Critical Frame Research Articles

Participatory video analysis in disability research

This article sets out critical framing as an analytical approach in participatory video by which people investigate and analyze a topic through arts-based engagement, storyboarding, and collaborative editing. Participatory video as an action research method in self-advocacy has been discussed elsewhere. Here, the author examines critical framing and the role of generative themes in participatory analysis by describing a case study in which adults with developmental disabilities explored the dimensions of sexual health through participatory video. The author proposes that critical framing provides a more nuanced approach to participatory analysis. Credibility and trustworthiness with data triangulation and overall findings are also described.

Ductility damage indices based on seismic performance of RC frames

This paper presents an analytical procedure for determining ductility damage indices using static collapse mechanism analysis for ductile reinforced concrete (RC) frames subjected to prescribed drift limits corresponding to different seismic performance levels. This assessment benefits from performance-based seismic design (PBSD) concept that employs rotation ductility factors, pre-defined target damage indices and beam sidesway mechanism as key performance objectives to estimate curvature ductility demands at pre-designated plastic hinges of beam sidesway mechanism. The proposed ductility-based damage indices (DBDI) assessment procedure considers regular frames with secondary effects such as P-Delta and soil–structure interaction (SSI) within a simple non-iterative process suitable for practical applications. A 12-story RC moment frame was chosen to implement the proposed procedure considering P-Delta effect. Pushover analysis using SAP 2000 was carried out for the frame to verify the results of the DBDI method. The results show that the DBDI seismic assessment procedure can be used to quantify the damage potential at different performance levels and relate that to local flexural ductility of critical frame members. The research presented in this paper provides a simple yet conservative damage assessment tool for use by practicing engineers.

Neil Lazarus The Postcolonial UnconsciousThe Postcolonial Unconscious. Neil Lazarus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+299.

<i>Neil Lazarus</i> The Postcolonial Unconscious<i>The Postcolonial Unconscious</i>. Neil Lazarus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+299.

The person-centred approach as an ideological discourse: a discourse analysis of person-centred counsellors' accounts on their way of being

In accord with humanistic psychology, the person-centred approach (PCA) highlights individuality and is characterised by subjectivity and freedom vs. objectivity and determination. This study endeavoured to define how person-centred counsellors position themselves within PCA. In order to employ a critical frame of mind, analysis focused on identifying constructions, contradictions and functions of language that pointed to power relations. This study revealed a power relation between PCA and the counsellors, displaying five discourses: the philosophical discourse, the discourse of freedom, the discourse of religion/spirituality, the discourse of militarism and the discourse of eros (love). PCA is thought to empower the client in relation to its respectful and non-directive, therapeutic framework. Analysis suggests that despite rhetorical endorsement of PCA as enabling, the approach has implications for subjectivity and practice regarding the counsellor him/herself. Adhesive attachments closely resembling religious and erotic ones seem responsible for dogmatic and militaristic phenomena as described by participants. Strong emotions such as pride and guilt are indicative of this adhesive investment. Furthermore, the analysis shows that as the discourse of freedom becomes embedded in the philosophical discourse of PCA, it has connotations of truth. Lastly, the discourse of religion/spirituality seems to organise PCA in terms of meaning coherence.

A Real-Time Human Imitation System Using Kinect

Robots are commonly used in harsh environments where it is difficult for humans to carry out dangerous tasks. Robot imitations provide a natural approach for humanoid robots to mimic the behavior of humans in real time. However, it is never an easy task to build an efficient and robust imitation system because of the high degree of freedom involved in motions. In this paper, we propose a human imitation system based on the Aldebaran NAO robot and the Microsoft Kinect, which can mimic the motions of the whole body in real time. By solving inverse kinematics through an optimization process, motions are split up into critical frames which are represented by a list of robot joint angles. Each joint angle is then derived through the control of the joint motors in NAO. In addition, balance maintenance in both the single and double supporting phases as well as the self-collision avoidance are taken into consideration. Experimental results show that the system is robust and flexible enough to imitate various human motions.

