Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model and the circulation of journalism in the digital landscape

ABSTRACT

Notions of circuitry are central to Stuart Hall’s conceptualization of how communities, cultures, and media constitute each other. This is very explicit in his encoding/decoding model from 1973. Hall here reserves the term “circulation” for a delimited process within a broader argument for a circular movement, or a “reproduction” of culture through media. In this broader view, however, Hall sees circulation as both technological and hermeneutical processes through which meaning and/or ideology move into and out of discursive form. The encoding/decoding text(s) refer on several occasions to “current affairs” but later applications of this model have somewhat neglected the sphere of journalism. This paper consequently situates Hall’s notions of circulation in relation to new modes of circulating journalism on participatory digital platforms. Given the status of Hall’s model, the overall goal of this re-reading is twofold: seeing Hall through contemporary issues puts into perspective key aspects of Hall’s thinking, while Hall’s framework in turn helps illuminate important characteristics of how journalism is ascribed meaning in a digital landscape. The paper ultimately argues that while Hall’s insistence on seeing the circulation of journalism within a broader circuit of culture is as important as ever, some of his main tenets and assumptions need to be rethought and supplemented in light of newer developments.     

Facilitating integrated agricultural technology development through participatory research

Purpose: In this paper, we discuss the role of participatory research in integrated agricultural technology development using the example of a solar fruit drying project in Mozambique.

Design/methodology/approach: We engage in seven participatory exercises with groups of farmers from two farmers’ associations in Inharrime district in Mozambique to identify their needs for solar fruit drying that are crucial for solar dryer technology design. We focus in the analysis on three of these exercises including a daily schedule exercise, SWOT (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats) analysis and technology requirement exercise.

Findings: Participatory research takes a dual function for integrated agricultural technology development. First, it can help to identify the technology needs of farmers and second it can enable the exchange and creation of different sets of knowledge for agricultural technology development between multiple stakeholders.

Practical implications: Participatory research provides a tool for joint knowledge exchange and creation, which allows the identified technology requirements to be translated into practical technology design.

Theoretical implications: This paper extends the concept of integrated research to integrated agricultural technology development and shows how participatory research is a tool that enables transdisciplinarity, which presents the most desired form of integrated research.

Originality: This research is highly relevant for researchers working in an interdisciplinary environment with agricultural technology development in cross-cultural contexts. From a meta-level perspective, it provides insights for joint and integrated technology development.     

First-Year Non-STEM Majors’ Use of Definitions to Solve Calculus Tasks: Benefits of Using Concept Image over Concept Definition?

Six US first-year university students in humanities or social science degree programmes were interviewed while solving 4 tasks on continuity and asymptotes in a required mathematics course. The focus was on how the students referred to the definitions or to the concept images when solving the tasks and if partial understandings appeared. Partial understanding denotes when the definition or the concept image has correct parts but essential parts are missing or incoherencies occur. Some students confused continuity with differentiability or perceived it as a graph not having holes, which is also reported by other studies. Another misconception that emerged is to perceive points on the x-axis as non-continuous. The partial understandings of asymptotes were related to the vertical asymptote as it was confused with a function property. Some students referred to the definitions when correctly solving some of the tasks and some students with coherent concept images were successful solving some of the tasks even when they did not refer to the definitions.     

An ethnographic field study of the influence of social interactions during the school day for children diagnosed with ADHD

The aim of this ethnographic field study was to investigate the influence of school-day social interactions on the well-being and social inclusion of children diagnosed with ADHD. The empirical data consisted of participant observations and informal interviews over a three-month period at a Danish primary school. Two ADHD-diagnosed 11-year-old boys in the fourth and fifth grades were followed on an alternating basis. The field notes were analysed using a qualitative content analysis that incorporated Etienne Wenger’s concepts of social identity and participation. The results revealed that the effects of school-day social interactions are complex and situation dependent. Medication, friendships and relationships with teachers and other adults strongly influence how children diagnosed with ADHD participate in social interactions and, consequently, how they thrive. We argue that it is important to emphasise the mediation of these children’s participation in the classroom community throughout an entire school day to ensure their social inclusion and well-being.     

Competence development in the workplace: concepts, strategies and effects

In spite of the expectations that exist regarding efforts to develop competence and in spite of the large amounts of resources devoted to it, there is a marked lack of empirically-based research on competence development in companies and other organizations. The purpose of this article is to present a review of research on strategies for competence development in organizations, their prerequisites and effects. More specifically, the following three questions will be addressed: (i) Why do organizations invest in competence development? (ii) What effects can realistically be achieved through competence development? (iii) What characterizes successful strategies for competence development in organizations? Before these questions are dealt with, different views of the meaning of the concepts of competence and competence development are presented and discussed.     

Information retrieval and machine learning for probabilistic schema matching

Schema matching is the problem of finding correspondences (mapping rules, e.g. logical formulae) between heterogeneous schemas e.g. in the data exchange domain, or for distributed IR in federated digital libraries. This paper introduces a probabilistic framework, called sPLMap, for automatically learning schema mapping rules, based on given instances of both schemas. Different techniques, mostly from the IR and machine learning fields, are combined for finding suitable mapping candidates. Our approach gives a probabilistic interpretation of the prediction weights of the candidates, selects the rule set with highest matching probability, and outputs probabilistic rules which are capable to deal with the intrinsic uncertainty of the mapping process. Our approach with different variants has been evaluated on several test sets.     

Waste in education: the potential of materiality and practice

This article explores how waste materials and waste practices figure in education, pointing to educational potentials of waste which have hitherto received little consideration in environmental and sustainability education practice and research. Building on empirical research on waste education in Danish schools and preschools, we discuss how an empirical and theoretical focus on waste as material and on waste practices moves beyond conventional approaches to waste in education. Seeking to overcome the shortcomings of habitual-behavioural and rational action approaches, we argue for an approach to waste education which encourages pupils to explore the socio-material aspects and trajectories of waste practices and waste materials.     

Implicit and explicit attitudes towards sport among young elite athletes with high versus low burnout symptoms

The development of cynical attitudes towards elite sport is a core symptom of athlete burnout and has been associated with dropout from elite sport. To date, this phenomenon has mainly been studied by investigating explicit attitudes towards sport, whereas athletes’ automatic evaluations (i.e. implicit attitudes) that have been shown to influence behavior as well were not considered. This study aimed to compare explicit and implicit attitudes towards sport of young elite athletes with high (N = 24) versus low (N = 26) burnout symptoms. Using self-reported measures, general and athlete burnout symptoms were assessed. Additionally, a single-target implicit association test was administered to examine participants’ automatic evaluation of sport. Statistical analysis revealed greater emotional/physical exhaustion and sport devaluation in athletes reporting high compared to low burnout symptoms. Implicit attitudes towards sport did not significantly differ between the groups. Furthermore, no significant correlations were observed between different athlete burnout symptoms and implicit attitudes. Athletes with high burnout symptoms show a tendency to explicitly detach themselves from sport, thus fostering sport devaluation as a core symptom of athlete burnout. However, this process does not seem to be reflected in their implicit attitudes towards sport.