Creepy Creepers: Planty Animacy in the Ecogothic Landscape

Children's status as research participants in applied linguistics has been largely overlooked even though unique methodological and ethical concerns arise in projects where children, rather than adults, are involved. This article examines the role of children as research participants in applied linguistics and discusses the limitations of traditional research 'on' and 'about' children, using research studies as examples published in mainstream applied linguistics journals. As neighbouring fields have already embraced a new approach to children as 'active participants', it is essential that SLA also widens its research agenda by focussing on children as active social agents who are capable of taking more responsible roles in research that concerns their own language learning. The last section of the article examines studies 'with' and 'by' children outside SLA in some detail and suggests future directions for research within SLA, based on the epistemology of plurality and on developing a dialogic relationship between adult facilitators and children.

Part one of this article concentrated on the political and social determinants of health in relation to dyspepsia. Here the concentration is on how we engage and empower patients with dyspepsia to become active agents of change. It is not enough simply to motivate patients to change; we need to ensure that they have the capability to affect change. Rather than the notion of Creating a Patient Led NHS (DH, 2005) becoming simply an empty ritual, this article proposes a stepwise framework for engaging patients as 'active participants' in their care. It demonstrates how we can engage patients into choosing health and shows what that service might look like. The challenge has been made to the healthcare profession on social and political grounds and it is up to us to find and utilise strategies to make the best of the available resources for the benefit of the patient population.

Children today face a rapidly changing society with new social, economic, ecological and political challenges. This study attaches special importance to modern childhood, learning and didactics, and citizenship from a child-oriented perspective. Early childhood education for sustainability (as taught in Swedish preschools) is examined and the ways that young children are seen as active participants and agents of change are described. The theoretical framework of this qualitative study is guided by a critical theory approach. The empirical material is derived from 18 applications submitted by preschools to the Swedish National Agency for Education for a Diploma of Excellence in Education for Sustainability. The findings show that education for sustainability in Swedish preschools can be interpreted as a project defining human individual responsibility in a modern, pluralistic and contradictory world. Education for sustainability is seen as an important task in preschool educational activities, as is children's participation in various activities dealing with sustainability issues. Children are described as important actors in relation to their own lives in the present and in the future. In these various activities, hidden structures appear, along with taken-for-granted assumptions in need of reflective study. Children's participation and agency were mostly understood in terms of ‘taking part in’, and even though the overall rhetoric in the texts expressed a children's rights perspective, children were not really recognised to any great extent as active participants or as agents of change. An affirmative approach to change was detected in which underlying structures of inequity and gender inequality, and notions about human connectedness to nature and unsustainable lifestyles, are not problematised. Nevertheless, some transformative approaches are emerging, with children's participation and rights being interpreted and handled as an important part of the everyday practices in the preschools.

The article outlines the developments in the national concept of family planning with particular reference to the female agents of healthcare and social policy measures from the turn of the century up to 1944. After the lost war and the shattering Treaty of Trianon in 1920, Hungary found itself in a deepening demographic crisis. High infant mortality and criminal abortion rates, the deficiency of graduate midwives, and the one-child system in the south-western part of the country concerned both politicians and intellectuals. The paper aims at connecting the medical, political, and social discourses based on archival and press sources on family planning by analyzing the role and agency of different women's organizations. I argue that state social policy measures and aid actions of the church and civic organizations and associations principally assigned two types of roles to women. On the one hand, they were active participants and agents, on the other hand, they were passive subjects and beneficiaries of social assistance activities. Furthermore, the article highlights the role of medical professionals (doctors, midwives, nurses) intersecting with the role of women as active agents in the execution of social policy measures. By integrating documents on family planning such as journal articles, political speeches and criminal abortion data into the national and political discourses, the article claims that women have often played contradictory roles in the process of family planning. Midwives and nurses who served as gatekeepers either helped women by providing access to birth control and abortion or complied with the regulations of the pro-natalist state, depriving women of choice.

