Process Of Recontextualization Research Articles

The interplay between subject recontextualizers: Social reproduction through critical reading

This article uses a Bernsteinian approach to explore, examine, and theorize about an activity in the upper-secondary curriculum within the Swedish Language subject. Based on an examination of the interplay between different educational actors in this recontextualization process the possibilities for pupils with different social backgrounds and their possibilities to gain access to valuable knowledge are delineated. The analysis is conducted in relation to a specific classroom activity called ‘reading critically’, of which four different aspects are described, each of which in its own way illustrates how didactic choices are justified in general and also specifically for pupils from different social backgrounds. Finally, an attempt is made to examine the findings in light of the recent neo-liberal turn in education in Sweden.

Rock critics as 'Mouldy Modernists'

Contemporary rock criticism appears to be firmly tied to the past. The specialist music press valorise rock music of the 1960s and 1970s, and new emerging artists are championed for their ‘retro’ sounding music by journalists who compare the sound of these new artists with those included in the established ‘canon’ of rock music. This article examines the narrative tropes of authenticity and nostalgia that frame the retrospective focus of this contemporary rock writing, and most significantly, the maintenance of the rock canon within contemporary popular culture. The article concludes by suggesting that while contemporary rock criticism is predominately characterised by nostalgia, this nostalgia is not simply a passive romanticism of the past. Rather, this nostalgia fuels a process of active recontextualisation within contemporary popular culture.

Manuscripts in Motion: The Diffusion of Galilean Copernicanism

Manuscript diffusion was not a passive act of replication and reception, but an active process of recontextualization, reinterpretation, and even intentional rewriting. Authorial attempts to control the diffusion of manuscripts through intended social channels often encountered resistance and subversion as networks regrouped, texts were altered, or manuscripts were forwarded to unintended recipients. Traditionally, such variants have been viewed as corruptions rather than evidence of use. Authors, well aware of these risks and opportunities, incorporated such instabilities into their own writing strategies, and used the unintended transformations of diffusion as a hypothetical safeguard for unorthodox arguments. This essay analyses the diffusion of Galileo's Copernican letters and tracts (1613–16). The texts in question, whose subject matter is the relationship between hermeneutics and power, offer an uncanny case study of the self-transforming nature of early modern manuscripts.

Identity Construction Strategies in Muslim hip-hop. A multimodal analysis of the work of the German rapper Sahira

The aim of Nadja Thoma's paper is to explore how young Muslim artists construct identity within contemporary hip-hop culture in Germany. Using the example of the rapper Sahira,the author focuses on the following questions: Which strategies are used to express religious identities in hip-hop? Which modifications of the traditional hip-hop culture can be observed within and through elements of Muslim culture and religion? The data used in the paper ranges from visual resources (a CD cover and the logo of the record label) to song lyrics and interview excerpts. In the first section of her paper the author offers an orientation towards hip-hop culture, introducing a number of important cultural concepts for the successive discussion. Then she provides an overview of discussions about the permissivity of music, especially hip-hop and Islam. Finally, Thoma deals with identity construction in German hip-hop culture and discusses of how cultural and religious identity is constructed in the work of the German rapper Sahira. At the conclusion, Nadja Thoma states, that multimodal analysis shows that German Muslim rap is the achievement of a recontextualization process, wherein a global cultural model has been adapted to a specific audience in a different reception country. Beyond the mere use of different languages as markers for ethnic belonging, Sahira uses religious visual codes and linguistic phrases in order to transgress ethnic differences and monocultural, monoreligious or Islamophobic conceptions which, in her opinion, could restrict communication. Furthermore, the different visual and linguistic elements are a demonstration of Sahira's ability to insert new elements into the existing hip-hop culture, one of the abilities which label someone a good and real rapper.

