Textbooks: changing materiality, changing meaning

In a print-based society the physical characteristics of books not only controlled how knowledge was accessed, stored and disseminated, but also exerted a powerful unconscious influence over our perceptions about the status of knowledge. Textbooks, encyclopaediae, journals, comics and magazines were allocated status according to their material composition - for example, the amount of time it took to produce and disseminate the publication. The knowledge tools of Western pedagogy (textbooks) have traditionally been accorded powerful credibility and respectability because they were presented in tomes that imply content with enduring value. This pre-weighting of knowledge was difficult to discern in a print-based society but now, as meaning is increasingly digitally mediated, and teachers and learners are freed from the exigencies of print/textbook based knowledge, we are reassessing and reallocating our often unconscious perceptions of the status of knowledge. This paper examines the changing materiality of three sample pedagogical texts over a 16 year period in order to reveal, through an analysis of the changing dialectics in their material modes of representation, the epistemology embedded in each text. It then generalises these findings in order to shed light on the question: how does the changing materiality of texts shape our perceptions of knowledge

Sport in the city: measuring economic significance at the local level

In many cities throughout Europe, sport is increasingly being used as a tool for economic revitalisation. While there has been a growth in literature relating to the specific economic impacts of sports-led development, including professional sport facilities, teams, and sport events, limited research has been undertaken on the contribution of the whole sport sector to output and employment. In the United Kingdom (UK), studies have focused on evaluating sport-related economic activity at the national level, yet despite the increasing use of sport for local economic development little research has been undertaken at the city level. To address this situation, this article uses the National Income Accounting framework to measure the economic importance of sport in Sheffield, UK. It shows that the value-added in 1996/97 was 165.61m or 4.11% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), approximately twice the amount predicted from current national estimates. It is argued that this can primarily be explained by previous studies under-estimating the economic importance of sport, largely due to methodological differences. It goes on to suggest that future research on the significance of sport should be undertaken at the local level to provide policymakers with information at the spatial level where regeneration programmes are being implemented.</p

Remembering global disasters and the construction of cosmopolitan memory

Debates on the relationship between media and memory have recently focused on the potential of globally mediated events to expand collective memory beyond national borders, to what Levy and Sznaider (2006, 2010) have described as "cosmopolitan memory". This article critically engages with the concept of cosmopolitan memory and provides an empirical contribution to the relevant debate drawing upon a study of focus group discussions with Greek audiences remembering global disasters. The article argues that the memories of these events place audience members within a global community of viewers simultaneously witnessing the same events. However, they do not necessarily challenge the primacy of the nation as a moral community, therefore lacking the moral dimension implicit in the concept of cosmopolitan memory

How film can carry being: film melodrama and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life as a post-religious film

This paper argues that Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life (2011) can be read as a postreligious film that offers its audience an experience of the "beyond" of the non-cinematic real. In order to make this argument, the paper employs Schleiermacher's concept of religious experience as the beyond of human existence, experienced in moments of openness to the infinite-divine otherwise blocked in the natural state of finite human being. In western culture, cinematic experience is enclosed within the apparatus of melodrama, serving a quasi-religious function by offering audiences an amelioration of human existence in a world from which God has withdrawn. Hollywood melodrama subjectifies the audiences' belief in the moral good within the mythic presentation of a world defined by ideals of historical progress linked to the power of industrialised capitalism and the nation state. The cinematic real is simply this reality presented as an experience of an ameliorated state of being unfolding in the film melodrama itself. Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life breaks with the apparatus of melodrama, and opens into the non-cinematic-real - the nothing of the cinematic world opened up by the film breaching its own framework. My reading will show how The Tree of Life presents human life as an evolved way of being blocked in a masculinised mode in midtwentieth century America. The film releases this blocked way of being through the unwilling of the will of masculinised power, shown in visions of nature as the "beyond" of the cinematic real. These visions of nature, appearing through cracks in the film frame, enable the feminine way of being, otherwise blocked by the masculine will to power, to lead the way into the beyond of the non-cinematic real

Making Sense of Pedagogical Knowledge Media: An Analysis of How Modal Composition Influences Epistemological Beliefs

