Interpretative presentation versus impersonative presentation

This essay attempts to explain the underlying reasons for a fundamental shift in Benjamin Franklin's pictorial representations of the British colonies in America, by exploring the hypothesis the “Magna Britannia” was both a deliberative work directed to the British Parliament and an apologetic work directed to a conservative segment of the colonial public. Although the rhetorical tradition originates in the study of public speeches about civic matters, this analysis of “Magna Britannia” illustrates how concepts from the rhetorical tradition can illuminate pictorial persuasion, so contributing to a growing body of literature that explores the interdisciplineary value of the rhetorical tradition.     

Teaching 1, 2, salesmanship 1, 2

Mercy Otis Warren's dramatic sketch, “The Defeat,” portrays some of the heroes and villians in the movement for colonial independence. “The Defeat” capitalized on widely held values, beliefs, and attitudes in the Massachusetts colony and established Warren as an effective propagandist early in the 1770's.     

Passing,Protesting, and the Arts of Resistance: Infiltrating the Ritual Space of Blood Donation

This essay critically engages challenges made against the federally mandated deferral policies which prohibit “men who have sex with other men” from donating blood. I argue that “passing” and “protest” are dialogically dependent on one another as two separate but related tactics of resistance. Drawing on interview materials from men who have both “passed” and “protested,” the essay explores the implications of this dialogical tension for understanding stranger-relationality, enacting civic identity, and disciplining queer bodies.     

THE STATE,PARENTING, AND THE POPULIST ENERGIES OF ANXIETY

In this essay James Conroy raises the question of how far the state should engage in the rearing of children, looking in particular at homeschooling as a site for contestation. He considers this question by looking specifically at recent developments in the United Kingdom around the elision of child safeguarding issues with concern about the control of home education. In the first part of the essay, Conroy explores some general questions about the relation between politics and populism, and the consequences for the prerogatives of parents. In the second part of the essay, he interrogates constructivist accounts of the family and offers something of a historical corrective to the widely held view (emanating from Philippe Ariès) that the very conceit of the family is a “modern” invention. This analysis leads Conroy to conclude that, while states do have a proper locus in the upbringing of children, they must make certain presumptions in favor of the parent if governmental responses to home education are to be considered political rather than populist and “controlling.”     

The Pedagogy and Politics of Art in Postmodernity: Cognitive Mapping and The Bothersome Man

This essay inquires into the pedagogical and political dimensions of art in the contemporary moment. Specifically, it seeks to reanimate Fredric Jameson's notion of “cognitive mapping,” which he introduced as a response to the postmodern problem of representing the social totality. To that end, the essay begins by explicating the twin impulses of cognitive mapping. It, then, undertakes a sustained rhetorical analysis of Jens Lien's award-winning 2006 Norwegian film, The Bothersome Man, demonstrating how the film employs entropic satire to, at once, map and critique the cultural logic of late capitalism. The essay concludes by reflecting on the important contributions rhetorical scholars can make to a renewed interest in cognitive mapping.     

The World Tomorrow

Drawing on the author's experience as director of a long-lived school—university partnership, this essay describes how one such organization can “do it right” and enhance the development of teacher leadership in schools. It also provides a cautionary tale about how that same organization can “do it wrong” and achieve the opposite effect. “Doing it right” requires having a set of core beliefs that are enacted through key social practices. “Doing it wrong” violates those core beliefs and practices.     

White gazes,brown breasts: imperial feminism and disciplining desires and bodies in colonial encounters

This article examines the colonial encounters of gender, race and sexuality in the United States and the Philippines in the early 1900s. It traces the anxieties over US men's moral degeneracy and the representation of Filipinas as libidinal temptations, which mobilised US women's active participation in colonial biopolitics and governmentality. It contends that white women as imperial feminists asserted their principled crusade and superiority over white men and brown women by becoming bearers of racialised heteronormative traditions and feminine respectability and becoming barriers to inter‐racial sexual relations. White women focused on the white male domains of military and government and on the colonial education of brown women. Ultimately, the article supplements the Spivakian claim that “white men are saving brown women from brown men”, which has become the quintessential narrative of colonial justification and redemption, with “white women are saving white men and brown women from each other”. Drawing on government, newspaper and school documents, the article engages feminist discussions on the role of women in empire and education.     

Teacher Unions, (Neo)Liberalism and the State: The Perth County Conspiracy of 1885

In 1885, following a period of severe economic depression and social unrest in colonial Canada, state teachers in rural Perth County, Ontario met and formed the nucleus of what could clearly be described as a teachers' union. The idea spread quickly, and within six months the founding convention of a province‐wide union was held in Toronto. Understandably, state officials were not pleased, and worked assiduously over the ensuing months to counter this movement. Building on the already‐pervasive official discourse of individualized “professional responsibility”, these officials began hinting about the possibility of teachers being “blessed” with a state‐sanctioned “College of Preceptors” – a strategy that had previously been employed in England for a similar purpose. This article attempts to describe these events (and their sad outcomes), within the context of a review of the origins of state schooling systems, recent theory related to governmentality and individual (self‐)regulation, and recent schooling “reforms” being undertaken concomitant with the (continuing) globalization of neo‐liberal regimes of governance.     

