Space For Dialogue Research Articles

Adolescents, new social relations and media practices: a research in the Metropolitan City of Bologna (Italy)

Abstract Currently almost 99% of Italian teenagers own a smartphone and with it they can enter the world of the infosphere: this fact has profoundly changed the online habits of teenagers. The pedagogical literature grafted onto Media Education has highlighted the cognitive and relational opportunities favoured by smartphones and their use by adolescents. Which are today’s adolescent’s online media-practices? In which terms these practices have an impact on adolescents’ socialisation? This contribution intends to explore these questions and focus attention on the ways in which these devices are managed by teenagers on a personal level, offering a descriptive picture of the media practices activated in the context of the reticular society for the school and family context and consequent reflections on identity and on the sociability of adolescents. The research involved nine upper secondary schools with different curricula in the Metropolitan City of Bologna (1657 students, age 14–19) in school year 2020/2021. The data collected through questionnaires and focus groups highlight how technologies and social media play a role of fundamental importance not only as daily mediators in the relationships of young adolescents but also as a space for negotiation of their identity. And this role was crucial for their well-being during periods of lockdown due to Covid-19.

Assessing Road to Mental Readiness (R2MR) training among correctional workers in Canada

BackgroundMental health frameworks, best practices, and the well-being of public safety personnel in Canada are topics of increasing interest to both researchers and organizations. To protect and improve worker mental health, different training programs have been implemented to serve this population. The Road to Mental Readiness (R2MR) training regimen is one such program specialized to build cultural awareness of mental health, reduce stigma, and mitigate the cumulative impacts of exposures to potentially psychologically traumatic events among public safety personnel. However, limited research has been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of R2MR, especially among correctional workers.MethodsThe current study analyzed 307 open-ended survey responses to four (4) questions about R2MR garnered from 124 Canadian provincial and territorial correctional workers between 2018–2020 to reveal their understandings and perceptions of R2MR training, and to identify what learned skills they found challenging or easy to implement.ResultsThe results suggest that R2MR training plays a significant role in decreasing stigma and increasing mental health awareness. Across jurisdictions, R2MR creates a supportive space for open dialogue around mental health meant to shift cultural and individual barriers that often hinder treatment-seeking. Some respondents also indicated that R2MR was a starting point for intervention.ConclusionsFurther research is necessary to understand how R2MR and other programs could support the mental health and well-being of correctional workers.

Citation behavior, audience awareness, and identity construction in Arabic and EFL research

Citations are an integral component of writer-reader dialogic interaction in academic discourse. One under-researched question concerns the role of audience as a contextual factor that impacts writers’ citation choices and the nature of the identity and disciplinary knowledge that they construct. The present study adopts a discourse analytic, case-study research design. First, it aims to investigate the citation behavior in five Arabic education research articles. Second, it examines whether the writers of these papers would modify their intertextual style to enact different identity and disciplinary community when writing in English as a foreign language (EFL). Findings revealed a unique character for the Arabic-based citation behavior that contrasted, sometimes, markedly with conventional academic norms, indicating the pivotal role that culture plays in shaping rhetorical preferences. Arabic-based tendencies involved predominance of integral citations, use of combined citations and non-citations, and reliance on what is herein termed intertextual saturation and diffused intertextuality as rhetorical strategies to contract dialogic space and persuade audience. The findings also showed marginal modification of intertextual style in the EFL texts. This suggests lack of significant orientation toward target audiences’ characteristics that would have resulted from enculturation into disciplinary community. The findings imply the need to introduce novice writers to the concept of audience if they are to produce academic discourse that is interpersonally optimal from the perspective of the international discourse community.

