Sites Of Attention Research Articles

What 'Race' Has to Do With It: A Student Perspective on Experience inside British Higher Education (Presentation Slides)

All but absent from academic literatures at the time of this inquiry were candid accounts of lived experience inside British Higher Education as articulated through the lens and voices of students of Black African-Caribbean heritage. In official documentary sources, where the presence in British Higher of students of Minority Ethnic heritage was acknowledged, data about the population tended to be aggregated and discussed in terms of undifferentiated data sets (Allen, 1998; Bird, Ching Yee and Myler, 1992; Davis, 1994, Higher Education Statistics Agency, 1997-1999; Metcalfe 1993). These records also signalled the limited possibility of Black African-Caribbean students completing or attaining Higher Education outcomes on par with their majority background peers. But evidentially rare were sustained official attempts to interrogate the nature of these findings or the influences that had given rise to them. The few attempts to do so seldom moved beyond fairly rudimentary statistical associations with school leaving examination scores and literacy assessments (c.f. Modood and Shiner, 1994). The following presentation outlines interim findings from an exploratory inquiry which employed a qualitative data handling strategy. This approach offered opportunities for Black African-Caribbean Higher Education (HE) students to tell their education related stories in their own words and on their own terms. Participants were also offered the option of being as closely involved in the framing and direction of the rest of the inquiry as a formally assessed doctoral programme would permit in the late 1990s. Outlined is what Black African-Caribbean heritage students’ say their perceptions are of significant experiences, from inside the HE academy, which had the greatest potential to undermine their Higher Education aspirations. 36 students were interviewed in 2 cohorts across 6 Higher Education institutions during the mid 1990s and mid 2000s. The students offered narratives of experience from which it was possible to identify recurring themes. They perceived critical moments that adversely defined them as ‘raced’, and/or pathologised them as ‘othered’. They recounted experiences which invalidated their world views and the knowledges that had sustained their sense of self. They were able to articulate experiences which served to promote or hinder the aspirations that had taken then into Higher Education. The exploratory inquiry offered useful insights into: sector related and institutional policy, professional and pedagogical practices as well as research practices that had so comprehensively obscured the issues discussed by the students; the close attention to ontological, epistemological and methodological challenge and alignment required whilst framing the main part of the doctoral study. In summary, the inquiry highlighted sites of attention we may need to prioritise in future if we are to improve Higher Education experiences and eliminate disparities of outcome and benefit for students of Black African-Caribbean heritage.

Coordinating attention in a classroom environment which includes both physical and virtual spaces

ABSTRACTThrough detailed multimodal analyses, this article shows how participants of an English language course create and manage sites of attention for achieving collaboration across multiple spaces. The ethnographic data for the study comes from an English language course ‘Academic reading’ offered for university students majoring in Finnish Sign Language. The paper examines a classroom situation where the participants interact simultaneously with each other in a chatroom environment and physical environment via several mediational means, such as Finnish Sign Language and typed text in a chatroom that appears on students’ tablets and on a large screen in the classroom. The emerging interactional patterns coordinate fragmented interaction into mutual sites of attention so that the participants are able to collaborate. Further, the paper reflects how gaze plays a crucial role in coordinating actions together. Gaze itself is seen as a mediated action which begins to display regularities, and ‘comes into being’ through long and short life trajectories. The longer trajectory of the mode of gaze is traced to the patterned ways of using gaze in signing communities of practice.

Grabbing attention: the importance of modal density in advertising

This article compares marketing communications mediated by conventional media (street posters) with those employing a convergence of old and new technologies (posters, SMS texting, Bluetooth transmitters). The author first analyses in detail the famous Lord Kitchener poster created in 1914 and shows that the semiotic and modal structure of the Kitchener poster became a template on which many subsequent communications have been and still are based. He then goes on to compare the semiotic and modal structure of the famous Kitchener poster with the New Zealand Army interactive recruitment posters created by Saatchi & Saatchi (New Zealand) in 2007. Building on Rodney Jones’s notion of sites of engagement as sites of attention and using Sigrid Norris’s concept of modal density, this article analyses the New Zealand Army interactive posters and shows how communications in the age of information overload are more likely to be successful if they find new ways of getting and keeping attention. Furthermore, it suggests that multimodal discourse analysis can have an important and, as yet unrealized, role to play in refining the study of advertising and marketing communications effectiveness.

The neural site of attention matches the spatial scale of perception

The neural site of attention matches the spatial scale of perception

A Terapia Ocupacional e as novas formas do cuidar em saúde mental

A constituição de redes de atenção psicossocial que trabalhem rumo à implantação de uma ação integrada de base comunitária, sob a diretriz da reabilitação psicossocial vem sendo estimulada. Nesses novos locais de atenção, o profissional de terapia ocupacional deve levar, por meio de sua especificidade, a ampliação do cuidado e a possibilidade de resgate dos direitos de cidadania desses sujeitos. A terapia ocupacional, por ter como ferramenta principal a atividade, que reflete a cotidianidade do sujeito, pode transformar a sua ação junto à sua clientela em promotora de um protagonismo social que historicamente foi arrancado daqueles que foram marcados pela história da psiquiatria. Dessa forma, ela não deve ser apenas um instrumento de intervenção para controle e eliminação do mal-estar psíquico, ela deve contribuir para que a vida coletiva e as existências individuais sejam mais interessantes, abertas e criativa e nós, terapeutas ocupacionais, facilitadores desse processo de transformação, devemos ser incansáveis criadores de possibilidades, inaugurando um cuidado que prioriza a liberdade de criação de todos os sujeitos envolvidos.

Battlefields as cultural resources

The category of 'historic battlefield' is a relatively new one in archaeology. As a place of activity in the past, a battlefield is most often considered to be a 'historic place', rather than an 'archaeological site', although the attention of archaeologists over the past few decades has done much to indicate the archaeological potential and significance of such places. As a site of attention by heritage agencies in the present, battlefields are subject to a range of different treatments not only in different territories, but often also different manners of treatment under the same management regime. Neither of these sets of approaches has resulted in any kind of debate about the nature of the historic battlefield as an object — the discourse remains locked in a set of unexamined assumptions that are worthy of review. Accordingly, this paper reviews, from the perspective of archaeology, the current state of the category of 'historic battlefield' internationally. In particular, it considers the historical development of battlefield studies in archaeology and examines the ontology of the historic battlefield from three key perspectives: the definition of 'battle'; battlefields as places; and the manner in which they are given value as part of management regimes.