusion that architecture is a science, but nevertheless it is the case. In the last analysis, architectural theory is a matter of understanding architecture as a system of possibilities, and how these are restricted by laws which link this system of possibilities to the spatial potentialities of human life. At this level, and perhaps only at this level, architecture is analogous to language. Language is often naïvely conceptualised as a set of words and meanings, set out in a dictionary, and syntactic rules by which they may be combined into meaningful sentences, set out in grammars. This is not what language is, and the laws that govern language are not of this kind. This can be seen from the simple fact that if we take the words of the dictionary and combine them in grammatically correct sentences, virtually all are utterly meaningless and do not count as legitimate sentences. The structures of language are the laws which restrict the combinatorial possibilities of words, and through these restrictions construct the sayable and the meaningful. The laws of language do not therefore tell us what to say, but prescribe the structure and limits of the sayable. It is within these limits that we use language as the prime means to our individuality and creativity. In this sense architecture does resemble language. The laws of the field of architecture do not tell designers what to do. By restricting and structuring the field of combinatorial possibility, they prescribe the limits within which architecture is possible. As with language, what is left from this restrictive structuring is rich beyond imagination. Even so, without these laws buildings would not be human products, any more than meaningless but syntactically correct concatenations of words are human sentences. The case for a theoretical understanding of architecture then rests eventually not on aspiration to philosophical or scientific status, but on the nature of architecture itself. The foundational proposition of the book is that architecture is an inherently theoretical subject. The very act of building raises issues about the relations of the form of the material world and the way in which we live in it which (as any archaeologist knows who has tried to puzzle out a culture from material remains) are unavoidably both philosophical and scientific. Architecture is the most everyday, the most enveloping, the largest and the most culturally determined human artefact. The act of building implies the transmission of cultural conventions answering these questions through custom and habit. Architecture is their rendering explicit, and their transmutation into a realm of innovation and, at its best, of art. In a sense, architecture is abstract thought applied to building, even therefore in a sense theory applied to building. This is why, in the end, architecture must have analytic theories