Authorial Voice Research Articles

ECHOES OF CHANGE: TRANSFORMATIVE NARRATIVES IN CONTEMPORARY TRIBAL LITERATURE WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE ADIVASI WILL NOT DANCE: STORIES, THE BLACK HILL, AND KOCHARETHI: THE ARAYA WOMAN

This study delves into the intricate dynamics of narratives within tribal contexts, examining how narratives undergo change over time and mirror transformative experiences. Tribal communities have been impacted by globalization, cultural shifts, and individual authorial voices by following the trajectory from traditional tribal narratives to contemporary expressions. This present study focuses on contemporary tribal narratives analyzing particularly three chief works of great tribal writers; The Adivasi Will not Dance: Stories by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, The Black Hill by Mamang Dai, and Kocharethi: The Araya Woman by Narayan. Their narratives provide a forum for discussing the intricacies of transition, protecting cultural identities from contemporary influences, and advancing knowledge of the dynamic changes occurring within tribal communities. The study’s conclusion not only highlights the vital role that Contemporary tribal literature plays in promoting comprehension, adaptability, and cultural continuity amidst transitions, but it also celebrates the vibrancy of this genre through a thorough examination of themes and authorial perspectives. It also advocates for the inclusion of diverse tribal perspectives in the global discourse to contribute to a more nuanced portrayal of these experience.

Feminism Up on Stage A Discussion on the Deformation of Female Images in Chinese Film and TV Works

Taking Chinese film and TV works as the research subject, this paper attempts to analyze the development of feminism and the deformation of the female image shaped by film and TV works, summarize and reflect on the motives as well as the results of these works. We deploy a case-study methodology to scrutinize the evolution of feminism and the prevailing trend of distorted female portrayals in film and TV. It identifies three primary modes of distortion in the depiction of women in three mediums. This paper also aims to advocate that film and TV works should reasonably shape female image, veritably reflect the voice of females and convey feminism, and positively promote the development of feminism in China. At the same time, we advocate that filmmakers ought to fathom the true essence of feminism, genuinely reflecting the authentic voices and demands of women. We also hope that this paper will have a deeper significance for the subsequent research.

Authorship, place and voice in research: A transitivity analysis of selected African and Western journals

The concept of voice has become crucial within academic discourse, where texts constitute sites for enacting identity. In spite of the recognition that expressing authorial voice in writing constitutes a salient feature of academic writing, various studies have pointed out that there appears to be a fair amount of trepidation when it comes to the expression of authorial voice in academic texts, especially so for L2 writers. The argument has been that L2 writers are likely to suppress authorial voice in writing. This argument identifies the L2 status as the underlying cause of the lack of voice in writing. This study examines the relationship between the expression of authorial voice and the cultural location of the journals in which articles are published. It examines authorial voice in the methodology sections of research articles published in Western and African journals. Methodology sections extracted from 60 journal articles from two broad disciplines – Arts and Social Sciences constituted the corpus for the study. Using Halliday’s transitivity framework, the study revealed that within the methodology section, there is a general tendency to diminish authorial voice and that this is reflected in the nature of first-person pronoun usage and in the distribution of the transitivity patterns across the corpus. The study suggests that the cultural location of journals does play a subtle role in the expression of authorial voice and presence in the methodology sections of RAs. There are no deep divergences between the two categories.

Acculturation and linguistic ideology in the context of global student mobility: a cross-cultural ethnography of anglophone international students in China

ABSTRACT This cross-cultural ethnography explored the global student mobility patterns of international students from English-speaking countries in China and asked research questions about (a) their motivational factors and acculturation expectations before arrival; (b) linguistic factors influencing their acculturative stressors in the host group community’s culture and its academic, social, and public systems after arrival; and (c) their reflections on intergroup ideologies with the host community after graduation, based on looking ahead. This study collected data through fieldwork by observing and interacting with approximately 80 individuals from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in university towns in East China during the academic years from 2012 to 2023. In turn, 17 individuals who graduated before 2021 were selected as the final sample to conduct in-depth interviews. The study placed the concepts of acculturation expectations and intergroup ideologies at the nexus of linguistic hegemony, symbolic power, and social space. The overarching findings showed that despite positive motivations to visit China, language barriers led participants to express confusion, culture shock, anxiety, and perceived discrimination in their academic, social, and public domains. However, some participants who remained in China after graduation expressed their authentic voices regarding changes in attitude toward the host community culture and their heritage language. Therefore, this study focused on a different dimension of acculturation and linguistic ideology by examining how a linguistically and culturally dominant cohort faced acculturative challenges and negotiated to cope with their stressors in power dynamics.

