Search Results (34)

The existence of poor academic performance among English as a second language (ESL) high school learners in the Eastern Cape Province has raised a lot of debate among scholars on the most suitable approach teachers could use to assist learners. Teachers’ narratives on the implementation of differentiated instruction and its effectiveness in the academic development of learners have been emphasized. Despite these prolific debates, learners in the Eastern Cape still struggle academically, given that the province always appears in the bottom three of the National Senior Certificate report regarding learners’ academic performance. Therefore, this study examines high school English as a second language teachers’ narratives on differentiated instruction. A purposive sampling technique was used to select a sample of ninety-nine (99) teachers, which involved fifty (50) teachers for the questionnaires and forty-nine (49) teachers with at least five years of experience from ten (10) schools for the interviews. The findings revealed that some teachers understood the concept of the approach and narrated its effectiveness, while some teachers misconceived DI as individualized instruction and inclusive education. Similarly, others preferred the traditional method and maintained that differentiated instruction implementation is easier said than practiced where there are diverse learners. Based on this study’s findings, it was concluded that teachers should be afforded professional development programs. Full article

Emerging from the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers in the riverine environments of the Brahmaputra and its tributaries, the Miya Poetry movement is a unique environmentalism of the marginalized in contemporary Assam, India. Writing as a native scholar of Assam, I look at how the poetry movement displays the ethos of an ecopolitical spirituality that embodies the riverine ecology, environmental politics, and sacrality and how it challenges the majoritarian state’s narrative of the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers being denigrated as the “environmental waste producers”. My concept of “ecopolitical spirituality” is in tandem with Carol White’s ‘African American religious naturalism’, which elucidates the remembrance and evocation of traditional environmental relationships of and by the marginalized communities with the purpose of healing and rehumanizing themselves. I begin with a short history of the Miya Poetry movement among the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers in Assam. It narrates how the leading Miya poets adopt the local “Miya” dialect to express the traditional and continued relationships of Bengali Muslim char-dwellers who find themselves entangled with and nurtured by the land, rivers, plants, and animals. I then examine how Bengali Muslims have been framed by the majoritarian state and Assamese society as “environmental waste producers”. With climate change-induced destructive floods, along with post-colonial state’s rampant building of embankments leading to violent floods and erosion, Bengali Muslim char-dwellers are forced to migrate to nearby government grazing reserves or national parks. There, the majoritarian state projects them to be damaging the environment and issues violent evictions. In state reports too, the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers have been equated with “rats”, “crows”, and “vultures”. I use the concept of “environmental racism” to show how this state-led denigration justifies the allegation of the Muslim char-dwellers as “environmental waste producers” and how the Miya Poetry movement counters the racist allegation with new metaphors by highlighting the traditional relationships of the marginalized community with the riverine environment. In the final section, I look in detail at the characteristics and reasons that make the poetry movement ecopolitically spiritual in nature. I thus lay out an argument that the ecopolitical spirituality of the Miya Poetry movement resists the statist dehumanization and devaluation of Miya Muslims by not mocking, violating, or degrading the majoritarian Assamese but by rehumanizing themselves and their relationship with the environment. Full article

