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The awareness of “light” as both a concept and a phenomenon existed long before it became a matter of scientific interest. This volume investigates the many ways in which light has been conceptualized throughout history. Employing different methodological approaches derived from various disciplines in the humanities, the essays gathered here situate the concept of light within discourses on gender, religion, intellectual life, politics, art, and digital culture. Through diverse perspectives, light is defined – in some cases synchronically – as a physical phenomenon, a visual tool, and a philosophic idea. This book combines the fields of intellectual studies, religion, literature, and visual culture to explore the complexities of conceptual paradigms that represent various manifestations of the idea of light. Through original readings, the contributing authors present a range of scholarly perspectives, offering new interpretations of the idea of light and its history within the humanities.
Tackles the question of whose interests are being served by the current science education practices and policies, and offers perspectives from culture, economics, epistemology, equity, gender, language, and religion. Promotes a reflective science education that takes place within people's cultural lives rather than taking it over. Among the topics are situating school science in a climate of critical cultural reform, the influence of language on teaching and learning science in a second language, a cultural history of science education in Japan, and the philosophy of science and radical intellectual Islam in Turkey. Of interest to students, researchers, and practitioners of education. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Social Thinking and History demonstrates that our representations of history are constructed through complex psychosocial processes in interaction with multiple others, and that they evolve throughout our lifetime, playing an important role in our relation to our social environment. Building on the literature on social thinking, collective memory, and sociocultural psychology, this book proposes a new perspective on how we understand and use our collective past. It focuses on how we actively think about history to construct representations of the world within which we live and how we learn to challenge or appropriate the stories we have heard about the past. Through the analysis of three studies of how history is understood and represented in different contexts – in political discourses in France, by intellectuals and artists in Belgium, and when discussing a current event in Poland – its aim is to offer a rich picture of our representations of the past and the role they play in everyday life. This book will be of great interest toacademics, researchers, and postgraduate students in the fields of psychology, memory studies, sociology, political science, and history. It will also make an interesting read for psychologists and human and social scientists working on collective memory.
This important book provides a bridge between psychoanalytic perspectives and socio-cultural issues to shine a spotlight on the experiences of women in India today. Women’s well-being and security has often depended upon their gender positioning while other binaries like rural-urban, class, and caste have also played a crucial role globally and especially in India. Historically, women have been subjected to various forms of oppression that include sex selective abortions, domestic violence, bride burning for dowry, and acid attacks. Threats to women’s security have recently increased with progressive polarization and hardening of socio-political and cultural ideologies. This book assesses how women’s lives are impacted by these social and cultural conventions and stigma, including ideas around motherhood, religion, intimacy and femininity itself, and the psychological implications these have. Topics include the seduction of religion, motherhood in contemporary times, intimacy and violence, and fundamentalist states of mind in the clinical space. While the book echoes a regional specificity, it simultaneously resonates a backdrop of global change of affairs that has its impact on ideological freedom and the concept of inclusivity in terms of gender, race, culture, and politics across the world. For this comprehensive perspective, the effort is to create a platform of authors comprising psychoanalysts, social scientists, scholars from the liberal arts discipline, as well as social activists. In a country where women have been historically subjected to both psychological and physical oppression, this timely and original book will interest a range of scholars interested in gender, mental health and contemporary Indian society, as well as clinicians in the field.
International interest focuses on why pupils from East-Asia tend to outperform pupils from the West and scholars have proposed a number of possible explanations to account for these international trends. Using Vygotsky's theory (1978) as a conceptual framework to "construct" school achievement, this book puts forward culturally relevant context for understanding developmental aspects of children’s school achievement and their implication to classroom practice and education progress. Converging the two important lines of inquiry – the child factor and the sociocultural factor – this book showcases evidence-based scholarly works from across the globe that shed light on causes of academic achievement in different contexts. The book brings together eminent scholars from early childhood, primary education, secondary and vocational education who expertly capture the vitality of development and processes of specific child factors and their interaction with their environment that explain their school achievement. Foregrounded in the five planes of cultural historical, institutional, social, personal and mental, the research explain how children think, learn and form the will to perform amidst the changing social and family environment, and challenging school and educational environment.
