University Discourse Research Articles

Dal Mandylion di Edessa alla Sindone di Torino: metamorfosi di una leggenda by Andrea Nicolotti, and: I Templari e la Sindone: storia di un falso by Andrea Nicolotti (review)

Reviewed by: Dal Mandylion di Edessa alla Sindone di Torino: metamorfosi di una leggenda by Andrea Nicolotti, and: I Templari e la Sindone: storia di un falso by Andrea Nicolotti Andrew N. Palmer Dal Mandylion di Edessa alla Sindone di Torino: metamorfosi di una leggenda. By Andrea Nicolotti. [Bibliotheca Erik Peterson. Collana di Studi del Centro di Scienze Religiose, 3.] (Alessandria, Italy: Edizioni dell’Orso. 2011. Pp. viii, 236. €20,00 paperback. ISBN 978-88-6274-307-5.) I Templari e la Sindone: storia di un falso. By Andrea Nicolotti. [Aculei, 3.] (Rome: Salerno editrice. 2011. Pp. 188. €12,50 paperback. ISBN 978-88-8402-720-7.) The Shroud of Turin, a unique icon presenting itself as Christ’s burial-sheet, is now probably, thanks to the publicity so successfully sought by Ian Wilson, the best-known object of Christian devotion in the West; the icon of the Mandylion of Edessa, Christ’s “image not made by hand,” enjoys comparable fame among the Orthodox and has been identified with other towel-icons venerated in Genoa and Rome; the icon of Veronica’s Veil, a western mutation of the Mandylion, has become one of the Stations of the Cross. Carbon 14 tests have dated the Shroud to the fourteenth century. This is confirmed by the evolution of the loom and by the fact that the Shroud cannot be traced back beyond the second half of that century, when it is first signaled in the church of Lirey in Champagne. Yet the rumor persists that science and scholarship have conspired to discredit a genuine relic that may even be evidence of the Resurrection. Those who make this claim support it with pseudo-science and pseudo-scholarship. Andrea Nicolotti deplores the irresponsibility of the media and the gullibility of the literate public. He argues that serious historians ought not to ignore pseudo-history, but should take the pains to refute it; that they ought to disseminate more widely an understanding of the differences between hypothesis and certainty as well as between evidence, interpretation, conjecture, and speculation. If his books reach the public outside the “ivory tower” of university discourse, they will certainly supply arguments to those who have all along been unconvinced by the self-styled “sindonologists,” without feeling able to refute their supposed proofs. In this way the genre of these two books is somewhat similar to that of the catechisms that flourished among Christian communities in the Islamic Middle East, which taught Christians what to say in reply to the classic Muslim arguments against Christianity. Nicolotti does not, of course, simplify things as much as these question-and-answer tracts do. After all, he is not trying to reach the man in the medieval street, but the modern reader who borrows Wilson’s Shroud of Turin (Garden City, NY, 1978) from the public library and is all the more impressed by this book because it has all the trappings of scholarship. Confronted with the thirteen centuries in which no relic resembling the Shroud was known anywhere in the Christian world, Wilson suggests that it was there all [End Page 319] along but incognito. According to him, the Shroud was folded, leaving only the face visible. The rest, for some reason, was carefully concealed, so that the cloth appeared to be about the size of a towel. This gave rise to the legend that it was in fact a towel used by Jesus to dry his face, leaving the imprint of his features there—the Mandylion of Edessa, as described in the Greek Acts of Thaddaeus. This icon was translated from Edessa to Constantinople in 944 and probably taken in 1204 to Western Europe, where, according to Wilson, it was unfolded and so “emerged” as the Shroud in fourteenth-century France. Wilson’s book, simultaneously published in the United States and France, enjoyed a success and inspired several other sindonologists. A popular refinement of his theory—to which Nicolotti devotes the second book—identifies it with an “idol” allegedly venerated in secret by the Knights Templar in the thirteenth century. The hypothesis that the Shroud was folded rests on the use of the Greek word tetrádiplon to describe the towel on...