This study analyzes the award-winning documentary film Searching for Rodakis, directed by Kerem Soyyilmaz, produced in 2023. The aim of this study is the historic comprehension and analysis of this filmic narrative in the field of social–semiotic literacy and its utilization in historical studies for approaching issues of conflict in modern history, otherness, collective experience and trauma, and collective memory. The research material is the documentary Searching for Rodakis (produced by Denmark, Turkey 2023; screenplay/director, Kerem Soyyilmaz; duration, 57’), which received the following awards: Adana Golden Boll FF 2023 Turkey | Best Documentary, Thessaloniki International Doc. Festival 2023 Greece, Greek Film Festival Los Angeles 2023 USA, and Istanbul Documentary Days 2023 Turkey. As regards the historic context, the year of production, 2023, coincides with the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, where Turkey’s current borders were set and the “population exchange” legally sealed, i.e., the violent expulsion of 400,000 Muslims, citizens of Greece, many of whom spoke only Greek, and 200,000 Orthodox citizens of Turkey, who in the majority spoke Turkish. At the same time, the Treaty of Lausanne ratified and finalized the expulsion of approximately one million Orthodox who were forced to leave the Ottoman Empire, as well as 120,000 Muslims who had fled Greece since the beginning of the Balkan Wars (1912–1913). About two million people were deported and lost their citizenship and property, in the context of “national homogeneity” (which connotes an ethnic cleansing), with the official states ignoring the criticisms of lawyers and academics who spoke of violations of constitutional rights. Mohammedan Greeks, estimated at around 190,000 as early as 1914, based on ecclesiastical statistics in the Pontus region, did not receive attention from the provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne, even though linguistically and culturally (origin, customs, culture and traditions) they did not differ in any way from the Orthodox Greeks. In Turkey, there was general indifference to the thousands of desperate people who arrived, with the exception of a few academics and the Lausanne Exchange Foundation. The filmic scenario is as follows: as a Greek tombstone of unknown origin is discovered underneath the floorboards in an old village house in Turkey, an almost forgotten story from the country’s creation unravels—the forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. The engraved Greek letters tell of a woman, Chrysoula Rodaki, who died in 1887. Thus the search for her descendants begins. It leads director Kerem Soyyilmaz to local archives, where his own family’s role in history is laid bare; to abandoned ghost towns, and through the memories of older villagers—all while Soyyilmaz meets massive support for his quest from Greeks on the other side of the border. The stone becomes a portal to the past—and for a while, the trauma becomes redeemed when the previous owners of the village house return. Searching for Rodakis is a movie that reconnects people, culture, and the stories that were discarded in order to build a strong, nationalist state—told through the director’s personal experiences. The research questions, as they arise from the cinematographic material itself, are as follows: How is the historical memory of traumatic events of the previous century, such as the exchange of populations according the Treaty of Lausanne, recorded in the cinematographic narrative? What are the historical sources? To what extent did the origin, ethnicity, and geographical location of the narrators as participants influence the preservation of historical memory and the historical research? What are the criteria of the approach of the creator, and what are the criteria of the participants? Methodologically, we apply historic and socio-semiotic analyses in the field of public and digital history. The results: The types of historical sources found in filmic public discourse include the oral narration of testimonies, of experiences and of memories, as well as the director’s historical research in state archives, the material cultural objects, and the director’s digital research. Thus, historic thematic categories occur, such as the specific persons and actions in Turkey/Greece, actions on-site and in online research, and the types of historical sources, such as oral testimonies, research in archives, and objects of material culture. Sub-themes such as childhood, localities and kinship also emerge. These cinematic recordings of biographical oral narratives as historical and sociological material help us understand the political ideologies of the specific period, between the years 1919 and 1923. The multimodal film material is analyzed to provide testimonies of oral and digital history; it is utilized to approach the historical reality of “otherness”, seeking dialogue in cross-border history in order to identify differences, but above all the historic and cultural similarities against sterile stereotypes. The historic era and the historic geography of the Greek and Turkish national histories concern us for research and teaching purposes a hundred years after the Treaty of Lausanne which set the official borders of the countries. Full article

