Living in several languages: Language, gender and identities

Living in several languages encompasses experiencing and constructing oneself differently in each language. The research study on which this article is based takes an intersectional approach to explore insider accounts of the place of language speaking in individuals’ constructions of self, family relationships and the wider context. Twenty-four research interviews and five published autobiographies were analysed using grounded theory, narrative and discursive analysis. A major finding was that learning a new language inducted individuals into somewhat ‘stereotyped’ gendered discourses and power relations within the new language, while also enabling them to view themselves differently in the context of their first language. This embodied process could be challenging and often required reflection and discursive work to negotiate the dissimilarities, discontinuities and contradictions between languages and cultures. However, the participants generally claimed that their linguistic multiplicity generated creativity. Women and men used their language differences differently to ‘perform their gender’. This was particularly evident in language use within families, which involved gendered differences in the choice of language for parenting – despite the fact that both men and women experience their first languages as conveying intimacy in their relationships with their children. The article argues that the notion of ‘mother tongue’ (rather than ‘first language’) is unhelpful in this process as well as in considering the implications of living in several languages for systemic therapy

'I'm not going to tell you cos you need to think about this': A conversation analysis study of managing advice resistance and supporting autonomy in undergraduate supervision

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer in Postdigital Science and Education, available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00194-5 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.This article firstly, critically analyses a face-to-face supervision meeting between an undergraduate and a supervisor, exploring how the supervisor handles the twin strategies of fostering autonomy while managing resistance to advice. Conversation Analysis is used as both a theory and a method, with a focus on the use of accounts to support or resist advice. The main contribution is the demonstration of how both the supervisor and student are jointly responsible for the negotiation of advice, which is recycled and calibrated in response to the student’s resistance. The supervisor defuses complaints by normalising them, and moving his student on to practical solutions, often with humour. He lists his student’s achievements as the foundation on which she can assert agency and build the actions he recommends. Supervisor-student relationships are investigated through the lens of the affective dimensions of learning, to explore how caring or empathy may serve to reduce resistance and make advice more palatable. By juxtaposing physically present supervision with digitally-mediated encounters, while acknowledging their mutual entanglement, the postdigital debate is furthered. In the context of Covid-19, and rapid decisions by universities to bring in digital platforms to capture student-teacher interactions, the analysis presented is in itself an act of resistance against the technical control systems of the academy and algorithmic capitalism

Pranking in children's helpline calls

Pranking can be understood as challenging a normative social order. One environment where pranking occurs is in institutional interaction. The present study examines a sample of pranking calls to telephone helplines for children and young people. Some cases had been posted on YouTube by the person doing the pranking; others were from a subcollection of possible pranks, extracted from a larger corpus of Australian children's counselling helpline calls. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis we aim to understand the inferential and sequential resources involved in pranking within telephone-mediated counselling services for children and youth. Our analysis shows pranksters know the norms of counselling helplines by their practices employed for subverting them. YouTube pranksters exploit next turns of talk to retrospectively cast what the counsellor has just said as a possible challenge to the perception of the call as a normal counselling one. One practice evident in both sources was the setting up of provocative traps to break a linguistic taboo. This detailed study of pranking in interaction provides documentary evidence of its idiosyncratic yet patterned local accomplishment in telephone-mediated counselling services aimed at children and youth

