Discursive Essay Research Articles

Toward diverse SOGIESC-transformative theorizing in nursing: A revisitation and expansion of Im and Meleis' guidelines for gender-sensitive theorizing.

Over two decades have passed since Im and Meleis proposed "gender-sensitive theories" as a category of nursing theories in 2001. Since then, the global conditions of women and minoritized identities across the various spectra of sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sexual characteristics (SOGIESC) have changed. Moreover, feminist theorizing has evolved, prompting the need to update how nurses theorize and research the interactions of gender and health in their practice. This discursive essay aims to (1) provide a summary of Im and Meleis' characterization and guidelines in the development of gender-sensitive theories in nursing and present exemplars that use these guidelines; (2) assess the gender-sensitive nursing theory guidelines in terms of gender-responsiveness; and (3) expand the transformative potential of gender-sensitive theorizing in nursing by proposing Diverse SOGIESC-Transformative Theories. Diverse SOGIESC-Transformative Theories include three additional aspects to enhance the transformative potential of gender-responsive theorizing in nursing: inclusion of diverse SOGIESC, elaboration of intersectionality, and consideration of men and masculinities.

Upper secondary students’ discursive writing in two languages

This longitudinal study examines one central dimension of discursive essay writing, viz. text structure. It presents results from 40 upper secondary school students’ argumentative and expository texts, four essays in Swedish and four in English (N=320) written during the students’ three years upper-secondary schooling. In addition, three students’ writing progression in eight tasks is presented as cases. The study contributes to the knowledge about upper-secondary school students’ written discursive development in two languages, Swedish (L1) and English (L2). The research is informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and the texts were analyzed for logical structure, defined as the cultural norms for clear organization of texts in more academic or formal contexts. The analysis comprised three levels: (1) the global level (text structure in steps and general organization), (2) the paragraph level (paragraphing supporting the global structure), and (3) the linguistic level (language related discursive markers). Based on the analyses of different levels, an overall assessment of logical structure was made. The results show that the progression in terms of text structure largely failed to occur and neither the choice of language or different text types (argumentative and expository texts) shaped students’ ability to structure their text.

The Wretched and the Redemptive in John Berger’s Late Fiction

The precarious existence endured by the communities depicted in John Berger’s late fiction bears some similarity to the condition of the human condition that Frantz Fanon examines in his The Wretched of the Earth. Throughout his adult life Berger maintained a deeply held concern for the plight of the marginalised and abandoned in society and often made this the subject of his discursive essays. This article examines Berger’s late fiction as representations of despair and of hope in the midst of the changing nature of contemporary society. In doing so, it attempts to establish connections between the state of the contemporary world which Fanon circumscribes. Achille Mbembe’s more recent work and, in particular, his reassigning of Fanon’s vision for a new world, is included in this reading of Berger’s fiction which, in its conclusion, seeks to demonstrate how some measure of hope for a different society can be envisioned through the imaginative and speculative possibilities which fiction promises.

METHOD OF WRITING DISCURSIVE ESSAYS ON SOCIAL AND PEDAGOGICAL TOPICS


 
 
 The article discusses essential problems of discursive essay writing method during professional formation of a future teacher, conceptual approaches and technique of step-by-step preparation for its writing, as well as approaches to assessing and analyzing the level of performance using defined set of criteria given specifics of social and pedagogical problems. General theoretical bases of interpretation of discourse features and logic and technological support of its implementation are described, given the specifics of essay writing method, which was not relevant in the system of information and reproductive professional education.
 
 

METHODOLOGY OF WRITING AN ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAY ON SOCIAL AND PEDAGOGICAL TOPICS


 
 
 The article concerns the problems connected with the use of such non- standard creative method of professional training of the future teacher as an argumentative essay, having high potential of independent scientific study of the problem that has clearly expressed personality-oriented priorities. Both the concept and the methodology of preparing and writing an essay on social and pedagogical topics by the student are based on the determined theoretical positions that reflect the essence of the argumentative essay, the logic of its formation, indicating a fundamental difference in relation to functional and content-procedural features of writing a discursive essay.
 
