•This study drew upon the concepts of imagined communities and identities and utilized a multimodal critical discourse analysis.•This study explored how the textbooks imagine the language learners ...and target language communities.•Nation-state ideologies and tourism discourse prevail the textbook imagination of language learners and communities and neglect their complex, fluid, and diverse identities and cultures.•The comparative analysis demonstrates how Al-Kitaab differs from Vis-à-vis and Deutsch: Na klar! in the representation of target language communities.
In world language learning contexts, where learners may have infrequent contact with the target language speakers, learners are primarily exposed to these speakers and their cultures through textbooks. Therefore, the representation of the target language communities and their cultures in textbooks greatly influences language learners’ understanding of these communities. Drawing upon the concepts of imagined communities and identities (Kanno & Norton, 2003) and conducting a multimodal critical discourse analysis (Machin & Mayr, 2012), we analyzed three introductory level world language textbooks (Arabic, French, and German) used at a U.S. university. We examined how the texts imagine language learners and target language communities. Our findings indicate that nation-state ideologies and tourism discourse prevail in how the textbooks imagine language learners and communities, and they fail to represent the complex identities and cultures of language users and learners. We found that these textbooks construct language learners as uncritical and apolitical, and represent language communities as homogeneous and essentialized in which minoritized groups are tokenized or erased. This study contributes to the scholarship in textbook analysis with the critical examination of three collegiate world language textbooks through a comparative analysis of the similarities and differences amongst these textbooks. Based on the findings, our paper presents implications for teaching, including class activities that the authors use to counter the problematic discursive construction in these textbooks.
India has seen a rise in the proportion of internal migrants between 1983 and 2007-08. Much of this increase is attributed to female marriage migrants. However, there is limited literature analysing ...the well-being of female marriage migrants in India. This paper seeks to examine whether women's autonomy in the public sphere is a function of: (a) the geographical community where the woman resides, or (b) imagined communities (the mindset of the communities to which the woman's family belongs), using multilevel mixed-effects logistic and ordered logistic regression. Analysing data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), 2012, for more than 34,000 ever-married women aged 15-49 years, the study finds that the communities in the mind (norms about marriage migration in the caste/sub-caste to which the woman's family belongs) are more important than the physical communities to which the women have migrated, in relation to certain aspects of women's physical autonomy and autonomy to participate in civic activities. In contrast, a woman's economic autonomy is a function of both 'imagined' and 'physical' communities. Thus, the opportunities available to women who migrate for marriage are shaped by both geographical communities, and more importantly, by the norms in her community about marriage migration.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
People who challenge the status quo through collective action face tremendous obstacles—not just practically, but in their ways of thinking, existing, and relating to others. This article addresses ...how collective actors sustain their engagement in the face of such high costs. System‐challenging collective actors must reimagine and enact new, non‐normative ways of thinking, existing, and relating that transform the status quo. This article explores the social psychological processes underlying sustained system‐challenging collective action through activists’ narratives of politicization, experiences of identity change, and reimagination of social structures. We draw on contributions from social psychological theories of system justification and social identity to examine how system‐challenging collective action is motivated and sustained. Through interviews with Chicago‐based activists and organizers engaged in system‐challenging collective action, we implement a qualitative thematic analysis to propose that sustainability arises from three integrated factors: shared identity, system‐challenging ideology, and intentional community.
Grounded in self-based and community-oriented concepts of motivation research into learning world languages, this study investigated stereotypes about native-speaker and non-native-speaker teachers ...of German that 110 novice learners of French, German, Russian, and Spanish had encountered. It furthermore analyzed how participants rated the accuracy of the described stereotypes. With the goal to explore whether stereotypical attributions to teachers of German speak to Chavez's (
2021
) concept of the plausible foreign-language self, the study examined how clichés about instructors and their perceived accuracy differ between learners and non-learners of German. Statistical analyses showed students' awareness of stereotypical notions about teachers of another language and differences between learners and non-learners in perceived accuracy scores. Findings indicate that students' language choice reflects how strongly students believe in the target-language community's acceptance of differing characteristics of native speakers and non-native speakers. Ultimately, the study discusses implications for world language classes, programs, and institutions.