Aussie blokes and high maintenance girls: how the old became new again on dating apps in COVID-19 in Australia

Dating apps saw increased usage during the COVID-19 lockdown in Australia – both of new users, and of activity. Using Bumble and Tinder, two of the largest dating apps in the Australian market, we examine the ways in which gender scripts were reinforced and/or subverted on dating apps during the COVID-19 lockdown. Dating apps offer a potential space for negotiation of gender scripts and challenges to heteronormativity, particularly during a period like COVID-19, where media discourse reported a shift in normative constraints because of liberation from physical social spaces. So how did it play out in practice? How did the inability to meet in person affect the ways in which users conformed to or subverted normative binaristic gender scripts? We explore this question drawing on interviews and focus groups conducted with dating app users during the COVID-19 lockdown. We discuss how and whether participants mobilised heteronormative gender specific cultural codifiers to present themselves on app, and whether this was encouraged by Bumble and Tinder architecture. We also discuss how and if ‘traditional’ gender scripts were adhered to in the navigation of new matches and relationships, and the particularities of this in Australian culture. This includes the (re)emergence of stereotypical presentation ideals such as the ‘high-maintenance girl’ and the locally specific ‘Aussie bloke’, and an apparent increased desire for the ontological security provided by monogamous romantic relationships.

An empirical study on court-related mediator’s discourse strategies from the perspective of proximization: Based on a workplace injury pretrial mediation case

Court-related mediation is proceeded by verbal negotiation to shorten the distance of both parties involved for the final fulfillment of dispute resolution and social harmony. Based on the transcribed mediation data on a workplace injury pretrial case, and from the perspective of Proximization Theory and Spatial-Temporal-Axiological (STA for short) model, this study investigates quantitatively and qualitatively how the mediator arbitrates in terms of spatial, temporal, and axiological proximization. During court-related mediation, the mediator intends to stimulate both sides’ desires to mediate the negotiable space, proximize the mediating discourse and finally achieve persuasive functions of the mediator’s discourse; the mediator’s manipulation of the spatial, temporal, and axiological proximization strategies is of decreasing frequency. Among them, the spatial proximization strategies as dominant roles while the temporal and the axiological proximization ones as auxiliary roles, jointly promote the construction of “mediating space” and establish the legitimized forces in mediation discourse. This study aims at exploring how to achieve the dispute resolution by court-related mediation, total conciliation of conflicts as well as full construction of social harmony.

Fostering agency through dialogue in classroom writing assessment

Student agency is considered an important outcome of formative assessment, yet we know little about how interactional dynamics between teacher and student are implicated in the development of agency. Using Bakhtinian notions of dialogic space and persuasive voice, we analyze how four high school teachers assess and support students' writing processes in conference-like assessment events, tracing whether and to what extent student concerns were addressed. We found that teachers created dialogic space for agency and supported students' knowledge construction by positioning themselves as interested readers, eliciting students' ideas and confusion, and offering customized support for students’ use of sociocultural tools.

Family's roles as a welfare pillar: The case of older persons living in extreme poverty in Bangladesh

SummaryMotivationMany mainstream welfare theories developed by social scientists and applied by economists and policy‐makers underestimate families' roles in providing welfare to citizens. This is surprising given that the family constitutes one of the main welfare pillars across typologies of the welfare state.PurposeThis article seeks to explore the role of the family as a welfare pillar with an ageing perspective. We aimed to test whether the family serves as a space for negotiations to improve wellbeing and achieve security in the absence of effective formal mechanismsMethods and approachApplying the framework of “informal security regimes,” this article draws on 37 life‐history interviews collected from older persons living in extreme poverty in Bangladesh. Recurring themes are identified and analysed to explore the relationship between family and wellbeing/security.FindingsWe find that family relationships are often central in the pursuit of security. This shows how welfare delivery in low and middle‐income countries (LMICs), in this case Bangladesh, is deeply rooted in reciprocal family systems where all members actively fulfil moral and material expectations. Pursuing this collective goal can take different forms relative to each member's physical and mental capacity, position, gender, and age. Building on the empirical evidence, we propose the concept of “relational security” as a crucial marker and shaper of wellbeing.Policy implicationsTo be effective, welfare policies need to better consider how the conception and experiences of wellbeing and security, especially for the older persons living in extreme poverty, are deeply embedded within the complex functioning of the relationships that can shape welfare outcomes in different directions.