Discurso universitário e função do estágio na clínica-escola: contribuições da psicanálise

The transmission of Psychoanalysis at the university is questionable because there is a tension between the rules that governs the university discourse and analytic discourse. The article intends to point out some limits and possibilities of working with Psychoanalysis at the university. Initially features two discourses based on Lacanian theory. Following, it investigates the valuation model used in universities as a contemporary version of university discourse. In this model, the issues of subjectivity are silenced in favor of valuing quantity of knowledge. Finally, the article elects supervised stage as a privileged moment of the transmission of Psychoanalysis at the university. Despite the difficulties, we conclude that clinical experience acquired at clinical-school has a positive function because it requires that the intern be responsible for his/her practice.

Oral Academic Discourse Socialisation: Challenges Faced by International Undergraduate Students in a Malaysian Public University

This paper reports a qualitative study which examines the challenges faced by six international undergraduate students in their socialisation of oral academic discourse in a Malaysian public university. Data were collected employing interviews. Students’ presentations were also collected. Semi-structured interviews were transcribed verbatim and qualitative content analysis was employed to examine the challenges faced by international undergraduate students in their socialisation of oral academic discourse. The results reveal that the major difficulties international undergraduate students face in their oral academic discourse socialisation are related to linguistic knowledge, presentation skills and content-related difficulties. Linguistic difficulties constrain students to express complex concepts and ideas while engaged in oral presentations. Difficulties related to presentation skills are associated with how to prepare PowerPoint slides and how to organise the content of the presentations. This study also reveals that content difficulties may be related to the specific topics the students are asked to prepare presentations on. In this study I argue that understanding the challenges faced by undergraduate international students in their oral academic discourse socialisation can be one of the essential steps to help them overcome the challenges they face.

Professionalization of Teaching in Universities: A Compelling Case

Discourse in university often revolves around that teaching is common sense business and that anyone can teach. University lecturers as experts in their disciplines often feel they are able to teach and it is up to students to learn. It is against such discourse that calls for the professionalisation of teaching in universities continued to grow. This view is against the argument that despite being discipline specialists, academic staff need special training in teaching and learning to be effective teachers. In this paper the researchers interrogate the issue of professionalisation of teaching in universities. The meaning of professionalization of teaching and what it really entails are examined. The researchers discuss reasons why it is necessary for teaching to be professionalised in universities by centering on the main responsibilities of a university teacher which are curriculum organisation, teaching, assessment and dealing with of adult learners. The researchers further propose a model that could be utilised in the professionalization of teaching by way of deliberate teacher training programmes, short courses as well as research and publication in teaching and learning issues. Such approaches allow the imparting to university academic staff members knowledge, skills and values that ensure better facilitation of learning.

‘Indigenous Knowledge’ and ‘Science’ in the Age of Globalization

Globalization accentuates the local, as seen in the increasing emphasis on ‘indigenous knowledge’ in the discourse of governments, universities and international organizations. This essay explores the categories of ‘indigenous knowledge’ (IK) and ‘science’/ ‘Western science’ (WS) as used by scholars in science policy, anthropology and the history of science, and examines how the similarities and differences between IK and WS have been understood. It argues that IK is an imprecisely formulated term, and highlights recent scholarship that sees IK and WS as constructed categories that emerged in particular historical circumstances. It concludes by discussing briefly the notion that these mutually exclusive labels should be avoided, so as not to privilege some forms of knowledge over others.

The marketization of public discourse: The Chinese universities

Contemporary universities are characteristic of an evident proliferation of corporate discourse. A sole concentration on the production of new knowledge and the education of students does not ensure the prosperity or even survival of universities any longer, and equally important are the admission of elite students, the outcome-based evaluation of academic performance, the establishment of alumni network and also fundraising. This article examines how and to what extent this trend of marketization has invaded the order of discourse of Chinese universities. The research methodology combines the paradigms of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and the tenets of critical genre analysis [Bhatia VK (2007) Towards critical genre analysis. In: Bhatia VK, Flowerdew J and Jones RH (eds) Advances in Discourse Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 166–177], with particular attention paid to the notion of genre, interdiscursivity and conversationalization. The texts examined include ceremonial speeches, regulatory documents, insiders’ accounts and field notes. Analytical results show that the trend of marketization, in spite of a potential threat for academic integrity, does facilitate the institutional restructuring and transformation of universities in the context of Mainland China.