Vancouver, British Columbia, is a changing city with a diverse population from all over the globe. Within this metropolis are small neighborhood houses where people can find community services like ...conversation groups to learn English, clubs to meet new people, and daycare and preschool to care for their children. This article explores social relations in one neighborhood house. Despite the small size of the house, the members and users of the house do not necessarily identify with a larger house identity or an imagined community. Using ethnographic research, this paper examines how gentrification, imagined communities, and liminal events separate and unite different portions of the house membership via Goffmanian theory about masks, teams, and regions. It looks at the house in terms of individuals establishing team identity through space-claiming practices that reinforce mask identities. In a place and time of demographic change, this paper seeks to find out how the concept of neighbors and neighborhood membership is changing through individual and group efforts to control shared spaces.
Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s notion of ‘queer use,’ I present and extend a neo-Aristotelian theory of artifacts to capture what I call ‘counter-use.’ The theory of artifacts is based on the idea that ...what they are, how they come to be, and what their functions are cannot be understood independently from each other. They come to exist when a maker imposes the concept of their substantial kind onto some matter by working on the matter to make an artifact of that kind out of it. The extensions to this core theory that I describe are two. First, I show how using can be a kind of making and how disparate users may form what Benedict Anderson calls an imagined community. Second, I describe what I call an artifact’s historicity and suggest that, like its substantial kind, an artifact’s historicity is essential to it. On this basis, I characterize counter-use as use of an artifact by an imagined community that re-arranges an object’s historicity and hence brings into existence a numerically distinct object. Thus, politically motivated counter-use has genuine ontological implications.
Based on research into qualitative responses to capital punishment in raid twentieth-century Britain, this article examines how letter writers to the Home Office constructed imagined communities in ...relation to capital cases. It uncovers a shift in these responses from creating respectable, local communities in the period 1930-45, when most letter writers had a personal connection to the condemned, to the creation of the imagined national community from the late 1940s onwards, when most correspondents in relation to high profile cases were not connected to the condemned. These post-war letters reveal how meanings of Britishness, particularly in relation to the important symbol of 'British justice', were negotiated in relation to capital punishment.
In the heritage site of Luang Prabang, Laos, international and local stakeholders employ the practices and rhetoric of conservation to constitute and reaffirm their belonging to imagined national ...communities. By negotiating with each other the preservation of old houses and temple rites, French heritage experts reaffirm the role of France as a universal civilizing power, Laotians validate the status of Laos as pearl of unsullied Buddhism, and Thai tourists enhance their status as a modern, progressive nation. While many studies have linked heritage with colonial and national identity, we demonstrate how a single site may serve to confirm multiple national identities through friction with significant cultural others. Heritagization may thus be both a repressive, as well as a creative force in forging dynamically evolving identities.
Imagined communities of practice create spaces for language learners to participate in local and global interactions as individuals and as members of global communities. However, scant research has ...examined imagined communities of practice in the context of English as an international language (EIL). The present study adopted a mixed-methods design to explore English language learners' perspectives on using English in the context of EIL. A total of 592 participants completed an Imagined Community of Practice Questionnaire, and 64 participated in semi-structured interviews. The questionnaire data were subjected to exploratory factor analysis, which identified four underlying factors, including constructing language learning identity, learner agency, coordination and synergy, and EIL and global communication. Furthermore, themes emerging from the interview data indicated that imagined communities of practice could afford opportunities for English language users to negotiate their identity, communicate globally, preserve values uniting English language users, exercise learner agency, and practice coordination and synergy in their imagined communities. These findings suggest that English language teachers should place a high value on imagined communities of practice.
An enlightening account of the entwined histories of knowledge and nationhood in Latin America—and beyond The rise of nation-states is a hallmark of the modern age, yet we are still untangling how ...the phenomenon unfolded across the globe. Here, Nicola Miller offers new insights into the process of nation- making through an account of nineteenth-century Latin America, where, she argues, the identity of nascent republics was molded through previously underappreciated means: the creation and sharing of knowledge.Drawing evidence from Argentina, Chile, and Peru, Republics of Knowledge traces the histories of these countries from the early 1800s, as they gained independence, to their centennial celebrations in the twentieth century. Miller identifies how public exchange of ideas affected policymaking, the emergence of a collective identity, and more. She finds that instead of defining themselves through language or culture, these new nations united citizens under the promise of widespread access to modern information. Miller challenges the narrative that modernization was a strictly North Atlantic affair, demonstrating that knowledge traveled both ways between Latin America and Europe. And she looks at how certain forms of knowledge came to be seen as more legitimate and valuable than others, both locally and globally. Miller ultimately suggests that all modern nations can be viewed as communities of shared knowledge, a perspective with the power to reshape our conception of the very basis of nationhood.With its transnational framework and cross-disciplinary approach, Republics of Knowledge opens new avenues for understanding the histories of modern nations—and the foundations of modernity—the world over.
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