Black Feminist Theory and Literature in the Critical Language Classroom: An Interdisciplinary Study of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred and How It Can Be Used to Engage in Critical Pedagogy in the Swedish Upper Secondary ESL Classroom

The aim of this interdisciplinary study is to consider how teachers of English as a second language (ESL) might engage with critical pedagogy through the use of literature. This is illustrated by, on the one hand, applying a Black feminist lens to Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 science fiction novel Kindred, which is argued to constitute an appropriate novel for upper secondary students to read. On the other hand, the analysis is discussed in the light of the Swedish National Curriculum for the Upper Secondary School and the ESL subject syllabus. The literary analysis is concerned with analyzing the ways in which race intersects with gender in creating women’s experience within the novel, how the female characters are portrayed and what the novel tells the reader about African heritage and African American history and experience. The analysis is then systematically organized using coding method. Using this method, the emerging themes were: The importance of heritage, Racism and sexism intersected and Equality in relationships. The major interpretations include showing how such a systematic analysis can elicit themes that can constitute the basis for a critical pedagogy approach to the teaching of ESL, as well as showing how engaging with critical theory creates a way for teachers to cover a number of the aims expressed in the Swedish National Curriculum for the Upper Secondary School

A Survey and Classification of Methods for (Mostly) Unsupervised Learning

Proceedings of the 16th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA-2007. Editors: Joakim Nivre, Heiki-Jaan Kaalep, Kadri Muischnek and Mare Koit. University of Tartu, Tartu, 2007. ISBN 978-9985-4-0513-0 (online) ISBN 978-9985-4-0514-7 (CD-ROM) pp. 292-296

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Challenging Mainstream Metaphysics – Barad’s Agential Realism and Feminist Philosophy of Religion

The article outlines the impact of Barad’s thinking on our understanding of reality, being and becoming at large, and demonstrates the relevance of her agential realism for feminist philosophy of religion. Barad’s agential realism is presented as the cornerstone of a relationalist metaphysics, challenging the mainstream masculine metaphysics of separateness. Agential realism is also applied as a fruitful perspective for an  alternative understanding of religion, and as an important and solid theoretical perspective for the further development of feminist philosophy of religion. The latter claim is substantiated through a discussion of Pamela Sue Anderson’s and Grace Jantzen’s feminist philosophies of religion, showing how they can benefit from and find support in Barad’s ontoepistemological metaphysics

The Conquering Heart - Exploring allegorical short-cuts in Conrad's Heart of Darkness

The aim of the essay is to gain a deeper understanding of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, through exploring a number of its allegorical short-cuts: the sepulchral city, the Company's offices, the knitters of black wool, the grove of death, and Kurtz' sketch in oil. The analysis of these short-cuts, aided by the gist of some of Conrad's letters to Cunninghame Graham, yields important clues to the understanding of Heart of Darkness as a whole, and its underlying conflict between Man and Nature, as well as to the understanding of specific elements of the story such as the significance of Kurtz' Intended and Marlow's final lie

Pronouns and the (Preliminary) Classification of Papuan languages

A series of articles by Ross (1995, 2001, 2005) use pronoun sim- ilarities to gauge relatedness between various Papuan microgroups, arguing that the similarities could not be the result of chance or bor- rowing. I argue that a more appropriate manner of calculating chance gives a signicantly dierent result: when cross-comparing a pool of languages the prospects for chance matches of rst and second person pronouns are very good. Using pronoun form data from over 3000 lan- guages and over 300 language families inside and outside New Guinea, I show that there is, nevertheless, a tendency for Papuan pronouns to use certain consonants more often in 1P and 2P SG forms than in the rest of the world. This could reect an underlying family. An alter- native explanation is the established Papuan areal feature of having a small consonant inventory, which results in a higher functional load on the remaining consonants, which is, in turn, reected in the enhanced popularity of certain consonants in pronouns of those languages. A test of surface forms (i.e., non-reconstructed forms) favours the latter explanation