Continuum Of Positions Research Articles

Students’ stance towards translanguaging in an EFL oral productive assessment task

ABSTRACT Albeit the growing plurilingual research due to the new sociolinguistic realities in education and a reaction to the dominant monolingual bias, few studies have focused on plurilingual assessment and students’ ideologies towards using their plurilingual competence and resources such as translanguaging. A total sample of 36 undergraduates who completed a five-month EMI or ESP course in Catalonia, Spain, participated in our study. We examined their stance-taking discourse on a speaking assessment task in which they could draw upon all their communicative resources if they felt that it would increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their message. Findings suggested that, rather than two clear extreme positions, there is a continuum of positions in favour and against the legitimacy of using their whole plurilingual repertoire. Moreover, our results also showed the dominance of a deeply-ingrained monolingual mindset among the learners which leads them to implicitly or explicitly resist the possibility of translanguaging.

SMART SPEAKERS AND DATA RELATIONS IN FAMILIES WITH YOUNG CHILDREN

Due to their internet connectivity and intensive data collection about users and their environments, smart speakers extend the datafication of the domestic environment, while contributing to the normalisation of data relations as an integral part of family everyday life. Our study extends the analysis of the domestication of smart speakers into the domestic context, family relations, practices and imaginaries. In particular, we provide theoretical and empirical insights into the study of datafication as a diverse, situated and embodied experience. In order to analyse the emergent and situated relationships (through and with smart speakers), agencies and power structures mobilised in the domestication of smart speakers, we conceptualise families as communicative figurations comprising actors (family members), culture (including technological and surveillance imaginaries), communication practices, and a specific digital media ensemble. Drawing on mixed-method data, our findings show that communicative figurations involve a reconfiguration of power and agency relating both to traditional axes (status, class, gender and age) and new forms of power enabled by the progressive colonisation of the domestic environment by data colonialism. We propose and discuss a typification of households along a continuum of positions in family relationships with data between two opposite poles: data-resistants and data-normalisers. Households can negotiate, resist and oppose datafication practices and imaginaries by mobilising various strategies, discourses, meanings and practices. Ultimately, our theoretical approach and typification allow studying how data practices materialise – and are (partially) accepted, negotiated or rejected – as a specific communicative figuration in each family.

The Perils of Strong Social Constructionism: The Case of Child Sexual Abuse

ABSTRACTThis article tests the adequacy of social constructionism from a critical realist standpoint by examining a single social problem in some detail: child sexual abuse (CSA). It explores a continuum of positions in the research literature. These range from: strong social constructionism, derived from social and historical relativism, which can be read as effectively justifying CSA; to a position that, while accepting ‘weak constructionism’, prioritizes the real abiding features of sexual violence against children and the proven harm that it creates in any social context. The critical examination of competing views on CSA places a particular emphasis upon the rhetorical power of the conceptualizations of CSA as a ‘moral panic’. The notion of a moral panic brings with it assumptions about the degree of confidence that we can have in the extent of CSA in modernity in terms of: its wrongfulness; the assumed harm that accrues to victims; and the costs to society in its wake.

Politics, Faith, and the Making of American Judaism PeterAdams. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014.

Politics, Faith, and Making of American Peter Adams. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014.Former journalist, now teaching English at Virginia's Old Dominion University, Peter Adams chronicles major events from 1840s through turn of twentieth century spurred Jewish community to Americanize every facet of life, unify their fractious congregations, and engage more forcefully in partisan (1). The drive to Americanize led to rapid expansion of Reform seeking to erase the foreign features of Judaism and making it look more like American Protestantism (5). assimilated by relinquishing orthodox conceptions of God, replacing traditional Hebrew with English in shortened Sabbath services, adding Sunday services, introducing music, and seating men and women in same pews (4, 5). Adams finds four hundred year Jewish diaspora in America without precedent, with early on malleable and served well by its lack of hierarchy and decentralization, this resulting in factualism at times and continuum of positions from Orthodox to Reform, with middle position in Conservative moment. American Judaism, as described by Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise, was the religion of God, reason, humanity, and freedom (7). With a series of persecutions overseas and occasional spikes in antiSemitism at home, Adams concludes that Jews fashioned an authentically American synagogue and way of life that put experience of European ghetto forever behind them (153).After a particularly vicious spike in Judeophobia during Civil War and into Gilded Age, Jews made steady but painfully difficult advancements toward modernity (1). They transformed themselves from fractured communities into political presence and power. The Jewish population, although tripling in population from 1848 to 1860, remained religious minority seeking public anonymity. Following events of Civil War, Jews in 1850s recovered from expulsion by Union generals to address whether they had become sufficiently American to influence events of their own survival, this resulting in further efforts to assimilate, modernize, and become involved in partisan politics (4). Nonetheless, bitter debates over matters of faith, ritual, and observance divided Orthodox from Reform Jews and delayed compromises and bridges to union.The reader of Politics, Faith, and Making of American learns much about both and Civil War. General Grant, although saving Union, gained infamy for his expulsion of Jews (General Order No. 11), who were accused of violating Treasury Department's regulation of trade and were thought to be involved in black market in Southern cotton, from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi. President Lincoln expressed surprise at Grant's actions and his condemnation of class outright, voicing his own position of making no distinction between Jew and Gentile and revoking Order within eighteen days. Grant, too, after War, transcended his antiSemitism, actually carrying Jewish vote in 1868 for his presidency and appointed several Jews to high office. …