This case study aims to problematise concepts of equine and human co-relational agency in the context of ‘mis-re-presentations’ in the Australian media of harms experienced by the Anglo Arab stallion, Cambridge, following his development of laminitis and his consequent confinement at a leading national Equestrian centre. Autoethnographic narrative is used to retrospectively and selectively narrate the evolving relationship between Cambridge and his owners, farrier, and treating veterinarians within the dominant housing and veterinary practices and welfare paradigms in equestrian culture of 1990’s Australia. Structured author/owner autoethnographic vignettes are framed by newspaper and internet reportage to highlight a productive tension between the public mediation of the case, and what it means to be fully embodied in relationship with an equine companion agent within a particular, racialised, gendered, and biopoliticised location. Adopting a phenomenologically informed intersectional feminist ethics of care perspective, a counternarrative to the gendered, racialised and essentialising rights-based judgements about Cambridge’s illness and eventual death that dominated the popular media is provided. Crucially, the autoethnographic vignettes are chosen to capture the corporeal reciprocity and rapport of forces that produced a co-created agentivity that characterised the horse’s birth, training, and treatment. The embodied interspecies knowledge that informs the training and care of equines (and all animal species) is always historically situated within permeable, dynamic worlds of self and other that are fluid, contextual, and always in relation. It is suggested that the case of Cambridge illustrates how competing stakeholder investments in animal welfare can play out in the public mediation of particular cases in ways that exclude their historical and interspecies situatedness and serve to reinforce dominant ideologies governing human and animal relationships. Full article

This article proposes rethinking communication, development, and social change from a decolonial perspective through the case study of the Ticoya resguardo. It examines how the oral traditions of Indigenous elders construct a history of the territory, positioning orality as a practice of communicative and cognitive justice that transcends the dominant structures of the nation-state. Border tensions are explored both as a physical reality between Colombia and Peru and as a metaphor for identity conflicts. The theoretical framework incorporates debates on post-development, pluriverse, and southern epistemologies, challenging social inequalities. A qualitative methodology based on the praxeological method was implemented in four stages in collaboration with the resguardo’s communications committee. Producing a radio series narrated by participants was crucial for gathering the elders’ narratives through conversations, social mapping, and storytelling. The findings emphasize the break with linear temporality in narratives, the sense of territory beyond state borders, and the identity tensions of river dwellers. The conclusion underscores the necessity of a decolonial perspective, recognizing the impact of monocultures in obscuring diverse forms of life. The Ticoya resguardo case illustrates how communicative justice can highlight the local and everyday, considering the territory essential in the pluriverse, aligning with Escobar’s and Santos’ proposals on transitions toward a pluriversal world. Full article

Starting on 2 November 2023, some territories in the Region of Tuscany in Italy were hit by exceptionally intense meteorological and calamitous events. The Region of Tuscany’s government was immediately at the forefront of relief, assisting the population, and aiding restoration. On 3 November, a national state of emergency was declared due to flooding. Journalistic communication is an essential aspect of disaster mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. In terms of protecting people and reducing damage, journalists and the media have an important role to play. This article reports an Italian case study analysing the behaviour of local media in cases of natural disaster. Nine focus groups were conducted with local journalists covering the flood emergency. The results highlight the role of social and institutional mediation, rather than mere dissemination, played by the local press in emergency situations, a central element in the construction of a community bond, precisely in moments of insecurity and disorientation. The narration of a disaster from the inside seems to have allowed the emergence and representation of hitherto unknown social realities in Tuscany. The goal of the news coverage was widened, making it possible to respond better to the diverse interests of the reading public and to satisfy in a short time and exhaustively the information needs of individual communities in difficulty. Full article

This paper examines Philip Huynh’s short story collection The Forbidden Purple City in relation to its engagement with the nativity–territory–citizenship triad on which Western socio-political communities found the principles of affiliation of their members. First, the Canadian reaffirmation of a discourse of national benevolence is contextualised to later draw on how the collection is nurtured by boundary-crossing ethics that interrogates any sequential relation between past and present, Vietnam and Canada, which usually structures refugee narratives. It is argued then that disruptive and productive time/space interconnections delegitimate any simplistic representations of easily assimilated grateful refugees, fracturing the convenient narration of Canada as a benefactor concerned with old and new international humanitarian causes. The newness of Huynh’s stories relies on their mobilisation of the discourse of state citizenship through exceptional migrancy and its disruptive border nature. In contrast to premises of birth and geographical territory, which lose ground as backbones of any affiliation, citizenship appears incomplete and processual. The stories use the precarious performativity of collective homogeneity expected of a former settler colony, like Canada, to launch agency and resistance to state homogenisation, and de-institutionalise the refugee subject to critically intervene sovereignty and political subjectivity. Finally, the stories evince that Canada’s social spectrum is ideal to explore the threshold opened by the adjacency of sameness and otherness embodied by Huynh’s protagonists. Their condition as diasporic refugee subjects augments the transformative potential of new refugee narratives, in which literal and metaphorical polymorphous borders unveil the bases of the contemporary Canadian socio-political community. Full article

