Original Story Research Articles

“I’m Used to Bad Things Happening to Me”: The Victimisation of Low-Income Earning Foreign Nationals Living in South Africa

South Africa hosts millions of foreign nationals who are often blamed for the country’s high crime rate, despite their victimisation being under-reported. Foreign nationals often settle for low-income jobs regardless of their qualifications or work experience. Consequently, these minority groups are vulnerable to victimisation due to their environment and circumstances. Thus, this study reflects on the victimisation of low-income earning foreign nationals living in Gauteng, South Africa. Through qualitative interviews, fifteen foreign nationals shared their experiences concerning their victimisation. Data were analysed thematically and interpreted through a radical victimological lens. The findings suggest that the participants’ origin stories set the context for their willingness to endure victimisation in South Africa. Moreover, some participants experienced xenophobia and crime victimisation such as robbery, sexual assault, and witnessing a xenophobic-motivated murder.

Automated lexical analysis of story recall in healthy controls

AbstractBackgroundImpaired episodic memory is one of the earliest and most prominent symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Examining how patients produce words and phrases in story recall tasks is useful for tracking and understanding progression of their disease. Traditional approaches rely on manual assessments of recalled stories which can be limited, time‐consuming, and not applicable in large‐scale studies. Here, we implement an automated, computational approach to measure verbal episodic memory in a digitally recorded story recall task performed by young healthy speakers using natural language processing models.MethodWe analyzed digitized speech samples of pre‐recorded immediate and delayed Craft Story recall tasks performed by healthy speakers (n = 67, mean age = 20.31 years, SD = 2.17, 45 (67%) females). All transcripts were transcribed by trained annotators and automatically scored for number of verbatim and paraphrase recall, total recall score ( = verbatim+paraphrase), and semantic distance from the original story (degree of semantic similarity between the original craft story and the recalled story based on the Word2vec module in python). We also calculated total word count and number of unique words, and rated all recalled words for word familiarity, concreteness, and semantic ambiguity based on published norms. Number of pauses and total durations of speech and silent pauses were also measured.ResultWe found larger semantic distance between successive words in the delayed recall task compared with immediate recall within speaker (p<.001). Delayed recall also elicited lower total recall scores than immediate recall (p = .03). Comparing the effect sizes of semantic distance vs. total recall scores, our model comparison showed a smaller prediction error for semantic distance (AIC = 95.45) than total recall score (AIC = 736.18). In addition, speakers in the delayed recall task performed more paraphrase recall, had higher total word count, number of unique words, more ambiguous words, and produced more speech (all p‐values<.001).ConclusionOur findings suggest that automated speech analysis can provide informative and cost‐effective measures from a recorded story recall task. The study provides an automated and quantitative way to better measure memory abilities by including semantic distance. Future work will test procedures in patients with AD or other neurodegenerative diseases.

'And then there was silence': shaping practice through the experience of parents' emotions.

Spina bifida, the most common Neural Tube Defect occurring around 28 days following conception, is often discovered in a routine ultrasound examination. Nurses offer continuous support for families who care for children with disabilities, associated with this diagnosis. To articulate and analyse parents' recollection of the emotions they experienced when they were informed by professionals that their unborn baby may have neurological disabilities. Qualitative study, using participatory visual narrative method, engaging parents caring for young children with Spina bifida. The emotions parents described, surfacing at the point of diagnosis, and the crafted stories they shared, demonstrated the significance and the long-lasting impact of their experience. Disclosing sensitive information and the way it is shared has a significant role in shaping how families adjust to caring for disabled children. Role and care transitions of parents who choose to keep their babies, despite their impending disability, is a lengthy and complex process. Nurses should be aware of and informed by the origin story, to offer appropriate support throughout this period. Policies to promote integration with services delivered by 'not for profit' organisations will benefit family-focused and person-centred care.

