Persuasive Articles Research Articles

Mediated Encounters in Autistic Spectrum Disorder: From the Material to the Digital

Mediated Encounters in Autistic Spectrum Disorder: From the Material to the Digital Lucy Osler*, PhD (bio) Research on autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) commonly describes autistic individuals as displaying: i) a preoccupation with the world of objects and ii) a withdrawal or detachment from the world of subjects. In her insightful and persuasive article, Sofie Boldsen argues that we should not fall into the trap of viewing the world of objects and the world of subjects in isolation from one another. Drawing from her qualitative and phenomenological study on social interaction in ASD, Boldsen urges us to recognize how interacting with material objects can scaffold, facilitate, and regulate different forms of social connectedness in ASD. In doing so, the distinction between the “social” and “non-social” dimensions of ASD is problematized, and a robustly situated and embedded understanding of ASD is presented. Excerpts from both observational and interview-based data are used to illustrate ways in which social interaction in ASD is mediated via interaction with the material world. Line and Helene engage with one another through their mutual attention to a guitar; Ina and Viola dance together, guided by a virtual dance partner; Hanna and Mads connect while playing a board game. Boldsen argues that through engagement with material aspects of the environment various social possibilities are opened; social possibilities that are importantly experienced as less uncertain and overwhelming. Boldsen suggests two ways in which material mediation regulates and grounds social interaction. First, through their sensible nature, objects can scaffold social co-ordination and attunement. The rhythmic structure of music, for example, is socially supportive; it entrains our bodily movements both in time with the music and, in turn, with others also dancing. As such, the music provides a shared structure in which bodily movement and attunement unfolds, guiding and delineating when and how to act. Second, Boldsen highlights how objects can make normative rules and expectations explicit. As such, they not only provide a structure which shapes the spatio-temporal [End Page 209] dynamic of an interaction but facilitate an understanding of how to act appropriately in a particular situation. Board games, for instance, come with a clear set of rules about turn-taking and actions. This brings a confidence about what to do oneself, as well as making the actions of others predictable, thus helping to alleviate the pervasive uncertainty that many autistic individuals experience in social situations. Using material objects is an efficient and effective way of grounding a social interaction in a specific framework that not only makes appropriate forms of interaction more salient, but importantly reduces the kinds of action that might arise. Engaging in a specific materially mediated activity, then, carves out a more manageable space of meaning in the world. Indeed, we might be reminded, here, of Alfred Schutz’s notion of “finite provinces of meaning” (Schutz, 1962). Schutz describes how we can enter certain worlds which operate along their own codes of conduct and logic (e.g., the world of theater, poetry, games). In such worlds, aspects of the everyday world are temporarily rendered irrelevant or non-salient and meaning is constituted within the limited framework of that particular world. If the everyday world is experienced as overwhelming and chaotic, entering the explicitly codified world of, say, a game might be experienced as a relief. Note, though, that material objects offer up different styles and structures of mediated engagement. This point could be made more explicit in Boldsen’s analysis. Music prompts a different rhythmic interaction and set of normative expectations than playing a board game together. Even within the sub-category of games, different games promote very different forms of social engagement—think of the difference between playing chess (a game with highly structured moves, sometimes a specified response time, and which structurally unfolds in a near-identical manner across games and players) and a role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons (a game with more diverse and creative game styles that alters across games and players). I am, therefore, left curious about the differences between materially mediated social encounters. To use the Schutzian terminology, it would be interesting to explore how different finite provinces of meaning and engagement are created...

Music in Tolkien's Work and Beyond ed. by Julian Eilmann and Friedhelm Schneidewind