This article considers the growing rift between Western and Eastern Europe regarding the commemoration of Europe’s recent past and related historical narratives of nationhood that shape contemporary political preferences. More specifically, it investigates the connections between collective memory, national identities, and democratic cultures as they manifest themselves in Germany and Poland. With the help of an interpretative analysis focused on the discourse of political elites in both countries, the article identifies competing ways of interpreting 20th-century history and providing it with meaning for contemporary audiences. The national case studies of Germany and Poland present a contrasting logic in this respect: the promise of freedom and democracy in Poland is primarily narrated as the liberation from foreign rule and the desire for national independence. This narration is significantly built around a notion of popular sovereignty in which dissenting views of the heroic national past tend to be discredited and largely banned from public debate. In contrast, in Germany, the memory of fascism and the Holocaust has established a stronger rights-based approach to democracy in the liberal tradition and an openness to contesting historical narratives in the public domain. Full article

This essay follows a somewhat unconventional approach to writing about Indian dance in the diaspora. I say “unconventional” because it unfolds as a kind of self-reflexive narration of my own journey as a “doubly diasporic” Indian dancer, born in Singapore but having made my career in North America. In essence, I map my own unconventional paths to understanding Indian dance in the diaspora, outside the tired and troublesome idea of “dance as heritage”. The aim of this critical meditation on my own work is to offer up new possibilities for moving Indian dance into progressive conceptual spaces that direct it out of the discursive field of cultural nationalism that frames the idea of “heritage”. Full article

This article discusses the twofold role of music as a means to manifest border-induced (cultural) difference and simultaneously foster alternative modes of belonging. The author draws on her ethnographic research, consisting of participant observation, desktop research, and interviews, and reflects on her auto-ethnographic recordings of engaging with refugee musicians. The discussion unfolds around vignettes that exemplify moments of musical encounters among refugees and between refugees and people from the host society. The vignettes are narrated from the refugee interlocutors’ point of view, who are engaged in the musicking instances as listeners and musicians. The article discusses how they devise music to cope with their estrangement from home and to articulate narratives of belonging. It illuminates how refugees challenge stereotyped representations of themselves, reinforcing the terms under which they can become “visible” and “audible.” Finally, the article argues that refugees’ narratives suggest understandings of reality as a continuum in ways that challenge the linear reifications produced by nation-state bordering practices and displacement-induced ruptures These understandings are embedded in music’s mobilities and their intersections with human movement, informal networks, and the cultural industry. Full article

This perspective is a qualitative meta-analysis study using a critical interpretive synthesis that narrates three future and equally plausible scenarios of social and economic development in the State of Kuwait over the next 15 years. The first scenario follows what we call the ‘Sustainable Growth’ model as defined by the United Nations Development Goals and the Kuwait Vision 2035 presented by the Amir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah. As a polar opposite, the next scenario is what we call the ‘Mismanaged Resourced-Based Autocracy’ model, a negative reflection of the worst-case scenario. The third scenario is in between these two, and we call it the ‘Equality of Outcome Between Societal Groups’ model. So as not to lay blame for past actions or point fingers, which could prove counterproductive to a consensus-building process for needed actions, we chose to use the pasts of other countries for future projections for the State of Kuwait. Our search through recent socio-economic pasts revealed that Singapore was the best fit for the first scenario, Venezuela for the second, and Lebanon for the third. All these countries became fully independent at approximately the same time as the State of Kuwait and share many other similarities. The three future projections were used as input variables to the outcome, which was a bottom-up and top-down consensus-making process regarding utilitarian action for Kuwait to be used by Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), Think-Tanks, Development Agencies, the government and the parliament. Full article

