Introduction: how Scotland translates

No abstract available

Towards a rhetoric of translation for the postdramatic text

For the literary translator, the question arises as to how she might approach the delicate task of migrating texts that resort largely to “a purely intensive usage of language,” while acknowledging that such texts share a mode of expression that transcends historical or critical periodization. If one is to focus on fidelity or equivalence, the aim should not be the production of a text that translates some underlying meaning or sense where signification and representation are fixed. Rather, the aim should be the meticulous rendering of its surface expression so that the text’s performative capacity can be realized anew in the target language and culture. The focus on what “might be” in language invites a parallel with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic genre in theatre and a rhetoric of translation that reflects the aporia of the source expression, in stark contrast to the centrality of the logos to traditional Western rhetoric. While ultimately unattainable, an approach to text as a Deleuzean “map” would seem an appropriate means for the translator to remain true the “intentio” of postdramatic texts

Variability of Hydroclimate in the North American Southwest: Implications for Streamflow, the Spring Dry Season and Ecosystems

The Southwest United States (SWUS) is facing an ongoing drought which has led to water short- ages, in addition to forest mortality due to wildfire and bark beetle outbreaks associated with increased temperatures. This region has a population of 9.6 million people and is one of the fastest growing parts of the United States, and pressure on its resources can be expected to increase in the future. The SWUS is also projected to become more arid in the coming century under greenhouse gas induced climate change, which will impact its environmental, economic and social vitality. This thesis explores the climate dynamics which control water availability, streamflow, and vegetation green-up in the SWUS, in order to constrain our understanding of the mechanisms controlling the ecohydrology of the region, and to inform projections for the 21st century. Chapters 1 and 2 investigate the climate drivers responsible for producing the observed vari- ability in streamflow for the Gila River, a tributary of the Colorado, and the upper Rio Grande. The Gila is the southernmost snowfed river in the SWUS, and has a spring streamflow peak that responds to melting of the snowpack at its headwaters in New Mexico. The Gila is also sufficiently south so that it has a secondary streamflow peak in the summer which is fed by rains from the North American Monsoon (NAM). On interannual timescales, the Gila’s spring peak is primarily influenced by natural variability associated with Pacific sea surface temperature (SST), while the summer peak apparently does not respond to interannual variability. The upper Rio Grande is fur- ther north and east in the SWUS, and only has one streamflow peak occurring in spring-summer which is influenced by both tropical Pacific SST and Atlantic SST. Spring streamflow has also declined in each river post-1998, and this is due to a shift in the tropical Pacific leading to negative precipitation anomalies and drying in the SWUS. Chapter 2 assess a region of the SWUS that receives both winter storm track precipitation and NAM, and therefore has two periods of vegetation green-up annually with an intervening spring dry season. The first peak in vegetation occurs during the spring, and is influenced by the magnitude of winter precipitation and snowmelt, which gradually adds water to the soils. The second peak in vegetation follows the spring dry season when soil moisture recovers with the arrival of the NAM. A climatic shift in the tropical Pacific occurred in 1997/98 and produced a shift to an earlier and more severe spring dry season, and reduced vegetation green-up. An earlier extended dry period in the mid-century (1948 to 1966) also was influenced by a cool phase of the tropical Pacific, which led to a reduction in precipitation of a similar magnitude as the recent drought. However, the recent drought is more severe - and temperatures also have been greater during the recent period. Using a decomposition of the impact of precipitation and potential evapotranspiration (PET) on soil moisture, we found that PET contributed 39% to the negative soil drying anomalies in the recent post-1998 drought, compared to 8% during the earlier extended dry period. This indicates an increased role of temperature during the recent drying. In Chapter 4 we evaluated 18 CMIP5 models based on comparisons with observations of pre- cipitation, net ecosystem exchange, leaf area index and soil moisture from land surface model output. Following our evaluation, we selected three models which best simulated the bimodal region: CanEMS2, GFDL-ESM2G and GFDL-ESM2M. These models indicate that overall this region will be drier in the 21st century; runoff is projected to decrease, particularly in the spring, soil moisture is reduced, and snow fall declines. The variability in projected precipitation, how- ever, is large, and we find that for the most part does not exceed what can be expected from model natural climate variability. The multi-model ensemble from the rest of the CMIP5 models indicate an overall decline in annual precipitation by the end of the 21st century, particularly during the spring. The three models also project an increase in net primary productivity in both the spring and summer growing seasons due to the effects of CO2 fertilization. Enhanced vegetation growth is likely to further exacerbate drying of the soils as vegetation draws down moisture, and enhances water losses via evapotranspiration. The fertilization process is, however, still uncertain and fur- ther studies are needed on the representation of CO2 enhanced vegetation growth in the SWUS to constrain this result. The findings of this thesis have contributed enhanced our knowledge of how climate dynamics, natural variability, and recent warming have influenced the ecohydrology of the SWUS, and also inform future climate projections. Constraining our understanding of this region is of importance given the growing populations, mounting pressures on natural resources, and anthropogenically induced climate change which is expected to affect this region in the 21st century

Introduction: how Scotland translates

No abstract available

The multimodal translation workshop as a method of creative inquiry:acousmatic sound, affective perception and experiential literacy

