Process Of Recontextualization Research Articles

Reorienting scarlet letters: Suzan-Lori Parks’ and Marina Carr’s Hester plays

Abstract This article considers the figure of Hester from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and its adaptation to contemporary African American and Irish dramatic writing. It focuses on In the Blood (1999) and Fucking A (2001) by African American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, as well as Irish dramatist Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats … (1998). These theatre-makers consciously manipulate The Scarlet Letter in that each Hester figure is a racially different and already marginalized woman who goes on to murder her child. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, I argue that Parks and Carr combine complex and overlapping processes of adaptation to expose the slippery relationship between signification and affect, and to reveal how affective economies shape and control racial and gendered bodies as well as their movements in space. In doing so, these dramatists call into question accepted conventions of judgement, justice and morality. Through processes of domestication, recontextualization and actualization, Parks and Carr engage complexly with hotly debated issues within their individual national contexts and in the wider, western milieu that they share.

Docentes nóveles y los procesos de recontextualización en contextos de vulnerabilidad

En este artículo se sintetizan los resultados de una investigación cualitativa entre profesores nóveles que trabajan en zonas de alta vulnerabilidad social, económica y cultural en la Región del Biobío, Chile. El objetivo central de la investigación fue conocer las interpretaciones y percepciones de los docentes ante los procesos de recontextualización en el aula de planes y programas oficiales. El método consistió en entrevistas cualitativas profundas y el análisis se basó en la técnica ad-hoc. Los resultados demuestran un alto grado de compromiso social por parte de los docentes nóveles con sus estudiantes y una actitud autónoma ante la recontextualización de planes y programas.

The expositive discourse as pedagogical discourse: studying recontextualization in the production of a science museum exhibition

In this paper I report on the sociological and educational particulars of The Biodiscovery Space exhibition of the Life Museum of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, using Basil Bernstein’s framework of pedagogic discourse and recontextualization. Data for analysis was obtained from interviews with the exhibition developers, field observations of museum visitors and analysis of exhibition documents. Using the ideas of power, classification and framework, among others, I analyzed the recontextualization process of the production of expositive discourse. Thus, working with Bernstein’s idea of classification, I explain the relationship between the discourses of the science of biology, history of science, museology, education, and communication in order to produce an expositive discourse. I also make explicit how agents of the Official Recontextualization Field of the Museum and the Pedagogic Recontextualization Field “....of the Museum determine partly the final expositive discourse of an exhibition”. Using the idea of a pedagogic discourse framework, I discuss how the constraints imposed by objects and texts in exhibitions help to create a specific manner of visitor interaction with these elements, “even if they have some autonomy”. Considerations about the audience and the intended process of acquisition are presented, when I discuss the control strategies of the exhibition. I propose that the Biodiscovery Space exhibit has a visible pedagogy. Finally, using the collected data I discuss the power tensions created in the production of expositive discourse showing how distributive, recontextualization and evaluation rules work in the context of exhibitions. The study of the dynamics in forming the expositive discourse using Bernstein’s framework reveals the individuals and institutions, the selection criteria, the negotiations and the power relations involved. It has the potential to assist both educators and researchers in the museum education field, as well as designers to understand the teaching and learning processes that occur during a visit and to establish relevant criteria to evaluate quality to best produce exhibitions in science museums.

Regions and their relations: sustaining authoritative professional knowledge

The development and iteration of a body of professional knowledge appropriate to the demands of practice is a central concern of studies of professional education and work. This article concentrates on Bernstein’s notion of the ‘region’ of professional knowledge, identifying regions as complex socio-epistemic entities into which forms of knowledge are appropriated and transformed to meet the requirements of practice. In order to better understand the constitution of professional knowledge, there is a need to conceptualise how knowledge is recontextualised between regions, disciplinary ‘singulars’, and professional practice. Two variables, proximity and dominance, are introduced to illustrate how relations between regions, singulars and practice may vary, with implications for what is recontextualised into regions. In some professions, there are pressures for greater proximity between regions as a consequence of changes in work practices, while in others there is the potential for the dominance of recontextualisation processes by market and bureaucratic logics. It is suggested that actors within regions need to find ways to maintain authority over professional knowledge while avoiding the risks of control by bodies ill-equipped to maintain knowledge validity. The analysis provides a lens through which to view developments in the knowledge bases of professional, or professionalising, occupations, and concomitant changes in professional education.