How to Read the Quran in Religious Islamic Education: What Educators Can Learn from the Work of Mohammed Arkoun

The study of the Quran is central to Religious Islamic Education (RIE). Exposed to different political and social pressures, teachers in RIE still struggle between traditional approaches concerning the divine nature of the Qur’an and more secular approaches emphasizing the historicity and critical analysis of the religious text. Mohammed Arkoun (d. 2010), an Algerian-born Sorbonne professor, offered a hermeneutical methodology for reading the Quran that was Western, scientific, and critical, and at the same time related to the Living Islamic Tradition, faith, and thought. The article analyzes Arkoun’s methodology for reading the Quran and its possible implications on RIE in a way that creates a space for creativity, criticism, and dialogue between worldviews and opens new possibilities for the faithful to teach and learn the Qur’an.

The Silent Mental Health and Well‐Being Crisis of Early Career Researchers in Aquatic Sciences

The Silent Mental Health and Well‐Being Crisis of Early Career Researchers in Aquatic Sciences

Socio-ecological conflicts and (cosmo)political reconfigurations in the Peruvian Amazonia: the case of the Wampis Nation

ABSTRACT This paper, which draws on research carried out in collaboration with the first indigenous government to be officially constituted in the Peruvian Amazonia, the Gobierno Territorial Autónomo de la Nación Wampís (GTANW), describes the governance structure and territorial policies of this new political actor. Research activities conducted between June and August 2017 included fourteen interviews with Wampis political leaders and GTANW activists, three discussion groups organized and co-animated by the participants and the participant observation of a variety of activities related to the democratic life and territorial governance of the Wampis Nation. In the context of an explosion of social conflictuality caused by the expansion of extractive industries in Wampis territory, the GTANW puts into practice a vision of indigenous political and territorial self-determination that revendicates Wampis cosmopraxis, ancestral knowledge and traditional institutions of political leadership. Through a participatory democracy based on consensus building, Wampis political leaders and GTANW activists seek to establish an economic development model compatible with their worldview. Results suggest that, in the Peruvian Amazonian context, socio-ecological conflicts are rooted in different ontological understandings of the territory that is being disputed and of the stakeholder entities involved in the conflict, and therefore do not occur in a unified system of signs and cosmovisions shared by all the conflict stakeholders. The newly formed indigenous government’s intent is to create spaces for political dialogue in epistemic equality by translating their cosmovisions into terms that are negotiable to the State and other institutions.

Rediscovering home: an autoethnography of leaving church

ABSTRACT In this article, I have used the methodology of autoethnography to reflect on my experience as a Christian navigating life post-church and the dis-ease of living with the new status of a ‘done’. Within the reflection, I explore some prominent aspects of the experience such as belonging, the feeling of being orphaned, and shame, as well as the related notions of ‘home’ and ‘unity in diversity’ commonly encountered in organised religious communities. The reflection joins other emerging research efforts to understand and lend a voice to those who have chosen to or have experienced being disembedded from their faith communities and to encourage the cultivation of a hospitable space for dialogue with those beyond the sacred/secular divides.

Cinematic collage as an ethical response to the abject: Sang-mi Choo’s The Children Gone to Poland

ABSTRACT In The Children Gone to Poland (2018), Sang-mi Choo employs different narrative styles not to faithfully present public history on North Korean orphans who were moved to Poland during the Korean War but to rewrite different groups of subjects who underwent painful experiences during the Cold War, such as North Korean war orphans, the Polish teachers who cared for them, and a North Korean refugee who risked her life during the 1990s. To create their dialogic engagement, Choo uses her personal experience and weaves them into her cinematic narrative. Her filmic endeavour, however, is often conflicting as her audiences encounter a non-linear story world in terms of editing. In addition, she experiments with her filmmaking by having a porous nexus among images capturing disparate spaces and times. Audiences become defamiliarized from the film narrative as historical truth and are instead aware of it as a careful construction creating a dialogic space. To explicate Choo’s cinematic project, this article employs the philosophical concept of gesture elaborated by Giorgio Agamben. Choo’s construction of an unconventional film narrative is an ethical response to the miserable subjects who still have painful memories and urgently seek to be heard.

