Academic Conversation Research Articles

The Change Laboratory as an approach to harnessing conversation for academic development

ABSTRACT Informal academic conversations constitute a valuable addition to the repertoire of academic development initiatives. This article proposes that a Change Laboratory methodology may enhance the productivity of such conversations. Support for this proposal comes from a detailed analysis of participants’ transformation of conversations on individual problems, into collective and systemic understandings as well as potential solutions in the Change Laboratory. This is achieved through their use of theoretically derived tools from activity theory. Such transformative ability, as well as some participants’ application of the approach in their own research, it is suggested, may indicate the development of transformative agency.

Guest editorial: the entrepreneurship challenges in Latin America

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue “The Entrepreneurship Challenges in Latin America”. Design/methodology/approach Latin America and the Caribbean is a region with many potentialities. Like one of the largest markets in the world, entrepreneurship activities can constitute a key element to enhance regional competitiveness. Findings This study makes a general overview of entrepreneurship dynamics in Latin America and its contexts. This study presents the eight manuscripts that constitute the special issue. Originality/value This study contributes to current academic conversations and highlights the relevance of continuing inquiring about the entrepreneurship phenomena at the regional level. Contribution to impact This study expects that this special issue will help the region’s scholarly entrepreneurship community and others interested in Latin America. This study also believes that this special issue manuscript makes a relevant contribution to policy and practice.

Enhancing Critical Thinking Skills and Dispositions Through Community Dialogue in an Academic Writing Programme

The ability to think and write critically is a core outcome in higher education. Many universities provide writing programs for undergraduates to develop sound argumentation skills and build the foundation to engage in academic conversations. Still many students struggle with academic writing. This paper argues that teaching using instructional frameworks is not sufficient; learning will be more effective when situated within a community of practice. Drawing from the learning experiences of students who participated in a community-based activity in a freshmen academic writing class in Singapore, I share my insights on how reframing learning from a structure-driven approach to a community-based experience had enhanced learning dispositions and outcomes. Results show that when learners viewed academic writing as a socially situated practice, and not a task to be completed to fulfil academic requirements, the dispositions needed for critical thinking were honed to drive them towards writing with more criticality.

Using a Collaborative Academic Conversation Approach to Improve Language and Literacy

Purpose: This tutorial describes a comprehensive approach to the development of collaborative academic conversations in older students with language delays and impairments. Support materials including a link to an instructional video are provided. Conclusions: These students require systematic, explicit instruction to develop competence and to acquire the thinking and language skills required to productively engage in a collaborative academic conversation. Speech-language pathologists are uniquely equipped to prepare students for gainful participation and to collaborate with classroom teachers, ensuring transfer of language and thinking skills. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16799545

Breaking All the Rules

Breaking All the Rules

MSc student voices about learning together in an online academic conversation club: a collaborative student project

MSc student voices about learning together in an online academic conversation club: a collaborative student project

“Yellow Perils,” Revived: Exploring Racialized Asian/American Affect and Materiality Through Hate Discourse over the COVID-19 Pandemic

The goal of this essay is to explore what kind of hate is produced against Asian bodies in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. By centering Asian/American affect and materiality – marginalized voices, narratives, and feelings of Asian/Americans as affective-performative texts, this essay attends to critique the historical continuum of racial discrimination against Asian/Americans (i.e., yellow peril) and advocate for social justice, equality, and inclusion in the U.S. Overall, I argue that Asian/American bodies are both physiologically and ideologically desensitized, dehumanized, and weaponized as the revival of yellow perils over the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, this essay highlights the possibility of adding affective and performative lenses in Critical Intercultural Communication research, exploring the politics of Asian/American bodies and the hate discourse as a case study for further academic conversations in Asian/American scholarship in Communication.

Protecting Autonomy of Rohingya Women in Sexual and Reproductive Health Interventions

Protecting Autonomy of Rohingya Women in Sexual and Reproductive Health Interventions

Identification and Adoption of Themes in The Big Bang Theory Sitcom to Foster Academic Cultural Competencies of Doctoral Students in English for Academic Conversation Classroom.

The primary purpose of this study is to identify academic cultural themes in the popular television sitcom The Big Bang Theory in order to enhance doctoral students’ awareness and acquisition of Ph.D. competencies through formalized and explicit instruction. The secondary aim is to assess the impact of the selected academic themes on doctoral students’ acquisition of Ph.D. competencies in an English for Academic Conversation (EAC) classroom. Drawing upon the concept of thematic learning instruction, a qualitative research method involving six clusters of Ph.D. competency reference framework developed by Durette and others was adopted to identify the academic cultural themes depicted by the sitcom’s main characters. This is followed by evaluating the effectiveness of an EAC course in fostering learners’ Ph.D. competencies using selected identified academic cultural themes. The result showed that the sitcom’s main characters demonstrate the personal and professional skills commonly possessed by a competent academic as an individual or group. This is evidenced as all the thirty-four identified skills traverse the six clusters of Ph.D. competencies devised by Durette and colleagues in 2016. Also, the impact assessment results revealed that the course fostered learners’ Ph.D. competencies as they shared knowledge, past experience, and action plans of every selected academic theme. This work contributes to existing knowledge of doctoral competencies vital to promoting competency-based Ph.D. programs in higher education.

