Tradition, authenticity and expertise in and through Cypriot Easter flaounes

Flaounes are festive cheese pies that are widely produced and consumed at Eastertime in Cyprus. This article explores how preparing, consuming and evaluating flaounes is interactionally constructed in everyday practices and naturally occurring interactions, written accounts and ethnographic interviews with Greek Cypriot participants residing in various regions of Cyprus and in the UK diaspora. An ethnomethodological perspective to identities, culture and society is employed to provide analyses of the participants’ local understandings of themselves and their social world and of categorizations of authenticity, tradition and change in relation to flaounes. It is shown that members, even when addressing the cultural and historical significance of flaounes, problematize categorizations of authenticity, while they construct tradition as compatible with innovation and change. For participants, however, the categorizations that have more relevance and importance relate to the taste and quality of the flaounes and the expertise of the maker. Practices around flaounes offer a prime site for positive self-presentation, where performance of culinary expertise intersects with gendered roles and Cypriotness

Repairs and old-age categorisations: interactional and categorisation analysis

This paper examines the use of self-repairs in ascribing old-age categorisations to self and others in casual interactions among friends. Membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis are employed to analyse self-recorded, everyday conversations of a group of older Greek Cypriot women with a long interactional history. The interactional organisation of old-age labels, and specifically instances of self-repair of age categorisations, reveal that members orient to old-age categories as hierarchically positioned and inference-rich. Members make relevant a very intricate set of expectations of who can be categorised by whom, with what specific age category term and at which context, partly because other-categorisations can also implicate one’s self-categorisation as old. Sequential and categorisation analyses provide a powerful analytical toolkit for the investigation of participants’ local system of self- and other-ascription of explicit -but also implicit- age identities. It is shown that the combination of membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis can be extended beyond the analysis of turn-generating categories and can be instrumental in analysing flexible, context-shaped and agentively managed category identifications that also have currency beyond the local interactional occasion

Language and age identities among older Greek Cypriot women

This contribution discusses the language and social practices of older Greek Cypriot women. It looks at the casual, every-day interactions of an all-female group, with a long interactional history (most of them in their seventies). The ethnomethodological approach to identities is adopted, and a toolkit from membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis is used. This paper shows how the participants employ various terms, with distinct meaning and associated features, to categorise self and others as “older women”. The discussion includes certain emblematic uses of code-switching between (varieties of) Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek and shows how this discourse strategy contributes to the construction of old-age identities with distinct associations. On the whole, this bottom-up analysis provides an overview of older Cypriot women’s situated understanding of their age identities and how the deployment of various category labels of different registers ultimately achieves positive self-presentation and dissociation from age-induced decline

An exploration of the sub-register of chemical engineering research papers published in English

The increased pressures for high-volume, high-impact publications in English language and the high rejection rates of submitted manuscripts for publications present an often unsurpassable obstacle for (early career) researchers. At the same time, register variation of peer-reviewed journals—that can contribute to whether a paper is accepted for publication—has received little attention. This paper redresses this gap, by investigating the register (especially discourse moves and lexical choices) in 60 published, original-research articles on wastewater treatment published in four Chemical Engineering journals, with impact factor (IF) above 2. Our survey shows that chemical engineering research publications tend to comply with a set of requirements: multidisciplinarity, brevity, co-authorship, focus on the description of practical results (rather than methods), and awareness of non-specialised audiences. Lexical choices were analysed through frequency tables, phrase nets and word trees produced by data visualisation software (ManyEyes). It was found that less discipline-specific vocabulary is used in higher IF journals and this is interpreted within the current context of manuscript publication and consumption. This study concludes that data visualisation can provide an efficient and effective tool for prospective authors that wish to gauge telling details of the sub-register of a specific journal

Η συγκρότηση της ‘καλής μαγείρισσας’ μέσω συνομιλιακών συνταγών ηλικιωμένων γυναικών της Κύπρου' [The construction of culinary expert through recipe tellings among older Greek Cypriot women]