Weathering Saharan dust beyond the Spanish Mediterranean Basin: An interdisciplinary dialogue

This interdisciplinary dialogue draws on climatology and cultural studies to explore the phenomenon of “Saharan dust” that passes through and beyond the Spanish Mediterranean Basin. The dialogic process seeks to unearth the power relations within which weather stories and the authors are always already entangled, with a view to re-imagining weather writing and climatic storytelling in decolonial terms. Our parallel inquiries trace how origin stories, material mobilities, atmospheres, and environmental regulation work to codify the aeolian dust as an intrusion across borders. Drawing on critical theory, we argue that this weather “from” the Sahara Desert is othered in Eurocentric weather narratives, mapping onto geopolitical logic of “Fortress Europe”. Our research is instructed by postcolonial thought, political ecology, and the speculative feminist position of weathering. Through critical engagement with science in context, we dwell lastly on African air quality and experiences of weathering atmospheric dust further upwind. Our concluding comments speculatively drift with Mediterranean winds to animate a positionality of middleness.

Becoming User: Oracle, Barbara Gordon, and Representations of the User in Popular Culture

Abstract This essay considers the figure of the “user” as an emergent subject of late twentieth-century US culture, in relation to the World Wide Web and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. The user is a subject position that is historical in the sense that use relations have always determined social formations within capitalism, but it has been newly energized in contemporary modes of capitalism after digital computing, and newly weighted in contemporary renderings of the nation-state as service provider. This essay turns to a cultural moment in which a privatized user subject was coming into formation, using comic books of this moment to find the user figure and its stories. The DC Comics archive might not seem the most likely place to find answers to these concerns. But superhero origin stories are always about becoming user in late capitalist imaginaries. Superheroes learn to use their histories to reproduce the world they want. The then newly inaugurated DC Comics character Oracle, aka Barbara Gordon (formerly Batgirl), is becoming a wheelchair user and a computer user. Reading Oracle's 1990s user origin stories, this essay attends to scenes of wheelchair and computer use to work out a theory of user history and user time emerging in 1990s US culture. The comics reveal that the process of becoming user is always intersecting with the processes of becoming a racialized, gendered, classed, (dis)abled subject. They also open up the possibility for other affordances: becoming user as a process which can be torqued in its unfolding.

Embodying Ethnic and Settler Identities: An Analysis of the English-Language Korean Play Sim Cheong (1938) in Hawai'i

Abstract: In 1938, Koreans in Hawai'i premiered an English-language play, Sim Cheong ( Sim Chung ), at the Honolulu Academy of Arts to celebrate the Korean Spring Festival. Sim Cheong is an adaptation by a second-generation Korean of a cherished Korean folktale, The Story of Sim Cheong , emphasizing filial piety. This study uses Sim Cheong to examine the cultural milieu of 1930s Hawai'i and the complex identities interwoven within the Korean diaspora, revealing efforts by Koreans to preserve their ethnic pride while creating a sense of closeness with the white upper class. The adaptation signalled a dramaturgical shift from the original story, often framed in the context of Confucianism and Buddhism, to a theatrical production incorporating musical performances and revised storylines. This shift is encapsulated in the contrast between the play's downplaying of the boat scene, commonly regarded as pivotal in illustrating the protagonist's commitment to filial piety, and accentuation of the scene depicting the initial encounter between Sim Cheong and the King, presenting independent and diverse elements of Korean culture and conveying undertones of Christian belief. Through this analysis of local political, social, and cultural realms, this study identifies dual identities existing in the Korean diaspora surpassing the confines of a generic pan-ethnic Asian American identity, unraveling the intricate interplay between the preservation of ethnic pride and the imperative of assimilation within the broader sociocultural landscape.