INTERAÇÕES VIRTUAIS DE FAMÍLIAS DE CRIANÇA COM CÂNCER: ESPAÇO POTENCIAL DE ATUAÇÃO DE ENFERMEIRA(O)S

ABSTRACT Objective: to analyze nurses’ resignification of the needs of family members of children with cancer in institutional Facebook® communities. Method: participatory research developed with the Speak Map and Body-Knowledge dynamics of the Sensitive Creative Method in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, conducted between 2019 and 2020. Nine specialist nurses in pediatrics and oncology participated in groups of three to four people. Thematic analysis was applied in the treatment of the data. Results: dynamic virtual communities favor family members of children with cancer in the search for support, solidarity, and information. In that space, they share experiences of illness, success, losses, and mourning. Challenges mark the community; the nurse can act as mediating information since prepared to interact with ethical responsibility and scientific knowledge. Conclusion: In the resignification, these communities are recognized as spaces for dialogue, expanding the locus of action and empowerment of nurse educators and advocates of the best interests of these children.

Navigating co-design of actor-networks

In this paper, we illustrate the importance of involving different types of users in collaborative design and innovation processes to allow end-users to speak on their own behalf. However, involving multiple actors with diverse concerns requires designers to carefully stage spaces for negotiation. Through a case study of the design of a pilot program to make insulin more accessible to marginalised diabetes patients in India, we explore how designers navigate the design process by staging and facilitating several spaces for negotiation populated by patients with diabetes, doctors, company representatives, design games and management templates.

Places, non-places, spaces

This study aims to provide an insight into the typology of spatialization in public spaces. Non-places characterized by anonymity, and places, imbued with significance, coexist without static or fixed meanings, serving as spaces of negotiation. The study will explore their possible relations with external spaces, including crisis and deviant heterotopias, former workers' spaces as (non-)places of resistance, the evolution and adaptation of consumerist spaces, and public spaces as political arenas, where alternative spaces challenge the tendencies of globalization in an age of liberal atomism. Furthermore, the study will question the conceptualization and identity of geographical spaces such as Eastern Europe and the Balkans, examining cultural hegemony and Orientalism as imposed conceptual schemes that demand scrutiny. The representation of non-place in films and the tendency to negate place through travel will be explored, along with the consumerist logic of ephemeral shopping centers as alternative (non-)places of culture. These spaces act as sites of consumer tactics and strategies of resistance, countering the normativity of urban everyday life through micro-procedures of resistance, ultimately creating a public-political space of resistance. 8 The text is based on the essay Nemjesta (Non-Places) read on the Third Program of Croatian Radio in 2007.

Fragmentos da negociação epistolar entre potiguaras no contexto da guerra luso-holandesa (1645): “xe nheenga” / “xe papera”

Drawing on the definition of the communicative function of the letters written in Tupi by the Potiguara Indians in 1645 as an offer of surrender, the purpose of Pthis work is to analyze such documentation regarding it as a space for negotiation among Potiguaras, textually built on the superposition of traditional Tupinambá modes of expression (directly quoted speech, interpellation with kinship terms) and Portuguese letters (opening, closure). The stylistic resources employed in nheenga/papera either distinguish or approximate these correspondences from other letters with the same communicative function exchanged between Europeans in the scenario of the Portuguese-Dutch war unleashed in the Brazilian northeast. The research corpus comprises six potiguara letters belonging to the National Archives of The Hague and written between August and October, 1645.