Αυτή η εργασία επικεντρώνεται σε ομιλίες για μαγειρική μιας φιλικής ομάδας ηλικιωμένων, Ελληνοκυπρίων γυναικών και εξετάζει τη δόμηση των συνομιλιακών συνταγών αλλά και τις ταυτότητες που κινητοποιούν. Τα δεδομένα αποτελούνται από δεκαοχτώ ώρες αυτο-ηχογραφημένων συνομιλιών που συλλέχθηκαν σε περίοδο δύο ετών και η ανάλυση έγινε στο πλαίσιο της εθνομεθοδολογίας και ανάλυση συνομιλίας. Οι μαγειρικές δραστηριότητες και οι συνταγές εμφανίστηκαν ως το πιο συχνό θέμα των αυθόρμητων συνομιλιών. Η οργάνωση των συνομιλιακών συνταγών στα δεδομένα περιλαμβάνει έντονη διαδοχικότητα, εσωτερική εκμαίευση, συνεργατική αφήγηση, διαπραγμάτευση και διαφωνία. Αυτά τα δομικά χαρακτηριστικά των συνταγών αναδεικνύουν όψεις των προβαλλόμενων ταυτοτήτων των ομιλητριών, και συγκεκριμένα την επανειλημμένη ταύτισή τους με την κατηγορία ‘καλή μαγείρισσα’. Οι συνομιλίες των συμμετεχουσών για συνταγές και η αυτο-κατηγοριοποίησή τους ως καλές μαγείρισσες λειτουργούν, εν τέλει, ως στρατηγική αποσύνδεσης του εαυτού από τη φθορά που στερεοτυπικά συνεπάγεται η τρίτη ηλικία. Συνεπώς, αυτή η εμπειρική έρευνα προβάλλει μια όψη των συνομιλιακών πρακτικών και ταυτοτήτων των ηλικιωμένων γυναικών της Κύπρου

An exploration of the sub-register of chemical engineering research papers published in english

The combination of increased pressures for high-volume, high-impact publications in English language with the high rejection rates of submitted manuscripts for publications presents an often unsurpassable obstacle for (early career) researchers. At the same, the register requirements of peer-reviewed journals -that can contribute to whether a paper is accepted for publication- has received little attention. This paper redresses this gap, by investigating the linguistic choices in 60 published manuscripts in four journals, with impact factor (IF) above 2; all 4 journals, publish original research papers in the field of chemical engineering science and specifically focus on wastewater treatment. Our survey shows that chemical engineering research publications tend to comply to a set of unwritten requirements: multidisciplinarity, brevity, co-authorship, focus on the description of practical results (rather than methods), and awareness of non-specialised audiences. It is found that less discipline-specific vocabulary was used in higher IF journals and this is interpreted within the current context of manuscript publication and consumption. Also, a complex relationship between the advertised scope of each journal and the actual published papers exists, indicating that guide for authors and aims and objective published by the journal's editorial office should be critically evaluated

Authentic recipes from around the world

This general audience book is the outcome of the AHRC project "Consuming Authenticities: Time, Place and the Past in the Construction of Authentic Foods and Drinks." It addresses the temporal relationships and ideas that contribute to the construction of narratives of authenticity in relation to four foods and drinks: pulque (an alcoholic drink from Central Mexico), flaounes (celebration Easter pies from Cyprus), Welsh craft cider and acarajé (a street snack from Brazil)

Requests and counters in Russian traffic police officer-citizen encounters: face and identity implications

This paper analyses video recorded interactions between police officers and drivers in traffic stops in Russia. The interactions were recorded via cameras installed on the drivers’ car dashboards, and subsequently uploaded to YouTube; a practice to which over one million Russian motorists have resorted to counterbalance perceived high levels of bribery and corruption (Griaznova 2007). The analysis focuses on responses to opening requests for identification in five different encounters. These show that the drivers repeatedly engage in potentially interpersonally sensitive activities in which the vulnerability of face, especially that of the police officer, is interactionally manifested by launching counter requests in return. The organisation of the request - counter request sequences highlights how face and identity related concerns are interwoven in the participants’ attempts to contest each other’s authority

Requests and counters in Russian traffic police officer-citizen encounters: face and identity implications

This paper analyses video recorded interactions between police officers and drivers in traffic stops in Russia. The interactions were recorded via cameras installed on the drivers’ car dashboards, and subsequently uploaded to YouTube; a practice to which over one million Russian motorists have resorted to counterbalance perceived high levels of bribery and corruption (Griaznova 2007). The analysis focuses on responses to opening requests for identification in five different encounters. These show that the drivers repeatedly engage in potentially interpersonally sensitive activities in which the vulnerability of face, especially that of the police officer, is interactionally manifested by launching counter requests in return. The organisation of the request - counter request sequences highlights how face and identity related concerns are interwoven in the participants’ attempts to contest each other’s authority