Humanising Online Pedagogy through Asynchronous Discussion Forums

Humanising pedagogy has been a focus of recent research as more universities move to online and blended models of instruction. Online learning has been linked to feelings of isolation, disconnection, and depersonalisation of the learning experience for many students. In South Africa, the shift to online instruction took place in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and recent student movements that brought attention to how the country’s violent history resulted in structural inequalities in terms of race and class that affect learning environments. Thus, humanising pedagogy also meant recognising and addressing how students’ contextual challenges might affect their feelings of connection in the learning environment. In this article, we present a case study of a first-year course at a South African university where we used online discussion forums that required students to engage with weekly forum tasks. Through thematic content analysis of students’ dialogic responses on these forum tasks, we demonstrate how the tasks facilitated humanising pedagogy by allowing students to use their authentic voices, to form social connections, and to reflect their affective and personal experiences. We argue that interactive, asynchronous online forums can be effective tools to facilitate humanising online pedagogy when these forums are designed in ways that encourage dialogic learning, use content that is relevant to students’ contexts, and give students agency by allowing them to select texts for discussion and share their diverse perspectives. Our analysis also showed limitations to forum discussions which include students echoing responses and instances of silencing and unsupportive group dynamics.

Their Bodies, Their Selves: Reflexivity and Embodiment in 2010s Women's Autobiographical Author-Performer TV Dramedies

Abstract During the 2010s, American television witnessed a growing attention to and presence of women, both in TV representation and in TV creation and production. As part of that development, the self-representation of women who are both the creators and the stars of their shows — such as Lena Dunham (creator and star of Girls; HBO, 2012 – 17), Tig Notaro (creator and star of One Mississippi, Amazon, 2015 – 17), Issa Rae (creator and star of Insecure, HBO, 2016 – 21), Pamela Adlon (creator and star of Better Things, FX, 2016 – 22), and Frankie Shaw (creator and star of Smilf, Showtime, 2017 – 19) — has been on the rise. This article examines these five dramedies in which women both exert authorial voices in telling their own stories and bring to bear performative embodiment in starring in these autobiographical texts. The textual multilayeredness of these author-performers’ autobiographical dramedies, the article shows, reveals the ways in which authorship and performance operate in the realm of women's televisual representation.

The Lonely Hearts Club: A polyphonic reflection on the making of an erotica performance in India

This essay is a multi-authored text by the creator and the six performer-writers of The Lonely Hearts Club—an erotica performance made in India during the pandemic. The Lonely Hearts Club initially unfolded on Instagram, and subsequently on Zoom as a digital show1. The text below documents the collaborative spirit with which the show was realised. Rather than a singular authorial voice, here multiple perspectives with varied registers share their experience, process, and trepidation of making an online erotica show. This erotica does not cater to the hetero-normative gaze, but lies in-between and on the periphery—queer stories, feminist narratives and intimate chronicles in regional Indian languages. The essay is framed as a series of reflections, along with excerpts from the original performance texts, to offer a flavour of the language, artistic choices, and impulses. This recounting offers an insight into a documentary theatre making process in India.

Newswork in crisis: Sourcing patterns during COVID-19 through a ‘lived experience’ perspective

During crises the newsmedia are expected to provide relevant and accurate information to help citizens comprehend the crisis and act upon it. As a source-driven practice, journalism relies on a variety of sources to validate news and provide perspectives. The disruptive nature of a crisis though raises questions about how journalists select sources and what these choices say about professional autonomy and criticality. Considering source choices as newsgathering venues and strategies, and drawing on semi-structured interviews with journalists in Greece and Cyprus, the study explores the factors that shaped journalists’ sourcing practices during the COVID-19 crisis. We find that journalists over-relied on political sources and selective authoritative voices compromising the tenets of verification and independence. The fear to convey inaccurate or ‘biased’ information amid disinformation flows, bolstered journalist's elite orientation. Professional precarity and economic pressures are found to further worsen the ‘lived experience’ of journalists limiting their ability to question and scrutinise power in times of crises.

