Academic Claims Research Articles

Fostering Pragmatic Proficiency: The Influence of Explicit Instruction on Plurilingual EFL Learners’ Mastery of Hedging Devices in Canadian Academic Writing Context

Hedging academic claims is a crucial aspect of scholarly writing that presents challenges for many non-native English-speaking academic authors. Scholars, such as Hyland (2021), have emphasized the vital role of explicit instructional interventions in raising awareness about hedging devices among Plurilingual non-native English writers. This is particularly relevant considering the nuanced nature of certain hedging devices, characterized by polysemy and polypragmatics. This research aims to investigate the effectiveness of explicit instruction in enhancing the pragmatic competence of non-native English-speaking learners, with a specific focus on the acquisition and application of English modal auxiliaries as hedging mechanisms within an academic context. In this study, a group of 37 non-native English-speaking College students, representing various academic disciplines, were purposefully selected from Sommet College located in Greater Montreal area, and divided into two groups: a control group and an experimental group. The control group received conventional academic writing instruction, while the experimental group underwent explicit instruction on the use of modal auxiliaries for hedging in their academic writing. Both groups completed pretests and post-tests as part of the evaluation process. Analysis of the test scores and t-test results revealed a significant improvement in linguistic and pragmatic proficiency concerning the use of modal auxiliaries for hedging within the experimental group. Moreover, the findings demonstrated the superior performance of the experimental group in employing modal verbs for hedging purposes. The findings of this study have broader implications that reach beyond pedagogical practice, resonating with educational program administrators and curriculum developers. These results underscore the importance of including explicit instruction on hedging devices, particularly modal auxiliaries, to bolster the academic writing skills of non-native plurilingual English-speaking learners.

Frying Pans, Limpets, Donkeys and Becs-jaunes: Thinking about Violence in Late Medieval Universities

ABSTRACT This essay examines the initiation ceremonies to which new recruits were often subjected in late medieval universities. These ceremonies theatricalised and ritualised violence, playing with metaphors and symbols and toying with the fine line between representation and reality. Why draw quite such attention to the notion that one was de-bestialising a new student (in the case of Heidelberg, Avignon, and others), re-clothing a country bumpkin (in the case of Siena, for example), or policing imagined violence by a hapless freshman (Pavia)? It was, I argue, because these ceremonies were engaging with the ways in which universities provided spaces to think about violence. The student perpetrators (both consciously and unconsciously) took aim at the hypocrisy of academic claims to represent a civilising space; they challenged the boundaries between physical violence and cruel words; and they parodied and drew attention to the hypocrisy of university regulations in institutions which in many ways continued to glorify violence. The parodic, subversive ruliness of the initiation ceremonies was a way to engage with ideas about violence.

Review: Women, Islam, and the Abbasid Identity, by Nadia Maria El Cheikh

Review: <i>Women, Islam, and the Abbasid Identity</i>, by Nadia Maria El Cheikh

Cost of trading factor strategies

Recent academic literature claims that style premia are not robust to trading costs. Several papers written by practitioners counter that the assumptions made by academics on how style portfolios rebalance are too conservative. In this paper we analyse the cost of trading factor strategies using a market impact model estimated from actual transactions data, realistic and multiple portfolio construction techniques and up-to-date data. Our results suggest that, for realistic portfolio sizes, the typical costs of rebalancing a single-factor strategy are unlikely to erode the factor premium.&#x0D; In addition, by building portfolios across different factors and with alternative portfolio construction techniques, we are able to assess the degree of similarity amongst strategies over time, which can be viewed as a measure of crowding. The properties of our new crowding indicator are illustrated through an extensive empirical investigation. We then assess its relation to volatility, liquidity and market impact and find that increases in our crowding measure tend to be followed by increases in the volatility of a strategy’s returns.