Reviewed by: Music in Tolkien's Work and Beyond ed. by Julian Eilmann and Friedhelm Schneidewind David Bratman Music in Tolkien's Work and Beyond, edited by Julian Eilmann and Friedhelm Schneidewind. Zurich: Walking Tree, 2019. Cormarë Series no. 39. viii, 474 pp. $32.00 (softcover). ISBN 978-3-905703-39-9. This is the third anthology of articles about Tolkien and music. Together with its two predecessors (Music in Middle-earth, edited by Heidi Steimel and Friedhelm Schneidewind, Walking Tree, 2010; and Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien, edited by Bradford Lee Eden, McFarland, 2010), it demonstrates that music was vital to Tolkien's imagination. All three anthologies venture outside of the topic of music as strictly defined, into lyrics on their own as poetry, and into Tolkien's special interest of the music—if it may be so called—of language as studied in philology. The "and beyond" of this book's title, however, alludes to articles discussing other authors in comparison with Tolkien, and to articles covering music inspired by Tolkien. The most prominent theme of Music in Tolkien's Work and Beyond, however, is the central topic of the pervasiveness of music and musical references in Tolkien's work. This is the theme of some of the bestwritten as well as the most persuasive articles in the anthology. In what might as well serve as the keynote entry, though it is the sixth essay in the book, Elizabeth A. Whittingham delivers a sweeping declaration that music is essential to Tolkien's legendarium, completely imbued into the story. Her examples are primarily from the Silmarillion papers, particularly The Lays of Beleriand. Two more surveys with equally impressive sweep, despite narrower topical focus, come from Jennifer Rogers with a thorough ethnomusicological analysis of some incidental song verses in The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers, and from Angela P. Nicholas, who digs out an impressive number of musical references in the life of Aragorn, both as a singer and as the focus of music around him, particularly in his role as king. These two essays, though placed together, are separated from Whittingham's to which they are most closely related. [End Page 266] Several other authors pursue the same theme on a smaller scale, again scattered through the book: Sabine Frambach with a quick survey of the music of Tolkien's evil characters, who she concludes "almost exclusively use functional music" (339); John Holmes, who sets out to "canvas the references to harps" in Tolkien's works (361); and Bradford Lee Eden, who itemizes, but does not analyze, the perhaps surprising number of musical references in recently published work by Tolkien, from The Story of Kullervo to the book form of A Secret Vice. Two other remarkable articles follow the theme of pervasiveness in a tighter focus. Renée Vink traces the shift from a concentration on dance in "The Tale of Tinúviel" from The Book of Lost Tales to one on song in the same story retold in "The Lay of Leithian," evincing the increasing influence of the "Ainulindalë" on Tolkien's imagination. Petra Zimmermann writes strikingly on Tolkien's use of silence in his fiction, both in general and specifically as an element in performances of songs and poetry. She suggests that the heightened emphasis on sounds in a silent environment gives the reader cues for how to hear the story in the mind's ear. This essay could be tied to one elsewhere in the book by Allan Turner on Tolkien's use of music to mark a shift from the ordinary to the wondrous, as with the arrival of Gildor in The Lord of the Rings or several moments in Smith of Wootton Major. In her essay on Aragorn, Angela P. Nicholas discusses the Lament for Boromir ("Through Rohan over fen and field where the long grass grows," TT, III, i, 19–20) mostly in terms of Aragorn's personal reaction to Boromir's death and its place in the quest. Three other articles raise the particular question of fictional plausibility: could Aragorn and Legolas have improvised such a complex lyric? Nancy Martsch's article addresses the general topic of...

Content analysis of newspaper reports on passive smoking regulations in Japan

Objectives Ever since Tokyo was awarded the privilege to host the 2020 Olympic Games, the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare has worked toward implementing a ban on passive smoking. This study examined the present situation of passive smoking in Japan, and the coverage of passive smoking regulations in newspaper reports, based on a content analysis. This was followed by a comparison with the contents of the "White Paper on Tobacco," published by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare in August, 2016.Methods In total, 182 articles published from September 7, 2013 to March 31, 2017 were collected from three major newspapers based in Tokyo (Asahi, Yomiuri, and Mainichi). The article search criteria included the presence of the following keywords in the title or main text: "passive smoking OR entire surface smoking cessation OR indoor smoking OR indoor smoking cessation OR smoking cessation in the site OR smoking cessation in the building." Online posts and articles that did not focus mainly on the regulation of passive smoking were excluded. The 37 coding categories that were developed were classified either as positive or negative (with respect to coverage of passive smoking regulations). The assessment of passive smoking in the White Paper on Tobacco informed the coding categories, to allow the evaluation of the extent to which the contents of the White Paper were reflected in newspaper reports.Results Among the 182 articles examined, 107 addressed only the positive aspects of the regulations, while 7 addressed only the negative aspects. Further, 50 articles addressed both positive and negative aspects, while 18 addressed neither. Among those addressing both positive and negative aspects, 14 (28%) included counterarguments to the negative comments, which consistently reflected the contents of the White Paper on Tobacco.Conclusions Majority of the articles reported only on the positive aspects of the regulations. Persuasive articles that presented both the positive and negative aspects of the issue, which included counterarguments to the negative opinions, were scarce. However, such articles were found to some degree in the editorials of newspapers. The influence of such editorials may increase if newspapers include the pros or cons of this issue, and present counterarguments. Additionally, some topics were not reported sufficiently. Thus, problems were observed in the newspaper reports regarding passive smoking regulations.