Beyond texts in context: Recontextualization and the co-production of texts and contexts in the legal discourse, excited utterance exception to hearsay

The excited utterance exception to hearsay from the US Federal Rules of Evidence (US Courts, 2006: Section 8) is a special kind of reported speech — the repetition of an utterance that reports an event, made prior to the courtroom interaction, in response to exciting circumstances, to a passive third party. This reported speech and the rules that govern it provide insight into the discursive relationship between text and context. This article uses the excited utterance exception to develop a theory of recontextualization, building on research that shows that texts do not merely constitute contexts, nor do contexts neatly hold and inform the texts embedded in them. Contexts are complex and subjective matrices made up of utterances, texts, actions and events, and these matrices are themselves open to recontextualization. This analysis shows that legal discourse simplifies and constrains both texts and contexts, and positions them causally in the recursive and simultaneous processes of entextualization and recontextualization.

Internationalisation and reform of higher education: global challenges and local interpretations

'Globalisation' and 'internationalisation' have been dominant concepts in the development of higher education policy no less than in business. This paper analyses the 'semantics' and 'pragmatics' of these key concepts in the discourse of higher education. The common features of higher education reforms in Europe and worldwide which constitute the contemporary social, political and economic conditions for education and social policy making are analysed in connection with the tensions of globalisation. The processes of translation and recontextualisation involved in the implementation of similar policies in specific national settings are then explored in the context of the transition in the higher education system of Russia.

‘But your body would rather have this …’: conceptualizing health through kinesthetic experience

This article provides an empirically grounded analysis of how children and adults kinesthetically recontextualize standardized, official health messages into personally meaningful, context‐specific health knowledge. The in‐depth interview research uses grounded theory methodology to analyze transcripts and a sociology of childhood framework to design a child‐centered methodological tool for collecting data with young children. Analysis demonstrates the need for further child‐centered research regarding children’s cognitive and experiential understanding of current health regimes, and discusses implications of theorizing recontextualization processes with a kinesthetic lens. Research findings include a warrant for further investigation of the biopolitical relationship between health promotion and the social body that attends to the experiential aspects of advancing moralizing health messages.

Translated interviews in printed media — A case study of the Spanish daily El Mundo

The journalistic interview is a highly accepted genre in all the media (TV, radio, newspapers) and equally a much-translated genre. Just like many other news products, the distribution of interviews is governed by news organisations and alliances between media companies. This mode of news presentation goes across linguistic and cultural boundaries in a process of transcultural communication possible only through translation. Based on a comparative analysis of 21 interviews translated and published in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo in 2008, this study analyses the type of interviews selected for translation, the strategies used in the translational process, and whether these are similar to strategies in news translation in general. It also considers whether this material is translated as a stable source, respecting the original, or as an unstable source. Printed media have their own translation policies, which involve a complex process of recontextualization of the information in order to localise it to suit the interests of the media themselves and of their audience. This complex process of translation is widely misunderstood at an academic level in both the fields of Journalism Studies and Translation Studies.

Intercultural Balinese Painting from the Classic to the Modern


 
 
 This article examines the representation mode painting like a change parallel to the profound transformation of the technical or theoretical knowledge, and also parallel to changes in the Balinese society values due to the physical evolution and the evolution of the system of values. In fact, within one century of painting it has been like moving from the classical, traditional, standard, homogeneous, local, and collectively turned into a painting that has been varied, heterogeneous, individual, and internationally with a modern twist. These waves of change occurred in the span of time through several stages, and most striking result from cash capitalistic economy and culture, especially tourism. In pre-colonial time the painting is a narrative religious functions until the time of breath commercialism modernist touches to always make innovations or changes. From the sacred space of temples and palaces to moving objects souvenirs, hotel interiors, fash- ion and even interior and exterior car. Developments of painting through innovation should not be inter- preted as a discontinuity (rapture) or discontinuity of the local context, but on the contrary, to appreciate again the classical values (pastiche), not by road of preserving it rigidly, but the process of reinterpretation and re-contextualization. 
 