Bracketing Belief: Giyyur for the Godless

Bracketing Belief:Giyyur for the Godless Shai Cherry (bio) God forbid, the Talmud tells us, that we should mouth platitudes about God that are contrary to our understanding. Since God’s seal is truth, and we are created in the divine image, we must remain true to our own experience.1 And that experience, for a significant percentage of American Jews, is that God is absent.2 According to the 2013 Pew survey, of those who identified as Jewish, only a third (34%) claim “absolute certainty” in their belief in God or a universal spirit.3 Nearly a quarter (23%) do not believe in God or a universal spirit.4 Statistics are slippery things.5 The discussion in this paper assumes that more than one quarter of the Americans who identify in some way as Jewish [End Page 83] are either agnostics or atheists. Since most of my discussion concerns policy rather than philosophy, I’ll be grouping the agnostics and atheists together under the label of “the godless.” It is also my assumption that such “godless” Jews suffer no discrimination or sanctions from the various bodies within the Jewish community.6 The question of this paper, then, concerns the propriety and wisdom of reaching out to the non-Jewish godless population to invite them under the wings of the Shekhinah. The question itself can so easily be reduced to the absurd.7 How could and why would the godless convert to any religion? Where is the motivation or authenticity in such a decision? The problem in asking that question in regard to Judaism is precisely that Judaism is not reducible to its religious beliefs. What we must avoid reducing then is not the question of godless conversion, but the very understanding of Jewishness itself. As of 2012, roughly 1/3 of Americans under 30 years old do not identify with a religion. Although these “nones” claim no religious affiliation, the majority still considers themselves religious or spiritual!8 Some of those [End Page 84] young people are marrying Jews, who may themselves identify as godless Jews, thus vitiating the religious distance between the two partners. When a godless Jew marries a godless gentile, is that an intermarriage? It may be intercultural, but it is not exactly interfaith. Rabbi Harold M. Schulweiss calls these unions interfaithless!9 Another assumption: most Americans place Judaism in the same category as Christianity, and Christianity is a religion. Since neither the the godless nor the “nones” are in the market for religion, Judaism is not likely to be a live option.10 Thus, if the Conservative Movement is amenable to converting the godless, the onus is on us to invite the godless to consider seriously the process of giyyur (conversion). In many cases, godless gentiles will be introduced into the Jewish world through a romantic relationship with a Jew. I will argue that it is in the best interest of this couple, their future children, the Jewish people, and the whole world (!) to actively engage the godless in giyyur. Although I will be citing many rabbis in this paper, I am contextualizing their words in a novel way, and in many cases I suspect these rabbis would disagree with my conclusion. Yet, the process of recontextualization is quintessentially Jewish; it is the process of midrash.11 I, like my rabbinic ancestors, am placing their words into my context. This exercise in midrash halakhah will be successful to the degree that it allows others to hear how our tradition might respond to the unprecedented challenges before us. Classical Jewishness Shaye Cohen, in his book The Beginnings of Jewishness, contends that Judaism becomes something more akin to what we call a religion only in [End Page 85] the Hasmonean/Hellenistic period.12 Prior to that time, religious elements of Jewishness were inextricably bound with other elements of Israelite, and then Judean, culture. When one discusses conversion, it is significant to note that there is no evidence of such a thing prior to the Hasmonean conquest of the Idumeans in 128 b.c.e.13 Moreover, the process of conversion, as attested to at that time, did not explicitly involve a change in belief.14 As we...