Voice disguise and foreign accent: Prosodic aspects of English produced by Bra-zilian Portuguese speakers

This study aims to explore how much a speaker of English as a foreign language can mask one’s accent by performing voice disguise toward a native-like accent, and what implications it might bring forward. For the Methods, we conducted three experiments, (a) both the native and the foreign groups produced authentic voices, (b) the native group performed authentic voice and the foreign group performed disguised voice, and (c) a group of native listeners of English rated the degree of foreign accent from experiments a and b. The results showed evidence of correlation between the ratings and authentic voices. Nevertheless, they remained somewhat inconclusive for the disguised voice. It may be concluded that the more the Brazilian speaker approaches the L1-English target accent when voice disguising, the harder it is for the listener to recognize his/her L2-English accent.

Identity and Investment: A Critical Exploration of English Major Students’ Perceptions of Learning and Using English Language in Contemporary China

Abstract This study is contextualized onto three levels- the macro-level globalized context, the meso-level national context, and the micro-level of school contexts. Under the influence of these different contexts, this study is designed as a phenomenological study with the aim to understand the phenomenon of English learning and using perceptions, investment, and identity constructions of ten English major students in China through semi-structured interviews. In order to fulfill that goal, Darvin and Norton (2015)’s model provides a solid theoretical foundation for the researcher to investigate this critical educational phenomenon. The findings of the study include not only how participants reflect on their English learning experiences at different learning stages, but also how they exert their sense of agency and re-construct their English language identity in new environment. Findings also show the power of native English as a form of capital and the influence of authoritative voices on students’ perceptions and language identity while students enter and transfer their English learning to teaching trajectories. By providing a critical and multi-layered approach, this study demonstrates how Chinese educational system institutionalizes native English and thus shapes English major students in China.

Never Die Alone: Donald Goines, Black Iconicity, and Série Noire

Abstract Depending on who you ask, Donald Goines is a pioneer of Black popular fiction or a purveyor of shoddy pulp. This duality is illustrative of an impasse between American intelligentsia and Goines’s folk readership. Goines wrote sixteen novels between 1971-74 that have remained in print for sixty years with sales in the millions. Yet Goines remains an understudied American author and unacknowledged in the transnational reach of his writing. This essay offers the first scholarly consideration of Donald Goines’s status as a transnational author. Specifically, I analyze Goines’s promotion and reception in America and France. I will focus on Goines’s two prime distributors: Holloway House Publishing, which debuted Goines’s novels as the premier works of its Black Experience Books imprint in the early 1970s, and Gallimard Publishing, which translated Goines’s work into French as part of its famed crime fiction imprint, Série Noire, in the 1990s and early 2000s. This transnational comparative approach draws on three archives: Holloway House’s promotional materials that endorse Goines as the unprecedented authentic authorial voice of American Blackness, an unexamined element of the Holloway House archive that promotes Goines as an internationally revered author, and the nearly unacknowledged materials of Goines’s French publisher Gallimard that situate Goines as an author of American noir. Holloway House’s shift in promotional tactics and Série Noire’s prioritization of Goines as an author of American noir has two telling implications. First, it exposes how the racially essentialist logic of Holloway House linked authorial experience and literary fiction to promote the “authentic” Black experience as tethered to criminality. Second, it situates Goines in an internationally recognized US tradition of crime fiction in a way still largely unacknowledged in the United States.

Nurses' experiences of moral distress and how it affects daily work in surgical care-a qualitative study.

To describe nurses' and specialist nurses' experiences of moral distress and how it affects daily work in surgical care. A qualitative descriptive study design was used. A qualitative study with 12 interviews with nurses and specialist nurses working in surgical care. All interviews were conducted during October and November 2022 in two hospitals in southeastern Sweden. Data were analysed using conventional qualitative content analysis. Three categories and seven subcategories generated from the data analysis. The three categories generated from the analysis were Experiences that lead to moral distress, Perceived consequences of moral distress and Strategies in case of moral distress. The results show that a lack of personnel in combination with people with complex surgical needs is the main source of moral distress. Both high demands on nurses as individuals and the teamwork are factors that generate moral distress and can have severe consequences for the safety of patients, individual nurses and future care. The results show that moral distress is a problem for today's nurses and specialist nurses in surgical care. Action is necessary to prevent nurses from leaving surgical care. Prioritizing tasks is perceived as challenging for the profession, and moral distress can pose a patient safety risk. Surgical care departments should design support structures for nurses, give nurses an authentic voice to express ethical concerns and allow them to practice surgical nursing in a way that does not violate their core professional values. Healthcare organizations should take this seriously and work strategically to make the nursing profession more attractive. There was no patient or public contribution.