Scientists deserve public recognition. The ways that they are depicted, however, are severely limited in physical and personal traits, helping to establish and enhance stereotypes under the general title of ‘scientist’. These stereotypes range from the arrogant researcher who wants to rule the world, to the lab coat wearing ‘nerdy’ genius, but all generally fall to an extreme view of an existing perception of what a scientist should look and be like. For example, the popular image of ‘a scientist’ overlooks the presence of women almost entirely unless attributed to specific subjects and/or with narrow character depictions. The implications can be far-reaching. Young people, being heavily swayed by what they see and hear in the media, may avoid scientific careers because of these limited or unflattering portrayals of the scientific community, regardless of whether they reflect real life. Based on findings from the Light’13 project, this book examines such stereotypes and questions whether it is possible to adjust people’s perception of scientists and to increase interest in science and scientific careers through a series of specific actions and events.
This book focuses on the dynamic nature of EAP (English for academic purposes) learners’ beliefs about language learning in their shift from an EFL (English as a foreign language) environment to an EMI (English as the medium of instruction) setting in mainland China. It adopts a mixed method paradigm, whose quantitative part aims to capture the general dynamic feature of the selected student population, while its qualitative part attempts to unveil the process of change in beliefs about language learning among the sample. It is hypothesized that the change in their beliefs about language learning is the result of the interplay between the learners’ agency and the mediation of the contextual realities at the institutional and social levels.
This book is the result of research which was begun over twenty years ago and which spanned two countries, as well as two decades. It developed out of the author’s work in speech therapy, but took on the in-depth theoretical investigation of the work of Bernstein, Vygotsky, Luria, and Hallidayan linguistics in an investigation of ways of thinking and the use of language, and particularly the relationship between group processes and individual learning. The small sample analysed in the book, taken from classroom data gathered in a small town in Tuscany and a small group of adolescents, and put under the microscope of quantitative and qualitative analysis involving multiple tests regarding various linguistic and socio-cultural elements, is testament to the complexity of such a setting and the nature of classroom interaction. The complex interactions between theory and practice, and between individual consciousness and socially organised experience are laid out in detail throughout the book, which offers both wide ranging and in-depth theoretical analysis of the relevant literature and insights into the careful sampling procedures used in the classroom all brought together to provide up-to-date and detailed information for teachers and to highlight aspects of diversity in the appropriation of cultural tools. The book can be read in two different ways, each one of them informative in itself. For those interested in socio-culturally informed theories of language, this book will serve as a guide to the relationships between three possible approaches: namely, the sociological approach of Basil Bernstein, the cultural-historical approach of Lev Vygotsky, and the linguistic approach of Michael Halliday. For those interested in empirical analysis of discourses produced by adolescents from different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds, the book provides rich material about language use by Italian and immigrant youth.
Digital cities constitutes a multidisciplinary field of research and development, where researchers, designers and developers of communityware interact and collaborate with social scientists studying the use and effects of these kinds of infrastructures and systems in their local application context. The field is rather young. After the diffusion of ICT in the world of organizations and companies, ICT entered everyday life. And this also influenced ICT research and development. The 1998 Workshop on Communityware and Social Interaction in Kyoto was an early meeting in which this emerging field was discussed. After that, two subsequent Digital Cities workshops were organized in Kyoto, and a third one in Amsterdam. This book is the result of the 3rd Workshop on Digital Cities, which took place September 18–19, 2003 in Amsterdam, in conjunction with the 1st Communities and Technologies Conference. Most of the papers were presented at this workshop, and were revised thoroughly afterwards. Also the case studies of digital cities in Asia, the US, and Europe, included in Part I, were direct offsprings of the Digital Cities Workshops. Together the papers in this volume give an interesting state-of-the-art overview of the field. In total 54 authors from the Americas, from Asia, and from Europe were contributed to this volume. The authors come from Brazil (two), the USA (eleven), China (three), Japan (fourteen), Finland (two), Germany (two), Italy (three), Portugal (two), the Netherlands (eight), and the UK (seven), indicating the international nature of the research field.