Gender equality for whom? A critical frame analysis of the 2007 Swedish domestic services tax reform

This article considers the motivations behind a 2007 reform in Sweden to implement a tax deduction on domestic services for households, and how the reform could be passed despite extensive political opposition to it. Critical framing analysis is used to argue that at least a partial explanation for the policy reform is to be found in the inherent limitations of the gender equality policy as hitherto pursued in the country, and in the way these limitations were framed in the political debates to push for the reform. The analysis draws upon public documents and records of parliamentary and media debates.

The Issue of Research Graduate Employability in Australia: An Analysis of the Policy Framing (1999–2013)

The prevalent knowledge economy discourse has direct implications for higher education policies and practices. It is expected that the higher education sector supports national economic competitiveness mainly through promoting scientific research, supporting technological transfer and innovation, and producing ‘knowledge workers’ such as higher degree by research graduates. However in the context of changing work requirements and fast paced technological progress, the ‘skills gap’ between the labour market needs and the actual attributes of graduates has emerged as a tangible concern. This paper explores the issue of research graduate employability in Australia. Drawing on critical frame analysis, the paper particularly problematises the way research graduate employability has been framed in relevant policy texts, and shows what issues are excluded from the policy agenda and why. By way of demonstrating exclusions from the current debate on doctoral graduates’ skills and employability, we briefly report on new data on the level of industry-engagement of research students at one large Australian university to argue that assumptions about the need to ‘fix’ the skills deficit of graduates have excluded from view high levels of industry engagement.

Responding to Literature Texts through Films in English and the L1 within a Multiliteracies Pedagogy

This article presents the results of a study exploring the aesthetic and critical responses of English as a Second Language (ESL) learners when engaging in the multimodal design of literature texts through films in English and their first language (L1). Participants consisted of 25 culturally and linguistically heterogeneous first-year undergraduate students in a Literature in English Language Teaching program in a Malaysian public university. The participants engaged in a multi-modal design of the novel Step by Wicked Step by Anne Fine in three phases over a period of eight weeks based on the four components of the multiliteracies approach: situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice. The transformed practice component of this approach involved students making and presenting short films both in English and in a local Malaysian language or dialect. Data for the study came from six focal participants’ journal reflections throughout the project and semi-structured interviews with them. The findings showed that the multimodal design of texts through films in the L1 increased personal meaningfulness and intercultural understanding. It also allowed learners to function as language experts, take liberties with the text, and look beyond the text for inspiration from dramas and movies.

Uptake and accumulation of bulk and nanosized cerium oxide particles and ionic cerium by radish (Raphanus sativus L.).

The potential toxicity and accumulation of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) in agricultural crops has become an area of great concern and intense investigation. Interestingly, although below-ground vegetables are most likely to accumulate the highest concentrations of ENMs, little work has been done investigating the potential uptake and accumulation of ENMs for this plant group. The overall objective of this study was to evaluate how different forms of cerium (bulk cerium oxide, cerium oxide nanoparticles, and the cerium ion) affected the growth of radish (Raphanus sativus L.) and accumulation of cerium in radish tissues. Ionic cerium (Ce(3+)) had a negative effect on radish growth at 10 mg CeCl3/L, whereas bulk cerium oxide (CeO2) enhanced plant biomass at the same concentration. Treatment with 10 mg/L cerium oxide nanoparticles (CeO2 NPs) had no significant effect on radish growth. Exposure to all forms of cerium resulted in the accumulation of this element in radish tissues, including the edible storage root. However, the accumulation patterns and their effect on plant growth and physiological processes varied with the characteristics of cerium. This study provides a critical frame of reference on the effects of CeO2 NPs versus their bulk and ionic counterparts on radish growth.