The rhetorical limits of the “plastic body”

This essay analyzes the “plastic body” as it is produced in the discourse of plastic surgery. The contemporary industry has constructed a popular image of plastic surgery as a readily available and personally empowering means to resolve body image issues, on the presumption that any body can become a “better” body. The ideology underlying the industry emerges out of analysis of the rhetoric of surgeons and patients. The rhetorical efforts of amputee “wannabes,” who seek elective amputation and who use arguments similar to those of mainstream plastic surgery applicants, reveal the paradoxes and contradictions in decision‐making about who has access to these procedures. The essay concludes that the concept of the plastic body is based less on medical technology and skill than on rhetorical power and suggests that this body of discourse has important implications for medical and technological advances that have enlarged the possibilities for body alteration practices.     

Friendship and the Public Stage: Revisiting Hannah Arendt's Resistance to “Political Education”

Hannah Arendt's essays about the 1957 crisis over efforts of a group of youth, the “Little Rock Nine,” to desegregate a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, reveal a tension in her vision of the “public.” In this article Aaron Schutz and Marie Sandy look closely at the experiences of the youth desegregating the school, especially those of Elizabeth Eckford, drawing upon them to trace a continuum of forms of public engagement in Arendt's work. This ranges from arenas of “deliberative friendship,” where unique individuals collaborate on common efforts, to a more conflictual “public stage,” where groups act in solidarity to change aspects of the public world. While Arendt famously asserted in her essay “The Crisis in Education” that political capacities should not be taught in schools, it makes more sense to see this argument as focused on what she sometimes called the conflictual “public stage,” reflecting the experience of the Little Rock Nine. In contrast, Schutz and Sandy argue that Arendt's own work implies that “deliberative friendship,” as described in her essay “Philosophy and Politics” and elsewhere, should be part of everyday practices in classrooms and schools.     

Talk about School: Education and the colonial project in French and British Africa (1860-1960)

As a study in comparative colonialism, this research attempts to identify similarities and differences in the French and British models of colonial education in Sub-Saharan Africa. Differences in colonial policy were conditioned to some extent by settlement patterns, the role of missionaries and variations in local politics and economies, but also by the moral stances underlying colonial practice. By calling attention to some of the 'signposts' of British and French colonial education policy, this research attempts to contrast British and French ideas about morality and the colonial project in Africa.     

Sanitizing “Indians” in America’s Thanksgiving story

Children’s books about the Thanksgiving holiday offer a superlative example of America’s supposedly innocent interactions with “Indians.” In this essay, we describe how representations of “Indians” in children’s Thanksgiving books are often used to promote a Manifest Destiny ideology, we correct basic “facts” about the “first” Thanksgiving, and we urge educators to employ decolonizing and indigenizing pedagogical strategies when teaching about Thanksgiving in order to better explain America’s historical relation to “Indians” in their classrooms.     

The historicity of the physics class: enactments,mimes and imitation

This essay discusses Anna Danielsson’s article “In the physics class: university physics students’ enactments of class and gender in the context of laboratory work”. The situated co-construction of knowledge and identity forms the crucial vantage point and I argue that it is a point of intersection between the history of science and research in science education. The former can provide a valuable understanding of the historicity of learning science. I thus highlight the importance of knowledge as situated in time and space, for instance the importance of the historical division between “head and hand” clearly visible in the discourse of Danielsson’s informants. Moreover, the article discusses how identity is produced in specific knowledge contexts through repeated performances. The article closes by briefly suggesting analytical alternatives, in particular “belonging” and “imitation”. Both draw on post-structuralist ideas about the citational nature of identity. Belonging is created by citing and reinstating norms. Imitating knowledge, identity and norms is an issue that should be brought to the fore when we speak of education and training.     

Evaluations and the Forgetfulness of Pedagogical Relations: Remarks on Educational Authority

In this essay, Christiane Thompson addresses the question of evaluative practices, particularly student evaluation of teaching (SET), and their effects with respect to pedagogical relations in the university setting. In the first part of the essay, Thompson draws on Michel Foucault's analysis of power to show how university teaching has come to be defined according to notions of obligation, accountability, and assurance. The forgetfulness of pedagogical relations that results from the increasing use of SET prompts Thompson to rethink the significance of pedagogical relations in the second part of the essay. Referring to the notion of “educational authority” and Foucault's framework of power, Thompson argues that education is about the continuous re‐institution of pedagogical relation to the other. In the final section, Thompson reflects upon the professor's “authority” in terms of constituting a “community of inquiry”: specifically, the seminar is interpreted as a pedagogical setting that implies a different “being‐with” than SET suggests. She concludes by considering what possibilities and limitations the seminar setting offers and how we can discuss this issue (by means of evaluative practice).     