Recontextualisation, resemiotisation and their analysis in terms of an FDG-based framework

“Recontextualisation” is the process whereby content that has been given expression in one context (the “source” context) is subsequently reused in a different context (the “destination” context). It is often accompanied by “resemiotisation”, the process whereby content is lifted from one text (the “antecedent” text, situated in the source context) and recast in a modified form during the production of a subsequent text (the “derivative” text, situated in the destination context). The aim of the present paper is to evaluate the adequacy of FDG, incorporating an extended model of context (EMC), as a basis for the analysis of the process of recontextualisation and of the accompanying resemiotisation. The study is based on the analysis of a corpus of texts consisting of one antecedent and six derivative texts, all drawn from the field of science communication. The texts are subjected to a contextual analysis in terms of the categories afforded by an analytical framework based on the EMC. From these contextual analyses, the differences between the source context and each of the six destination contexts are identified. These differences encapsulate the changes that constitute the essence of recontextualisation. In addition, each of the texts is analysed in terms of a three-tier framework based as far as possible on FDG. The resulting analyses are then compared, in order to identify the changes that constitute the essence of resemiotisation. Finally, the relationship between the recontextualisation and resemiotisation is discussed. From the point of view of evaluating the linguistic models employed, it transpires that the categories offered by the EMC appear to be viable as units for the analysis of recontextualisation. As for the analysis of resemiotisation, it turns out that a theoretical foundation for a substantial part of this, though not all, can be supplied by current FDG.

Recontextualizing the Racial Present: Intertextuality and the Politics of Online Remembering

Remembering is never an end in its own right, but a means of asserting power and legitimizing social hierarchies. Thus, voices that seek to interpret the past in contradictory ways are often silenced (Zelizer, 1995). No part of the U.S. past is more called upon to legitimize contemporary racial relations than the Civil Rights Movement, which is constructed as the end of the nation's systemic racism. Institutionalized racism is thereby relegated to history. Troubling aspects of the past that might lead citizens to interpret the contemporary U.S. as anything other than an egalitarian meritocracy are erased or rendered ideologically safe. This article examines how the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), one of the largest contemporary Black Nationalist organizations in the U.S., uses its website to challenge the notion of a “post-racial” U.S. by undermining the history upon which this conception is built. The MXGM's website recontextualizes contemporary events within marginalized accounts of the past to decrease the temporal distance between the racism of the past and present racial politics, constructing an uninterrupted historical continuum of racial oppression. This recontextualization process is reinforced at the structural level of the website through the inherently intertextual nature of hypertext.

Towards an understanding of the shaping of research outcomes by contextual issues: reflections on the contributions of the ReMath project

In this paper, we react to Lagrange and Kynigos’s contribution to this special issue, in which they present some of their experiences from two cross-case studies in the ReMath project (associated respectively with the use of two dynamic digital artefacts, Casyopee and Cruislet). They described how the project, which involved teams from three different countries (France, Italy and Greece), working in different conditions and relying on different theoretical approaches, was structured in order to address the role played by contextual characteristics. We consider how the ReMath approach of using cross-studies, and especially the inclusion of a cross-analysis phase, served to identify particularities associated with designing and implementing mathematics learning scenarios using digital tools. In their discussion of the process of re-contextualising, one of the factors which appears to have been particularly influential in shaping research activities was theoretical framework and they show how this factor both influences and is influenced by institutional and cultural characteristics. To further explore some of the other important contextual factors they pinpoint, such as the role and engagement of teachers, student characteristics and issues related to the empirical settings, we reflect upon the processes of re-contextualisation that we could identify in our own research.