Who Taught You to Talk Like That?: The University and Online Political Discourse

Rancorous dialogue among political opponents is nothing new in the American political system. However, in the past two decades or so, pundits and scholars have noted an increase in the overall intensity and frequency of incivility among elected officials and citizens. At the collegiate level, many universities have undertaken some form of civility initiative to help students learn how to address political conversation in a civil manner. However, these initiatives are problematic in that they may tend to attract those already predisposed to such civility goals and lack in external validity. In this article, we investigate how university communities may be able to use online discussions, particularly spontaneous ones, to address controversial political issues. Using the asynchronous online postings at one liberal arts university, Furman University, in response to a campus visit by George W. Bush, we investigate the nature of political discourse in these unstructured political conversations. Through content analysis, we assess the level of democratic incivility versus impoliteness in the discussion, the role of anonymity in facilitating incivility, and the potential of such online exchanges for use by colleges to help socialize young people into how to engage in effective and civil political discourse.

Competition or collaboration: policies and practices in international higher education

Universities in the twenty-first century experience numerous competing drivers that shape their sense of purpose and role in society, their perspectives of knowledge and its production and their overall sense of being in the world. One major force is marketplace discourse, in particular neo-liberalism and competition, which is discordant with the discourse of academic collaboration and collegial sharing. This review essay examines what it means to ‘be’ a university in light of these overarching discourses and what is envisioned for universities of the future. In particular, the essay focuses on how universities around the world respond to the tensions of competition agendas in local contexts. How are global policies on education as a tradeable commodity shaping university policies, discourses and practices? How is competition moulding the overall notion of a university education? What is imagined for the future of universities, given the dissonance between competition and collaboration agendas and practices in higher education? These questions are explored through reviews of two recent books that focus on global shapings of higher education institutions: ‘‘Being a University’’ by Ronald Barnett (2011) and ‘‘Higher Education, Policy and the Global Competition Phenomenon’’ (Portnoi et al. 2010) edited by Laura Portnoi, Val Rust and Sylvia Bagley. Barnett’s book is used primarily to outline the characteristics of various universities’ being and becoming. Portnoi et al’s work provides clear illustrations of the lived experience of higher education in the current globally competitive age. Three broad questions frame this review: • How do universities currently see themselves as being in a globally competitive market? • How does the globally competitive agenda operate in practice in different universities? • What could universities ‘become’ in the future?

Globale Untersuchung zum Sondervokabular des Thomas von Aquin

This contribution studies the vocabulary of scholasticism – exemplified in St. Thomas Aquinas – from a global, linguistic point of view. His digitised opera and the Thomas-Lexikon by Ludwig Schütz in comparison with works from St. Augustin and Cicero serve to determine the formation of words not yet present in these latter authors and changes in the frequencies of prefixes, suffixes, compounds and prepositions. This procedure makes it evident that nominalisation – especially through suffixation – is the main source of new words (although not so much with the «prime suspect » -tas) whereas prefixes and compounds play only a minor rôle. But on the whole it is the amount of prepositions that differs most strikingly in St. Thomas from Augustin and Cicero. They seem to be of special importance to guarantee the perspicuitas needed in scientific university discourse. A concluding glance at Byzantine Greek seems to indicate that there composition took the rôle suffixation plays in Latin scholasticism.

Sujeito e discurso da racionalidade técnica na sociedade mediática

Este ensaio discute em que condições a racionalidade técnica constitui um composto com a sociedade mediática para a constituição de um sujeito normalizado. Como suporte à discussão são desenvolvidas relações entre dispositivos de construção do sujeito e dispositivos de três tipos de discurso, a saber: o do mestre moderno, o universitário e o competente. Sujeito e discurso são conceitualmente considerados no contexto da teoria lacaniana, sendo o discurso compreendido como o liame social a partir do qual o sujeito se constrói e sobre o qual se projeta. A racionalidade técnica é considerada como ideologia de dominação, nos termos desenvolvidos por Marcuse, Habermas, Weber e Heidegger.
 
 Palavras-Chave
 Racionalidade técnica. Sociedade mediática. Sujeito.
 Discurso. Dominação.

