Language and Learning Links (Asynchronous Session)
Invisible Men: Representations of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Hong Kong Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jiayuan Wen, Tianlun Zhou
As a city of immigrants, Hong Kong is never a stranger to refugees; instead, it has seen refugee crises three times. To date, like in other countries, refugees also survive in Hong Kong - they are isolated, excluded from the local community, and news reports. The coverage on refugees is scarce, scatted, even with certain frames in Hong Kong media. Through the use of computer-assisted content analysis, this study explores the reporting situation of refugees in local media, and also identifies the dominant frames employed in the coverage of refugee-related issues between January 2016 and January 2020 in eight local Hong Kong newspapers (N = 126). The not large sampling of news revealed that, firstly, refugee and asylum-related topics are indeed not favored by the media, and thus received rather less exposure compared to other social issues. Secondly, two dominant frames exist in the local news - either portraying refugees or asylum seekers as criminals by escaping to Hong Kong to dodge debt/criminal liability or lazy people who ventured here appealed by the social welfare or stating international NGOs’ rescue operations on Hong Kong refugees. It is difficult to see information about refugees’ personal experience, background, reasons to be here, and the Hong Kong government’s policies on this issue. Overall, these results aligning with existing documents, further confirm the predominance of stereotyped interpretations of refugee-relevant issues, and thus strengthening journalistic routines, weakening the objectivity, and impairing professional journalism.
Explanatory Factors for Viral Communication of COVID-19 on Twitter: An csQCA approach View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elena Cerdá Mansilla, Sara Campo, Natalia Rubio
Declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, the Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2) outbreak represents the first time that an international health crisis of this level has been experienced in the digital age. Proper management of the crisis thus presents a great challenge from the point of view of communication. This study aims to determine causal configurations of different types of content that have led to a high rate of diffusion in a backchannel account during the first phase of COVID-19 spread. Firstly, we perform exploratory analysis through Google Trends and Twitter to identify possible explanatory variables of content dissemination. The variables identified were organized into two blocks (content richness and psychological content). After establishing the potential explanatory variables, two analyses were performed using different samples with Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to find causal configurations that obtained a high rate of retweets of this backchannel Twitter account. The results reveal the importance of a combination of three factors in mal-information diffusion: emotional content, identifying content, and video. Other combinations of four factors also contributed to the success of the tweet. The two samples obtained similar results proving the effectiveness of QCA. These configurations could be useful for public management in the face of a health crisis such as COVID-19.
Featured Understanding Island Spaces through Cultural Studies: Practices and Representations View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shrija Srinivasan, Sushila Shekhawat
The interdisciplinarity of cultural studies enables one to: explore – the realms of culture that is non-canonical; investigate – systems of cultural representations contesting power structures; and most significantly, analyse – cultural representations as historical narratives of a society situated within space-place-landscape. Literature documents and represents lived, perceived, and conceived experiences and cultures. However, they may not always be documented in the written form and are either passed down as oral narratives, are embedded within contemporary cultures and practices or leave symbols and evidences in geographical spaces such as architectures and monuments. This paper explores, investigates, and analyses island spaces. Subjected to isolation and mystification in colonial and adventure narratives, island spaces need to be studied for their art, culture, literature, and histories. They assume roles of tourist destinations, prisons, asylums, and sites for anthropological research. This paper aims to understand how islands are represented in literature, films, and media such as P.D. James’ police procedural The Lighthouse (2005), the 1996 film Kaala Pani, or in Hiroyuki Okiura’s anime film A Letter to Momo (2012). Adopting a new historicist and cultural materialist theoretical framework along with spatial theories and island studies, the methodology includes textual analysis supported by relevant sources which include historical documents, newspaper articles, books, and journals. This paper thus observes how cultural studies provides a platform for diverse fields like geography, history, cinema, and literature to come together and understand the functioning of social spaces and spatial practices.
Motivation as a Tool for Improving English Language Learning in Primary Education View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ana María Carmona Pozo, Ana M. Perez Cabello
The main aim of this work is to offer a proposal to care about the different motivational aspects of students. This approach has been created for different English lessons in Primary Education to reduce difficulties caused by the lack of motivation. This work proposes students´ needs to be taken into account and considers the different educational factors that can affect their learning. Some of them are related to the methodology carried out, type of resources, classroom environment, the use of English, and students’ expectations. Because of all these factors alternative activities have been planned in order to enhance positive effects on students. As a result, the development and proficiency of English language can be improved.