Княгиня Ольга и Константинополь: бродячие сюжеты и изменчивые надписи

Introduction. The author proposes a new reconstruction of two episodes concerning Princess Olga in the chronicles and Prolog, which allows to clarify the overall picture of the development of the pre-Mongol legend about the baptism of Olga and her trip to Constantinople. Analysis. In the early chronicles, two layers of narrative about Olga’s trip to Constantinople are clearly distinguishable. The original story contained only the relationship between Olga and Emperor Ioannes Tzimiskes: the author had a good knowledge of the realities of Byzantine politics in the 960s, probably from the Byzantine chronicles. However, the story itself is too fictionalized, and its author, who inscribes Olga’s trip in 946 and her baptism in a completely different chronological frame – the turn of the 960–970s, had to work in the 1060s – early 1070s imitating stories about a wise pagan princess from an older chronicle. Probably, in the “Initial Compilation” this ‘secular’ story was ‘Christianized, but not quite harmoniously. In this form, the story of Olga’s trip and baptism was included in the “Tale of Bygone Years”, but in its recension the “unhistorical” Ioannes Tzimiskes was replaced – probably on the basis of Byzantine chronicles – by the ‘historical’ Constantine VII. However, the chronicles of the late 11th – early 12th century do not know Olga’s cross, which, according to the Prolog, stood in the 1160s in the altar of St. Sofia of Kiev. It was either a “fixation” of the historical memory of the first baptist of Rus’, or a contribution of a 12th century princess with the same name (e.g., of the daughter of Yuri Dolgorukiy and a Byzantine princess). The author of the Prolog combined excerpts from the “Tale of Bygone Years” with the story of Olga’s cross, also “historicizing” the patriarch, who became now Photios, and creating the basis for the entire further hagiographic tradition of the princess.

Passion and Passio: The Chahua nü and Late Qing Courtesan Narratives

Lin Shu and Wang Shouchang's Bali chahua nü yishi (1899), a translation of La dame aux camélias (1848) by Alexandre Dumas fils, has usually been read with an eye to the idealized figure of the noble courtesan in the Chinese literary tradition. The resemblance of the lady of the camellias to that figure has served to explain both her popular appeal to late Qing readers and her transformation into a Chinese literary and cultural icon. Her iconic status, however, has overshadowed the complex ways in which Lin and Wang's translation retells Dumas fils's story in relation to the array of late Qing courtesan narratives that would have been known to contemporary readers. By closely reading the original story in light of these narratives, this article shows how Dumas fils's tale shares many elements with late Qing courtesan fiction, including negative images of courtesanship, which the translation omits or rewrites. I examine how the translation transforms the morally ambiguous heroine into a devoted lover and re-situates her suffering (passio) and recognition — central motifs in the original story's Christian mythos — within a nostalgic reflection on courtesan-literati culture, where the courtesan serves as the alter ego of the unrecognized literatus.

The Keller Plantation and the Racial Plot of Disability History in the U.S.

Between the popularization of Helen Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), and the cinematic dramatization of The Miracle Worker (1962), scenes of Keller’s early life and education have served as touchstones through which nondisabled Americans have imagined disability’s history and narrowed its political possibilities: toward the conditional dispersal of access based on individual acts of overcoming. Yet, if Keller’s story has played an outsize role in consolidating disability’s history and politics, it is also a site of profound racial occlusion. The context of Keller’s early life on the Keller plantation in Tuscumbia, Alabama is largely absent from her popular legacy. With the disappearance of this context, the black people who facilitated Keller’s disabled coming of age have also fallen away, as well as the history of slavery and Indigenous removal that made her life story possible. This void—at the locus of perhaps the most hegemonic origin story of American disability history—is cause for critical race inquiry. This essay traces the relationship between the material background of Keller’s autobiography and its imaginative foreground; from her family’s role in settler conquest and slavery in the Alabama Muscle Shoals, to Keller’s status as a transcendent icon of disability. Reading between the plantation and the plot of Keller’s Story while locating both beside the Tennessee River’s shoals, this essay turns to theories of cartography and narrative authored by Sylvia Wynter and Tiffany Lethabo King for insight into a critical paradox: the antiblack and anti-Indigenous structure of ableism, and the whiteness of disabled representation. By resituating Keller’s iconicity in relation to conquest, slavery, and their afterlives, this essay locates the problems and possibilities of narrating black and Indigenous disability history from the Keller plantation’s surround. Yet, while invested in unsettling the landscape, I neither recover these stories nor entomb them as untellable. Instead, I write toward further investment in black and Indigenous counter-archives that have complicated who has been—and who remains—the imaginable and politically traction-able subject of disability.