 

Femme resistance: the fem(me)inine art of failure

ABSTRACTUsing femme theory, Foucault, and queer failure as analytical frameworks, the current paper demonstrates the role of feminine failure in resisting and subverting systems of oppression, subsequently providing the minute shifts in power necessary to expand the terms of patriarchal femininity. More specifically, the current paper draws on contemporary modes of art and aesthetics to examine the productive potential of failing to embody patriarchal femininity, positing this failure as a form of femme resistance. By hijacking cultural signifiers of adornment, femme and feminine failure celebrate that which is culturally shamed (queer, fat, disabled, variant, poor, and racially minoritised bodies), expose systems of erasure, challenge binary systems of meaning, and promote feminine growth. Examining each of these themes in turn, the current paper argues that feminine failure challenges the pillars of patriarchal femininity and discursive systems of normativity. To this end, femme as a theoretical framework demonstrates the freedom of failure by exposing the heterogeneous multiplicities of femininity, and offering possibilities that normativity never could. This critical discursive essay contributes to the emergent application of femme as a theoretical framework.

Sustentabilidade como vantagem competitiva nas organizações: um levantamento da responsabilidade das empresas

O estudo tem por objetivo descrever a responsabilidade social empresarial e a sustentabilidade organizacional como dois caminhos estratégicos possíveis à serem adotados pelas organizações em prol de ofertarem a busca pelo alcance das metas de vantagens competitivas sustentáveis previstas e dos objetivos traçados pelas empresas responsáveis ecologicamente correta. Metodologicamente, se caracteriza como uma pesquisa básica, conceitual, explicativa, qualitativa, discursiva e bibliográfica. A vantagem competitividade sustentável impulsiona as organizações a refletir constantemente sobre como maximização dos resultados operacionais em busca de uma diferenciação estratégica. Empresas com estratégias sustentáveis têm grandes negócios no ambiente empresarial, podendo abrir novos segmentos de mercado e revolucionar os que já existem desde que invistam nas competências necessárias, não medindo esforços para construir uma sociedade mais justa, começando pelo nível mais alto empresarial, governamental, chegando até no âmbito social.

A Dream Play

Abstract

Writing about Asia from Australia: notes towards avoiding a firm view

This discursive essay – part exegesis, part literary analysis – analyses the act of writing about Asia from Australia (and from the west). I use the circumstances of my early childhood to frame my interest in ‘Asia’, suggesting that Australia is a genuinely diverse nation that is engaged with the region but that it also retains and values a monocultural outlook. In turn, I analyse several novels by westerners about Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge (including my own novel, Figurehead) to reflect on, first, cultural appropriation, and, second, the limits of empathy in fiction.

Who Benefits? World Heritage and Indigenous People

ABSTRACTThis paper provides the context for a continuing research project on the potential benefits of World Heritage Listing for Indigenous people. The benefits of World Heritage listing are regarded as obvious by advocates of the system, but this view is not shared by many Indigenous communities. This paper provides an assessment of the issues that create conflict between the World Heritage system and Indigenous people. A review of academic and policy literature suggests that the World Heritage System is incompatible with many aspects of Indigenous worldviews, and that conflict arises over issues of sovereignty and translation. These deep-seated issues make it impossible for the World Heritage system to stay abreast of Indigenous concerns, and as a consequence World Heritage continues to be a site of protest and contestation for Indigenous people. This discursive essay offers preliminary insights from research currently underway using Australian case studies to explore these issues.