 

Recontextualizing European higher education policies: the cases of Austria and Romania

This paper explores, in some detail at the European Union scale, processes and relationships of recontextualization between higher education and other EU policy fields, including for instance the recontextualization of ‘competitiveness rhetoric’ and ‘globalization rhetoric’ in HE policy documents. We trace the implementation of the Bologna Process in two EU member states, Austria and Romania, illustrating the effects of these very different socio-political and historical contexts on EU standardization processes through a detailed discourse analytic study of recontextualization processes of policy documents. This paper integrates two approaches in critical discourse analysis, Fairclough's dialectic-relational approach and Wodak's discourse-historical approach, by introducing recontextualization as a salient critical discourse analysis category and explaining its relationship to other categories within a discourse-analytical approach to (or ‘point of entry’ into) trans-disciplinary research on social change.

Applied nursing assistance methodology in the promotion of cardiovascular health of elderly - preview note

Fieldwork with qualitative approach, which uses the group of convergence as a strategy for its development. Objectives: to identify the cardiovascular risk factors of an elderly clientele assisted at the ambulatory of Gerontogeriatry of a School Hospital of the town of Rio de Janeiro; to discuss with the elderly clientele, practices of self care applied in the prevention of complications arising from the most prevalent cardiovascular diseases in the studied environment; to elaborate subsidies for the construction of a model of nursing care that would foment self care in the promotion of cardiovascular health of the above mentioned patients. This research was conducted at the Rio de Janeiro Federal University Hospital São Francisco de Assis. The subjects will be the elderly patients assisted in the ambulatory of that hospital, who will agree to participate in the discussion group. In that study, the collection and data analysis should take place simultaneously, using processes of information gathering, synthesis, theorization and re-contextualization, for information analysis.

A agenda do Legislativo Federal para as políticas curriculares no Brasil (1995-2007)

Considerando a organização do Congresso Nacional instituída a partir da Constituição Federal de 1988, este trabalho tem o objetivo de investigar o papel do Poder Legislativo na formulação das políticas curriculares no Brasil, destacando e discutindo a agenda proposta no âmbito desse Poder para as matérias sobre esse tema. Para consecução desse objetivo, foram identificadas todas as proposições sobre educação apresentadas e concluídas no processo legislativo durante as 50ª, 51ª e 52ª legislaturas (1995-2007), analisando-se, entre estas, aquelas que tomam como objeto o currículo escolar. Dessa maneira, o trabalho analisa o processo legislativo de 29 proposições sobre currículo escolar, 3 das quais transformadas em norma jurídica. Conclui-se que o Poder Legislativo apresenta um fraco poder de agenda em relação às políticas curriculares, limitando suas propostas à criação ou à modificação de disciplinas escolares. Na concepção de política curricular expressa por meio das proposições apresentadas, é como se o currículo escolar se instituísse de fora para dentro das escolas, pelo somatório desarticulado de disciplinas pretensamente importantes para a minimização das mazelas sociais. Não são preocupações de tais projetos os objetivos precípuos da instituição escolar, mas as próprias problemáticas sociais que os inspiraram. Desconsideram o contexto da prática, revelando procedimentos para os quais o texto da política curricular parece fazer sentido em si mesmo, fora dos processos de recontextualização e hibridismo fundamentais para o entendimento das políticas curriculares como políticas culturais.