Teaching Sleeping Dogs New Tricks? Transitional Justice as Identity-Building

Abstract Transitional Justice (TJ) mechanisms have been applied in several post-conflict spaces and commonly hailed by the academy as a – if not the – route to lasting positive peace. Taiwan has seen bouts of at times violent protest, which has given rise to popular and academic claims that renewed TJ efforts are required to achieve true, lasting peace. Against this backdrop, this text identifies sources of grievances and situates Taiwan’s case in the wider TJ literature to then explore Taiwan’s most recent TJ endeavours under Tsai Ying-Wen, focusing on its core mechanism, the Transitional Justice Commission. Engaging other readings of Taiwanese TJ mechanisms, this article argues that Tsai’s TJ mechanisms should be read chiefly as an identity-building project. Located in a wider drive to develop a positive identity for Taiwan, they are an attempt to establish shared historical narratives and ultimately aim to create a more stable Taiwanese identity independent of China as a pivotal Other or benchmark. This process is directed at both domestic and international audiences. This way, Taiwan negotiates, (re-)constructs and reifies a relatively inclusive positive Taiwanese identity not solely through the memories uncovered and remembered through the TJ process, but chiefly through the process itself.

Malezya Da Dahil Olmak Üzere Küresel Olarak Artan Yasadışı Dişhekimliği Kültürünün Hasta Güvenliği Açısından Azaltılmasında Multidisipliner Eylem Çağrısı

Fake dentistry is a term used to describe any dental procedures done by bogus, unqualified dentists who perform various dental procedure without proper educational background. In Malaysia, a well-trained, qualified dentist is required to register to ensure they are committed in ensuring a professional, safe, high quality and ethical dental practice. The issues of fake dentistry had gone worldwide; not only involving the emerging of fake practitioners but also raises concerns over the authenticity of dental equipment being used and available in the global market. This necessitates the interaction between the profession, public and dental suppliers. A qualified dentists is strictly recommended to continuously liaise with licensed dental dealers in order to get a constant supply of genuine dental products and equipment for their clinics. The public must be able to identify the authenticity of a practitioner’s academic claims by examining their practice and checking whether they are registered to ensure they all possess a license in good standing and that their educational claims are authentic.

Do we care about the Societal Impact of our research?

Do we care about the <i>Societal Impact</i> of our research?

Reassessing Prosecutorial Power Through the Lens of Mass Incarceration

A review of John F. Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration - And How to Achieve Real Reform.

Religious revival in rural China and the fate of ‘religion’ in China

This paper explores three aspects of the question of religious revival in rural China, one of the most ‘unexpected’ phenomena since the beginning of the reform and opening-up policy. Firstly, by offering a critical reappraisal of the three models of explaining religious revival – ‘invention of traditions,’ ‘state–society relation,’ and ‘religious market theory’ – I argue that religion should not be reduced into such categories as ‘politics’ or ‘economy’ but taken as a set of facts sui generis. I delineate some premises implied in the religious market theory, premises that are rather Christian in worldview and cannot fit the Chinese context. Secondly, it is necessary to understand the process of shaping ‘religion’ by the political and intellectual elites in modern Chinese history. Academic claims to legitimize some of the religious practices merely continue the complicity among these elites. Thirdly, religious revival in rural China is largely separated from this process of elite complicity, implying an unknown mechanism with the potential to yield an indigenous social theory. Referring to the recent model of ‘doing religion,’ I emphasize the dimension of morality being central to social solidarity. Finally, I suggest that rather than trying to apply secularization or market theories, we try using a ‘gift model’ to study religious revival.

Reassessing Prosecutorial Power Through the Lens of Mass Incarceration

Prosecutors have long been Darth Vader of academic writing: mysterious, all-powerful and, for most part, bad. This uber-prosecutor theme flows like force through John Pfaff's highly-anticipated new book, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration – and How to Achieve Real Reform. The book concludes that police, legislators, and judges are not to blame for Mass Incarceration. Instead, the most powerful actors in entire criminal justice system (prosecutors) have used their almost unfettered, unreviewable power to determine who gets sent to prison and for how long. Locked In’s data-driven thesis aligns neatly with academic consensus. If prosecutors are most powerful actor in criminal justice system, they must be responsible for its most noteworthy product – Mass Incarceration. The only problem is that it probably isn’t right. While Pfaff’s empirical findings have been embraced by media, legal academy, and even former President Obama, they are grounded in questionable data. With these flaws exposed, familiar villains of Mass Incarceration story reemerge: judges and, above all, legislators. This reemergence provides a very different focus for reforms designed to unwind Mass Incarceration. It also says something profound about prosecutorial power. Prosecutors possess substantial power to let people escape from an increasingly inflexible system. But decades of academic claims suggesting that prosecutors are equally powerful when acting in opposite direction – to dictate sanctions – fold under scrutiny. When it comes to imposing incarceration, prosecutorial power is largely contingent on actions of other, more powerful criminal justice actors.