The Fabric of Society Part II: The Relationship of Touch, Trust and Deception to Human Development and the Heteronormative vs. LGBTT Sexology Perspective and Political Dynamic

This discursive essay informs the emerging discipline of political ponerology with a view to help complete the hetero - vs. LGBT-sexual perspective and political dynamic. The author focuses on the concept of ‘trust’ in an attempt to integrate physiological development and human sexualization with socio- political, neurologic and psychological perspectives. The position taken is one of epistomological certainty that heterosexuality’s primacy and constancy are normative metrics and essential to the commonweal. Moreover, evidence is provided for the assertion that diverse eroticisms and sexual orientations are due to insults that cause anomalous development, dysfunctions and/or mal-adjustments on a natural continuum of variation. The author argues that fashionable sexology facilitates misinterpretations, misery, mind-bending apologies and affinities for enduring equivocations that nuture collective cognitive dissonance and criminality. Moreover, he posits this great sexology muddle has helped foster a post-modern mindset that supplants a beneficial and truly informed social order. Hence, the paper is essentialist in that it describes ‘what is done’ rather than ‘what should be done’ in a society that cannot be trusted.

Bringing a Taste of Abroad to Australian Readers: <em>Australian Wines & Food Quarterly</em> 1956–1960

Bringing a Taste of Abroad to Australian Readers: <em>Australian Wines & Food Quarterly</em> 1956–1960

Peer feedback: moving from assessment of learning to assessment for learning

The following case study showcases a model of academic peer learning that has demonstrated clear links to learning development in final year students. The paper discusses the introduction of a new assessment structure for a 15 credit course unit usually taken by 90 students in the form of a short discursive essay (500 words) due early in the first teaching term. This essay is peer assessed in groups of four students. The peer feedback and tutor mark then serve as formative feedback (feed forward) for the main, longer essay (2-2,500 words) due in the second teaching term. Following the outline of the case background, details of the peer assessment are provided, including its development and structure. The new assessment structure has resulted in deeper learning, positive student feedback, fewer student complaints with regard to grades received for the main essay, and better preparation for the final exam. Reflections are offered in the conclusion. ÂÂ

Like A Myth

Like A Myth Barry B. Powell (bio) Approaches to Greek Myth edited by Lowell Edmunds (Johns Hopkins University Press, second edition, 2014. 480 pages. $29.95 pb) What do we mean by Greek myth and what do these myths mean to us? A good introduction to this tangled conversation is the second edition of Lowell Edmunds’s Approaches to Greek Myth, at least for the attentive reader. The writing here brings us up to date on many matters: the history of the reception of myth; myth and ritual; comparative Indo-European myth; comparative folklore; narratology; iconographical approaches to myth; and the use of psychoanalysis. Two chapters are reprinted from the first edition, three chapters are revised, two chapters are completely rewritten, and there is a new chapter on the reception of Greek myth; a chapter on Greek myth and history has been dropped. This is an important revision over the first edition of 1990. In a learned introduction, rich with footnotes, Edmunds leads the reader through the complex topic of approaches to Greek myth. Edmunds gives a sensible definition of myth as a story about gods and heroes set in a primordial time that extends from the creation of the cosmos up to the heroic age, with which the present age is continuous. He emphasizes that by the classical period the Greeks were steeped in myths and surrounded by their imagery, especially on pottery. Most Greek myths, however, were learned through the oral presentation of written texts, [End Page viii] themselves often of oral origin. When knowledge of the myths faded in the Roman imperial period, handbooks appeared to support aristocratic learning and display, especially the Bibliotheca of Apollodorus in the second century a.d.—a summary of stories that still today defines what we think of as Greek myth. Greek myth had both system and variability: the general outlines of the stories were known (system), but you could mold individual myths to suit the occasion, often in surprising ways (variability). For the Greeks, myth and history were the same thing. Myth was therefore expected to be true. Only when reading became private, and the truth value of the narrative was not alleged, did fiction become possible. Fiction as we understand it does not appear until the Greek novels of the second century a.d. What about myth and religion? All myths certainly do not derive from religious ritual, as once widely believed. It is hard to say what Greek religion was (or Greek myth for that matter), except that religious practice in Greece was the killing of animals, and it had no creed. Myth and religion seem to inhabit different spheres, and certainly Greek myth did not support Greek belief. Before each of the eight chapters Edmunds provides a short lucid summary of the contents, while also situating the chapter into the general context of “approaches to Greek myth.” In “The Reception of Greek Myth,” translated from the Spanish and new to this edition, Jordi Pàmias covers the topic from its beginning through the nineteenth century. Already in Homer is the notion that a preexisting tradition is being reworked for the audience, but with the mythographers in the fifth century b.c. myth was systematized in writing and separated from its oral roots: at this time myth became an artifact. The mythographers’ principle of organization was genealogical. The handbooks of the Augustan and imperial periods heightened this development and resulted in the modern “handbook of Greek myth,” in fact a survey of the important genealogies in the Greek tradition. Two methods of understanding myth by these early commentators were Euhemerism, wherein the gods were thought once to have been real human beings; and allegorism, in which all the stories were thought to have a hidden meaning, usually morally uplifting. Ovid especially was the object of allegorical interpretation in the medieval and Renaissance periods. These twin approaches were powerful up to the modern period, but Pàmias stops at the end of the nineteenth century. The second somewhat discursive essay by H. S. Versnel, “Myth and Ritual, Old and New,” translated from the Dutch and unchanged from the first edition, explores myth’s relationship to ritual. Versnel gives equal...

