Navigating Cyberspace: Vision, Textuality and the World Wide Web

This article is an examination of the language, structure and imagery of the World Wide Web. It argues that the Web is not just a rich source of information but offers new ways of seeing and engaging with the world. As well as a consideration of the nature of electronically mediated texts, it looks at the World Wide Web as a kind of meta-text itself which has mythopoeic resonances.     

Moral authorship of novice teachers in primary education

This article focuses on moral authorship as an element of the professional development of novice teachers in the Netherlands. Moral authorship refers to the ability of teachers to observe, identify, verbalize and reflect on the moral aspects of their work in a proactive and dialogical manner. We elaborate on moral authorship by theoretically exploring six interdependent tasks of moral meaning making: moral commitment, awareness, orientation and positioning, moral performance and evaluation. Narratives of 19 novice teachers were analyzed to explore moral authorship in teachers’ talk. The results show the opportunities of moral authorship to support, navigate, and reinforce the professional development of novice teachers. This study suggests professional self-dialogs for enhancing the development of moral authorship.     

Bourdieu’s habitus and field: implications on the practice and theory of critical action learning

This paper considers the logic of practice of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in relation to critical action learning: in particular habitus which is co-created with field and the interplay amongst the two in the form of misrecognition and risk. We draw on interviews with participants who have experienced action learning as part of an NHS leadership programme. We argue that Bourdieu provides helpful ways of understanding and explaining the complex processes of social interactions which are centre stage in action learning – especially the ‘social friction’ through which action learners gain new insights and new prompts to action in their workplace from learning set members. These insights can support action learning practitioners keen to explore their own practice.     

Vivisecting Major: a Victorian gentleman scientist defends animal experimentation, 1876-1885

Through an investigation of the public, professional, and private life of the Darwinian disciple George John Romanes, this essay seeks a better understanding of the scientific motivations for defending the practice of vivisection at the height of the controversy in late Victorian Britain. Setting aside a historiography that has tended to focus on the arguments of antivivisectionists, it reconstructs the viewpoint of the scientific community through an examination of Romanes's work to help orchestrate the defense of animal experimentation. By embedding his life in three complicatedly overlapping networks-the world of print, interpersonal communications among an increasingly professionalized body of scientific men, and the intimacies of private life-the essay uses Romanes as a lens with which to focus the physiological apprehension of the antivivisection movement. It is a story of reputation, self-interest, and affection.     

Jacques Derrida meets Nelson Mandela: archival ethics at the endgame

Verne Harris offers a reflection on legacy and the archive through three intersecting enquiries, on: the South African tradition of ??archives for justice??, deconstruction??s insistence that the work of archives is justice; and the legacies of Nelson Mandela and Jacques Derrida. He makes a case for an open-ended making and re-making of legacy and for a more radically transformative agenda in the work of archives in South Africa.