Figuring Radicalization: Congressional Narratives of Homeland Security and American Muslim Communities

This essay focuses on the language of domestic radicalization as it has been invoked in recent debates regarding homeland security and the specter of homegrown Islamic terrorism. The language of radicalization is not new. However, beginning in 2004 and 2005 this language began to be appropriated into legislative and law enforcement discussions of domestic terrorism and national security. Using the rhetorical figure of polyptoton as a critical frame, this essay explores how the language of radicalization has evolved and how it has come to shape available arguments and define the legitimacy of participants (and non-participants) within recent congressional hearings and legislation.

Time Windows of Interneuron Development: Implications to Our Understanding of the Aetiology and Treatment of Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a devastating neuropsychiatric disorder widely believed to arise from defects during brain development. Indeed, dysfunction in the formation and function of GABAergic cortical interneurons has been implicated as a central pathogenic mechanism in this, and other, neurodevelopmental disorders. Understanding the coordination and timing of interneuron development including the complex processes of specification, proliferation, migration and their incorporation into finely tuned cortical networks is therefore essential in determining their role in neurodevelopmental disease. Studies using mouse models have highlighted the functional relevance of transcription factor networks and common signalling pathways in interneuron development but have faced challenges in identifying clear time windows where these factors are essential. Here we discuss recent developments highlighting critical time frames in the specification and migration of cortical interneurons and the impact of aberrant development to aetiology and treatments of schizophrenia.

Cultural Racist Frames in TF1's French Banlieue Riots Coverage

Based on news video archives, this article employs critical frame and content analysis to analyze representations of the 2005 French banlieue riots on France's most-watched television station, TF1. Cultural racism theory is then used to analyze the results to demonstrate the discursive nature of the TF1 frames and the contexts of institutional racism they left out but which historians, ethnographers, and theorists of cultural racism suggest are crucial to understanding racial conflict in contemporary France. The most frequent frames blamed non-integrating cultures and illegal immigration. That is, race was coded in cultural traits of a problematic sub-group without mentioning it specifically.

Two Personalities of Comparative Literary Studies (Claudio Guillén and Dionýz Ďurišin)

The study aims to analyze two different conceptualizations of comparative literary studies – one by a Spanish scholar (Claudio Guillén) and the other by a Slovak one (Dionýz Ďurišin). It focuses on the circumstances of development of this discipline on the basis of particular sources and impulses with regard to the geographic limits of the study.In the first part, the notion of supra-nationality is characterized as an effort to free oneself from the narrow frame of national literary history. Guillén was very aware of the tension between the local and the universal, or the particular and the general, which, according to him, requires the scholar to transcend conventional approaches and respect the reader’s ordinary experience. Instead of a rigid critical frame, what is needed is a historical and critical horizon that does not exclude the individual dimension, nor a unifying perspective. At the same time, Guillén emphasizes the search for the universal dimension of literature. Guillén is sceptical about the focus on formal-linguistic approaches in studying literary development, which he observes at Spanish universities today.On the other hand, Slovak comparative literary studies had different points of departure. The Slovak comparatist Ďurišin took many impulses from the Russian formalists, who focused particularly on the issues of the national literary development. As an example, the study uses the term historical poetics, applied in the study of the development of Slovak verse (Mikuláš Bakoš). Instead of the prevalent genetic method used by Guillén, Ďurišin at the same time used a theoretical-developmental model in studying the relationship between national and world literature, with an emphasis on the role of the receiving literature.

Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages by Louise D’Arcens (review)

