What They Said (She Said) I Said: Attribution and Expertise in Digital Circulation

Theorists of discourse have long recognised the complexities of attributing reported speech in textual circulation. Yet rarely does one follow words from an original speech event through their many re-entextualisations, and it has proved particularly difficult to capture such circulations between oral events, print, and online media. This article captures such movements by following the mediatised – and politicised – afterlife of a speech event that would normally be classified, in academia, as ‘a talk’. It begins with a talk on Russia, given by the author-anthropologist of this paper, that was (mis)reported in Russian by a Voice of America (VOA) journalist, then traces the resulting text's subsequent movement from the VOA website into the Russian fieldsite that the oral talk described. It explores how the tone and substance of debates over politics and representation were enabled, constrained, and otherwise shaped by the particular textual circulations made possible in digital media. As the text traversed online newspapers, comments forums, blogs, social media networks, and private-turned-public personal emails, it produced a body of commentary that was both directly and indirectly a struggle over representation. While substantive debates unfolded over ethnic and national politics, much of the online commentary concerned the expertise of the commenters weighing in and the expertise and identity of the anthropologist who had been cited. This essay argues that Russian commenters and posters were productively using the intertextual gaps offered by digital circulation, while minimising those gaps' increasing breadth and depth by attributing ‘original’ authorship to a discrete, stable person.     

伦敦塔里的鬼魂

也许你知道伦敦塔藏有无数文物珍宝,保存着英国历代王冠和王室珠宝;也许你听说过这里是全英国闹鬼传闻最多的地方,但你知道个中原因吗?这里曾经被用作监狱,无数皇亲国戚命丧于此。伦敦塔里到底藏着怎样的史实和谜题?住在这样一个地方又是怎样的感觉?想知道答案,伦敦塔守卫将为你一一道来。     

Environmental Education as Critical Education: how teachers and students handle the challenge

Previous research studies suggest that environmental education for social change has to be considered as critical education rather than as nature study. In a participatory research approach, classroom projects with teacher teams in five senior high schools were initiated and in‐service seminars were offered. A theorising debate about environmental education resulted in a critical environmental education concept based on human action in local social systems and the questioning of the norms and value judgements of the people concerned. Classroom projects were analysed with respect to locally constructed critical knowledge and in view of the teaching/learning culture. This study shows that teachers are most concerned about ways of handling a complex and value‐laden process. It is concluded that reflection on processes and methods is essential if teachers are to understand their students’ critical exploration of social issues.     

Sixth-Grade Physical Education: An Acculturation of Bullying and Fear

Purpose: Although bullying is recognized as a serious problem among adolescents, more information is needed regarding bullying within the context of physical education. Grounded in a social-ecological framework, the purpose of this investigation was to discover the perceptions students and teachers have about bullying in physical education and about peer and adult support. Method: Data collection included formal and informal interviews with 24 students and 4 teachers and 20 observations of 6th-grade physical education classes in 1 Midwestern school. Data were analyzed using a constant-comparative process. Results: The results indicate that adults acculturate students to support a bullying climate by providing mixed information regarding social interactions, ignoring nonphysical instances of bullying, and promoting inappropriate curricular selections. Participants also report that perceived differences such as appearance, body size, physical ability, and personal attire ignite most episodes of harassment in physical education. Further, students perceive that fear prevents many from (a) reporting instances of bullying to those in authority, (b) assisting bullied friends, and (c) feeling safe in certain physical education locations. Finally, students and teachers report that bullying impacts students' desire to participate in physical education. Conclusions: Overall, evidence from this investigation suggests that an efficacious support system does not exist for addressing the magnitude of the bullying problem. Although this study provided an initial step toward understanding the social-ecological factors affecting peer harassment in physical education, additional research is warranted.     

The Bathroom Boogeyman

In 2015, Houston, Texas voters defeated a bill that would have expanded civil rights to previously unprotected groups, including transgender people. Using a critical framing analysis, this paper investigates how the city’s daily newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, covered the debate over the bill. As such, this study found that the newspaper used almost exclusively elite sources, provided almost no in-depth context, and employed four frames—Equality, Bathroom Boogeyman, Bureaucratic Process, and Religious Freedom—in its Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) coverage. Together, these elements aligned to form a daunting challenge to an effort to protect one of society’s most vulnerable groups: the transgender community.     