The “Ulysses” Delusion: Rethinking Standards of Literary Merit

The “Ulysses” Delusion: Rethinking Standards of Literary Merit

Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers ed. by Bryan Albin Giemza (review)

Reviewed by: Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers ed. by Bryan Albin Giemza Mathieu W. Billings Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers, edited by Bryan Albin Giemza, pp. 223. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. $60. Over the past twenty-five years, the history of the Irish in the American South has emerged as a dynamic field of study. From academic claims that Southern culture was essentially “Celtic,” to more popular conceptions of mythical Irish Southerners—such as Gone with the Wind’s Gerald O’Hara—the implications are clear: Irish Americans would have felt more at home in the South than [End Page 157] anywhere else in the United States. Yet thorny questions over “Irishness” have blurred some of these assumptions. As one contributor to Rethinking the Irish in the American South notes, “how much can a staunchly Protestant society . . . have in common with the country that until recently was seen as perhaps the most Roman Catholic in the world?” This interdisciplinary and well-edited collection not only challenges the notion that the Irish were somehow “natural” southerners; it proposes a framework for future exploits in the field. Rather than searching for Irish “influences” in the American South, editor Bryan Giemza challenges scholars to “distinguish between analogous experience, shared history, and common cause, and to consider how and why these things are so often muddled together.” With these distinctions in mind, readers should begin this collection at the end, with Conor O’Callaghan’s “Smoke ’N’ Guns”—a literary experience akin to having dessert first. The author’s often-humorous prose and sobering poetry serve as reminders that even today, residents of the South of Ireland and the American South indeed share analogous experiences. Here, this native of the Irish borderlands who later settled in North Carolina makes connections that are compelling, yet hardly romantic. From the tobacco-based, smoke-ridden economies of Dundalk and Winston-Salem, to the violence and intimidation of the IRA and the KKK, O’Callaghan sees two societies, “where the border really does cross backyards and the Civil War keeps on happening in the hapless imaginations of certain aging men.” In “Smoke ’N’ Guns,” O’Callaghan’s analogous experiences in both “Souths” reveal possibilities and expose limitations of projecting a shared history and common cause upon these two similar, yet often very different, societies. Following “Smoke ’N’ Guns,” many of the remaining chapters offer a range of historical, musical, and literary analyses, which explore Giemza’s second analytical category: shared histories. As Patrick Griffin observes in his essay on “Irish Migration to the Colonial South,” the paths of Irish emigrants and the American South first overlapped during the seventeenth century. Yet due to a longstanding teleological lexicon employed by scholars, such terms as “Irish,” “Scotch-Irish,” and even “South” have obscured this shared history. To contemporaries, “Irish” meant any emigrant from Ireland, and the colonial “South” might well have included such places as Barbados, Monserrat, and Bermuda. Emily Kader’s “Shared Traditions,” a study of the roots of Appalachian ballads and whiskey songs, issues a similar warning about anachronistic nationalist categories. By cross-examining secondary sources and contemporary lyrics, she argues that “Irish influences cannot be discarded,” but folk music from Ireland was itself “a hybrid of various international folkloristic strains.” And in a chapter on shared literary histories in the twentieth century, Kathryn Stelmach Artuso explores the “transatlantic friendship” of Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen. Here, the author pushes the [End Page 158] boundaries of the Irish and Southern literary renaissances “beyond the Yeats-Synge partnership” to the strong female characters of Welty and Bowen, who not only upset typecasts but underscored the theme of individual rebirth evident in both literary movements. Overall, such exemplary works indicate that there are vast opportunities for scholars to explore the shared histories between the Irish and the American South. As to Giemza’s distinction of common cause, more than half of the chapters in this collection address the issues of race and whiteness. Noel Ignatiev’s argument that America’s Irish “became white” when they ceased to “be green” is nearly twenty years old, but it...