Seeing education with one's own eyes and through PISA lenses: considerations of the reception of PISA in European countries

The paper addresses the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) as a public policy instrument, whose worldwide circulation is mediated by processes of reinterpretation, negotiation, and re-contextualization, where national, local, and international agencies intertwine. It is focused on the active reception of PISA in six European spaces (Francophone Belgium, France, Hungary, Portugal, Romania, and Scotland) along its first three cycles. The paper identifies two contrasting developments: the Program's divergent uses and its attractiveness in different social worlds. The paper gives particular attention to what is called the ‘update of reference societies’ in the context of national receptions of PISA. These ‘updates’ are analyzed as part of a composite process that involves domestic reasons, either related to current agendas for education or to deep historical factors, and injunctions related to PISA's rationale and PISA objects.

Eschatologische hoop: Moderne doodsbeleving en theologie in dialoog Eschatological Hope: Modern Mourning Rituals and Theology in Dialogue

Afname van religieuze affiliatie is een realiteit in de Nederlandse samenleving. Veel mensen identificeren zich slechts gedeeltelijk met religieuze leerstellingen, verhalen en rituelen. Als contexten veranderen, transformeren rituelen rond de dood en moeten zij 'vertaald' worden om betekenis te hebben voor mensen. Een dergelijk proces van heruitvinding en recontextualisering is moeilijk, want het vraagt om een dialoog tussen twee zeer verschillende gebieden die hedendaagse rituelen rond de dood beïnvloeden: ten eerste, het veld van de theologie, en ten tweede, het veld van hedendaagse geleefde praktijken en opvattingen rond de dood. Dit artikel confronteert rouwrituelen en het traditionele christelijke repertoire op twee onderwerpen: opstanding en de onsterfelijkheid van de ziel. Op deze manier gaan we een dialoog aan tussen moderne rouwrituelen en theologie.

The Nature of Science in Science Curricula: Methods and concepts of analysis

The article shows methods and concepts of analysis of the nature of science in science curricula through an exemplary study made in Portugal. The study analyses the extent to which the message transmitted by the Natural Science curriculum for Portuguese middle school considers the nature of science. It is epistemologically and sociologically grounded with particular emphasis on Bernstein's theory of pedagogic discourse and Ziman's conceptualization of science construction. The study used a mixed methodology and followed a dialectical process between the theoretical and the empirical. The results show that the nature of science has a low status in the curriculum with the exception of the external sociological dimension of science. Intra-disciplinary relations between scientific and metascientific knowledge are mostly absent. Recontextualization processes occurred between the two main parts of the curriculum. These results are discussed and their consequences in terms of scientific learning are explored. The mode of analysis used in the study has the potential of highlighting the level of a science curriculum, in terms of specific aspects of the nature of science.

Recontextualising policy discourses: a Bernsteinian perspective on policy interpretation, translation, enactment

This paper contributes to critical policy research by theorising one aspect of policy enactment, the meaning making work of a cohort of mid-level policy actors. Specifically, we propose that Basil Bernstein’s work on the structuring of pedagogic discourse, in particular, the concept of recontextualisation, may add to understandings of the policy work of interpretation and translation. Recontextualisation refers to the relational processes of selecting and moving knowledge from one context to another, as well as to the distinctive re-organisation of knowledge as an instructional and regulative or moral discourse. Processes of recontextualisation necessitate an analysis of power and control relations, and therefore add to the Foucauldian theorisations of power that currently dominate the critical policy literature. A process of code elaboration (decoding and recoding) takes place in various recontextualising agencies, responsible for the production of professional development materials, teaching guidelines and curriculum resources. We propose that mid-level policy actors are crucial to the work of policy interpretation and translation because they are engaged in elaborating the condensed codes of policy texts to an imagined logic of teachers’ practical work. To illustrate our theoretical points we draw on data; collected for an Australian research project on the accounts of mid-level policy actors responsible for the interpretation of child protection and safety policies for staff in Queensland schools.