Diagnóstico de la escritura de un ensayo de alumnos novatos de Pedagogía en el campus Villarica UC, Chile

Este artículo tiene el objetivo de diagnosticar, de manera cualitativa y cuantitativa, por medio de un estudio de caso, las dificultades discursivas y personales que enfrentan durante el año de ingreso los alumnos de la carrera de Pedagogía Básica del campus Villarrica UC (Chile) en la escritura académica de un ensayo. Se trabajó con 33 alumnos y con seis profesores de esa generación. Los estudiantes elaboraron un ensayo argumentativo que fue evaluado en diez dimensiones y participaron en grupos focales, al igual que los docentes. Los resultados evidencian que los estudiantes carecen de conocimientos para desarrollar un ensayo, especialmente de ortografía, contraargumentación e intertextualidad. A su vez, interfieren en ellos los diferentes factores emocionales. Es por esto que nace la necesidad de crear un tipo de formación específica en torno al proceso de escritura.

Grand Opera and the Decline of Ballet in the later Nineteenth Century: A Discursive Essay

Up to the end of the nineteenth century, the history of ballet and the history of opera were closely entwined in a war for supremacy, with opera often in the dominant role; this was particularly the case during the second half of the nineteenth century, when ballet was widely perceived as being in decline. Some historical background is necessary to provide a brief outline of the long process that led to this outcome.

Sinology, Feminist History, and Everydayness in the Early Republican Periodical Press

This article merges two approaches in what I am calling a horizontal reading of the women’s periodical press in early twentieth-century China. Feminism’s skepticism of all-encompassing narratives and attentiveness to the circuitous routes through which knowledge is produced make these multigenre, multivocal, and multiregistered materials legitimate objects of historical study. At the same time the methods of sinology, which combine competence in the mutating forms of Republican-era written Chinese with openness to new theoretically inflected approaches, help to unlock their aporetic richness. Aimed at capturing rather than disciplining the chaotic richness of these publications, this horizontal method reads the range of materials within women’s magazines against one another: discursive essays against photographic portraits, and advertisements against readers’ columns, for example. Rather than seeking the discursive logic articulated in selected essays—the prevailing scholarly approach to the periodical press—the horizontal method aims to capture the naturally occurring oddities of quotidian print matter. These oddities, in turn, highlight productive disjunctions inherent in Republican culture. Such a reading deepens our knowledge of the dramatic early twentieth-century changes that altered the course of modern Chinese history and enriches our understanding of the demographic that was arguably most affected by those changes—urban women. It also offers an alternate vision of how those dramatic changes were lived and understood, not in terms of a series of stark binaries that pitted “Western modernity” against “Chinese tradition” but through blended accommodations grounded in the intimate details of daily life.

CAROLYN DEVER and LISA NILES (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope.