Encoding certainty in bump attractors

Persistent activity in neuronal populations has been shown to represent the spatial position of remembered stimuli. Networks that support bump attractors are often used to model such persistent activity. Such models usually exhibit translational symmetry. Thus activity bumps are neutrally stable, and perturbations in position do not decay away. We extend previous work on bump attractors by constructing model networks capable of encoding the certainty or salience of a stimulus stored in memory. Such networks support bumps that are not only neutrally stable to perturbations in position, but also perturbations in amplitude. Possible bump solutions then lie on a two-dimensional attractor, determined by a continuum of positions and amplitudes. Such an attractor requires precisely balancing the strength of recurrent synaptic connections. The amplitude of activity bumps represents certainty, and is determined by the initial input to the system. Moreover, bumps with larger amplitudes are more robust to noise, and over time provide a more faithful representation of the stored stimulus. In networks with separate excitatory and inhibitory populations, generating bumps with a continuum of possible amplitudes, requires tuning the strength of inhibition to precisely cancel background excitation.

Faculty Writing Group Helps to Build Bridges in Academia

Faculty writing groups are notoriously difficult to generate and maintain. The competitive nature of the tenure process cultivates individualism and rivalry. But a goal of collective wisdom, support, sharing and peer mentoring can lead to group and individual success in a setting that is not always welcoming to women. We started a writing group in 2009, but faculty membership fluctuated as time and workloads dictated. In September 2010, some of us proposed a project for the writing group to get a more committed membership. An invitation went to all faculty; eight women, all relatively new and untenured, responded and joined. Members came from diverse backgrounds within education including counseling psychology, special education, arts, English as a second language and social studies. Many were professionals in their fields before joining the faculty. We conceptualized a formal project that consisted of the group committing to an individual writing project as well as a group paper over four months. We began by each writing a commitment piece, stating our writing goals, why this process was important to us and what we intended as a writing schedule. During the four months, we each kept a reflective journal as a form of self-study to explore our own practices as writers, researchers and academics. We also committed to attend weekly meetings. During the week, we worked on our own research projects. At weekly meetings, each member described what she had achieved during the week or what problems she faced. The written journal pieces were collected in a binder at the end of the meeting and all discussions were recorded. The weekly journal reflections and recordings became the data for the group paper. The entire project was framed by a post-structuralist approach, which set the data collection against a background of flexibility, ambiguity, uncertainty and an unfolding process of qualitative research. The idea was not for the group to be regulated or to regulate themselves, but rather to set up the architecture for an unfolding and emerging to happen. What unfolded and what emerged, we left open to the process; we set up the structure and then waited. We allowed ourselves to be open to non-linear, non-traditional forms of representing our “data” and the freedom to develop heuristics as and when we chose in order to understand what we were experiencing. The balance between structure and flexibility gave the group a life of its own. Our process was richly textured and deeply layered. It is not a coincidence that we are all women. Not everyone in the group felt the same way about each of these issues; for each there was a continuum of positions and both positive and negative responses. Positions changed based on what was happening in their lives. Clearly the writing group provided a mechanism of support but it was differential. More aptly, it created a bridge for everyone from their before-contexts and previous identities to this new-context with unfolding new identities. Our points of origin and destination were different but the bridge was a communal place. On the bridge, we could tell our individual stories and in the telling, the sharing, the reflecting, we noticed our voices merging into a common language that began to cross-fertilize and spill over into our individual projects. Shared thinking and writing, deliberate or not, was a key outcome. What worked well was the balance between structure and flexibility. A facilitator who had time to devote to the administration of the project led the group. The short commitment of four months set up a doable process. Individuals honored the verbal and written pledge to the group. The idea of producing two papers (one individual and one group) was a key motivating factor. Within these structured commitments, the weekly sessions were relaxed and fun. No one was penalized for not producing, but accounting for the week's writing became a motivation in itself. The written reflections became a stimulus for thinking, reading and writing. It kept our writing projects on the top of our priority lists. We began to socialize and to meld together as a group. After four months, we decided to produce more than one paper from the data collected. So although the “formal” part has ended, we continue to work together. We do get impatient with each other occasionally. We've had some spirited discussions around authorship. But the groundwork has been laid, and even if we do not reconstitute as a group, we have built a community of support. What our collective story points to is that collaboration is about vulnerability and the ability to build relationships from that foundation. In our writing group—our bridge—we forged connections among members, not only explicitly through constructing writing, reflecting and telling stories, but also implicitly through perception, intuition, smiles and a softening of the eyes as we regard each other.