Climate Change: Adaptation, Mitigation, and Critical Infrastructures

On October 22, 2012, an African easterly wave formed in the Caribbean Sea and quickly grew into a tropical storm with frightening potential. It was the hottest year in recorded human history (though that record has subsequently been shattered), and the seawater was unusually warm. Strong winds whipped the wet Caribbean air into a frenzy as the storm moved north and west, and by October 24 the system had become a hurricane. Meteorologists named it Sandy and predicted it would sweep through the Caribbean islands and make landfall somewhere on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Sandy turned out to be more dangerous than anyone initially anticipated. The “superstorm” intensified and grew as it moved across the Caribbean, ultimately covering an area more than one thousand miles in diameter, making it one of the largest hurricanes in American history. Its winds were punishingly severe, yet the weather system was painfully slow, and the steady, relentless storm seemed to pause so that it could inflict extra damage on nearly everything in its path. Sandy hit the Atlantic coast on October 29 — the worst possible moment. Not only was there a full moon with high tides, but there was also an early winter storm with arctic air moving into the northeastern region from the other direction, and the two systems collided to form what journalists called a hybrid “Frankenstorm.” As the primary target of the attacks on September 11, 2001, New York City had spent billions of dollars over the course of the following decade shoring up its security systems and preparing for a catastrophe. Terrorism was not its only con-

Editorial Policy on the Use of the Terms “Sex” and “Gender”

As Zoe Peterson and Charlene Muehlenhard (2011, this issue) elaborated, there is a long history of debate about the use of the terms “gender” and “sex” in the field of feminist psychology, as well as more generally in all psychological and social science research related to women and gender studies. They further noted that the generally preferred term now in psychology is “gender,” based on Rhoda Unger’s (1979) persuasive article. However, both terms are widely used, often interchangeably. Peterson and Muehlenhard conclude that the distinction will become less and less important over time. Others have suggested that we should take a definite viewpoint. In their chapter, titled “Words matter: The language of gender,” Smith et al. (2010) argued that the words we use affect how we think about issues and to what we pay attention. Many details are provided by Smith et al. about the naming of issues and how this affects the discourse regarding these issues within U.S. feminist thought. Based in these arguments and on Unger (1979), as past and present editors of Sex Roles, we believe that routine use of the term “sex” in the journals’ pages would suggest that the authors and editors believe that any differences in behavior and abilities are rooted in biology and that the journal’s reviewers and editors prefer essentialist and/or evolutionary approaches. Although it is impossible ever to know how much of human behavior is innate or biological and how much is learned or otherwise influenced by the environment or cultural context, we ask our authors to use the term “gender” because its implications are clearly broader and more inclusive than those of the term “sex.” This policy was developed by Sue Rosenberg Zalk during her editorship. As she routinely wrote in her letters to authors:

Examining the complex roles of motivation and text medium in the persuasion process

Models of persuasion (e.g., Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) and conceptual change ( Dole & Sinatra, 1998) acknowledge that reader elaboration of and engagement with a given text increases the potential for belief change and that the process of elaboration or engagement is fueled by reader motivation. However, little is known about the predictive powers of various motivational constructs on belief change after reading compelling texts in both traditional paper and computer-based formats. As such, the present study examined how belief change is differentially influenced by three motivational constructs (i.e., need for cognition, topic interest, and topic interestingness), as well as the mediating role played by mode of delivery. Utilizing stratified, random sampling, college students responded to two persuasive articles presented through two distinct media—paper and computer. The results revealed that mode of delivery did not significantly influence belief change. In addition, of the three motivational constructs only need for cognition emerged as a statistically significant predictor of belief change, regardless of the mode of delivery. Implications for research and practice are forwarded.

Limitations on the Moral Permissibility of Employee Drug Testing

Ethical questions surrounding the issue of employee drug testing are not new. Thirteen years have passed since the educational and persuasive article on this subject by Joseph Desjardins and Ronald Duska appeared in this journal.2 Discussion has subsided recently, but the practice continues to be utilized by employers. Of particular ethical interest is the policy of using urine tests. On pain of termination or not being hired, employees and potential employees are required to produce a sample, often in the presence of a witness, which is then analyzed for the presence of unaccept able substances. My intention is to suggest that the scope of employees who may permissibly be tested is very small* smaller even than Desjardins and Duska seemed to think. The arguments for this claim do not involve new moral concepts or values, but instead utilize traditional values in a manner not previously described. In sorting out and clarifying the principal issues, I wish to make clear that the moral importance of privacy, a value central to this debate, has been understated, while other values relied on in an effort to defend the practice of employee drug testing have been overstated. Consequently, privacy can be overridden only in very rare circumstances, and the implication is that drug testing is morally unacceptable except for these rare circumstances.