This article investigates the role of affective perception in the development of translation and experiential literacy through the medium of a multimodal translation workshop held with twelve arts practitioners, academics, and translators. Both the rationale for the workshop format and the interpretation of workshop outputs draw on a transdisciplinary framework spanning theories of intermediality and multimodality, the study of acousmatic sound, acoustic atmospheres, and corporeal music/sound reception. Adopting a phenomenographic approach, we discuss the role of the body and the senses in communication and how the sensory exercises developed for our workshop can provide access to the prenoetic nature of perception from both a cognitive and affective standpoint. Recognizing the narrative quality of participants’ comments, a deductive approach was taken to analyze their translations and reflections through the lens of narrative modes of acousmatic music. The article concludes with pedagogical implications on the basis of participants’ reflections. Our findings support the use of a multimodal online translation workshop as both a research method to investigate meaning-making and a pedagogical resource to develop experiential literacy for both practitioners and developing translators.</p

Translanguaging and product-oriented drama:An integrated pedagogical approach for language learning and literacy development

This study investigated the translanguaging practices of 12 students and a teacher rehearsing a German play as part of an extra-curricular UK university theatre group comprising different European nationalities.Our aim was to understand how these practices support foreign language and literacy development in the context of a script-based,product-oriented approach to drama. The final three full rehearsals were audio-recorded and transcribed. Following functional analysis to identify translanguaging instances, discourse analysis was applied to selected extracts where learning was inferred or shown to occur. Rehearsals provided a rich learning environment in which participants were affectively engaged, with specific opportunities for contextualised language learning and literacy development. Translanguaging enhanced these learning opportunities, enablingstudents to engage with the German script as bilinguals drawing on both their linguistic and multimodal repertoires to build meaning. The integration of translanguaging and product-oriented drama offers a linguistically diverse and embodied pedagogical approach to language education and a wealth of learning affordances less readily accessed in monolingual environments

From sanctuaries to prefigurative social change: creating health-enabling spaces in East London community gardens

How do community gardens impact the psycho-social well-being of marginalized groups in urban settings? And to what extent are they examples of prefigurative social change, understood as the development of social relations that prefigure a more equal and empowering social world? We explore these issues through qualitative research with four community garden groups in East London, thematically analysing interviews and group discussions with 28 gardeners, Photovoice with 12 gardeners producing 250 photographs, and 40 hours of participant observation. We offer two unique insights: a novel understanding of how participation in community gardens affects well-being through creating ‘health-enabling social spaces’ (Campbell, C., & Cornish, F. (2010). Towards a “fourth generation” of approaches to HIV/AIDS management: Creating contexts for effective community mobilization. AIDS Care, 22(Suppl. 2), 1569-1579); and a discussion of how creating these spaces is an act of prefigurative social change. Our findings suggest that in East London, participation in community gardens is not based on a common political intention or self-conscious motive to prefigure a new society, but instead on the shared practice of gardening. This results in unintended benefits that often address participants’ personal adversities in ways that contribute to the material, relational and symbolic deprivation of their daily lives – opening up new possibilities for being, seeing and doing. In this sense, community gardens in East London offer an alternative to traditional notions of prefigurative social action that are predicated on strategic intention. We argue for an understanding of prefiguration that better accounts for what participants themselves would like to achieve in their own lives, rather than in relation to externally imposed notions of what counts as political change

Word learning in preschoolers: are bilingual 3-year-olds less guided by mutual exclusivity than their monolingual counterparts?

A fundamental question in developmental linguistics and developmental psychology is how young children learn new words. While some researchers suggest that words are primarily learned through experience, others argue that the acquisition process is guided by innate lexical biases. One of the most widely studied biases is the Mutual Exclusivity Bias (ME), which describes children’s preference for just one label per concept. The disambiguation effect in ME has been demonstrated extensively with ostensive paradigms requiring young monolingual children to choose between familiar and novel labels in identifying unfamiliar objects. However, evidence for ME within languages in bilingual children is mixed. In the present study, a productive naming paradigm was used to assess 3-year-olds’ tendency to adopt novel labels for familiar items (a variant on Merriman and Bowman’s (1989) rejection/correction effect). Five monolingual and 5 bilingual children aged 2;11-3;6 were tested in English. Following a training session when the experimenter applied novel labels to 3 of 12 pictures of familiar objects, the children played two successive naming games. The first game involved further reinforcement of the novel labels by the experimenter while the second game did not. In the first game, the bilingual children adopted novel labels more frequently (Mdn=.40) than the monolingual children (Mdn=.13) and Mann-Whitney’s (one-tailed exact) U=3.0, was significant, p<0.05 with a large effect size (r=-.63). In contrast, only one bilingual produced a novel label in the second game. Measures of receptiveness in the training session displayed asymmetries between production and comprehension. Overall the results suggest that experience of two languages plays an important role in learning novel labels. The findings are consistent with an account of ME as a heuristic learned from monolingual input, the application of which varies in bilingual preschoolers according to both ambient language and socio-pragmatic context. The results are discussed in the context of what insights can be gained from possible extensions to the experiment