The Possibilities of Asian American Citizenship: A Critical Race and Gender Analysis

Conventionally, citizenship is understood as a legal category of membership in a national polity that ensures equal rights among its citizens. This conventional understanding, however, begs disruption when the histories and experiences of marginalized groups are brought to the fore. Equal citizenship in all its forms for marginalized populations has yet to be realized. For Asian Americans, rights presumably accorded to the legal status of citizenship have proven tenuous across different historical and political moments. Throughout U.S. history, Asian American or Oriental men and women have been designated aliens against whom white male and female citizenships have been legitimized. These categories of inclusion and exclusion- citizen and alien -are mutually constitutive; members are legitimate only when defined against the exclusion of others. Citizenship must be conceptualized as a broader set of social and cultural memberships and exclusions beyond political rights and legal status. This article examines how scholarly works engage citizenship formations of Asian American women and men. It also asks: Are there modes of citizenship, other than legal status and rights, to explain the experiences and histories of Asian American men and women, as well as provide anti-racist, feminist sites of resistance in the struggle for equality

CONTEMPORARY CONFUCIAN AND ISLAMIC APPROACHES TO DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Both Confucian and Islamic traditions stand in fraught and internally contested relationships with democracy and human rights. It can easily appear that the two traditions are in analogous positions with respect to the values associated with modernity, but a central contention of this essay is that Islam and Confucianism are not analogous in this way. Positions taken by advocates of the traditions are often similar, but the reasoning used to justify these positions differs in crucial ways. Whether one approaches these questions from an intra-traditional, cross-traditional, or multi-traditional perspective, the essay shows that there is great value in getting clear on the ways in which ones textual canon may constrain one. In the end, we will see that while there are creative Islamic approaches to taking human rights seriously, the looser constraints under which Confucians operate today may make things easier for Confucian advocates of human rights and democracy

Metadiscourse repertoire of L1 Mandarin undergraduates writing in English : a cross-contextual, cross-disciplinary study

This article presents a qualitative, comparative study of metadiscourse in the academic writing of two groups of undergraduate students working in two different disciplines. The groups of students were: 1) Native speakers of Mandarin studying in China through the medium of English; 2) Native speakers of Mandarin studying in the UK through the medium of English. For each group of students, we examined writing undertaken in two undergraduate disciplinary courses: Literary Criticism and Translation Studies. Our aim was to extend research into English writing by L1 Mandarin speakers, and to identify patterns of difference and similarity both between educational contexts and between disciplines. Results suggest that patterns of metadiscourse use in our corpus are associated with both disciplinary and contextual factors, but that contextual factors may have a stronger effect than disciplinary factors. For our data, local institutional culture seems to have a noticeable influence on student writers' use of metadiscourse

A Survey of Paraphrasing and Textual Entailment Methods

Paraphrasing methods recognize, generate, or extract phrases, sentences, or longer natural language expressions that convey almost the same information. Textual entailment methods, on the other hand, recognize, generate, or extract pairs of natural language expressions, such that a human who reads (and trusts) the first element of a pair would most likely infer that the other element is also true. Paraphrasing can be seen as bidirectional textual entailment and methods from the two areas are often similar. Both kinds of methods are useful, at least in principle, in a wide range of natural language processing applications, including question answering, summarization, text generation, and machine translation. We summarize key ideas from the two areas by considering in turn recognition, generation, and extraction methods, also pointing to prominent articles and resources.Comment: Technical Report, Natural Language Processing Group, Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece, 201