Feminism and the Media: Introduction

I N THIS FORUM, Wendy Kozol, Patrice McDermott, and Deborah Rhode have written persuasive articles on the complex relationships between the contemporary feminist movement and the commercial media. While all three articles point to the relative successes of the feminist movement-indeed, there would not be such obvious struggles if feminist activists had not had an effect-they each focus on the ways that the media continue, despite obvious improvements, to frame and present women's issues and the feminist movement in ways that support antifeminist perspectives. Rhode provides us with the most comprehensive overview of the constraints facing feminism within nonfiction media, from the historical shortage of women in newsrooms to the more complicated issues of how women and women's issues are represented. Analyzing the expanded coverage given to domestic violence in the last twenty years, Kozol asks the important question, Is increased exposure enough? Answering that it is not, she points to the ways in which news and fictional accounts of violence against women both express and moderate the threats such violence poses to our most powerful ideals about gender and nation. McDermott's article focuses on the sustained attack on feminism and women's studies programs and courses mounted by critics like Katie Roiphe, Karen Lehrman, and Christina Hoff Sommers. While these critics often emerge out of the academy, the popular commercial media play a crucial role in disseminating, supporting, and magnifying their antifeminist views. Connecting all three articles is a shared emphasis on the way the popular media have neither the language nor the vision to speak of systemic or cultural problems or solutions. Rather, commercial media focus on individual resistance and individual deviance. Rhode, for instance, recounts the ways that the media described the women's movement, once they began to focus on it at all, as about individual, extremist women like Kate Millett and Betty Friedan. Like American election

On the chronology of the South Arabian martyrdoms

In a persuasive article (AAE 1: 1990: 110–128), F. de Blois has argued for A.D. 523 as the year of the South Arabian martyrdoms. There are a few errors in this otherwise sober and balanced article, which I have pointed out in this short communication in the hope that they will be eliminated in future discussions of this problem.

Resisting Postmodernism: The Parodic Mode of Angus Wilson’s No Laughing Matter

RESISTING POSTMODERNISM: THE PARODIC MODE OF ANGUS WILSON’S NO LAUGHING MATTER A N D R Z E J G A S I O R E K U n iversity o f E ast A n glia A.NGUS Wilson’s much discussed No Laughing Matter (1967), his most in­ novative novel, is considered by many critics to be his finest work. Set in the twentieth century and located primarily in England, it is a grand fam­ ily saga that traces the fortunes of one family, the Matthews, focussing on the different paths in life taken by its various members. By giving almost all of his characters roles that take them to the heart of public life — ac­ tor, journalist, art collector, businesswoman, novelist — Wilson is able to explore their responses to some of the key events of the century’s history. Divided into five books, the novel begins in Edwardian England and then moves through a succession of dates (1919,1925-38,1946, 1956,1967) to the date in which it was published. However, No Laughing Matter is not sim­ ply an updated version of the totalizing nineteenth-century burgher novel. Through its multi-perspectival form, which entails several narrative view­ points, an elusive narrator, plays within the novel, and various pastiches of older literary styles, it both exposes the limitations of an earlier realism and pays tribute to its strengths. Several critics have focussed perceptively on the skill with which Wilson combines a self-reflexive analysis of the problem of representation with a dogged commitment to the nineteenth-century novel’s emphasis on social density and texture. Particular attention has been paid to Wilson’s use of pastiche, most notably by Malcolm Bradbury, who foregrounds this aspect of the novel in a persuasive article, but also by Kerry McSweeney, Jay Halio, and A.S. Byatt. These critics’ analyses have illuminated No Laughing Matter in various ways, but although the novel is replete with pastiches of different literary forms, its controlling mode, I would argue, is in fact that of par­ ody, within which the pastiches are placed and contained. While in some respects this distinction might seem to be gratuitous, I have Fredric Jame­ son’s influential remarks about the differences between parody and pastiche in mind, and I suggest that a reconsideration of Wilson’s novel in relation to these remarks will not only clarify its stance vis-à-vis contemporary post­ modernist fiction but also expose some problems in Jameson’s position. No Laughing Matter, multiple-voiced, unstable, carnivalesque, and linguistically English Stu d ie s in C a n a d a , 19 , 1, March 1993 self-conscious, might easily be taken for another postmodernist text. But if it is, then it is a singularly combative and oppositional one, which actively resists many of the assumptions embedded in other postmodern artifacts. Jameson’s work on the cultural logic of late capitalism offers a variety of thought-provoking reflections on the nature of the elusive and contradictory phenomenon it sets out to map. I am concerned here with only two as­ pects of his argument: his contention that postmodernism results in a loss of temporality, a dehistoricized sense of the present, the aesthetic corollary of which is depthlessness; and his further claim that parody, once potent and productive, has been displaced by motiveless pastiche, which treats the past as a museum of images that the cultural bricoleur can showcase in any number of arbitrarily chosen patterns. Postmodern society, for Jameson, is “bereft of all historicity” ; its “own putative past is little more than a set of dusty spectacles” (18). Pastiche represents such a dehistoricized culture’s artistic mode par excellence. It is “blank parody,” or “speech in a dead language” ; it is “without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists” (17). Pastiche is styleless; it replaces individual sig­ natures with codes, idiolects, and sign-systems, abandoning the attempt to represent history and to rejuvenate literary forms. Jameson’s argument is explicitly related to postmodernism. And although he acknowledges that contemporary culture...

