“Has he eaten salt?”: communication difficulties in health care

The communication gap can lead to lack of trust, poor diagnoses and ineffectual treatment. Using research in allied fields of applied linguistics and intercultural communication this article demonstrates the problem of considering patients as deficient in their language resources and suggests the use of arts-based methods for bridging the communication gap in minority and Aboriginal community settings

Violence against sex workers in the UK

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The sound of higher education: sensuous epistemologies and the mess of knowing

The soundscape of higher education is changing. The changes reflect an age of managerialism and an age of uncertainty. These changes call on us to give up on some of the ways we have understood knowledge in the past and prompt us to find news ways of recognizing and understanding the complexities facing higher education research. This paper explores the possibilities opened up by perceptions of higher education gained through the senses, especially through the auditory sense. Taking the case of modern languages it t some of the contours of the soundscape of higher education – its grief and its diversity

Me, not you: the trouble with mainstream feminism

Phipps argues that the mainstream movement against sexual violence embodies a political whiteness which both reflects its demographics and limits its revolutionary potential

Travelling languages? Land, languaging and translation

What does translation become if we uncouple language from culture and link language to perception and experience of the land? What would happen to translation if the culture concept was not the starting point for theorizing? In order to answer this question I examine the contributions of Eagleton, Keesing, Cronin and, most particularly, of the anthropologist Tim Ingold and his important work The Perception of the Environment. From this I then proceed to examine pertinent extracts of the works of two Celtic authors; Brian Friel's Translations and Margaret Elphinstone's A Sparrow's Flight in order to develop a relationally grounded view of translation. This view privileges both the land and the work of languaging as key aspects of translation, inhabiting positions in the world, rather than constructing and mediating views of the world. I therefore come to see translation as a mode of perception, a sensory even empathic mode, a languaging response to phenomena, its primary relationship, not with culture and genealogy but as positionality – in and with the land and to develop towards a geopoetics of the taskscape of the translator

Theta functions and arithmetic quotients of loop groups

In this paper we observe that isomorphism classes of certain metrized vector bundles over P^1-{0,infinity} can be parameterized by arithmetic quotients of loop groups. We construct an asymptotic version of theta functions, which are defined on these quotients. Then we prove the convergence and extend the theta functions to loop symplectic groups. We interpret them as sections of line bundles over an infinite dimensional torus, discuss the relations with loop Heisenberg groups, and give an asymptotic multiplication formula.Comment: 16 page