TROLLOPE readers in search of empirical information have been well served by R. C. Terry’s An Oxford Reader’s Companion to Trollope (1999). But a collection of discursive essays by leading scholars is a valuable addition to the resources assisting readers of this major mid-Victorian novelist. It is easy to categorize Trollope on the basis of a few texts and The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope is right to take as its starting point a sense of what the Introduction calls the ‘dialectic’ (2) of Trollope’s art: familiar but also experimental; a fictional realist responsive to sensational plots; a writer whose novels frequently end apparently tidily with marriage who is persistently aware of the unresolved, the loose ends, the threatening potential of the unsaid. The Trollope presented here, as the editors rightly say in their Introduction, is one ‘both known and unsettling’ (2). It is in opening up and contextualizing the less familiar Trollope, indeed, that this volume’s best qualities are to be found. Readers not familiar with the substantial body of Trollope’s short stories, for instance, will find in Lisa Niles’ essay on ‘Trollope’s Short Fiction’ a valuable over-view of the freedom Trollope found—as did others—in the genre, with its invitation to the quirky, the partial, the glimpsed. Part of this freedom and surprise is simply to do with geographical settings. But it is also to do with the daring nature of the topics—the violence of ‘Aaron Trow’ (set in Bermuda); the libertinism of ‘Mrs General Talboys’; the amusing confusions of classes that result from nude bathing together in ‘The Turkish Bath’ (a valuable example of a flawed narrator).

Discursive Essay: A better known territory? Medical history and Ireland

Academic research into the history of medicine in Ireland has attracted increased scholarly enquiry in recent decades and the subjects explored encapsulate a broad chronological and geographical breadth. This article provides an overview of the roots of the discipline in Ireland and its intellectual trajectory. It identifies particular themes that have preoccupied historians of the past decade, including the rise of lunatic asylums in the nineteenth century, campaigns to eradicate diseases and the emergence of state medicine. In contrast to earlier work on Ireland that has been criticised as narrow and Whiggish, scholars have increasingly produced fine-grained case studies that situate aspects of Irish medical history within broader economic, social and cultural contexts in Ireland, and have linked Irish experiences to key themes in the discipline internationally. Nonetheless, there remain some very basic lacunae in our knowledge, especially in relation to periods before 1800. Introduction The meanings, theories and practices of medicine, welfare, illness and disease in Ireland have attracted increased scholarly research and enquiry in recent decades. The work produced encapsulates a broad chronological and geographical breadth and is pursued by both established academics with pedigrees in political, medical, social and cultural history and by 'early career' scholars entering a field or discipline of medical history that they regard often mistakenly as entirely new. This vibrancy constitutes a significant development since 1999 when Greta Jones and Elizabeth Malcolm assessed the field in Ireland and described it as a 'largely unknown territory'.1 The 1990s was a period of reflection among social historians of medicine in general, especially those working on Britain and North America, who debated with some rigour Andrew Wear's claim that the subject had 'come * Author's e-mail: catherine.cox@ucd.ie doi: 10.331 8/PRIAC.201 3. 1 13.11 1 Greta Jones and Elizabeth Malcolm, 'Introduction: an anatomy of Irish medical history', in Greta Jones and Elizabeth Malcolm (eds), Medicine, disease and the state in Ireland, 1650-1940 (Cork, 1999), 9. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. 113C, 341-362 © 2013 Royal Irish Academy This content downloaded from 207.46.13.131 on Sun, 16 Oct 2016 05:18:29 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Discursive Essay: A better known territory? Medical history and Ireland

Academic research into the history of medicine in Ireland has attracted increased scholarly enquiry in recent decades and the subjects explored encapsulate a broad chronological and geographical breadth. This article provides an overview of the roots of the discipline in Ireland and its intellectual trajectory. It identifies particular themes that have preoccupied historians of the past decade, including the rise of lunatic asylums in the nineteenth century, campaigns to eradicate diseases and the emergence of state medicine. In contrast to earlier work on Ireland that has been criticised as narrow and Whiggish, scholars have increasingly produced fine-grained case studies that situate aspects of Irish medical history within broader economic, social and cultural contexts in Ireland, and have linked Irish experiences to key themes in the discipline internationally. Nonetheless, there remain some very basic lacunae in our knowledge, especially in relation to periods before 1800.