Finding Old Nubian, or, why we should divest from Western tongues

In this essay, I venture to describe my own trajectory, through linguistics and continental philosophy, to becoming a philologist specialized in the Old Nubian language, in tandem with a broader analysis of the destabilizing powers of philology that resonate in both deconstruction and psychoanalysis: the problem of the material carrier of writing as that which eventually determines the reading, the humbling idea that the most abstract thought of Plato can be traced to a crumbling fourth-century papyrus. In parallel, I also address the current state of Nubiology and how I have inserted myself into the field as an advocate of both accessible scholarship and a re-anchoring of the scientific field within the local political and social context of Egypt and the Sudan

Formação de conceitos científicos: reflexões a partir da produção de livros didáticos

Este trabalho sistematiza reflexões que orientaram a produção de texto didático de ciências de modo a encorajar os estudantes a desenvolverem conceitos científicos fundamentais. Apoiamo-nos em Vygotsky e Bakhtin para afirmarmos nossa convicção de que os sentidos das palavras não se resolvem em glossários, mas por meio de seu uso em contextos sociais específicos. Apresentamos exemplos, extraídos do texto didático, de estratégias elaboradas com o intuito de se estabelecerem pontes entre os sentidos pessoais, presentes no cotidiano dos estudantes, e os conceitos científicos, com significados mais estabilizados

Political dimensions of gender inclusive writing in Parisian universities

Écriture inclusive (EI) has long been the topic of public debates in France. These debates have become more intense in recent years, often focusing on the higher education system and culminating in the formulation of three separate laws banning it for public administration. In this paper, we investigate the foundations of these conflicts through a large quantitative corpus study of the (non)use of EI in Parisian undergraduate brochures. Our results suggest that Parisian university professors use EI not only to ensure gender neutral reference but also as a tool to construct their political identities. We show that both the use of EI and its particular forms are conditioned by how brochure writers position themselves on non gender‐related‐related issues within the French university's political landscape, which explains how conflicts surrounding a linguistic practice have become understood as conflicts about larger issues in French society. Our paper thus provides new information to be taken into account in the formulation and promotion of nonsexist language policies and sheds light on how feminist linguistic activism and its opposition are deeply intertwined with other kinds of social activism in present‐day France