Madness/Disability as “Spectral Presence” in The Woman Warrior: Confusing Hegemonic Categories Through a Mad Asian American Modality

Following queer crip theorists like Sami Schalk, Aurora Levins Morales, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this piece roots genealogies and origin stories of Disability Studies and Mad Studies in women of color feminist scholarship-activism. I offer an analysis of Maxine Hong Kingston’s enactment of a Mad Asian American modality in The Woman Warrior to locate examples of how women of color feminisms shift conceptual, methodological, pedagogical, and activist frameworks on Madness/disability. By thinking together Nirmala Erevelles’ historical materialist perspective on haunting with Yen Li Loh’s conceptualization of The Woman Warrior’s Mad women as “inhuman ghosts” (2018, 231), I assert that Kingston’s Mad Asian American modality blurs distinctions between human/nonhuman, past/present/future, and discourse/matter. Through the stories of Maxine and her family, Kingston engages in what I read as a form of Mad/crip of color critique, calling attention to the failure of whitestream Mad/Disability Studies to examine the entanglement of race, gender, and Madness/disability under the white supremacist settler colonial state. Kingston’s method of blurring reveals that the radical potential of Madness/disability lies in the ways that marginalized bodymind difference generatively confuses binary categories of eurowestern worldview and creates alternative modalities for living, being, and relating outside of white supremacist colonial cisheteropatriarchy.

The Nexus of Storytelling and Collective Learning: A Synergistic Spark for Human Emergence

This paper explores the implications of storytelling as an essential complimentary concept to collective learning for labeling human emergence within the Big History thresholds framework. It proposes that the distinctively human cognitive capability for communicating explanatory descriptive narration (i.e., storytelling) was a foundational adaptive behavior and central driving force that launched humans into a unique evolutionary pathway as collective learners whose increasing knowledge has transformed the world. Storytelling provides a theorem for why human language skills and brain capacity increased so dramatically since our common ancestor with chimpanzees, and how our storytelling brain models our world through narratives that undergird human belief systems and facilitate complex social coordination. The paper outlines the symbiotic role that storytelling played in turning the cultural “ratchet” of collective learning throughout prehistoric times and its corresponding influence on prehistorical milestones. It goes on to explore the benefits of teaching storytelling as a complement to Big History threshold (6) collective learning and concludes with a look at the vulnerability of the human storytelling brain regarding its ability to unite or divide people through the power of narratives, whether they are factual or fictional. The paper invites the Big History community to consider embracing the emerging transdiscipline of storytelling within the Big History tent as synergistic complement to collective learning, that pulls together many Big History threads and which can help improve the effectiveness of telling Big History as a common human origin story for navigating the precarious prospects of the Anthropocene.

The Drover’s Wife, the Legend of Molly Johnson: Leah Purcell’s Reclaiming of a Colonial Fetish