“My Book Ideas were Spinning in my Head”: Arts‐Rich Bookmaking Experiences to Create and Sustain Multilingual Children's Meaning Making Flows and Authorial Voices

AbstractImportant theoretical developments in TESOL education challenge the monolingual mindset, instead valuing and leveraging students' complex linguistic repertoires alongside their funds of knowledge and identity through translanguaging practices to foster literacy development. Through a case study of an arts‐rich book making experience facilitated by community organization, Kids' Own Publishing, this article uses assemblage thinking to examine how children's semiotic, knowledge, and identity resources interact to support them to create and sustain meaning making flow and to express distinctive authorial voices. Employing a critical content analysis guided by assemblage thinking, we highlight the literacy skills demonstrated in five students' published eight‐page books and show how the interaction of children's meaning‐making resources is best understood through an “assemblage” lens, a process which is under‐researched. Through this lens, we examine the facilitative role of the arts‐rich experience in furnishing vibrant activities, artifacts, and an inspiring physical space that shaped how the children's meaning‐making resources came together as flows. We consider implications for literacy learning, including the need to create conditions for all children's meaning making resources to be drawn upon in text creation in an approach that values what all students, whether they identify as monolingual or multilingual, bring to their learning.

Using Quotes to Present Claims: Practices for the Writing Stages of Qualitative Research

While there has been a great deal of guidance on qualitative research methodology, such scholarship has focused almost exclusively on the first three parts of the qualitative process: study design, data gathering, and coding/analysis. We suggest that writing findings is a fourth stage that involves pre-writing and composing. Our intent is to provide practices for this phase for those who are using qualitative data as the evidentiary basis for their claims. The pre-writing phase is strengthened by structuring claims and storyboarding findings, while the composing phase is improved by critically evaluating how to insert the author's voice. Practices surrounding qualitative writing are discussed, such as which quotes to include, where to place quotes, and how to edit quotes. Annotated examples are also provided that show both recommended and nonrecommended ways of inserting the author's voice into a findings section. A sample structure for writing a claim—a claim table—and a sample storyboard are provided.

Distinguishing Authentic Voices in the Age of ChatGPT: Comparing AI-Generated and Applicant-Written Personal Statements for Plastic Surgery Residency Application: Erratum.

Distinguishing Authentic Voices in the Age of ChatGPT: Comparing AI-Generated and Applicant-Written Personal Statements for Plastic Surgery Residency Application: Erratum.

Learning to facilitate student voice in primary physical education

Student voice pedagogies in physical education (PE) offer teachers a mechanism to promote meaningful experiences by actively engaging students in decision-making regarding their learning. Over one academic year, the experiences of one generalist classroom teacher's enactment of student voice pedagogies in their primary PE practice were explored within a Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practice (S-STTEP) frame. Data sources included post-lesson personal reflections, a researcher journal, and transcripts from meetings with a critical friend. Qualitative data was also collected from students ( n = 19) over a shorter timeframe of six months, and took the form of student work samples, along with transcripts from focus group interviews ( n = 2, with eight total participants). Findings show that the enactment of student voice pedagogies requires significant scaffolding for both the teacher and their students. The teacher needs to learn how to listen to, nurture, and act on their students’ voices, while students require assistance in developing their capacity to share their voices. Thus, the enactment of student voice pedagogies takes time, and necessitates a period of trial and error, to ensure the educator is providing authentic student voice opportunities in their practice. This study adds an additional layer to student voice research by providing a teacher's perspective of learning how to enact student voice pedagogies in PE. Furthermore, the findings add to the limited research into the use of student voice pedagogies at primary level.

