Language Obscures Social Change Melanie Eckford-Prossor; Michael Clifford
Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World,
01/1998
Book Chapter
When Michel Foucault asserts the following, he presents us with a crucial problem:
Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist—any more than the potency of life, the fecundity of ...labour or the historical density of language. He is a quite recent creature, which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with its own hands less than two hundred years ago; but he has grown old so quickly that it has been only too easy to imagine that he had been waiting for thousands of years in the darkness for that moment of illumination in which he would
The startup environment these days teeters somewhere between post-apocalyptic shock and hopeful desperation, making it a particularly poignant time to search out cool. Beneath the devastation, ...however, cool lives. Though this is without a doubt the toughest year for techies since FORTUNE launched its Cool Companies list in 1993, choosing what is cool has essentially remained unchanged. A look at 2001's list of cool companies is presented.
In order to evaluate the impact of a block in cancer medicine upon student interactions with cancer patients, a group of 32 students have been videotaped during interviews with simulated and genuine ...cancer patients before and after the block. The videotapes were scored and analyzed for frequencies and patterns of interactions by the method of Reciprocal Category Analysis. This disclosed significant decreases in purely factual questions by the students, with corresponding increases in discussion of emotional aspects of illness, following the course. The temporal pattern of interaction also changed with less of a tendency to delay or avoid addressing emotional aspects of disease noted. In addition to demonstrating changes in student interactions with cancer patients following a didactic course, this study exemplifies an approach offering more direct assessment of physician-patient interactions than has been practical using questionnaires.