Lenses for Framing Decisions: Undergraduates' decision making about stem cell research

Decision making is influenced by multiple factors, especially when approaching controversial socio‐scientific issues, such as stem cell research. In the present study, we used qualitative data from 132 college student papers in a biotechnology course to investigate how students made decisions about stem cell research issues. Students indicated their opinion about stem cell research topics and argued their stance using evidence they deemed relevant. We used NVivo7 software to develop categories, code student responses, and run queries. We identified a continuum of positions that students took regarding the support or opposition of stem cell research, and we found students used eight different perspectives as lenses to form their decisions: medical application, ethical, rights, economic, religious, personal anecdotes, political, or scientific. The most common perspective was ‘medical application’. Most students relied upon multiple perspectives when making their decisions. We found that when students used multiple viewpoints, the perspectives were unequally valued, generally relying more on ethical perspectives. Scientific perspectives were not common. These findings have implications for improving instruction by focusing the curriculum toward integrating scientific perspectives with non‐scientific perspectives held.

Young People, Pathways and Crime: Beyond Risk Factors

Research and policy approaches to risk are recognised as falling into two cultures, most commonly referred to as artefact and constructionist. Moreover, within constructionism, a continuum of positions exists from weak constructionist in which risks may be viewed as cultural mediations of ‘real’ dangers or hazards, to strong constructionist in which the ‘dangers’ or ‘hazards’ are themselves perceived as socially constructed. In this article a similar continuum of epistemological positions in relation to pathways is developed, and then findings from projects in the ESRC Network ‘Pathways Into and Out of Crime’ demonstrate how constructionist perspectives have generated new insights into the way in which traditional risk factors operate for young people. Examples based on three classically identified risk factors are presented. First, the complex and multidimensional effects of school exclusion are highlighted. Second, the nature of social networks is explicated and the role of their components as both potential risk and protective factors proposed.Third, the need for drugs to be understood within their cultural and historical contexts is identified, and the potential role of drugs as a mediator between other life stresses and offending portrayed. In conclusion, the value of synthesising rather than disputing paradigms to produce different layers of knowledge is discussed.

Ideology and candidate evaluation

How does the expressed political ideology of voters influence their evaluation of presidential candidates? The classic answer to this question is provided by the spatial theory of electoral choice in which utility for a candidate is a function of the proximity between the voter and candidate positions on the liberal-conservative continuum. We have argued elsewhere that spatial theory, while intellectually appealing, is inadequate as an empirical model of mass behavior. We have developed a directional theory of issue voting that we believe provides a more realistic accounting of how specific policy issues influence utility for a candidate. Directional theory is based on the view that for most voters issues are understood as a dichotomous choice between two alternative positions. While ideology is widely understood as a continuum of positions, the directional model can be applied to the relationship between ideology and candidate evaluation. In this paper we compare the two theories using National Election Study data from 1972 to 1988. The results tend to favor the directional model over the traditional proximity model. We conclude by briefly tracing out the implications of this finding.