Henry Lawson’s short story, “The Drover’s Wife,” has animated Australian nationalism since its publication in 1892. The story is much-loved, and has been perceived as representing a voice from the margins, the enduring archetype of the Australian frontier bush woman, a figure who is simultaneously vulnerable and stoic. This archetype organises other tropes in Lawson’s story, symptomatic of the national imaginary of the internal frontier–the unrelenting harshness of the Australian land, the resilience of the white frontier individual, and the civilising effects of those individuals’ labor on the landscape, as well as on First Nations people, who are coded as part of “nature,” requiring “civilisation.” It is against this context of white colonial fetishism of both the story and of Lawson himself that Leah Purcell’s version/s–a play (2016), and now a film (2022)–are set. Leah Purcell is a proud Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka Murri woman from Queensland, and one of Australia’s leading writers, directors and actors. In this article, I examine Purcell’s radical reimagining of this foundational Australian text. In the original story, Lawson imagines the key antagonists of the frontier as belonging to the “natural world,” including a bull, a poisonous snake, the isolation and harshness of the environment, and the presence of an “uncivilised” Indigenous man who appears as a stranger in the unnamed drover’s wife’s home. In Purcell’s reworking, she upturns this narrative and its fetishistic tropes, giving a name to the drover’s wife–Molly Johnson–and also truthfully naming the true antagonists the drover’s wife must face on the Australian frontier: the imminent threat of violence and sexual violence against all women, and the violence of the frontier wars against First Nations communities, which was followed by government policies of assimilation and intervention (Watson, 2009). Purcell’s work reveals truths about the violence of the frontier, about forms of state and outlaw violence that not only led to the massacre of First Nations people, but also created a false epistemology: that the land which Indigenous people have inhabited with peace and ease for thousands of years is “harsh,” that First Nations labor is “idleness,” and that the colonist’s work at the frontier is noble, rather than an act of ugly, violent theft. Purcell thereby critiques the role of particular Australian literary works in the creation of national mythology and in the papering-over of violent historical truths. Purcell’s work both reveals and subverts the colonial epistemology of violence, gender, sexuality, and state law’s complicity in these processes, from its foundational refusal to acknowledge First Nations law, to the imposition of a thieving land law and then to the “lawful” removal of First Nations children. This paper will explore the radical implications of this work to both legal and cultural imaginaries.

Heritage trails and the framing of place authenticity in Belfast’s Titanic memoryscape

ABSTRACT Titanic heritage tourism has recently become a major objective in Belfast, Northern Ireland, as civic leaders look to leverage the infamous liner’s local origins to advance the city’s post-industrial, post-conflict economic development. Much of this activity has centred on the Titanic Quarter, a new residential, commercial, and cultural district emerging in the historic docklands of East Belfast. This district is home to Titanic Belfast, an ostentatious, new-build visitor attraction created to tell a celebratory, Belfast-focused Titanic origin story. Titanic Belfast is surrounded by numerous heritage elements once associated with the Harland and Wolff shipyards where Titanic was built, which have been incorporated into two heritage trails traversing the Titanic Quarter. This article draws on literature related to authenticity, heritage trails, and memoryscapes to interrogate how these trails underscore the place authenticity of the heritage assets dispersed throughout the Titanic Quarter. It also examines how these trails position Titanic Belfast as the focal point of a vast and coherent maritime heritage memoryscape, revealing a symbiotic relationship whereby Titanic Belfast draws people and capital to the area while the authentic heritage elements nearby furnish the ‘credibility armour’ needed to justify this grandiose new signature attraction and the celebratory narrative it offers visitors.

Take Shanghai Disney as an Example to Explore the IP Development and Marketing Ideas

In today's market, IP in the Chinese context deviates from "Intellectual Property" in its original sense, and the IP we call now adds to the new cultural connotation in the context of pan-entertainment. The so-called IP is not a traditional intellectual property right, but a concept extended from the Internet ecosystem in the Internet era. For example, literary or cultural works like games, animation, and games with high attention and traffic can be called IP. In addition, IP is not a commodity that be directly purchased by consumers, but IP content is first acquired by major companies, followed by the secondary creation and industrial chain development of IP individuals, and finally, consumers can purchase and experience the material or non-material carrier formed by IP. In recent years, thanks to the in-depth integration of media development, different media platforms have been fully utilized and effectively integrated, so that better communication channels and a broader audience market are being steadily formed. The IP industry in China is developing rapidly in literature, television, games, film, and other fields. This paper with IP industry giant - Disney group, for example, shows that by observing the development path of Disney IP, and conducting in-depth analysis and research, one can understand the current domestic IP need to enrich their original story, attach great importance to the production of high quality content, not lose Chinese unique style, also want to diversify their development vitality. At present, domestic IP should pay attention to increasing the vitality of content innovation and production, and pay attention to media integration and promotion. While creating high-quality original content, we should pay attention to the audience experience, accurately locate the audience, help people establish an emotional connection, and thus form a long-term transmission and receiving relationship. At the same time, actively improve the IP operation industry chain (online and offline), expand the realization channels, and promote the domestic IP to glow with new vitality.