Louise D'Arcens. Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Brewer, 2014. 209 pp. $95.00. Louise D'Arcens's Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages is an impressive exposition of the workings of mirth, amusement, and laughter in modern and postmodern attempts to engage with the medieval past, commonly known as medievalism. It offers a welcome intervention into the study of humor (D'Arcens 7), for as the author skilfully shows, the three well-known theories of humour (superiority, incongruity, and relief) going back to Henri Bergson's 1900 seminal study Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic, are not quite sufficient when applied to comic medievalism (D'Arcens 182-83). To achieve her principal goal of developing a critical discourse for understanding how and why the Middle Ages have provided such a rich source of mirth for the later epochs, D'Arcens examines three paradigms for medievalist humour: laughing at, in, and with the Middle Ages. The first one pertains to the texts, conceived broadly, that laugh at the medieval past, such as Cervantes Saavedra's masterpiece Don Quixote or Mark Twain's novel Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. These works treat the Middle Ages as risible and express not a small degree of what the Germans term schadenfreude. They support a progressivist view of history that creates a breach between periods and that treats modernity as a more evolved stage, not unlike those promoted by the twentieth-century scholars Norbert Elias and Johan Huizinga. The second paradigm is represented by the texts that laugh in the Middle Ages, that playfully collapse temporal distinctions between the medieval and later epochs. Works of this group support the model of historical continuity and manifest, what D'Arcens calls transhistorical sympathy with medieval based on recognition of the universal humanity that the medievals share with the modern people (12). Finally, the third approach, laughing with the Middle Ages, espouses a notion that social progress might be achieved through recovery of medieval practices, as seen, for example, in the current popular phenomenon of medieval heritage tourism. All three models are explored in great detail across the four larger units of the book, divided into seven chapters. The first part, with its detailed analysis of Cervantes's Don Quixote sets up a critical frame for interpretation of comic representations of the Middle Ages. Don Quixote serves as a perfect example of a meta-medievalist novel, as a commentary on the process through which medieval texts to be disseminated and resignified in post-medieval settings (D'Arcens 26). The conclusion of this chapter, that in order to laugh at the Middle Ages, one has to laugh in the Middle Ages (D'Arcens 31), offers a smooth transition to what is to come in the subsequent chapters. Part 2 examines the ways in which the medieval era has come to be associated with particular forms of humour for the subsequent ages. Here D'Arcens analyzes the eighteenth-century reception of Chaucer as the so-called Joking Bard, particularly by Spenser, Pope, and Gay, and the twentieth-century Italian playwright and satirist Dario Fo's debt to medieval comic tradition and folk humour. It becomes clear that, in both cases, the postmedieval treatments of medieval material are deeply dependent on their premodern sources, which serve for them as the foundation to define their modernity. …

Dificultades con &lt;em&gt;Physica&lt;/em&gt; II 4: la confrontación dialéctica de Aristóteles con las opiniones precedentes sobre el azar y la disputa en torno a la identidad de sus portavoces

This article examines Aristotle’s critical account of the three groups of opinions on chance presented in Physica [Phys.] II 4-6 and considers the question of the identity of the advocates of these ideas. Aristotle confronts three common beliefs according to which: i) nothing happens by chance; ii) chance is the origin of everything; iii) chance is the instrument of a divine dimension inscrutable to the human mind. However, we find no explicit references to any authors. Who are the deniers of chance and who are its proponents? Who identifies chance with divine functions or particular deities? This article aims to outline the debate on the identity of the advocates of these common beliefs and to contribute to its clarification within the frame of the Aristotelian criticism on ancient atomism.

The Community Psychologist as Critical Friend: Promoting Critical Community Praxis

AbstractCommunity‐engaged researchers have a responsibility to community partners to get beyond the traditional researcher stance to take on the active role of critical friend. On the basis of my own community research experiences in the USA, in this article, I argue that there is added value in taking on the practice of critical friendship to encourage a higher degree of critical reflection and critical practice in our partners and in our work together. In the context of long‐term, trusting relationships with community partners, researchers can play the role of critical friend working together to shape critical community praxis on the basis of critical theorizing, critical reflection, and a shared commitment to working for social justice. Those trying to make a difference in communities are often isolated and can benefit from opportunities for dialogue with other community practitioners within a critical frame of reference. Although not without risks and challenges, stepping into this role allows us to put into sharper relief the gap between community practice that challenges injustice and practice that maintains it. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Fighting for an intervention in history in the face of dreams deferred in the making: Twenty years of South African democracy