On Decontextualization and Recontextualization in East Asian Cultural Interactions: Some Methodological Reflections

Abstract In the history of cultural interaction in East Asia, decontextualization and recontextualization can readily be observed in the exchanges of texts, people, and ideas among the different regions. When a text, person, or idea is transmitted from its home country into another country, it is first decontextualized and then recontextualized into the new cultural environment. These processes of decontextualization and recontextualization I refer to as “a contextual turn.” The present paper discusses methodological problems involved in the study of decontextualization and recontextualization. Section 1 introduces the paper. Section 2 then clarifies that “East Asia” is not an abstract term ranging over the countries of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, but rather refers to the dynamic, real process of concrete cultural interactions among these living cultures. On the dramatic stage of these interactions, China plays the role of the significant other to the many other actors. China is certainly not the sole conductor of the symphony of East Asia. Section 3 shows that the methodology of the history of ideas can be used when studying the phenomena of decontextualization. But one can easily become ensnared in what I call “the blind spot of textualism.” Section 4 provides an analytic discussion of an effective methodology for studying recontextualization that involves looking at the concrete exchange of texts, people, and ideas against a specific historical background, and then highlighting the subjective emotions of the intermediate agents in these cultural exchanges as the agents navigate the processes of decontextualization and recontextualization. This paper concludes by stressing that East Asian cultural interactions are dynamic processes and not static structures. Therefore, in our study of the history of cultural interactions in East Asia, we must seek a dynamic equilibrium between textualism and contextualism, as well as between fact and value or emotion.

Knowledge work at the boundary: Making a difference to educational disadvantage

This paper aims to contribute to the literature about boundary crossing and explicate how boundaries carry learning potential. We aim to do this by theorising the work of school-based researchers (SBRs) in a school–university partnership project aimed at addressing issues of educational disadvantage. We conceptualise the worlds of teaching and research as characterised by different types of knowledge work and ways of knowing, and by different interaction rituals and emotional investments for engaging with that knowledge. Yet we also contend that the practice boundary that separates also connects and intertwines, as people, objects and knowledge move back and forth across it and become transformed in the process. We suggest that the kind of transformative knowledge work discussed in this paper entails understanding the power and control relations involved in recontextualising knowledge as it moves across the research–practice gap. This process necessitates recognising and acknowledging the emotional investments, energies and interaction rituals attached to local, domain specific knowledge and ways of knowing. By discussing the work of school-based researchers we aim to show how processes of recontextualisation at the boundary between researcher and practitioner knowledge can hold the potential to make a difference to issues of seemingly entrenched educational disadvantage.

The performance of academic identity as pedagogical model and guide in/through lecture discourse

This article argues that lecture discourse has the capacity to support students in their transition into modes of social critique and that the lecturer, through an enactment of an academic identity in lecture discourse, plays a crucial role as both model and guide. Certain crucial phases and sub-phases of lectures are used to model an engagement with individual and everyday experience as grounds for analysis and critique. A close examination of phase structures illustrates how an academic's identity is used as a model within a pedagogical process wherein the academic shifts from the anecdotal to the theorised and critical through the process of recontextualisation.

‘We are Textbook Badnekais!’: A Bernsteinian Analysis of Textbook Culture in Science Classrooms

This article is an empirical study of science teaching practices using a Bernsteinian framework. It provides a comparative analysis through ethnographic examination of pedagogic recontextualisation in different school types—government, private unaided and international. Bernstein drew attention to the process of pedagogic recontextualisation and pointed out two interacting fields within it—the official recontextualisation field (ORF) and the pedagogic recontextualisation field (PRF). This article examines the textbook culture that is found in most of the schools and argues that it arises from the PRF. The differences in the pedagogic discourse within science classrooms are shown to arise from the interactions between the ORF, the PRF and the school context. The relative strengths of classification and framing within the pedagogic discourse is one of the key variants across the different types of schools. Control over students was highest in government schools, present to a lesser extent in the private school and least visible in the international school, indicating that poor children were perceived as requiring more disciplining. Poor children were also constructed as passive and probably unwilling/undeserving recipients of worthwhile knowledge, whereas affluent children were seen as capable of discursively constructing this knowledge. The knowledge to be transmitted within the government schools was kept distinct from everyday knowledge, thus indicating strong classification between knowledge to be learnt within the school and knowledge outside school. The pedagogic discourse experienced by students from government schools in conjunction with systemic problems results in creating an educational disadvantage for these students.