Turbocharging Practical Implications in Management Studies

This is the second editorial commentary in a three-part series that addresses introductions, implications, and interestingness. The first, focusing on the introduction design, is about what the beginning of a paper should look like. The second, focusing on practice implications, is about what the end of a paper should look like. The third discusses how to develop and fit attention-grabbing ideas into the academic conversation in the literature. We hope this editorial series provides inspiration and ideas about publishing papers that people want to engage with.

Exploring the impacts of artificial intelligence on freedom of religion or belief online

ABSTRACT Freedom of religion or belief is an essential right for building pluralistic and tolerant societies which can sustain a multiplicity of competing ideas. However, the opaqueness of artificial intelligence systems on the Internet represents a challenge to the protection and enjoyment of this and other human rights. Although AI has generated interest in the human rights literature, these studies have largely focused on AI and its impact on freedom of expression and privacy, leaving other rights such as freedom of religion or belief neglected. As part of a broader research project to expand the academic conversation about AI and human rights, this paper will examine the impact of artificial intelligence on freedom of religion or belief online. The paper will focus on the worship, teaching, observance, and practice associated with freedom of religion or belief alongside the impacts of AI in content display, content moderation, and online privacy. The paper will offer preliminary policy recommendations to encourage discussion on policy approaches to AI development and deployment which incorporate protections for freedom of religion or belief in the era of artificial intelligence.

Representation Matters: Theorizing Health Communication from the Flesh

ABSTRACT This essay engages simultaneous stories that bridge the personal and the professional within the context of health communication focusing on how cultural, racialized identity politics reveal the shortfalls of scholarly literature as the overarching and exclusionary pulse of an academic conversation. Drawing upon a publication journey and personal Latinx knowledge about health treatment preferences, I describe the intertwined and inescapable embodied knowledge that enriches and guides scholarly endeavors. I assert several health communication sub-field calls to action.

Academic Conversation: A Case to Exemplify the Influence of Non-Verbal Communication on Human Interaction

The present study tried to highlight the influence non-verbal communication has on human interaction; academic conversation is specified to exemplify this construct for other spheres of life. It addresses whether teachers’ non-verbal communication has an influence on students’ performance, the students’ perception regarding the non-verbal communication in academics and their respective impact were explored. Literature reflects that non-verbal communication has a significant role in human interactions; it not only elaborates but certainly clarifies the verbal message. The present study was devised to get subjective perceptions of students on board for presenting behavioural upshots serving academics. The sample of 37 Pakistani students of Quaid-i-Azam University within an age range of 19 to 24 years (M= 22.8, SD=1.77) responded to semi-structured interviews and their opinions were recorded in the form of interview transcriptions. Conventional content analysis was used for the analysis of data and categories were adjusted under two broader themes; perceived strong predictors of performance and perceived hurdles for students learning. Almost all individuals responded that non-verbal communication of teacher can be more influential than words. Findings of the study have great implications for behavioural management of people; teacher-student and other human interactions.

Ritual Frame Indicating Expressions (An Academic Conversation)

The present paper is based on an interview, conducted by Victor V. Leontyev with Juliane House and Dániel Z. Kádár. It provides an overview of a new theory in pragmatics, namely, Ritual Frame Indicating Expressions (RFIEs). This theory provides a bottom-up and corpus-based approach to the study of various pragmatically important expressions through which the participants of an interaction indicate their awareness of the Ritual Frame underlying the interaction. 'Ritual Frame' encompasses a cluster of standard situations in which the rights and obligations of the participants are clearly defined. The corpus-based RFIE approach complements sociopragmatic approaches to various expression types, including so-called 'politeness markers', honorifics, forms of address and so on, and it also helps us to systematically capture the relationship between expressions and speech acts. In studying RFIEs, the analyst focuses on the ways in which RFIEs spread across various standard situations. The study of this issue also allows the researcher to contrastively examine the use of RFIEs across linguacultures. Such contrastive research helps us to unearth major linguacultural differences. For example, the research of J. House and D.Z. Kádár has revealed that while in East Asian linguacultures such as Chinese RFIEs tend to be strongly associated with a particular speech act, this relationship is casual in Western linguacultures.

Publishing in the Academy of Management Journals

Publishing in the Academy of Management Journals

Introduction: Traveling Forms (Global German Studies)

The present Covid-19 pandemic has brought the contradictions of our global existence into sharp relief. While the spread of the virus across national and continental borders has raised the awareness of global entanglements, the resultant closure of national borders even within the European Schengen Area locked people down in place and brought transnational movement to a halt. With most academic conversations having moved online, the 29th Annual Berkeley Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference, held February 19-20, 2021, gathered a group of scholars from across the globe to address the state of our discipline in times of uncertainty and transformation. The breadth of approaches contained under the disciplinary heading “German Studies/Germanistik'' can be at times dizzying, but we believe this ultimately to be a strength of what we call German Studies. Ours, perhaps more than many others, has been a discipline seeking to redefine itself by deconstructing its originary conception – in the sense both of its initially nationalistic orientation as well as its theoretical foundations and antecedents.