“Voice” and “voicelessness” in rhetorical studies

This essay begins with the observation that the term “voice” is frequently used in rhetorical studies literature. Interestingly, rhetorical “voice” means different things to different scholars. This essay seeks to accomplish two tasks related to “voice.” First, it clarifies the conceptual confusion regarding “voice” found in the literature by relating it to a tension between “speaking” and “language.” Second, to avoid this tension, this essay presents a case study in which a notion of “voice” is posited that is constitutive of the public acknowledgment of the ethical and emotional dimensions of public discourse.     

后殖民主义视角下的“伪满洲国”日本女性——以牛岛春子为中心

"伪满"的日本左翼转向女作家牛岛春子,在她的短篇小说《女人》中,细腻而深刻的描述了女性的心路历程,在"伪满"这个殖民地男权社会里,作为女性,牛岛春子感到了自卑,她为了谋求与男性相同的地位和权利,极力地强调夸大只有女性才能做到的事情一生子。并且在战争中,"母性政策"和"贤妻良母"政策的大背景下,刻画出了"军国母亲"的形象。"伪满"的日本女性,可以说既是殖民地男权社会中感到自卑的受害者,对于殖民地的人民来说,又是不可否认的加害者。     

Tagore’s “rooted-cosmopolitanism” and international mindedness against institutional sustainability

ABSTRACT

Cosmopolitanism is often seen as a western concept associated with liberal individualistic values. It is also associated mostly with the urban educated middle-class. However, cosmopolitan thinking has been also prevalent in the East. Scholars in the twenty-first century are increasingly arguing that, there are multiple ways of thinking about cosmopolitanism originating from different regions of the world. Among Eastern thinkers, Rabindranath Tagore from colonial British India has been considered by many as one of the most cosmopolitan thinkers. The uniqueness about Tagore’s cosmopolitanism is that, it did not uproot him from his rural Bengali roots and sense of ethnic identity. He was very much a “rooted-cosmopolitan”. In his book, ‘Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers’, Kwame Anthony Appaiah had agued that, a “rooted cosmopolitan” is someone who was rooted in his own cultural context while having an open-mind to feel literally at home in the world. This article draws on archival research at Rabindra Bhawan in Shantiniketan and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Library archives to further this argument and demonstrates how Tagore’s school and university were built drawing on his “rooted cosmopolitan” ideals and international mindedness. In conclusion, this article highlights some of the challenges of sustaining the reformist educational institutions led by Tagore’s unique personality traits, social and pedagogic reform movements in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century colonial British India.     

“Darker than any prison,hotter than any human flame”: Punishment,choice, and culpability in A Clockwork Orange

Contemporary textbooks in criminal justice use A Clockwork Orange to illustrate issues of correctional and sentencing practices. This article challenges criminal justice faculty and students to use the film to explore the political and social realities of punishment, in particular the examination of the moral question of “voluntariness” and the implications for “treatment” as a mechanism of social control. This paper explores the moral questions of state sponsored social control and using the film satire invites the student to examine their beliefs about the political and social realities of punishment and rehabilitation.     

Reshaping the “Pillow Angel”: Plastic Bodies and the Rhetoric of Normal Surgical Solutions

This essay uses the controversial “Ashley Treatment” to argue that normative body rhetorics have become untethered from and more influential than traditional medical perspectives in determinations about surgical intervention. While disagreeing greatly over the ethics of the “Treatment,” both its supporters and critics construct rhetorics of a “healthy” body against which pre- and post-Treatment bodies can be evaluated. These rhetorics demonstrate how “health” and “illness” can be defined more through social ideology than medical certainty, resulting in fluid notions of what it means to have a “normal” body and how surgical techniques should be employed to achieve normality.     

The British and curriculum development in West Africa: A historical discourse

THE BRITISH AND CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT IN WEST AFRICA: A HISTORICAL STUDY – Only recently have African nations begun to make their way towards establishing genuinely autonomous education systems incorporating elements of indigenous culture. The present study examines the historical development of curriculum in British West Africa in its links with the educational activities of the early Christian missionaries and the imposition of British colonial rule. For over 300 years, the curriculum content was essentially European in nature. African interests and cultural practices were largely excluded, as “bookwork” was favored over “handwork”. The colonial curriculum also helped introduce a new social order to West Africa, leading to the rise of new local elites reading, writing, and speaking foreign European languages. This study explores how the idea of a “civilized” person, promoted through the colonial school curriculum, developed new local elites with different sets of values and expectations that often made them strangers in their own societies. It also describes the connection between this curriculum and the repeated failure of education-reform efforts.