Production, circulation and deconstruction of gender norms in LGBTQ speech practices

This paper investigates interdiscursivity in talk about gender norms in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer (LGBTQ) community. Drawing from field work conducted among gay and lesbian parents, transgender people, and the Drag King community, I show how accounts like les hommes sont comme ça (‘Men are like that’) or les femmes sont comme ça (‘Women act that way’) emerging in discourse about pregnancy reveal gender-based norms and their relationship to social conditions. Adopting a linguistic anthropology perspective, while paying particular attention to agency, categorization, circulation, and recontextualization processes, I show how gender norms are constructed and deconstructed through interactional, semantic, and morphosyntactic patterns found in a variety of multisemiotic mediums (e.g. texts, multiparty conversations and forum exchanges, images) and in a diversity of contexts. In addition to its contribution to the study of gender and language, this article takes new steps in the ongoing development of membership categorization analysis and queer linguistics.

Unknown agents in translated political discourse

This article investigates the role of translation and interpreting in political discourse. It illustrates discursive events in the domain of politics and the resulting discourse types, such as jointly produced texts, press conferences and speeches. It shows that methods of Critical Discourse Analysis can be used effectively to reveal translation and interpreting strategies as well as transformations that occur in recontextualisation processes across languages, cultures, and discourse domains, in particular recontextualisation in mass media. It argues that the complexity of translational activities in the field of politics has not yet seen sufficient attention within Translation Studies. The article concludes by outlining a research programme for investigating political discourse in translation.

Basil Bernstein's Theory of the Pedagogic Device and Formal Music Schooling: Putting the Theory Into Practice

This article describes Basil Bernstein's theory of the pedagogic device as applied to school music instruction. Showing that educational practices are not personal choices alone, but the result of socio-political mandates, the article traces how education functions as a vehicle for social reproduction. Bernstein called this process the recontextualization of knowledge: From its point of inception, originally conceived knowledge undergoes changes through selection and filtration processes, eventually becoming curriculum—a relay for certain social and cultural values. Gaps in the recontextualization process allow teachers to place their own individual stamp upon the learning and teaching that occur in their classroom. Teacher–pupil interactions, guided by school-internal processes, lead to school knowledge that is further reproduced by the pupils in particular ways. A teacher's awareness of socially conditioned and habitual patterns of preference and behavior (habitus) may be key to making socially inclusive and emancipatory instructional choices.

Literature and Cinema from "Adaptation" to Re-creation: Coping with the Complexity of Human Recollection

Early 20th-century avant-gardes put a premium on the notion of originality and so created a cultural context in which -- in particular, lit-to cinema adaptation -- later came to be construed by film theory as a kind of derivative, inferior notion. This article offers the proof, based on work on the little-known original Russian sources, that none other than Eizenshtein opined differently, so much so that he preferred to argue instead for the use of the term re-creation; and that later semiotic theory, especially thanks to Iurii Lotman, provides us with the tools to develop the re-creation concept fully. In the process of re-creation, which is always a process of cultural re-contextualization, the original literary complexity lost in the transmutation must be made up in specific cinematic ways, in order to offer a final re-created artefact worthy of recollection by human society. In times of an overburdened human ability to remember historic sufferings, re-created artefacts that lose information vis-a-vis the original will be quite justly forgotten. On this basis, the article concludes with an elaboration on contemporary Italian cinema -- especially some commercially successful noirs -- drawn from literature (or rather, books of fiction) and pinpoints the nature of one of that type of cinema's recurrent shortcomings. The essential defect of such films is identified in their inability to make up by cinematic means for the loss of complexity which they endure in the transition from one medium to another. This is all the more true when, as in the case of the noirs examined here, complexity is already scant in the original books in the first place.