When a C*-algebra is a coefficient algebra for a given endomorphism

The paper presents a criterion for a C*-algebra to be a coefficient algebra associated with a given endomorphis

To Act and Learn: A Bakhtinian Exploration of Action Learning

This paper considers the work of the Russian social philosopher and cultural theorist, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin as a source of understanding for those involved in action learning. Drawing upon data gathered over two years during the evaluation of 20 action learning sets in the north of England, we will seek to work with the ideas of Bakhtin to consider their value for those involved in action learning. We consider key Bakhtin features such as Making Meaning, Participative Thinking, Theoreticism and Presence, Others and Outsideness, Voices and Carnival to highlight how Bakhtin's can enhance our understanding of the nature of action and learning

Stereotypes and chronotopes: The peasant and the cosmopolitan in narratives about migration

Stereotypes are chronotopic (Bakhtin, 1994) in the sense that they make good use of character types in time and space to utter identifiable speech forms and make evident other semiotic displays. This paper argues for sociolinguistics to expand its interpretation of the chronotope to encompass the relationship between “character” and “author” in identity texts. It suggests that conflating author and character in identity scholarship, as is the case in much sociolinguistic research, risks losing an opportunity to understand how people author characters in their narratives to project sets of values and beliefs. Using linguistic ethnography, we report on two migrant women and their interactions among colleagues to illustrate their authoring of two characters, namely the peasant and the cosmopolitan. We show how these specific women mobilize these characters in narrative production to refute harmful traditions and ethnolinguistic stereotypes in favour of cosmopolitan identities which draw on broader geographical and social scales associated with the city

“I am Italian in the world”: A mobile student’s story of language learning and ideological becoming

This article theorises the relationship between language and intercultural learning from a Bakhtinian dialogic perspective, based on the language learning story of Federica, a mobile student in UK higher education (HE). I first outline the context of UK HE and its internationalisation agenda, discussing how research in this field has conceptualised language, intercultural communication (IC), and international students in terms of a totalising boundary between self and other. I link this to current concerns in IC regarding the philosophical underpinnings of the field, specifically the aporia created as a result of the totalising self/other relation in prevailing IC discourse (MacDonald & O’Regan, 2013). I then present a means of addressing this aporia through a Bakhtinian theorisation of the relationship between language and intercultural learning. This theorisation offers a relational perspective on the self and the other in which intercultural learning is a process of ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981) with the other, enacted in, with and through language, as illustrated in Federica’s story of learning English. The article concludes with a call for language and communicative practices to be placed at the heart of HE internationalisation agendas and for HE practitioners to recognise shared responsibility for intercultural communication