This essay offers critical framing of the articles in the Special Issue on Twenty Years of African Democracy. It prioritizes the ideas of radical scholars and their take on how contemporary South African democracy is being experienced. It focuses on a series of important paradoxes, such as those presented by the challenge to provide truly free and accessible public education and the challenge to provide rights to the city for rural women migrants, the challenge to navigate the foreign policy role of South Africa on the African continent, the challenge posed by new laws for the protection of the reproductive rights and the prohibition of gender-based violence, and the challenge offered by popular cultural production that intervenes in African humanities. These essays explicitly think about South African democracy beyond the basic and normative terms of measuring whether or not democracy has been consolidated and can deliver steady and safe support for civil society and competing political and social interests. Instead, contributors are particularly attuned to how state projects and entrenched power attempt to incorporate and deploy or dismiss alternative indexes of democracy that may in fact be far more insightful measures: it includes research on the seemingly non-political – the genre of crime fiction, the youth poetry scene, masculinity studies, and philosophical debates over the historiography of the struggle for liberation.

Evaluation of Medium-Rise Reinforced Concrete Building Performance under Low Intensity Earthquake Effect

The paper presents an evaluation of medium-rise reinforced concrete building in Johor which is subjected to low intensity earthquake effects. Even-though Malaysia is outside the earthquake region, the country had experienced and did suffer from major cases due earthquake in the past like tsunami. Engineers should concern and consider the loading for reinforced concrete building due to earthquake in the building design procedure. The study addresses the performance of critical frame reinforced concrete building when subjected to earthquake motion. The building of Marlborough College Malaysia chooses as model. The building was analyzed using Finite Element Modelling (FEM) using IDARC (2D) with respect to various earthquake intensities obtained from Time History Analysis (THA) data. The yield point at the beam-column connections was analyzed to determine the damage index and damage level of the building subjected to the various earthquake intensities. The building performed the early yielding point at 4.2650 sec for beam element at the intensity of 0.15g. Based on the results, it was found that the critical frame of Condominium Marlborough College Malaysia can stand an earthquake occurrence with intensity up to 0.20g. There is no structural damage some non-structural damage is expected in the non-linear analysis of modal frames. The building was also categorized as the one in the light damage level.

The face of multiculturalism in Korea: Media ritual as framing in news coverage of Jasmine Lee

In 2012, Jasmine Lee, a minor media celebrity of Filipino origin, became the first non-Korean appointed to national office in the Republic of Korea. To understand the media’s framing of the meanings of this unprecedented event within the cultural context of South Korean race ideology, we analyzed all news and editorial coverage by the nation’s three largest English-language media outlets: The Korea Herald, the Korea JoongAng Daily, and The Korea Times. Using Victor Turner’s social drama theory as a methodology for this critical framing analysis, we focused on the use of on-line news sources by all three outlets. Explicating the framing process surrounding Jasmine Lee allowed us to understand the hegemonic role played by Korean journalism in the reproduction of the ongoing process of multiculturalism, as well as the media’s reproduction of its own powerful role in that cultural, ideological, economic, and legal process.

Richard Wright's search for a counter-hegemonic genre: the anamorphic and matrixial potential of haiku

Examining Richard Wright's vast haiku oeuvre, this article shows how he used haiku to reinvent the form in English by repeating playfully anamorphic imagery so as to construct a poetic matrix modelled on, but distinct from, the categories he saw used in Japanese haiku. Writing haiku in this productive manner produced Nietzschean jouissance rather than resentment, so that the affective dimension of a multitude of socio-economic relations, including race, could be demonstrably reframed in this matrix of anamorphic imagery which maintained political allegories and critical consciousness in the landscapes of his invention. He asserted measured displacements and anamorphic transvaluations of how one sees (in Jacques Rancière's sense), and as such presented a modernist haiku constructed not in isolate verses (as haiku are often read), but in refrains and nodes, suggesting an intertextual matrix asserting new commonplaces (locus communis) and self-evident ways of seeing. This article also points out the lack of evidence for the current consensus in literary criticism which mistakenly asserts that Wright discovered a Zen spirit which elevated his spirit and brought him closer to nature. Moreover, the editing of the book manuscript is shown to be not only flawed in its critical framing, but in the very ordering of haiku, presentation, and even title.