W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity David Cockley J. J. Long . W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. ix + 224 pp. In much of the criticism focusing on W. G. Sebald's work, the Holocaust figures as the primary point of departure, and little work has been done to dispute its centrality to his texts. While not disagreeing with the indelible influence of the Holocaust, J. J. Long attempts to resituate Sebald's work inside a modernist context by arguing that it is modernity that forms the central focus. Long understands modernity to mean the "seismic social, economic, political and cultural transformations that took place in European societies from the eighteenth century onwards" (1). He charts how these transformations manifest themselves in Sebald's novels in order to observe how the technologies that come to prominence in modernity reshape memory and, subsequently, contemporary identity. Long argues that the photographic image, the archive, and the critique of power developed by Michel Foucault play prominent roles in Sebald's novels, essentially questioning how modernity implements new challenges to the contemporary subject. The Holocaust still plays a large role in Long's argument, but not as the starting point from which to study Sebald's work. Rather, the Holocaust becomes an example of the relationship between modernity and the contemporary subject. Long follows the lead of prominent scholars such as Zygmunt Bauman and Tzvetan Todorov who argue "that the Holocaust was an event whose very conditions of possibility lay in the technological rationality and bureaucracy characteristic of modernity itself" (2). In essence, one cannot study the Holocaust without considering the modern technologies that made it possible. Trains for transportation, modern bureaucracy in the form of record [End Page 869] keeping, and the horrific technologies that made mass killing possible all enabled one of the worst tragedies of the twentieth century. Furthermore images and archives, both characteristic of modernity, are essential to the formulation of cultural memory of the Holocaust and to Sebald's work. Long argues that modernity instituted a crisis in memory due to the technological changes that occurred, and Sebald's central questions focus on these issues in order to foreground their effect on the contemporary subject through the way they construct cultural memory. Postmemory, as it derives from both images and archives, plays an essential role in these questions. Even the museum plays a role in constructing a dominant narrative that shapes individual perceptions of the past. For Long "consciousness is always already infected by external mnemotechnical supplements; the artifacts of modernity are permanently lodged in the psyche as a kind of internal prosthesis" (4). Thus, the artifacts that exemplify modern technology link memory and modernity through the technological processes that recontextualize the past. Sebald uses these ideas as broad themes that reappear throughout his novels in the form of reprinted images and archives of all kinds. Long provides various examples from all of the novels in order to show the repetition of the theme and develop the way Sebald questions the processes that reshape memory in the modern world. The technologies of memory amount to a question of power in which the image and the archive institute a normative gaze. Images, for example, provide a view of a single moment in time that is then taken as evidence for how conditions were in that context. Alternatively, scholars have discussed the incomplete and constructed nature of an image. Sebald's use of images in his novels attempts to question the certainty of the viewer and bring to light the partial nature of any photograph. By using real photos that force the reader to question the authenticity of both the narrative and the image, Sebald challenges the authority of photography to construct memory. The same question relates to the archive in the example of the museum. Long examines how "museums in particular construct the illusion of adequate representation" through a "process of decontextualisation and recontextualisation" (28). The museum takes objects out of their natural context and replaces them in a new one where a different relationship between artifacts is established that conveys the sense of full representation. Sebald calls these representations into question by demonstrating...

Telephone-mediated communication effects on young children’s oral and written narratives

This study tested the effectiveness of a telephone-mediated language intervention on enhancing young children’s recontextualization processes in narrative expression. A four-week training program was incorporated into a primary school language-arts curriculum to investigate whether telephone experience designed to heighten listener awareness would augment oral and written narrative skill development. Findings supported predictions that telephone experience would affect both oral and written narrative expression. The telephone intervention enhanced oral psycholinguistic and narrative productivity over the face-to-face comparison treatment. Older students wrote significantly more sophisticated stories than younger students and the telephone enriched the written narratives of older children more than did in-person training. These findings advance theory and highlight educational benefits of a focus on recontextualization processes in distanced communication for understanding and advancing the role of audience awareness in emergent literacy development.