ДУЭЛЬ НАД ПРОПАСТЬЮ ВО РЖИ: МЕТАМОДЕРНИСТСКИЕ СТРАТЕГИИ СЕРИАЛА «ЧЕРНАЯ ВЕСНА»

the present moment in art is marked by the transition to a new key concept of development, defined by researchers as "metamodernism". This concept suggests a dichotomy of many features of modernity and postmodernity. Art, developing in the key of metamodernism, enters the space of semiotic dialogue with what was before it, and produces a reconstruction procedure. At the same time, within the framework of the collision of the incomparable at first glance, a special tension and “depth similarity” arise. This happens, for example, in the modern series «Black Spring», where the author of the article traces connections of many difficult-to-connect themes, such as: duel ethics and modernity, neo-romanticism and brutality, irony, heroes copied from literary characters or from the heroes of other movies. The article attempts to semantic analysis of images of the series for a better understanding of nature of metamodernism.

АНТИНОМИИ РУССКОЙ ТРАДИЦИОННОЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ В ПОЭТИЧЕСКОЙ КНИГЕ Д. МИЗГУЛИНА «ПО КРОМКЕ БЫТИЯ»

The object of the article is antinomy in Russian artistic culture, which manifested itself in the main oppositions: “up” and “down”, “male” and “female”, “living” and “dead”. The subject of the research is the variations of the fundamental principles with ambivalent semantics in modern poetry. The material for the article is a new poetic book by the modern writer D. Mizgulin "Along the Edge of Being". At the center of cultural-philosophical and onto-hermeneutical analysis is the interaction of the phenomenal and the noumenal, the rational and the metaphysical in poetry. Much attention is paid to the problem of the metaphysics of creativity, its apophatic side in the Russian cosmo-psycho-logos, which is of great importance for understanding the ontological issues of writers' creativity. The research methodology is reduced to a holistic hermeneutic analysis aimed at highlighting the cultural potential of this poetic book, studying the axiological and ontological value of antinomies in modern verbal culture. Much attention is paid to the comparison of poems within the book, the analysis of its structure, as well as the national topic, without talking about which it is impossible to perceive Russian literature in a holistic way. The results of the work may be of interest to literary historians, who include literature in the space of a large dialogue of cultures, and can also be used in teaching courses in cultural studies and Russian philosophy.

ГОЛОС О. МАНДЕЛЬШТАМА В ТВОРЧЕСТВЕ В. ДУДАРЕВА: НАЦИОНАЛЬНЫЙ ОБРАЗ СМЕРТИ

The object of the article is the national image of death in Russian verbal artistic culture. The subject of the research is the thanatological text in Russian poetry. The material for the article is two poems - “Why is the soul so melodious” by O.E. Mandelstam and “There are quiet valleys in Russia…” by V.F. Dudarev. At the center of hermeneutic and culturalphilosophical analysis is the interaction of two types of reality, phenomenal and noumenal, rational and spontaneous in art. Much attention is paid to the image of death in these two poems and the images of wind, groves, and flowers associated with it. The research methodology is reduced to a holistic ontohermeneutic analysis of poetic texts by O.E. Mandelstam and V.F. Dudarev, aimed at highlighting the cultural potential of the problem of perception of the phenomenon of death in the Russian national image of the world, which allows penetrating the poetic word from ontological and apophatic positions, as well as revealing the significance of the literary traditions of the Silver Age in the work of a modern poet; typological and historical-literary methods of text research are applied. The results of the work may be of interest to philologists who include literature in the space of a large dialogue of cultures, and can also be used in teaching courses in cultural studies and Russian philosophy.

"Keep Up the Fight": Indigenous Editorial Practices, Collaboration, and Networks of Exchange in the Early Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT: This essay explores how Indigenous editors such as Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai), Rev. Philip Gordon (Anishinaabe), and Gus, Theo, and Rev. Clement H. Beaulieu (Anishinaabe) created communities of practice that sought to use the press as a tool to advance what they believed to be the best interests of Indigenous peoples and define the role of the Indigenous editor in the early twentieth century. I first situate these editors and publishers within widening Indigenous periodical networks of the early twentieth century before moving on to discuss their editorial practices and collaborations. Ultimately, I argue that editors such as Montezuma, Gordon, and the Beaulieus sought to leverage Indigenous periodical networks to intervene in massmedia representations of Indigenous people and create spaces for intertribal dialogue that were not mediated by the BIA or white "friends of the Indian."