: Research was conducted on making transported objects (e.g., containers, pallets, and boxes) active participants in their own security. This effort focused on improving transportation security by enabling the objects being transported to become active agents in their own protection. Here, the objects are equipped with sensing and communication capabilities and are able to determine and communicate their sense of security throughout the dynamic transportation chain in a distributed manner. As part of the project, we have developed several data mining algorithms to enable intelligent agents to detect changes from their environment state. We have also designed algorithms to allow agents to communicate with each other for enhancing safety for the group of agents. Research issues of the designed algorithms have been applied to the Transportation Security SensorNet (TSSN) real transportation chain. We have tested all the new algorithms on real sensor data collected from transportation sensor network environments. The results have demonstrated the effectiveness of these algorithms for wireless sensor network security applications and provided useful insights regarding the challenges of the anomaly detection problem for distributed security in challenging environments. In addition the lessons learned from our experiments are documented and a set of requirements for possible future systems were formulated.

This effort focused on improving transportation security by making the objects (e.g.containers) being transported active agents in their own protection.Here, the objects are equipped with sensing and communication capabilities and are able to determine and communicate their sense of security throughout the dynamic transportation chain in a distributed manner.As part of the project, we have developed several data mining algorithms to enable intelligent agents to detect changes from their environment state.We have also designed algorithms to allow agents to communicate with each other for enhancing safety for the group of agents.Research issues of the designed algorithms have been applied to the Transportation Security SensorNet(TSSN) real transportation chain.We have tested all the new algorithms on real sensor data collected from transportation sensor network environments.The results have demonstrated the effectiveness of these algorithms for wireless sensor network security applications and provided useful insights regarding the challenges of the anomaly detection problem for distributed security in challenging environment.

The context that this book sets itself within is portrayed as one of increasing uncertainty. It presents a future in which graduates must develop skills for lifelong learning, adaptation and autonomy. It is argued that, contrarily, traditional assessment methods in higher education foster dependency, with teachers as experts – sole arbiters of judgements about the quality of work – curtailing key skills demanded by a constantly changing employment landscape. The editors’ definition of evaluative judgement, taken from Tai et al. (2018: 471), is “the capability to make decisions about the quality of work of self and others.” There are three particularly notable keywords at work here. First, that evaluative judgement is a capability, a skill, and not an activity; second, that it concerns quality – distinguishing the good from the less good with reference to a standard; and third, that it is applied to work, and not the self. At its core, this is an expansion of the established ambition in higher education for engaging students as active agents in their learning, through facilitating opportunities for them to participate in making and articulating judgements over their own work and that of others. Evaluative judgement is an empowerment of students to become active participants in understanding quality and developing connoisseurship regarding their work and their learning, thereby demystifying and potentially democratising teachers’ assessment of their work – a laudable aim in itself. [Review continues]

This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on interactional management of communicative impairment by focusing on practices, in which people with an impairment are supported by those without to collaborate in an activity. Thus, a conversation and embodied interaction analysis is conducted of a routine in which a physiotherapist assists a client living with acquired brain injury to perform an activity the client cannot perform for herself: turning from lying face-down to facing the ceiling. The analysis highlights the situated multimodal and embodied practices of scaffolding whereby both parties coconstruct the client as both a competent, collaborative participant and an active agent. This paper aims to enrich the discussion on how people with communicative impairment can become active participants in a given situation by emphasising the necessity of: (1) a dynamic and complex understanding of the participation framework, and (2) including the embodied aspects of interaction in the analysis.