The Importance of Being (In)Authentic

In response to three discussions of the author’s Creole Noise: Early Caribbean Dialect Literature and Performance (2022), this essay raises questions about the meaning of authenticity in the production of literary Creole in the anglophone Caribbean from the eighteenth century to the present. It puts into conversation related progressive concepts of Creole, such as Kamau Brathwaite’s formulation of nation language, with early racist ventriloquist Creole narratives by White creoles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It does so as a way of disentangling what we mean when we identify an authentic Creole voice. This essay also examines the role of linguistics in affirming or disproving the authenticity of historical Creole narratives; distinguishes spoken Creole from written; and considers the importance, or lack of importance, in identifying authors when constructing a history of literary Creole. Authors discussed include Henry Garland Murray, Kamau Brathwaite, V. S. Naipaul, Cynric Williams, and Samuel Augustus Mathews.

An Analysis of Dialogic Positioning in Online Commentaries

AbstractThe commentary as a journalistic genre that presents and comments on current events is characterized by intersubjective positioning, whereby the author constructs meaning, seeking alignment or, on the contrary, expressing disalignment with a putative audience. In line with the appraisal theory as developed by Martin and White (2005), which follows the Bakhtian dialogic perspective, according to which utterances and propositions are intersubjectively charged, the paper aims to describe the linguistic means ofengagement, one of the central elements of this theory. Engagement is concerned with how the author expresses authorial voice and how s/he negotiates meaning with the readers, opening up (dialogic expansion) or, on the contrary, closing the dialogic space (dialogic contraction). In this sense, the linguistic means of engagement, such as modality, hedging and boosting devices, evidentiality, are understood to transcend the functions attributed to them within a truth-conditional framework, namely epistemic status and reliability of knowledge, and are seen as means by which the author entertains or rejects alternative voices and opinions. Taking this into consideration, the paper intends to analyse a few selected commentaries on the war situation in Ukraine found on the online platform of The Rand Corporation, a global policy think tank that performs research and conducts evaluations of various topics. It analyses the linguistic means of dialogic positioning, focusing on how the authors negotiate the dialogic space with the audience; while presumably all forms of intersubjective positioning can be found in the texts, it is expected that certain forms of engagement will outnumber others. As all commentaries can be found on the website of the above mentioned corporation, the question also arises as to what extent commentaries show similarity with respect to engagement, thereby expressing, albeit indirectly, a certain standpoint with respect to the Ukrainian warfare.

Writing History in a Supreme Court Ruling: Evaluative language in the majority opinion concerning Dobbs vs. Jackson

This paper conducts an exploratory investigation into the use of evaluative language in the historical section of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. (2022). The investigation employs Martin & White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory, adapted specifically for the analysis of the particular evaluative features of historical discourse as elaborated on, for example, by Myskow (2018a) and Oteíza & Pinuer (2013). The findings confirm that a revised version of the Appraisal framework can be fruitfully applied to systematically account for the complex interplay between, on the one hand, the various sources of evaluation, and, on the other hand, the specific attitudinal resources, employed by the authorial voice in an attempt to construe and advance a particular view of the past. This particular ideological view is ultimately leveraged to produce a convincing justificatory argument for the overruling of the two previous landmark Supreme Court decisions that had, respectively, granted and confirmed abortion as a constitutional right in the United States of America.

The pen and the plow: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and the reimagining of African culture

Chinua Achebe’s magnum opus, Things Fall Apart, remains a key work of world literature, shedding powerful light on the complexities of African culture long suppressed by Western narratives. Born and raised in Nigeria, Achebe became not only a celebrated writer, but also a cultural ambassador, working to promote recognition and respect for the rich traditions and history of his homeland. With Things Fall Apart, Achebe has not only told a story, but also written a counter-narrative that opposes the Western view that often misinterprets or oversimplifies African civilizations. Central to Achebe’s literary philosophy was a belief in the sanctity and power of personal stories. He firmly believed that the stories of those on the margins of society, the marginalized, should be told by people who experienced and felt them directly. These stories, Achebe believed, would be authentic, nuanced, and profound, giving readers a real insight into the African experience. Through the lens of Things Fall Apart, one isn’t merely reading about African traditions, but rather, immersing in them. Achebe masterfully manages to weave a tapestry of life, love, conflict, and change that forces readers to rethink their perceptions and understanding of Nigerian history and African culture as a whole. Achebe’s influence was not limited to his narratives, however. His critique of non-native narrators, who often painted Africa with broad, uninformed strokes, resonated widely in literary circles. Achebe emphasized the dangers of allowing others to define one’s own story and underscored the urgency for authentic African voices to reclaim their narrative. Through his works and advocacy, Achebe has not only offered narratives, but revolutionized the discourse on African culture in literature.