Pro-form and metaphor—Pro-form and vocative

In their very interesting, well-argued and persuasive article 'A systematic approach to Russian obscene language' (RL 6/2, 1982, 232-249) F. Dreizin and T. Priestly write (236) that the mat nouns in the left-hand column of Table I (234) can only be used as PRO-nouns "with overt, explicit determinative adjectives". In other words, to use their own examples (omitting stress-marks), if you say (8) Vcera ja videl bljad you can only mean 'I saw a whore yesterday' but if you say (7) Vcera ja videl etu bljad' you can mean either 'I saw this whore yesterday', where bljad' is in its technical, i.e. literal sense, or 'I saw this person yesterday', where bljad is used as a PRO-noun, i.e. where bljad is almost indeed a pronoun, meaning 'human being', with some additional "colouring". This colouring can be of two types. The use of bljad hiere, instead of celoveka, can mean either we are in a for the sake of a better term "low demotic" mode, in which the entire discourse is coloured, that is to say that the use of bljad and other words of the same type simply signals "low demotic"; or the word bljad can mean, whether or not we are in "low demotic", roughly 'person, pejorative'. On p. 241 Dreizin and Priestly state that mat verbs, as PRO-verbs, are semantically void but "not totally void : they inevitably carry the feature of expressivity". From what I have just written it should be clear that a mat word (be it verb or noun) used as a pro-form (to introduce a blanket term covering all words prefixed with PRO-) may be no more than part of a text all of which is expressively marked or it may itself be an expressively marked item. To return to the use of mat nouns as pro-forms, Dreizin and Priestly state that there are exceptions to their rule that the mat nouns can only be used in this way with determinative adjectives. A class of exceptions is provided by mass-nouns: "in some cases, however, when mass-nouns are involved, the rule may be violated. For example, (14) V lagere kormili govnom. They served up shit in the (labour) camp', may (as in English) be understood in the non-technical sense." This is not in fact the case, for in the example govno is not used as a pro-form but is

Theatricality and humour: Galdós' technique inDoña Perfecta

Theatricality and humour: Galdós' technique in<i>Doña Perfecta</i>

Not an Ostrich Egg?

In a persuasive article in The Art Bulletin, LIII, 1971, 435ff., Dr. Isa Ragusa offered, among other things, new evidence for the identification of the famous ovoid object in the Brera Altarpiece by Piero della Francesca as the egg of an ostrich. In the June, 1974, number of The Art Bulletin Professor C. Gilbert undertook “a criticism of just one aspect of her article.” At the end of more than five pages of objections he reasserted once again his conviction that the egg in the altarpiece is probably Leda's.

On Augustus and The Aerarium

In a very persuasive article in the Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin Academy (1931, p. 772 ff.) Wilcken has argued that Augustus in the third section of his Res Gestae enumerated only the expenses that he paid out of his patrimonium ,his privatum, and the manubiae, and that Mommsen, Hirschfeld, and Rostovtzeff were probably in error when they supposed that some of these payments derived from the Fiscus. To Wilcken's argument, which I accept in the main, I wish only to add some calculations of the amounts attributed to the various chests, in order to see how far his theory stands the test of practical application. And before doing this I wish also to call attention to some slight matters in his article that may need closer examination.