A corpus-based look at short turns in university classroom interaction

AbstractThe aim of the present study is to explore the lexical content of short turns in university classroom discourse. Corpus-based techniques were applied to identify a large number of turns to analyze their lexical content in over two hundred university class sessions. The findings show that, although students take sixty per cent of the turns in our university classrooms, they use only twenty per cent of the total number of words. Consequently, students would produce short turns most of the times while teachers would engage in longer stretches of talk. The results also indicate that short turns generally mark intensive interactional sequences. More specifically, a closer look at the lexical items in these short turns and the functions they serve clearly show that while teachers offer support, elicit further elaboration or prompt reformulation, students mostly indicate agreement, understanding and involvement with these short turns. Considering the turn as a unit of analysis and its characteristic features such as turn-length and lexical variation, the findings of the lexical analysis of short turns suggest that participant roles can be well-defined in the classroom context.

Discursive and scientific psychology

I begin with the origins of Loughborough University's Discourse and Rhetoric Group (DARG), and in particular discursive psychology (DP). Rather than attempting to summarize DP, versions of which are plentiful, the article attempts to clarify various relationships and tensions between DP and other kinds of social psychology, particularly experimental. Common sense psychology is defined as DP's topic rather than rival; the aim is to study how people deploy everyday psychological notions and manage psychological business within talk and text, and what they accomplish by such deployments, rather than trying, as experimental psychology is often characterized as doing, to replace it all with something purportedly better. Claims for DP being particularly interpretative rather than scientific are rejected, by appeal to an 'interpretative gap' between phenomena, data, analysis, and conclusions that all research must manage, that gap being often much larger in quantitative and experimental work. The importance of pursuing causal explanations of psychological phenomena is questioned, and the importance asserted, of discovering, through rigorous empirical and conceptual analysis, the normative bases of human conduct and accountability.

O lugar do saber na psicanálise e na universidade e seus efeitos na experiência do estágio nas clínicas-escola

Este artigo retoma o debate sobre as relações entre a psicanálise e a universidade, enfocando a experiência do estágio clínico nas clínicas-escola dos cursos de graduação em Psicologia. Busca-se trazer para este contexto as contribuições de Lacan quanto ao lugar do saber na psicanálise e na ciência, bem como na distinção entre um discurso universitário e um discurso do analista. No âmbito de tal experiência, serão discutidos, ainda mais especificamente, os efeitos do término do atendimento, que, no caso, está associado à saída do estagiário.

Design universitären Wandels - Interventionen als Gestaltungsinstrument von universitären Veränderungsprozessen

Das Design von universitärem Wandel stellt nicht zuletzt aufgrund der aktuellen Herausforderungen von Universitäten ein zentrales Thema im Hochschuldiskurs dar. Im Beitrag wird diese Thematik aufgenommen, indem der Frage nachgegangen wird, welches Potential Interventionen als Gestaltungsinstrument in universitären Veränderungsprozessen innewohnt. Dabei werden aus analytisch-konzeptioneller Perspektive die Rahmenbedingungen zum Intervenieren erörtert und aus empirischer Perspektive konkrete Ergebnisse zum Interventionshandeln aufgezeigt. Intention ist es, über die Perspektiven Orientierungspunkte für ein potentielles Design universitärer Veränderungsprozesse anzubieten.02.11.2011 | Karl-Heinz Gerholz (Hagen)

Open to change: knowledge transfer policy reception in a new university in Scotland

In the past 10 years, higher education (HE) systems in many parts of the world have experienced the emergence and development of policies for knowledge transfer (KT). These policies have established KT as the ‘third stream’ of the university's activities after teaching and research and reflect attempts to make universities more responsive to the needs of the new knowledge economy (KE). These developments may be seen as a global policy trend towards extracting a greater contribution from universities to the economy and society as a whole. At the same time, contextual factors that reflect local histories and meanings have an impact on how such policy is taken up. This article examines the reception of KT policy discourse in a new university in Scotland in order to illustrate the power of discursive shifts to effect the re-definition of the university in an environment with strong civic traditions, and where there is considerable synergy between policy directions and institutional management aims.