Comment on Trinch’s risky subjects

Trinch’s article provides a thought-provoking consideration of the risks involved for abuse victims in telling their story. In bringing together two seemingly different types of narrative, Trinch compels us to consider what they share. First, there are similarities in the interactional production of the written versions of Rigoberta Menchu’s published testimonio and the stories which survivors of domestic abuse tell to paralegals. In both situations, the stories were/are told to an interested interlocutor who works to produce a written account in the first-person narrative of the storyteller. Second, Trinch’s analysis of the controversy surrounding Menchu’s testimonio and of the process by which the domestic abuse survivors’ written affidavits are produced highlights the risks involved for people reporting abuse. At the immediate level is the risk of antagonising their abusers, and on another level are the risks in the ways in which their story is transformed in the recontextualisation process, and the subsequent risks for the narrators involved in being seen as not ‘telling the truth’, or as embellishing the ‘facts’. It is this second level of risks which Trinch addresses, exposing powerful language ideologies about narrative truth relevant to the reception of these two different types of narrative. Building on her important (2003) book, Trinch’s work here on the interactional and entextualised nature of narrative production advances both the sociolinguistic analysis of narrative and linguistic anthropological work on language ideologies. Here, I take up Trinch’s point about the role of what she has referred to as the ‘ideology of narrator authorship’ (Trinch 2003, pp. 49–50) in the risks faced by victims of abuse in telling their story. As she explains in the article under review, ‘most listeners believe that the teller is the sole author of the narrative drafted’. This belief ignores the contributions to narratives made by interaction with interlocutors, for example by interviewers’ questions or listeners’ reactions, whether verbal or nonverbal. This ideology of narrator authorship is central to the ways in which the

Tsotsitaal, global culture and local style: identity and recontextualisation in twenty‐first century South African townships

Tsotsitaal is a linguistic phenomenon which is inseparable from a style adopted by many youth living in urban townships in South Africa. The style is signalled by the unique and innovative lexicon of Tsotsitaal, and additionally indicated by clothing and other identity markers. Features of the style are ‘urban‐ness’, consumerism (in terms of brand names) and cultural iconography, such as music and sports. While many of these items are influenced by, or even drawn from, global cultures (particularly in the diaspora), they are transformed into uniquely South African cultural currency by a process of recontextualisation in township spaces and between individuals. There has been a dialogue between the Tsotsitaal style and the global since at least the 1940s, which should put to rest fears that increased global influence since the end of apartheid will diminish the integrity of local South African cultures.

A tradução como mediação cultural: Antologia de contos de escritoras brasileiras contemporâneas em alemão.

This article discusses the translation of an anthology of short stories of female contemporary Brazilian writers into German by a team of translators (three German and one Brazilian), under the focus of cultural mediation. Based on the concept of context (David Katan, 1999), as a set of underlying information shared by the author and readers of a given cultural field, translation is seen as a process of recontextualization (Juliane House, 2002). Several examples of this process, in both macro-text and micro-text levels of the anthology in question, are discussed here.

<i>I Foresee My Life: The Ritual Performance of Autobiography in an Amazonian Community</i> (review)