Origin stories: Framing 25 years of Dutch political discourse on child sexual exploitation by tourists and travelers

Sexual exploitation of children in the context of travel and tourism (SECTT) has been described as a serious and growing problem. This study critically analyzes political debates and policy measures proposed by the Dutch government between 1995 and 2020 to combat SECTT. To understand how SECTT is framed in Dutch political discourse, Bacchi's ‘what's the problem represented to be?’ approach guided a systematic critical discourse analysis of over 200 political documents. Our analysis shows that SECTT has, over time, predominantly become framed as a crime problem. Offender detection, international cooperation, awareness raising, public–private partnerships, and prevention targeted at known sex offenders are the most commonly proposed solutions. Despite the focus on apprehending offenders, the political discourse offers no concrete clues as to who they are; still, conducting research or evaluating policies' effects is seldom proposed as a response. This problem representation overlooks the connections of SECTT with structural issues, such as victim vulnerabilities, colonization, and global inequality on the one hand, and mental health, sexual expression, and cultural values on the other.

Performing Geology: Risk and Conquest in the Origin Stories of a Field Science

Stories about the foundation of US geology as a discipline are prominent in the culture of field geology today. This article traces the threads of such “origin stories” through field geology practices and undergraduate training. The repetition of these origin stories obfuscates the colonial and race-fueled motives that underpin the actions of the US geologist characters featured in these stories. Increasingly, the field is recognized as a site of sexual and racial harassment and abuse. By making visible the racialized subplots in the history of US geology, which include entrenchment in racial science and land dispossession, I posit that the curated origin stories repeated today perpetuate processes of gendered and race-based exclusion and subjugation in field geology.

33 The Impact of Context on Memory for Short Stories Among Older and Younger Adults

Objective:On traditional pattern separation tasks, older adults perform worse than younger adults when identifying similar objects but perform equally well when recognizing repeated objects. When objects are superimposed on semantically related scenes, older adults are influenced by the context to a greater degree than younger adults, leading to errors when identifying similar objects. However, in everyday life, people rarely need to differentiate between two perceptually similar objects. Therefore, we developed a task using short stories to represent similar events people may experience in daily life. Our goal was to investigate the influence of context, detail-type, and age on memory performance.Participants and Methods:Twenty-one older and 18 younger adults listened to 20 short stories taking place in either a coffee shop or library, each paired with a unique picture (i.e., context). Participants were asked to imagine the story taking place within the picture. Approximately 20 minutes later, participants answered a yes/no question about a detail from a story superimposed on different contexts. The different context conditions were (1) the same picture from the original story, (2) a similar picture (i.e., a different library or coffee shop picture), (3) a dissimilar picture (i.e., a library picture instead of a coffee shop picture), or (4) a control using a Fourier-transform (FT) image without any spatial-context information. Questions either asked about an identical or similar detail from the story.Results:Correct answers were analyzed using a 4x2x2 repeated measures ANOVA including context (same, similar, dissimilar, and FT), detail type (identical and similar), and age (younger and older adults). Overall, younger adults were more accurate than older adults, F(1,37)=23.4, p<0.001. However, surprisingly, the context and detail-type made no difference in accuracy, (F’s<1.1) A similar model was used to analyze reaction times. Younger adults were faster than older adults, F(1,37)=23.4, p<0.001. Participants of both ages were faster at correctly responding to the identical detail than the similar detail, F(1,114)=62.87, p<0.001. Context also impacted reaction time, F(3,114)=7.97, p<0.001. All participants were faster while viewing same and similar contexts compared to both the dissimilar and FT contexts (t(39)’s>2.20, p’s<0.05).Conclusions:We did not find the kinds of age-related effects normally observed on traditional pattern separation tasks. Although younger adults performed better overall, older adults were not any worse when responding to a similar detail compared to an identical detail, which is inconsistent with performance on pattern separation tasks where older adults perform worse when identifying similar objects compared to younger adults. Additionally, older and younger adults were influenced by context in the same way. Previous studies from our laboratory demonstrated that older adults are biased toward the context when recognizing similar objects, but the context in this paradigm did not differentially influence accuracy for either older or younger adults. Potentially, this task relies on more semantic similarity rather than the perceptual similarity of objects. Semantic similarity from the short stories may incorporate more information to better orthogonalize similar memories, rendering retrieval less susceptible to interference.