Editorial

This special issue on "Antarctic Climate Evolution — view from the margin" presents results from modelling studies and reports on geoscience data aimed at improving our understanding of the behaviour of the Antarctic ice sheet and the climate of the region. This research field is of interest because of the sensitivity of the polar regions to global warming, and because of the influence of the Antarctic ice sheet on global sea level and climate through most if not all of the Cenozoic Era. The Antarctic ice sheet both responds to and forces changes on global climate and sea level. We need to be aware of the scale and frequency of these changes if we are to understand past patterns of environmental change elsewhere on earth. It was only three decades ago that we discovered from strata drilled in shelf basins on the Antarctic margin that the Antarctic ice sheet had a history that predated the Quaternary ice ages by over 20 million years (Hayes et al., 1975). Later that year the first interpretation of Antarctic glacial history through the Cenozoic Era from oxygen isotopes, recorded in foraminifera from deep-sea sediment cores, was published (Shackleton and Kennett, 1975). Revisions with a more extensive database have modified the story a little (Miller et al., 1987; Zachos et al., 2001), and there have been recent attempts to resolve the temperature–ice volume ambiguity (Lear et al., 2000). However, reports on strata drilled on the Antarctic margin have unambiguously shown the character of this huge ice sheet, which was oscillating in the Oligocene (Barrett et al., 1987; Barrett, 1999) with a period and magnitude comparable with the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets of the Quaternary (Naish et al., 2001a,b). In this issue we present further research on the history of the Antarctic ice sheet from Oligocene to recent times, most of them from the Antarctic margin, but with some on the nature of the deep-sea isotope record, and others using recently developed modeling techniques to investigate the influence of atmosphere, ocean and biosphere on past Antarctic climate. This special issue is the third in three years on the theme of Antarctic Climate Evolution. The first followed a workshop in Erice, Sicily, in 2001 to report on results from ANTOSTRAT, a SCAR-sponsored project for gathering and analysing circum-Antarctic seismic data for planning and promoting offshore drilling for climate history. The introduction to that issue (Florindo et al., 2003) provides a review of the recent history of circum-Antarctic drilling by the Ocean Drilling Program (Legs 113, 114, 119, 120, 177, 178, 188 and 189) and the Cape Roberts Project. For a more comprehensive review of earlier drilling in the Ross Sea region (Deep Sea Drilling Project Leg 28, Dry Valley Drilling Project, McMurdo Sound Sediment and Tectonic Studies, Cenozoic Investigations in the western Ross Sea) see Hambrey and Barrett (1993). The first of these issues (Florindo et al., 2003) featured a global plate reconstruction of the Southern Hemisphere through Cenozoic time with emphasis on evolution of Cenozoic seaways (Lawver and Gahagan, 2003) along with a study of the inception and early evolution of the EAIS using a new coupled global climate (GCM)– dynamic ice sheet model (DeConto and Pollard, 2003b), as well as data from recent drilling around the margin covering time period from Cretaceous to the present. A second special issue on the same theme (Florindo et al., 2005) also featured a mix of modelling and data papers with a focus on the Eocene–Oligocene boundary and the initiation of ice sheet growth, including a pioneering attempt to evaluate the relative influence of fluvial versus glacial processes in shaping the landscape of the Prydz Bay sector of Antarctica (Jamieson et al., 2005). The remainder of the issue comprised further papers on seismic stratigraphy and reports from drilling around the margin. The papers to be found in this special issue, like the previous two, maintain the mix of modelling- and data-oriented papers that reflect the range of this research

Children and mental health talk : perspectives on social competence - an epilogue

In this chapter, we offer a commentary of the individual chapters as well as the contribution of the volume as a whole. Specifically, we discuss the notion of children’s social competence advanced in this book, as well as its intellectual history in ethnomethodology, against the reductionist conceptualisations of children and young persons often found in mainstream social and behavioural science literature. Moreover, we also discuss the relatively broad approach taken towards children’s mental health and well-being, and conclude by identifying some implications that the chapters bring to this research field as well as to professional practitioners working with troubled children.En professionaliserad röst för barnen? Bris och det nya samhällskontraktet mellan stat och civilsamhäll

Parsing tasks for the mobile novice in real time:orientation to the learner's actions and to spatial and temporal constraints in instructing-on-the-move

Abstract This paper studies parsing as a practice used in mobile instruction. The findings build on ethnomethodological conversation analysis and on observations made on video data that have been collected from three settings: skiing, driving a car and flying a plane. In the data, novice learners are instructed by more experienced instructors to accomplish various mobile tasks. The paper shows how instructors use parsing to guide learners to carry out, step-by-step, the sub-actions that the ongoing mobile task (e.g. turning, landing) is composed of. The paper argues that parsing is a practice employed by instructors to highlight the sub-actions of a mobile task. Instructors may also use parsing to orient learners to emergent problems to do with the timing, quality and order of the sub-actions in the performance of a complex mobile task. Finally, the paper shows that sometimes there is not enough time to parse an ongoing task, in which case the parsing can be carried out afterwards