(Re)producing power-knowledge-desire : young women and discourses of identity

This study focuses on three young women in their final year of school using data gathered during a year-long process of individual conversational interviews, the contents of which were largely determined by their interests. Three themes arise from critical incidents during this year - the debutante ball, teenage pregnancy and dieting. These themes are used to focus wide ranging explorations of what it is to be a young woman at this particular time. The broader cultural production of discursive positions available to, and developed by, these young women as part of their identity formation is discussed. Methodological issues concerning power relationships between research participants are also the focus of critical attention. It is considered that young women's bodies and bodily practices are central to understanding the processes involved in their identity formation. It is in this context that the focus turns to bodies that matter. In contemporary Western cultures 'adolescent bodies' could be said to matter 'too much' in the sense that they are increasingly the focus for disciplinary practices in institutions such as schooling, the church, the family, health care, health promotion and the media. This disciplining is legitimised because adolescence is socially constructed as a 'becoming'. In this case it is a matter of 'becoming woman'; a sort of apprenticeship which allows for knowledgeable others to provide not only guidance and nurturance, but discipline. Using insights gained from feminist poststructuralist theory and cultural feminism this thesis argues that the discourses and practices generated within and across institutions, which are normalised by their institutional base, are gender differentiated. The focus is on young women's embodied subjectivity and how the discourses and practices they engage with and in work to construct an ideal feminine body-subject. The discursive production of a gendered identity has a considerable impact on young women's health and their health-related behaviours. This is explored specifically in the thesis in relation to sexuality and the cultural production of the 'ideal' female body. It is argued that health education and health promotion strategies which are designed to influence young women's health related behaviours, need to consider the forms of power, knowledge and desire produced through young women's active engagement with institutionalised discourses of identity if they are to have an ongoing impact

English education for international students in local schools : practices of inclusion and discourses of exclusion

This paper is concerned with the ways secondary teachers in Victoria, Australia, speak about inclusive education for international students. Preliminary analysis of recent research shows teachers understand that English language teaching is crucial and are committed to its good practice. Nevertheless, further analysis suggests teacher approaches to education are contested, support a deficit view of teaching practice, and simplify notions of language and culture to their discrete and systemic characteristics vis-a-vis their embodied and ontological aspects. Even as teachers work to include all of their students, their efforts are mediated by discourses that negotiate the nexus between identity and difference, language and culture, and English language education. Together these discourses work to inscribe international students differently within the community, redefine the education provided to them, and constrain their access to contemporary and globalized life-worlds.

Adaptive languages and a new programming style

A programming style can be seen as a particular model of shaping thought or a special way of codifying language to solve a problem. Adaptive languages have the basic feature of allowing the expression of programs which self-modifying through adaptive actions at runtime. The conception of such languages calls for a new programming style, since the application of adaptive technology in the field of programming languages suggests a new way of thinking. With the adaptive style, programming language codes can be structured in such a way that the codified program therein modifies or adapts itself towards the needs of the problem. The adaptive programming style may be a feasible alternate way to obtain self-modifying consistent codes, which allow its use in modern applications for self-modifying code.

Dynamic Languages and Applications. Report on the Workshop Dyla 07 at ECOOP 2007

Following last two years’ workshop on dynamic languages at the ECOOP conference, the Dyla 2007 workshop was a successful and popular event. As its name implies, the workshop’s focus was on dynamic languages and their applications. Topics and discussions at the workshop included macro expansion mechanisms, extension of the method lookup algorithm, language interpretation, reflexivity and languages for mobile ad hoc networks. The main goal of this workshop was to bring together different dynamic language communities and favouring cross communities interaction. Dyla 2007 was organised as a full day meeting, partly devoted to presentation of submitted position papers and partly devoted to tool demonstration. All accepted papers can be downloaded from the workshop’s web site. In this report, we provide an overview of the presentations and a summary of discussions.

Universal ontology: attentive tracking of objects and substances across languages and over development

Previous research has demonstrated that adults are successful at visually tracking rigidly moving items, but experience great difficulties when tracking substance-like ‘‘pouring’’ items. Using a comparative approach, we investigated whether the presence/absence of the grammatical count–mass distinction influences adults and children’s ability to attentively track objects versus substances. More specifically, we aimed to explore whether the higher success at tracking rigid over substance-like items appears universally or whether speakers of classifier languages (like Japanese, not marking the object–substance distinction) are advantaged at tracking substances as compared to speakers of non-classifier languages (like Swiss German, marking the object–substance distinction). Our results supported the idea that language has no effect on low-level cognitive processes such as the attentive visual processing of objects and substances. We concluded arguing that the tendency to prioritize objects is universal and independent of specific characteristics of the language spoken.