Towards a sociocultural understanding of children’s voice

While ‘voice’ is frequently invoked in discussions of pupils’ agency and empowerment, less attention has been paid to the dialogic dynamics of children’s voices and the sociocultural features shaping their emergence. Drawing on linguistic ethnographic research involving recent recordings of ten and eleven year-old children’s spoken language experience across the school day, this article examines how pupils’ voices are configured within institutional interactional contexts which render particular kinds of voice more or less hearable, and convey different kinds of value. Analysis shows how children appropriate and reproduce the authoritative voices of education, popular culture and parents in the course of their induction into social practices. At the same time they also express varying degrees of commitment to these voices and orchestrate their own and other people’s voices within accounts and anecdotes, making voice appropriation an uneven, accumulative process shot through with the dynamics of personal and peer-group experience. The examination of children’s dialogue from different contexts across the school day highlights the situated semiotics of voice and the heteroglossic development of children’s speaking consciousness

Re-storying and visualizing the changing entrepreneurial identities of Bill Gates and Richard Branson.

The storytelling in textual and visual re-constructions of Bill Gates and Richard Branson by their organizations produces entrepreneurial identities bound into particular social power-knowledge relations. Our purpose is to examine how these organizations, and their critics, mobilize storytelling in acts of re-storying (enlivening) or re-narrating (branding a monologic) practices using Internet technologies to invite viewers to frame the world of entrepreneurship. We use visual discourse and storytelling methods to analyze how Microsoft and Virgin Group use various kinds of entrepreneurial images and textual narratives to re-narrate and produce particular brands of capitalism. These organizations' scoptic regimes of representation are contested in counter-visualizing and counterstory practices of external stakeholders. We suggest that the image and textual practices of storytelling have changed as both entrepreneurs court philanthropic and social entrepreneur identity markers. Our contribution to entrepreneurial identity is to apply double and multiple narrations, the appropriation of another's narrative words (or images) into another's narrative, and relate such storytelling moves to visuality

Mediated Class-ifications: Representations of Class and Culture in Contemporary British Television

This article takes, as its point of departure, recent debates about the representation of working-class life, especially the lives of the 'feckless poor', on reality television in the UK. These issues are contextualized by reference to a set of wider-ranging historical debates about: a) the category of class as a mode of social determination (and as an explanatory model); b) the relations of language, class and culture in educational sociology and in community publishing; and, c) in relation to classical Marxism's theorization of both the 'respectable' working class and the lumpen proletariat. The article concludes with a consideration of debates about the representation of the working class in the contemporary British TV drama series Shameless

The construction of identity through visual intertextuality in a Bohemian early modern travelogue

Cultural historians have long been concerned with visual sources. Their research has centred on ways of reading images and how they can most accurately be interpreted. This article focuses on an alternative aspect of these visual sources: on how images were made and used. It analyses how the identity of a Bohemian Catholic, Bed?ich z Donín, is constructed by his use of images in a travelogue based on his pilgrimage in the early 17th century. Highlighting the process of ‘visual intertextuality’, it claims that the ways in which Donín adopts and adapts visual images reveals his association with various affinity groups. The distinction between ‘actual’ and ‘habitual’ intertextuality is applied to the analysis of this historical source and shows how competing voices are present in the images. This article is an example of how historians can use the methodologies of semioticians to benefit their research