This doctoral thesis is about knowledge and knowing. It considers how the medium by which knowledge is stored and shared influences perceptions about the value and validity of knowledge. The analysis is based on the idea that the unique material composition of the knowledge media of the time, rather than being merely a conduit for transmitting ideational content, deeply influences beliefs about knowledge. A number of theorists (Eisenstein, 2013; McLuhan, 1962, 1969, 1994; Postman, 2005; Ong, 1977a, 2004, 2012) have analysed how the material composition of mass-print has influenced perceptions of knowledge. Walter Ong (2004) conducted an extensive analysis of early forms of textbooks. In this analysis he found that textbooks have profoundly influenced epistemological beliefs since the Enlightenment, but their influence arose not as a result of good pedagogical design, but as an unintended consequence of the unique affordances and constraints of the highly mechanised production cycles associated with mass-printed texts. As a result of the mechanical processes associated with mass-printing beliefs about knowing and knowledge were based on representations of the world laid out on the printed page (Ong, 2012). Until approximately 35 years ago the Western world used mainly the same primary media for representing, storing and disseminating pedagogical knowledge that had been used for the previous 500 years. In other words the material composition of the media by which knowledge has been transacted has been stable. But it is clear that a period of intense change is occurring as knowledge media are increasingly digitised at all stages of their production, distribution and consumption cycles. As a result of the processes of digitisation knowledge media are more multimodal, increasingly dispersed beyond one certified knowledge medium and increasingly located outside the nexus of the classroom. Media ecologists, particularly McLuhan (1994) and Ong (1977a, 2004, 2012), have speculated about the epistemological changes that the digitised knowledge environment would bring, but they tended to take a hypothetical approach to considering these changes. This research seeks to bring a more fine-grained methodological approach to these speculations by developing a media-based methodology (or lens) that shows how knowledge seekers’ incremental sensory interactions with the modal composition of knowledge media are mediating changes to beliefs about knowledge. This research compares three specific examples of knowledge media diachronically along the material axes of time, space and the extent to which the authentic voice of the ‘others’ who are mutually engaged in the knowledge transaction can be heard. The three media are: a 1960s classroom textbook—Vernon, A. (1965). Human interaction: An introduction to sociology. New York, NY: The Ronald Press Company; a classroom textbook from 2010—Carl, J. (2010). Think sociology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall; and the Wikibook— Introduction to Sociology (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Sociology). The research finds that, as knowledge media are becoming increasingly digitised, a number of subtle epistemological changes are emerging: knowing is increasingly becoming a process of emotional connection with others rather than intellectual engagement with complex analytic categories; personal stories are becoming valued as a way of coming to know; and interpersonal connectedness and trust are increasingly perceived as valued sources of authority. In other words, the digitised knowledge environment is, rather serendipitously, increasingly facilitating more constructivist beliefs about knowledge. Despite this increased capacity for digitised knowledge media to mediate more constructivist personal epistemological beliefs, this research finds, rather alarmingly, that there are parallels between Ong’s (2004) findings and the current epistemological period: new knowledge media are being incorporated into classroom practice with limited attention to the influence that their modal composition is having on beliefs about knowledge and knowing. This inattention has significant implications for learning and teaching at this time of large-scale investment in new knowledge media. The research provides insight into how the characteristics of the ‘packaging’ of knowledge shapes perceptions of it. It provides a lens to help teachers, educational policy makers and planners avoid sleepwalking into the 21st century with 19th century perceptions (McLuhan, Fiore & Agel, 1967), and to advance academic consideration of these matters

Prensa partidaria: el discurso del diario La Época antes de las elecciones de abril de 1916

La siguiente investigación desarrolla un análisis de las estrategias discursivas, precisamente de los editoriales, del vespertino radical La Época. El marco de estudio abarca desde el 15 de diciembre de 1915, día fundacional del diario, hasta el 6 de abril de 1916, luego de la realización de los primeros comicios presidenciales en donde se aplicó la Ley Sáenz Peña y que llevaron al poder a la fórmula de Hipólito Yrigoyen y Pelagio Luna. Nuestra investigación pretende llevar adelante la reconstrucción de sus estrategias discursivas a partir de un género como el editorial, el cual expresa el posicionamiento del diario ante diversos actores, medidas, circunstancias; argumenta, urge acciones y explica hechos; repudia o alienta, sirviendo en última instancia para que el radicalismo canalizara un cúmulo de discursos.Facultad de Periodismo y Comunicación Socia