Group relations organisations and conferences as a fractal of society: how group relations work in different countries has been shaped by national variables of history, economics, politics, culture, and geography

This article follows the Eric Miller memorial lecture given on 1 April 2023. Based on interviews with many group relations practitioners worldwide, the article explores how group relations organisations and conferences are shaped by national variables of history, economics, politics, culture, and geography. Links between current practices in organisations and the connection of those practices to background forces are suggested. The significance of the patrons of group relations work, geography, religion and spirituality, trauma, and origin stories for the development of organisations and conferences are examined. Some current worldwide system dynamics are explored. The author's identity as an American, White man, and its relevance to the research is considered.

DUET THIS: STORYTELLING THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA VIDEO FOR TEACHING ENGLISH

This case study aimed to investigate the use of the social media video application, TikTok, to support ten EFL teachers in Indonesia to develop videos for storytelling with their students. During the emergency remote teaching, these teachers found difficulty in designing learning materials easy to share on various online platforms. In this study, a two-week training program consisting of face-to-face and online sessions was conducted to facilitate the teachers to explore TikTok affordances and tell stories in the form of TikTok’s Duet. The data were collected from TikTok videos produced during the program and the teachers’ pre- and post-training reflective notes. The findings show the teachers’ shifted view of TikTok as non-educational entertainment to an educational platform that could facilitate interactive and interesting storytelling with students. The teachers were aware that while the short duration of the TikTok video was beneficial for easy sharing and engagement with students, it affected the length of the unfolding stages of the story. In creating a TikTok video for storytelling, the teachers found modifying original stories into a one-minute interactive video challenging. More support is thus required to provide teachers with pedagogical, technological, and language content knowledge that allows them to develop teaching resources relevant to their student’s language learning needs and social and economic backgrounds.

Rise of Conceptual Association and Linguistic Register as Advertiser Persuasive Instruments

Consumer advertising is remarkable in its propensity to socially recalibrate and adopt new technology, thus providing a spectacular range of information-dissemination methodology in multimodal formats. Unsurprisingly then, the sensory-input phenomena of advertising language attract interdisciplinary interest. Despite researcher diversity, conceptual association presents as a premier audience-sensitive instrument deployed in relay of advertiser-intended meanings: in this dynamic, socio-culturally appropriate messaging is attempted via linguistic register (word choices) tied in semantic interdependency with non-linguistic elements. Compositional meaning-maker favourites include abbreviations, symbols, presupposition and implicature as facilitators of ‘hidden’ meanings. Here, an under-researched area emerges on the historical plane—namely the origin story of conceptual association as an operative in consumer-oriented rhetoric and its pragmatic transit from early-seller composition toward the kaleidoscope of today’s advertising broadband. In this vein, the evolutionary path of promotional discourse is traced via an Australian 1800s–1950s press dataset. The data evidences abbreviations and symbols in consumer advertising by the late 1840s and pegs the rise of presupposition and implicature to the 1850s. This finding, as historical backdrop, complements inquiries that illuminate how compositional choices work to generate non-evidence-based benefits that induce positive appraisal and, further, raises the formative journey of English as today’s global lingua franca of consumer advertising.