Reviewed by: I Foresee My Life: The Ritual Performance of Autobiography in an Amazonian Community Guillermo Bartelt Susan Oakdale. I Foresee My Life: The Ritual Performance of Autobiography in an Amazonian Community. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 206 pp. Paper, $24.95. The canon of a culture provides the desired concepts and categories into which individuals are socialized and that continue to be reestablished through interactions based on particular discourse structures. One such structure is the autobiographical narrative, a cultural practice that serves as the function of [End Page 363] reconstructing experience and making it acceptable not only to the listener but also to the narrator. Culturally shared meanings are negotiated and personal identities are established primarily for the benefit of the narrator. In other words, an acceptable sense of the self for presentation not only to others but also to oneself depends to a large degree on how well biographical events fit the cultural canon. This process of recontextualization becomes especially challenging for individuals with unusual or disturbing life experiences that demand at least a partial canonization through a relation to the established categories of the culture. Further complications are introduced when this process involves bicultural individuals, such as Natives of the Americas, who must come to terms with the integrative pressures of competing sets of cultural prescriptions. The setting for Oakdale’s study of narrative autobiography is the Xingu Indigenous Park, where Native casualties from the ever-encroaching Brazilian frontier have been encouraged to resettle. The data were elicited from Kayabi speakers, who seem somewhat defensive about appearing to outsiders as having “lost their culture” because they dress in modern clothing and have acquired Portuguese as a second language. However, as they quickly point out to the ethnographer, their tribe of 536 individuals still celebrates traditional festivals, at which some of the narrative performances analyzed in Oakdale’s study occur. The three genres of Oakdale’s recorded texts, which include political oratory, cures, and songs, apparently share the characteristics of travel accounts. For example, political oratory addresses movements in and out of Xingu Park, texts associated with cures describe a shaman’s journey to the land of spirits, and in songs the protagonist finds himself as a warrior in enemy territory. As a device for the presentation of the self, these accounts are interpreted by Oakdale as narrative representations of adult male knowledge. The ideal of male maturity, argues Oakdale, involves the dialogic management of other voices, such as those of ancestors, spirits, and enemies, which emerge through the narrator as a medium. Thus, the self becomes “a figure of the other” and is regarded as the property of relationships rather than a private entity, as in Western cultures. Although Oakdale’s conclusions seem reasonable enough, at least according to her citations of descriptions of other Amazonian groups, it would be difficult for anyone to replicate her study. Probably the greatest deficiency in her presentation is the lack of Native language data. Since many of her interpretations derive from the meanings of Kayabi grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic markers, it is somewhat mystifying why Oakdale relies only on English versions of the texts and chooses not to include the original Kayabi discourses with interlinear translations. Even her Native translators’ explanations [End Page 364] of Kayabi concepts, which she rephrases in English, should have been provided verbatim in Portuguese. Otherwise, it is unclear how another ethno-linguist would be able to add to or amend Oakdale’s findings. Another weakness in the study is Oakdale’s neglect to embed her analysis in the significant literature on life histories. In reviewing her bibliography, one is struck by the omission of such influential works as Charlotte Linde’s Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence (1993). In other words, how does the Kayabi way of structuring autobiographical narratives contribute to our understanding of adult speakers’ universally having life stories that are exchanged with others and that express a culturally acceptable sense of the self? Although the Kayabi stories clearly reconstruct the lives of the narrators as coherent in terms of asserting group membership, Oakdale makes no attempt to connect these narrative preferences to universal processes. For example, it is not clear from...

Learning to be teachers of adult numeracy

This paper investigates how teacher education programmes provide adequate preparation for its prospective teachers. It uses adult numeracy teacher education in the post‐compulsory education sector in England as exemplar. Using findings from two research projects on adult numeracy teacher education courses, the article investigates the applications of Bernstein's theories to teacher education, the approaches in which the diversity of prospective teachers is catered for on the course, the ways in which the recontextualization process may be incorporated into the course, the strategies to enable prospective teachers to learn to be teachers and the perception of prospective teachers regarding the weaknesses of their courses. Finally, this article mentions additional areas for research in order to gain further insight into the complex process of learning to be a teacher.

Theories of Bernstein and Shulman: their relevance to teacher training courses in England using adult numeracy courses as an example

Since 2002, adult numeracy specifications have been introduced for the first time in England. This article investigates the relevance of Bernstein and Shulman's theoretical frameworks to teacher training using the new Level 4 adult numeracy teacher training programmes as an example. The article discusses Bernstein's theories relating to pedagogic methods of acquisition and transmission. It investigates the recontextualization process in which subject content and teaching standards may be translated into teaching approaches, which can be used by trainee teachers. It also investigates Shulman's model of pedagogical reasoning and action in relation to teacher training. The article bases its evidence on a research project, which evaluates teacher training courses in adult numeracy and literacy, and English for speakers of other languages in England. The article suggests that the two educationists' theories have significant relevance to the design and implementation of teacher training courses. It also suggests that they can be used alongside each other with each educationist's theories having their particular strengths. Bernstein's theories emphasize a rigorous approach to course structuring; Shulman's theories offer an insightful approach to how a trainee transforms subject and teaching standards knowledge and skills into possible teaching methods to help her learners understand the subject.