Intellectual-Human Rights Defenders and Claims for Academic Freedom under Human Rights Law

Human rights claims arising out of attacks on intellectual-human rights defenders (hrds), if brought, typically do not include claims for violations of academic freedom. As a result the standards are underdeveloped relative to other human rights claims and the scope of academic freedom violations globally. This may be in part due to a negatively reinforcing lack of familiarity with issues of academic freedom and the available standards for protection among human rights advocates, and in part to the fact that attacks on academic freedom often manifest as violations of other rights under which claims are brought (e.g. wrongful detention or torture). This article argues that existing human rights law would sustain claims for violations of academic freedom as independently and interdependently derived from the rights to freedom of opinion and expression and the right to education. The article argues that including academic freedom claims in such cases has the benefit of providing an additional basis for relief while strengthening the claim for relief on a manifested violation by providing evidence of motive and intent. Including academic freedom claims also has the independent value of addressing the wider harms to the claimant-victim and society that result from attacks on intellectual expression and are not reached by relief on the manifested violation alone, including harms to a claimant-victim’s creative, intellectual or expressive work, and widespread chilling effects on creativity, teaching, publication and the free exchange of ideas in society.

Intellectual-HRDs and claims for academic freedom under human rights law

Many human rights defenders operate from within higher education institutions, research institutes, academies, societies and ‘think-tanks'. Many of these academics, researchers and lecturers would recognise themselves as human rights defenders because their academic work is consciously paired with rights-promoting education and advocacy. Others may not set out to be human rights defenders, but are cast in the role after being targeted for attack. Human rights claims arising out of such attacks on intellectual-HRDs, if brought, typically do not include claims for violations of academic freedom. As a result the standards are underdeveloped relative to other human rights claims and the scope of academic freedom violations globally. This may be in part due to a negatively reinforcing lack of familiarity with issues of academic freedom and the available standards for protection among human rights advocates, and in part to the fact that attacks on academic freedom often manifest as violations of other rights under which claims are brought (e.g. wrongful detention or torture). This article argues that existing human rights law would sustain claims for violations of academic freedom as independently and interdependently derived from the rights to freedom of opinion and expression and the right to education. This article argues that including academic freedom claims in such cases has the benefit of providing an additional basis for relief while strengthening the claim for relief on a manifested violation by providing evidence of motive and intent. Including academic freedom claims also has the independent value of addressing the wider harms to the claimant-victim and society that result from attacks on intellectual expression and are not reached by relief on the manifested violation alone, including harms to a claimant-victim's creative, intellectual or expressive work, and widespread chilling effects on creativity, teaching, publication and the free exchange of ideas in society.

Style and the value of gay nightlife: Homonormative placemaking in San Francisco

Reductionist conceptions of gay nightlife and the neighbourhoods they anchor have obscured their diversity amid claims of gentrification or displacement. The divergent trajectories of San Francisco’s three gay bar districts present a natural experiment to specify the relationship between gay placemaking and urban processes. In 1999, each neighbourhood anchored distinct stylistic practices but by 2004, one had collapsed, another became stylistically mixed, while the youngest expanded and became homogenous. In that neighbourhood a particular gay style and mainstream cosmopolitanism converged, spatially institutionalising what queer theorists call ‘the new homonormativity’ comprising sexual discretion, mainstream political assimilation and boutique consumerism. Adherence to this particular gay style conferred spatial capital, allowing cosmopolitans, gay and straight, to literally ‘take place’ anywhere, while nonconformist gays lost their places. Contrary to popular and academic claims, not all gay places are associated with gentrification: homonormativity fostered gentrification from within, nonconformist gay nightlife fell victim to gentrification from without. This study thus contributes to a clearer relationship between gay men and urban revitalisation, nightlife economies, and the valuation of some forms of urban creativity and placemaking over others.

The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler BenUrwand. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.