The Rise of Choice in the U.S. University and College: 1910–20051

Over the twentieth century, the curriculum in U.S. universities and colleges was restructured around the individual rather than a set body of knowledge. This is evidenced in the shift from a prescribed curriculum often classical in orientation to the elective system. This article explores these changes and tests whether broader economic factors or institutional cultural factors affect these changes. I argue that the shift from prescribed to elective curricula is due to the institutionalization of the individual in society, the process in which the individual person is increasingly culturally defined and legitimated as the primary actor of reality. I use longitudinal regression models to identify the broader social sources of curricular change for a sample of 30 universities between 1910 and 2005. The findings support my argument that a key condition that led to the decline of prescription and the rise of choice is the institutionalization of the individual. I also find that student enrollment has a significant effect on the structure of the curriculum. I find some support that the socioeconomic status of students matters in affecting the university discourse on the centrality of the student. Little support is given to explanations that emphasize interorganizational competition and economic differentiation.

Academic Literacies; Discourse and Epistemology in a Swedish University

This article explores the perceptions of active senior researchers from different scientific and scholarly areas about scientific and scholarly writing, specifically that associated with research. The study comprises interviews with 12 researchers in four different faculties at a Swedish university: Arts, Social Sciences, Science and Technology, and Medicine. The article draws on Biglan’s (1973) and Becher’s (1994) four intellectual clusters, i.e. (1) hard pure (natural) science; (2) soft pure (arts and social) sciences; (3) hard applied (engineering) sciences; and (4) soft applied (education) sciences and connects them with Graue’s (2006) four identified writing traditions in academia, of: reporting, interpreting, constituting and praxis. The findings suggest that researchers in the applied sciences see writing as having a mediating and creative function for research while, for pure scientists, writing is based on epistemology that does not attribute a mediating function to language (Wertsch, 1998). The study also indicates that researchers who are active in applied science, e.g. professional education of various kinds, are positioned at the interface between the discipline and individuals as social beings, and that they operate as epistemological boundary crossers for the faculties.

Examining two explicit formulations in university discourse

A formulation is a type of metapragmatic utterance that enables participants to comment on some segment of the ongoing talk and to negotiate meaning within an interaction. Formulations have often been investigated in therapeutic and counseling interactions, but little is known about the use of formulations in other institutional settings. Broadening the scope of inquiry to higher education, the present study explored the distributions, functions, and responses to two types of explicit formulations (those prefaced by what you're saying is and are you saying that) in university discourse. Using MICASE as a source of data, the study focused on the two explicit formulations in different types of university speech activities (e.g., lectures, study groups, research labs). The study's findings indicate that in higher education — just as in therapeutic contexts — the production of formulations is highly constrained by participants' institutional roles and their relative power. This article further illustrates the ways in which formulations can serve as didactic tools in educational contexts. Finally, the article concludes by highlighting potential interactions between formulation frames, response types, and participant structures.

Considerações sobre a escrita lacaniana dos discursos

A escrita lacaniana dos discursos é composta de elementos (letras), lugares (quadrantes) e funções (operadores lógicos). Cada um dos discursos formalizados por Lacan é composto pela distribuição peculiar dessas letras nesses lugares e funções. Lacan estabeleceu, desse modo, uma estrutura própria para cada um dos quatro discursos: o discurso psicanalítico, o discurso do mestre, o discurso histérico e o discurso universitário. Examinamos a construção lógica feita por Lacan - principalmente no Seminário 17, O avesso da psicanálise - para cada um desses discursos, ressaltando suas consistências, aproximações e contrastes. Pretende-se demonstrar como a devida consideração à teoria lacaniana dos discursos pode ser um importante meio de abordagem psicanalítica do sujeito por meio de seu universo discursivo.

Working-class women academics: four socio-linguistic journeys

This study focuses on the linguistic and cultural challenges faced by four female academics from working-class backgrounds as they navigated the marginalized dialects of their working-class communities and the dominant discourse(s) and culture(s) of schools and universities. Through a series of open-ended ethnographic interviews, the authors explored the evolution and insights of each woman, as she considered how her socio-linguistic identities were formed within varied contexts and through multiple relationships. Salient themes derived from discussions and analyses included: (1) the influence female caregivers had on language development; (2) a moment of recognition for each woman that her native language or dialect conflicted with the Standard English used in academic settings; (3) the struggle to deal with aspects of difference including contrasting pragmatic systems; (4) gendered discourses and social norms of behaviour within working-class and academic communities; and (5) a recognition by each woman that she would always have to struggle to survive in the academic world. This paper concludes by considering approaches educators might utilize to foreground the marginalized dialects of working-class students and to add the unique richness of class-based sub-cultures to the curriculum.