Visual observing by rhesus monkeys: Some relationships with social dominance rank

Five rhesus monkeys were tested in a visual exploration situation to determine whether the mean frequency or mean duration of visual observing were systematically related to the dominance status of the observing animal. A dominance hierarchy among the five subjects was first determined by means of a competitive food-getting task. Following dominance testing, visual exploration testing was begun. All subjects were permitted to observe all other subjects in a round-robin pairing system involving two animals at a time. In each pairing, one animal served as the experimental subject (observer); the other as the stimulus (visual incentive). A highly significant linear effect of dominance was found in regard to duration of observing. Subjects high in the dominance hierarchy observed for significantly shorter durations than low-dominant subjects. Significant effects of dominance on the frequency of observing were also found, with animals intermediate in the hierarchy viewing more frequently than animals at either extreme. The data were interpreted in terms of the arousal and reduction of fear as a function of dominance and also through the notion of dominance distance.     

Using Teleconsultation to Develop Independent Skills of School-Based Behavior Teams in Functional Behavior Assessment

ABSTRACT

The Iowa Department of Education (DE) has a history of partnering with the Biobehavioral Service (BBS) at the Center for Disabilities and Development to consult with educational teams in Iowa schools regarding students exhibiting challenging behavior. In 2009, the DE requested that BBS consultants improve behavior assessment skills of school-based behavior teams across the state. One aim of the DE was to develop school-based behavior teams who could independently conduct the full range of behavior assessments (i.e., indirect assessment, direct assessment, and experimental analyses). The BBS consultants worked with challenging behavior teams from eight Iowa Area Education Agencies, teaching them to independently design, conduct, and interpret a variety of behavior assessments (e.g., preference assessments, functional analyses). A three-stage teleconsultation model was developed during consultation visits to support and evaluate the independent assessment practice of consultees. The stages included in-person consultation, onsite teleconsultation, and remote teleconsultation. Consultees expressed satisfaction with the use of teleconsultation during the third stage of the model. Additionally, the use of videoconferencing addressed some of the barriers to conducting team-based behavior assessments in the school setting by creating observation and assessment rooms for team members. Consultees continue to use this method as they independently assess the behavior of students.     

A National Profile of Teacher Education Faculty: The Construction of an Online Survey

The purposes of this study were to examine the test-retest reliability of the PACER 20-m, multistage shuttle run and to examine the equivalence reliability of the mile run/walk and PACER from both a criterion-referenced and norm-referenced framework. All fourth- and fifth-grade children (N = 266) from one public school were administered two trials of the PACER and one trial of the mile run/walk (mean age = 10.5 ± 0.5 years). The percent of boys that passed the PACER (68%) was similar to the percent of boys that passed the mile run/walk (66%); however, the percent of girls that passed the PACER (96%) far exceeded the percent of girls that passed the mile run/walk (65%). Criterion-referenced reliability was estimated with proportion of agreement (Pa) and modified kappa (Kq) using FITNESSGRAM® (Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research, 1992) standards. Pa = .97 (Kq = .94) for girls and Pa = .82 (Kq = .65) for boys. The high level of agreement for girls was found because of the low criterion-referenced standards, which allowed 99 of 104 girls to pass both trials of the PACER. Criterion-referenced equivalence reliability of the mile run/walk and PACER was moderate for boys (Pa = .83, Kq = .65) and low for girls (Pa = .66, Kq = .33). The low level of classification agreement for girls was also explained by the low standards for the PACER for this age group. Thirty-four percent of the girls that passed the PACER failed the mile run/walk. Norm-referenced test-retest reliability of the PACER was estimated with an intraclass correlation (R_xx) from a one-way analysis of variance model. Reliability estimates were high for two trials (R_xx = .89 for boys and R_xx = .89 for girls) and acceptable for one trial (R_xx = .80 for boys and R_xx = .79 for girls). Pearson correlations between the mile run/walk and PACER were moderate (-.59≤r≤-.67). The moderate correlations between the mile run/walk and PACER and the low criterion-referenced...     

A Puzzling Problem

This study examines the discourse observed within The New York Times crossword puzzles that, in Gaye Tuchman’s terms, appears to symbolically annihilate people of color, women, and members of the LGBT community. Using a critical discourse analysis of a random selection of crossword puzzles between 1993 and 2015, this paper will argue that they tend to skew toward white (Western), male, and heterosexual clues and answers in one of the world’s most important newspapers. In doing so, the discourse of the crosswords appear to stereotype, omit, further marginalize, trivialize, underrepresent, and render as child-like many marginalized people. These findings contribute significantly to the theory of symbolic annihilation in mainstream media, the consequences of which will be discussed.