At the Intersection of Perception and Appreciation: Change, Resilience, and Adaptation View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Holly Skillman, James Larner
Abstraction is valued and appreciated in the visual arts, yet abstraction in other forms of art, such as music, is rarely tolerated. What is at the root of the perception of art? For this study, a psychologist and musician collaborated to explore aspects and intersections of perception and appreciation. Participants were asked to provide separate ratings of beauty and creativity of a variety of artworks, based on the Pleasure-Interest Model of Aesthetic-Liking (PIA Model). Focus group participants were asked to discuss beauty, creativity, perception, and appreciation and explore opportunities for deeper-level processing and interpretation of the works within the study. Using both the PIA Model and a dual-process approach to understanding aesthetics, we can begin to discuss the root of aesthetic-liking among variety and complexity of abstract works and the influences on perception and appreciation. Data was collected from over 500 online survey participants, as well as a series of small focus groups, to explore this intersection and how we, the perceivers, appreciate, process, and aesthetically like abstraction.
“A Knowledge Desert”: Alienating Arabic Classes and Linguistic Capital in Islamic Institutions View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shyla Dogan
Linguistic capital is context-specific as the power of a language in one context changes when in another. This paper focuses on Arabic as a form of linguistic capital in Islamic institutions and how it can lead to alienation for those with little knowledge of the language. Qualitative data was collected over a period of two years with attendees of three Islamic institutions in a southwestern portion of the U.S. Findings reveal that participants who do not have a grasp of Arabic can face "linguistic othering." The subsequent sense of isolation can then lead to decreased institutional attendance and may have a significant negative impact on the identity of institutional attendees. One participant referred to his local mosque as a "knowledge desert." The conclusion of this paper offers recommendations on how Arabic can be incorporated into Islamic spaces without it being a source of alienation and prevent the creation or continuance of "knowledge deserts."
An Investigation of Suppression in Mid-19th Century Japan: Case Study of the 1855 Catfish Prints as a Product of Censorship View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Vasanth Narayanan
The mid-nineteenth century saw Japanese elite and townsfolk alike undergo the now infamous Ansei Edo earthquakes. The quakes decimated Japan in the final decades of the Tokugawa Era and, perhaps more consequentially, birthed a new genre of politically inspired artwork, the most notable of which are the namazu-e. This essay advocates an understanding of the 1855 Catfish Prints (namazu-e) that prioritizes the function of iconography and anthropomorphic deity in shaping the namazu-e into a wholly political experience that makes the censorship of the time part of its argument. The visual program is defined as the creation of a politically profitable experience, crafted through the union of explicit religion, highly masked commentary, and the impositions of censorship. The strategies by which the works are designed, in the face of censorship, to engage a less educated, pedestrian audience with its theme, including considerations of iconography, depictions of the working class, anthropomorphism, and the relationship between textual and visual elements, are discussed herein. The essay then takes up the question of the role of tense Japan–United States relations in fostering censorship and as a driver of the production of namazu-e. It is ultimately understood that the marriage of hefty censorship protocol, the explicitly religious medium, and inimical sentiment towards United States efforts at diplomacy renders the production of namazu-e an offspring of the censorship and deeply held frustrations of the time, cementing its status as a primitive form of peaceful protest against a seemingly apathetic government.
Intangible Culture - a Way to Create Societal Change
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Iosefina Blazsani Batto
The paper challenges reconsideration of the concept of resilience from the diverse cultural perspective and to re-conceptualize it as an important framework applicable in a certain time frame. The focus is on how the community adapted to a different societal environment and how culture became the diversity that created a meaningful life. The experience in political detention is recreated through literary testimonies to illustrate traumatic historical experiences of political conflicts. The paper illustrates how prison memoirs reveal intersecting histories that show possible functions of literary art such as the need of confession, self-knowledge, therapeutic function (healing through writing of prison trauma), but also pedagogical function, with educational and constructive value, when the author intends to transmit to future generations testimonies of the era. Literature is, therefore, cathartic. Thus, literary art is a form of alternative historiography and the recent history should be rediscovered and understood nowadays by the young generation as it is a part of their background.
The Normativity of the Letter in University Pedagogical Practice: The Case of Ortega y Gasset in Argentine Exile (1939-1942) View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session María Eugenia Pizzul
Thinking about the pedagogical practice of the Madrid philosopher in Argentine Exile requires careful archival work if we consider the legal exclusion of the Spanish and Argentine universities. Both, historiography and cultural studies of the last three decades, properly literary, hold an update with the use of the letter. Due to this, the biographical approach of the work complicates the normativity of the academic conference in an attached space of deferred conversation: the correspondence. Thus, the observatory of this extension practice shows from the unpublished Ocampo / Ortega y Gasset epistolary the power of a non-institutionalized knowledge, writing as epoje (ἐποχή) of the Ibero-American dialogue begun in 1916 and the memory of space in Argentine university extension.