Interrogating the nexus between irregular migration and insecurity along ‘ungoverned’ border spaces in West Africa

ABSTRACT The ‘coloniality’, porosity, and ‘ungovernability’ of borders in West Africa, have engendered undocumented migration, in which most people engage to visit their kin and for economic reasons such as herding, farming, fishing, hunting, and trading. This occurs concurrently with human smuggling, human trafficking, gun-running, terrorism, and money laundering. The rise in these cross-border criminal activities and the resultant insecurity have put irregular migration into the mainstream of political and academic conversation, generating national, regional, and global concerns. Against this backdrop, this paper examines the nexus between irregular migration and insecurity along ‘ungoverned’ borders in West Africa, based on a review of relevant literature on migration, security, and governance in scholarly journals, books as well as relevant reports, newspaper, and media accounts. The overarching question which this raises and is addressed in this paper is: How does the coloniality and porosity of ungoverned borders in West Africa engender and/or entrench cross-border insecurity? Addressing this question suggests the need to provide sufficient governance mechanisms that involve both state and non-state actors in order to reduce the ungoverned spaces in this part of Africa.

What If DABUS Came to Africa? Visiting AI Inventorship and Ownership of Patent from the Nigerian Perspective

Dr Stephen Thaler’s artificial intelligent machine – DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience) recently created two patentable devises that were the subject of patent applications in the European Patent Office (EPO), the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and other patent offices, including under the Patent Cooperation Treaty system. Thaler named DABUS as the inventor in the applications and claimed to have acquired the right to patent from DABUS as its owner, employer and successor in title. The EPO, UKIPO and USPTO recently rejected the applications on the ground of non-compliance with the formal requirements of their respective patent legislation for failing to name a natural person as inventor. Based on a comparative study conducted as a desk research, the paper reviews the EPO, UKIPO and USPTO decisions against the backdrop of the ongoing policy and academic conversations on AI and patent policy. It then situates the decisions within the African context, especially under the Nigerian patent regime, and determines whether the Nigerian patent office will reach a different conclusion from those made by the EPO, UKIPO and USPTO should a similar patent application be considered in Nigeria. Artificial Intelligence, Inventorship, Patent Regimes, DABUS, EPO, UKIPO, USPTO, Nigeria

Designing Scholarly Introductions as Jobs to Be Done

This is the first editorial commentary in a three-part series that addresses introductions, implications, and interestingness. The first, focusing on the introduction design, is about what the beginning of a paper should look like. The second, focusing on practice implications, is about what the end of a paper should look like. The third discusses how to develop and fit attention-grabbing ideas into the academic conversation in the literature. We hope this editorial series provides inspiration and ideas about publishing papers that people want to engage with.

“Having Walked Alongside You”: A Conversational Exchange on Territory and Sound in Motion

As two artist-scholars engaged in research-creation, our goal with this project was to enact a performance/discussion regarding settler-colonialism, sound, performance, and our relationships to land, body and time. During the initial “lockdown phase” of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, we carried out a mediated conversation via WhatsApp voice memos, hiking towards each other along and across the Oldman River, then retracing the other’s path back to our respective points of origin. This collaborative project aims to decolonize the academic paper through a process which combines textual analysis, experiential learning, improvisational performance, and activated writing to ask questions of the relationships between sound, land, and colonial institutions. How does movement through space, and hearing the land, affect our experience of discussing texts? How is discussion informed by, say, the participants being separated (or connected) by a river? What richness exists in oral/aural exchanges that are lost in the textualizing process? What does it mean to move through occupied Blackfoot territory while discussing decolonialism? The structure of this conversational exchange unfolds in loops rather than in the linear standard of academic writing. This “essay” was originally devised as an audiovisual text, but during further revisions, we continued our experimentations with form. The result has taken shape in dual outputs of both sound and text, each form containing affective and sensorial elements not found in the other, creating parallel yet distinct “texts.” While this is an imperfect strategy for those who experience sight/hearing related disabilities, we also recognize that some sensorial experiences are untranslatable into the language of the other senses. We hope that we have encoded each experience of sound and text with enough richness for them to be enjoyed individually, and we invite those who can, to experience how the two forms play off of each other. To this effect, the form of this text focuses on the relationship between the content of our conversation and how it is presented, and between our conversation and the writers, artists and movements we have referenced. We also hope to emphasize our relationality with the land we walked through, the creators of the sounds we listened to, between us, the co-creators of this “text,” as well as the relationship we create with you, the listener/reader experiencing it. As artists/writers/curators, it is a challenge to find alternative textual formats that appropriately reflect artistic research-creation methodologies while also satisfying the demands of academic knowledge dissemination. This collaboration explores the possibility for academic conversations to escape the confines of learning institutions into a space of praxis and embodied experience in motion.