Voicing Terri Schiavo: Prosopopeic Citizenship in the Democratic Aporia between Sovereignty and Biopower

This essay examines the case of Terri Schiavo to develop a theory of prosopopeic democratic citizenship. Prosopopeia—the tropological attribution of voice—rhetorically sutures an aporia between sovereign and biopolitical modes of democratic governance. Citizens are split by the democratic rationality of self-governance: they act as sovereign subjects to govern themselves as biopolitical objects. However, that self-governing logic begins to falter when applied to live bodies that are not speaking subjects. By projecting a live body's self-determining capacity to speak in its own voice, prosopopeia rhetorically reconstitutes that citizen's capacity for self-representation, mediating the gap in the democratic order.     

Influences on intercultural relations: Counseling implications for American adolescents in Germany

A comparison of the relative importance of variables shown to influence the outcome of interracial contact was made in an intercultural contact situation. Implications of the findings for counseling applications were discussed. The variables studied were: amount of contact, length of time living in the country, norms, personal association, initial attitudes toward the country (expectations and first impressions), and attitudes toward people in general. The subjects were 199 American adolescents living in Germany and enrolled in on-base American schools for military dependents. The data were collected by questionnaires administered by faculty members at the schools during regular class time. Attitudes toward Germans, attitudes toward Germany and social distance toward German adolescents were utilized as the dependant variables. The analyses controlled for past intercultural experience and the age, sex, and ethnic group of the subjects. Three variables affected subjects' attitudes toward Germany: norms, first impressions, and sex of subject. The same three variables plus attitudes toward people affected attitudes toward Germans. Three different variables affected the social distance scale: age, sex, and expectations. Age and sex were control variables and appear to be artifacts of the particular social climate of the situation under study. Thus, norms, first impressions, expectations, and attitudes toward people appear to be the major influences on attitudes toward members of another culture. Amount of contact, length of time living in the country and personal association do not appear to be important in intercultural interaction. Suggestions were made for the preparation of educational programs and for family, group and individual counseling for families with adolescents who are transferred to new cultural environments.     

Women's contributions to instructional technology journals

Eleven leading instructional technology journals were examined to determine the percentage of articles written by women during a five-year period, 1988–1992. In addition, where women were either first or second author, the articles were analyzed to identify their main topic and categorized based on the categories used by Ely (1992) in determining the trends of the field. Results of this study indicate that the percentage of women publishing in journals in instructional technology showed no indication of consistency or trends of increase or decrease over the five-year period and averaged 34%, with an annual mean ranging from 27% to 54%. Content analysis revealed that women's publications in instructional technology journals were primarily of a technological nature in educational contexts.     

The Neighbourhood House: site of struggle,site of learning

Adult education research has tended to concentrate on the pragmatics of facilitating learning and developing educational programmes in institutionalised settings. Critical, contextual analysis of adult learning, and studies of informal learning, are both relatively neglected in the adult education literature. Applying concepts drawn from contestation theory to data from two Australian women's learning centres, this paper suggests that, while women gain considerable knowledge from adult education courses conducted in community centres, the informal, incidental or embedded learning that takes place as women participate in these centres is also very significant. This experiential learning enables women to make sense of and act on their environment, and to come to understand themselves as knowledge‐creating, acting being. It appears that much of this informal learning is generated by conflict between people within the centres.     

Confusions between memories for performed and imagined actions: a developmental comparison

Children are often assumed to be more confused than adults are about the origin of self-generated memories (e.g., what they did or thought). The present experiments showed evidence in support of this assumption but only under some circumstances. In Experiment 1, 6- and 9-year-olds were as good as adults in distinguishing what they did from what they saw someone else do. However, children had particular trouble distinguishing what they did from what they imagined doing. Confusion between performed and imagined actions was evident across a range of actions. Clustering data also showed that information about origin is part of the memory for an event; all subjects recalled actions according to who performed what action (Experiment 1). Further, the presence of person categories as a basis for organization reduced clustering based on action class more for children than for adults (Experiment 1 vs. 2). Collectively, these findings indicate that children become sensitive to some distinctions in memories sooner than they do to others.     

Validating the multimedia activity recall for children and adolescents in a large New Zealand sample

Abstract

The aim of the study was to validate the self-report Multimedia Activity Recall for Children and Adolescents (MARCA) against accelerometry for the assessment of physical activity in New Zealand children. Participants (n = 716, 10–18 years) recalled 3–4 days of activity using the MARCA and underwent a partially overlapping 7-day accelerometry protocol during a national survey. Spearman correlation coefficients (ρ) assessed the association between accelerometer-derived counts per minute and MARCA-derived physical activity level and time in locomotion. Both data sources estimated time spent in light and moderate–vigorous physical activity. Association and agreement between methods for light physical activity and moderate–vigorous physical activity was assessed using correlations and Bland–Altman plots respectively, and paired t-tests conducted. Accelerometer-derived activity counts were moderately correlated with both MARCA-derived physical activity level and locomotion (ρ = 0.38, P < 0.0001). The correlation between methods was –0.14 for light physical activity and 0.28 for moderate–vigorous physical activity (P < 0.0001). The MARCA overestimated moderate–vigorous physical activity compared with accelerometry (120 min, P < 0.0001), which increased as moderate–vigorous physical activity time increased. Some sex and ethnicity (Māori [indigenous] versus non-Māori) differences were observed. Overall, the MARCA indicated moderate validity for assessment of physical activity level, locomotion and moderate–vigorous physical activity and poor validity for assessment of light physical activity. This was comparable to other self-report tools. The MARCA has utility for future large-scale research.