This important compilation of primary documents shines light upon the neglected early colonial period in Panama and vastly increases the raw data available to library-bound researchers regarding the experiences of Africans and Indians on the isthmus. The text’s markers, which coordinate with the relevant sections of the AGN in Seville, will prove invaluable for those planning a trip to this archive to explore the ethnohistory of Panama’s indigenous peoples or the interactions between Africans and Spaniards. Jopling’s volume could readily serve as a primary source base for research seminars dealing with the Spanish empire, the Central American region, or the issue of race in the early modern Spanish world.Jopling’s collection deserves a place on the shelf beside Irene Wright’s Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 1569–1580 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1932). Her chronological span, however, is greater than Wright’s, and more important, her thematic selection highlights the experiences of Panama’s African and indigenous peoples. However, Jopling’s collection does not entirely replace Wright’s older and less nuanced one. For example, her chapter on cimarrones treads lightly over the 1577–79 period that Wright found so important and instead focuses upon the events that took place in the crucial 1579–83 period, when the African leaders of several cimarron bands accepted peaceable “reduction” under Spanish auspices. This revealing section provides a compelling and detailed narrative of events, including names and descriptions of individual leaders such as Antonio Mandinga, details about the rebellious former slaves (names and backgrounds), and the location of the villages set aside for the newly “pacified” peoples. While readers of Wright’s collections are left with the impression that Panama’s Africans were a passive lot, dependent upon European intruders like Drake to provide the necessary catalyst, planning, and coordination for their slave rebellions, in Jopling’s collection cimarrones emerge as historical agents in their own right, whose capabilities and motivations can be interpreted by the reader. Likewise, though her chapter on the role of Indians and blacks in the fight against English privateers covers ground similar to Wright’s Further English Voyages to Spanish America, 1583–94 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1949), she offers fresh material on the 1596–97 period from a Spanish perspective.Jopling notes that the majority of historical studies on Panama emphasize the Spaniards’ point of view: “These studies do not exclude information on the Indians and the Africans, but the details of their daily lives, modes of survival, and their participation in Panamanian society are considered primarily in terms of their relation to the Spaniards. . . . It is rare for the Indians and the Africans to speak for themselves” (p. xi). Although I would agree with the last part of the statement, I would question her disapproval of studying Africans and Indians “in terms of their relation to the Spaniards.” Rather than presenting the experiences of Africans and Indians in utter isolation, I would underline the importance of understanding the history of colonial Panama as the history of the interactions between these three groups, each of which were active participants. Paramount to studying this process of interrelatedness is the concept of agency. Members of the two subaltern groups must be presented as active agents in the region’s history, a challenge when drawing on sources almost entirely generated by Spaniards. This volume raises the question of how such histories might be written. I think that this issue has resulted as much from certain problematic attitudes that impeded researchers in the past as it has from deficiencies in the source material.I found the chronological and thematic arrangement of the documents constricting at times. Enlarging the field of view so that Spaniards, Indians, and Africans could occupy it together would provide a more rounded picture of Spanish attempts to subjugate, control, and interact with these varied populations. Finally, aside from a brief introduction, the documents are presented virtually without annotation; contextual information would be a welcome addition to a future edition. Lacking this nuanced information, the casual reader could be left with two unfortunate impressions: that the Africans and Indians in the documents were members of monolithic social groups without regional, temporal, or cultural differentiation; and that these groups were impervious to change over time.

One definition of “children” suggests it is the social grouping of humans from birth to age twenty. A closely related concept, “childhood,” refers to the life stage of these individuals. During the middle of the 20th century, sociologists generally were not focused on studying children, leaving that field to psychologists, who often studied children from the perspective of developmental psychology. Subsequently, three major streams of sociological thought began to develop. The first looked at how child development was conditioned by both historical and social circumstances. The second studied how children created their own worlds and were themselves active agents, rather than passive recipients of socialization. The third highlighted the importance of societal and family investment in children. For many researchers, scholarship from psychology, economics, and demography was combined with insights from sociology to provide new information on child well-being. As a consequence, several categories for entries in this article overlap conceptually. This means that entries logically could be listed under other subheadings or duplicated across these categories. A second definition of childhood suggests that it is a socially constructed life stage, with variations in how childhood is conceived both historically and cross-culturally. This definition ties directly to the second stream of research in which children are active participants in their socialization.

In the present paper, Heiner Müller’s 1982 play Despoiled Shore Medea-material Landscape with Argonauts1 is explored through a post-human interpretation of the myth, where Medea performs her mythical story of destruction and loss by means of the landscape itself. In this framework, Medea becomes the ‘despoiled shore’, the polluted anthropogenic landscape that acts against its perpetrators, the ‘Argonauts’ of capitalist society. In the theatrical triptych images of environmental degradation bring to the fore the non-human and the geological, as components of the myth in Müller's post-modern version. Medea, appearing as Nature herself, becomes the protagonist of a drama that stretches from mythical space to the landscapes of late capitalism. How can Müller’s play, and by consequence the myth of Medea, be interpreted through a non-anthropocentric notion of performativity; one that focuses on non-living things and landscapes rather than on human subjects? What messages do these entities convey as they act upon our lives?By examining excerpts of Müller’s text, the essay focuses on a renewed understanding of performativity through the lens of new materialist theory and more specifically through Karen Barad’s term ‘post-humanist performativity’. Working within the theoretical framework of agential realism, Barad offers “an elaboration of performativity—a materialist, naturalist, and posthumanist elaboration—that allows matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming”. (Barad, 2003, 803) In the essay, Müller’s Medea is associated with such notion of the performative. The analysis thus focuses on lyrics that reveal transformations in space, composite materialities, human-non-human alliances and the mediating role that inorganic entities play in the production of knowledge. This shift towards the ‘post-humanist performativity’ of matter ultimately aims to convey a renewed understanding of the contemporary environment as an active agent, rather than a passive space for appropriation.