Across the globe, comprehensive COVID-19 vaccination programs have been rolled out. Naturally, it remains paramount for efficiency to ensure uptake. Hypothetical vaccine acceptability in South Africa was high prior to the availability of inoculation in August 2020—three-quarters stated intent to immunize nationally. However, 24 months on, less than one-third have finished their vaccination on a national average, and in the sprawling South Western Townships (Soweto), this figure remains troublingly low with as many as four in every five still hesitant. Medical anthropologists have recently portrayed how COVID-19’s jumbled mediatization produces a ‘field of suspicion’ casting serious doubt on authorities and vaccines through misinformation and counterfactual claims, which fuels ‘othering’ and fosters hesitancy. It follows that intent to immunize cannot be used to predict uptake. Here, we take this conceptual framework one step further and illustrate how South African context-specific factors imbricate to amplify uncertainty and fear due the productive nature of communicability, which transforms othering into racialization and exacerbates existing societal polarizations. We also encounter Africanized forms of conspiracy theories and find their narrational roots in colonization and racism. Finally, we discuss semblances with HIV and how the COVID-19 pandemic’s biomedicalization may inadvertently have led to vaccine resistance due to medical pluralism and cultural/spiritual practices endemic to the townships. Full article

This article studies the architectural design and cultural significance of Villa Namazee, a modernist building designed by Italian architect Gio Ponti in Tehran. The study explores how the building, once a symbol of modernity and progress, has been neglected, delisted from the national heritage, and fallen into disrepair. Focusing primarily on the case of Villa Namazee in Tehran, Iran, as an example of Ponti’s projects in the Middle Eastern context, the second part of this paper aims to reconsider and re-narrate Gio Ponti’s project in Tehran. In this context, the article sheds light on the nationally and internationally prominent concepts, ideas, collaborations, and design elements of Gio Ponti’s project in Tehran. The paper argues for reevaluating our understanding of heritage and recognizing the importance of preserving modern architectural masterpieces such as Villa Namazee. Full article

Luke-Acts is a theocentric narrative. It tells how God in and through Jesus acts out of faithfulness to the covenant on behalf of Israel. This article uses this fundamental claim to offer a post-supersessionist reading of Luke-Acts. It contends that genealogical Israel (the Jewish people) remains God’s people because of election. God turns to Israel offering forgiveness and salvation. The people struggle to respond. All Israel, including Jesus’s disciples, stumbles. Some Jewish people are more faithful, others less. Together they comprise the less-than-faithful people of God to whom God is faithful. Luke’s Jesus and Paul embody this dynamic. Jesus recapitulates Israel’s history, acting faithfully on its behalf for its salvation. He dies in solidarity with the Jewish people, faithful and unfaithful alike. He is raised, proleptically guaranteeing their restoration. Paul embodies how God remains loyal to recalcitrant Israel. Apart from repentance from Paul, an encounter with the risen Lord transforms this “God-fighter” simply because he is a “chosen vessel”. In Paul, Luke narrates God’s radical fidelity to Israel. God will restore Israel, opening blind eyes to see Jesus as messiah. The article distills the author’s forthcoming monograph Reading Luke-Acts after Supersessionism: The Salvation of Israel and the Nations in Accordance with the Scriptures. Full article

Scholars are divided over whether narrative/storytelling occupies a central position in health-related behaviour or in the health-related issues discussed on social media platforms. This study explored Chinese COVID-19 vaccination expressions on Douyin, China’s biggest short-video sharing social media platform, and found that narration is still the most important tool employed by Chinese users when talking about COVID-19 vaccinations on Douyin, emphasizing nationalism and widespread optimism. Most of the narratives employed by Chinese users come from a first-person perspective. Nationalism, as manifested in the support expressed for national policies, rather than the external platform characteristics of memetics, makes the Chinese users’ expressions about COVID-19 vaccinations similar on Douyin. Douyin seems to have become a ‘pilgrimage platform’ for the Chinese public to express their patriotic sentiment and their trust in the country and the government. Full article