The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler Ben Urwand. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.This book has aroused a huge controversy among academic scholars, some of whom arc demanding that Harvard University Press review its publication of the book. Much of the debate stems from academic claims that Urwand's book is deeply anti-Semitic in many of the assorted claims that the author, a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, presents throughout the book.The reader can decide whether or not The Collaboration warrants all this negative attention. It is a fascinating story and well-written, a book that one will find difficult to put down. The title of the book describes correctly what the author's thesis is: the between the Nazis and the Hollywood film community, especially the producers, over the making of films that would be acceptable to the Germans. The author does not say anything that most film scholars have not said (or known) before, namely the methods that Hollywood employed to keep the lucrative German film market open by the Nazis during the 1930s, after Hitler took power, through World War II. In order to continue doing business in Germany after Hitler's ascent to power, Hollywood studios agreed not to make films that attacked the Nazis or condemned Germany's persecution of Jews. Urwand reveals this bargain as a collaboration (Zusammenarbeit) that drew in a cast of characters ranging from notorious German political leaders such as Goebbels to Hollywood studio heads such as Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner.Central to the story is Hitler himself, who was obsessed with movies (he saw one almost nightly) and who recognized the power of film to shape public opinion. The Prologue discusses the making of King Kong (1933) and its eventual reception in Germany where it became one of Hitler's favorite films. He was captivated by the story, discussed it often, and had it screened several times. Other chapters are just as illuminating, such as the first chapter (Hitler's Obsession with Film) which details how Hollywood desperately sought approval by the German film censors to show the antiwar film, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), in Germany and to show it without censorship. The film's plot is not sympathetic to Germany's loss in World War I so understandably there was concern on the film's reception in that country. In December 1930, his Party rioted against the Berlin screening of All Quiet on the Western Front, which led to a chain of unfortunate events and decisions that lasted over a decade.Fearful of losing access to the German market, all of the Hollywood studios started making concessions to the German government, and, when Hitler came to power in January 1933, the studios, many of them headed by Jews, began dealing with his representatives directly (37). …

An examination of factors and attitudes that influence reporting fraudulent claims in an academic environment

The study examined potential factors and attitudes associated with providing fraudulent academic claims. A total of 319 students completed an online survey which involved reading a vignette about an incomplete assignment. Participants reported whether they would contact their instructor to gain an extension, expressed their confidence in the believability of reasons for not completing an assignment, and answered questions about their attitudes toward academic excuse making. The results indicated that academic consequences of failing to turn in an assignment and communication medium did not affect the rate at which participants reported claims. Participants most commonly reported family emergency as a reason, and expressed higher confidence that the instructor would believe this reason if they or a classmate reported it. Furthermore, a survey about attitudes toward academic excuse making suggested that the belief that academic excuse making is not really a form of deception was associated with a greater likelihood of reporting a fraudulent claim, and that those who preferred email communication tended to endorse survey items that conveyed the ease of reporting academic excuses via email.

Study on Cultural Landscape and its Research Path of Cultural Geography: A Case Study of Tibetan Buddhist Cultural Landscape

The based on research of complexity of cultural landscape and the present situation of China's cultural landscape protection, this paper redefines the methods of cultural landscape, from the perspective of new culture geography's academic claims. It also analyzes the three cultural landscape research entrances: time and spatial process, race identity and the relationship concept of human and land, and landscape as the veil. Taking Tibetan Buddhist cultural landscape as research object, this paper proposes the research path. Firstly, the basic research of cultural landscape dominated by the cultural turn could guide landscape texts reading. Secondly, from the cultural landscape change analysis, we could find the forces of cultural landscape. At last, it puts forward Multiple Integrity to guide the practice of cultural landscape protection and development.

Introduction to Symposium on Behavioral Law and Economics

We are pleased to present in this volume of Supreme Court Economic Review a symposium on behavioral law and economics. Most of the papers presented herein were originally written and presented at a conference co-sponsored by the George Mason Law and Economics Center and the Liberty Fund and held in Captiva Island February 2012.1 In addition, the papers have been supplemented by additional papers related to the topic. Taken together, the papers included here present one of the most comprehensive and far-reaching analyses of the current state of behavioral law and economics. In particular, unlike many prior collections of papers on behavioral law and economics, the papers collected here include a wide variety of perspectives, from both enthusiasts for the behavioral law and economics research paradigm, as well as others who draw more skeptical conclusions. In addition, the papers presented here rely heavily on empirical analysis, as opposed to the anecdotal and non-empirical nature of much behavioral law and economics research. The variety of perspectives represented here appraise the current state of knowledge of behavioral law and economics and identify some of the challenges for the research paradigm going forward. The volume starts off with an overview essay by Thomas S. Ulen, one of the founding fathers of behavioral law and economics, Behav-

Academic claims the Tudor era is a misleading invention

From the six wives of Henry VIII to the Spanish Armada, the so-called Tudor period has long been a fundamental part of history lessons in our schools.