The issue of what is ‘effective’ in therapeutic interventions with children and young people who have experienced maltreatment has attracted increasing professional interest since the 1980s. Currently, these interventions are subject to evaluative processes that privilege data collected from the adult experts, who design and deliver them. Measurements of effectiveness are predominantly based on a positivist paradigm, as indicated by the number of studies that use standardised measures to capture therapeutic success. An important concern is the neglect of children and young people's voices in the discussion of therapeutic efficacy.This article presents the findings of a review of the literature, which revealed the continued privileging of adult ‘expert’ voices and the under-representation of the contributions from children and young people. However, when children and young people were engaged as active participants in evaluation processes, they were shown to demonstrate a depth of insight, which requires a reappraisal of adults as the only source of expertise in the effectiveness debate. The view that children and young people can be knowledge generators as well as active agents in their own healing is reflected by this article's proposals for future research partnerships with children and young people and changes to practice and policy development.

This paper explores how two Namibian female-authored autobiographical texts represent children as active participants in the liberation struggle. It interrogates whether children are portrayed as agents in the liberation struggle or simply objects of pity and victims in the exilic environment. The findings in this study reveal that during the liberation struggle, children were active agents and subjects. As such, the study debunks the portrayal of children as passive victims of the exilic environment, as often portrayed in some literary and academic texts. Although, to some extent, they suffer victimisation and the brutality of the struggle, the child characters in the autobiographies have proven agency by taking part in activities that enable the country to attain independence, for instance, the maintenance of the camps, working as teachers and material developers, and as nurses. It has further been revealed that children are intelligent and perseverant beings. Implicitly, they are portrayed as compassionate, assertive, full of endurance, as well as “s/heroes.” Therefore, the study re-versions the representation of children simply as weak, passive, and objects and victims of life’s historical events. The paper also argues that issues of child subjectivity in the struggle are rarely foregrounded in Namibian literary studies; hence this study has proven to be a platform to interrogate the conventional objectification of child characters in the autobiographical works of Shaketange and Namhila.

Child participation is advocated for in many contexts related to children, such as in education and health services, but also in everyday life settings. To facilitate children's real opportunities for participation, it is proposed that children need to be adequately empowered to liberate the child's autonomous voice and activate their powers of action. This involves an understanding of children as opinion-forming and social individuals, who play an active part in social relationships. This article aims at a theoretical exploration of empowerment in the organization of ethically justifiable participation situations with children. With a semantic view of theory, an eclectic research design has been used to search for a theoretical framework based on basic human needs to be an active agent in one's own life. The purpose is to define key factors that promote the sense of empowerment as a prerequisite for being an active participant in interaction with adults. This conceptualization aims to raise clearer guidelines for the implementation of child participation and presents an empowerment model with four dimensions for the active inclusion of children in participatory processes with adults. These dimensions are information, autonomy, recognition, and alliance.

This chapter aims to elaborate different research methods that can be employed in organizational studies. Since the complex and indivisible relationships between the constructs and nature of the social content about the phenomena can be understood better through qualitative methods, importance of qualitative investigation is mentioned and a detailed explanation of grounded theory data analysis as a qualitative method is provided. Grounded Theory mainly suggests that theory can be discovered in qualitative data. The theory employs a specific method that follows symbolic interactionism in viewing humans as active agents in their own lives who create meaning in the processes of action and interaction. Grounded Theory which deems researchers as active participants in the construction of knowledge leading to generation of theory has been used in organizational research widely. Therefore, the chapter also offers an example of the application of grounded theory by using several extracts from the sample transcripts of interviewees.