Faculty of Arts - Papers

Challenges in Understanding Public Responses and Providing Effective Public Consultation on Water Reuse

Stewart Russell — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:31:42 PST

This paper suggests key challenges facing our understanding of public responses to water recycling and our efforts to provide effective public consultation. The current understanding of public reactions to water recycling is insufficient to predict support in general or for specific schemes, and cannot obviate a thorough investigation and engagement for each proposal. Such support as is evident may not be robust. We need to provide better opportunities and mechanisms, and a wider scope, for community involvement. These entail a broader conception of the information needs of participants, and careful integration of education and consultation processes. Our discussion forms the rationale for a program of research as part of the Oz-AQUAREC project. We propose trialling discourse analysis methods, first, to examine the views expressed in focus groups and try to understand their social bases, and second, to facilitate interactions between technical practitioners, authorities and community groups.

Pseudo history/weird history: nationalism and the Internet

Greg Melleuish — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:59:26 PST

One of the most important developments in the production of history in the early twenty-first century has been the capacity of ‘weird history’ or ‘pseudo history’ to have a large impact on the public sphere. Pseudo history mimics professional history in the way that it presents itself to the public but its arguments defy any reasonable assessment of the evidence. In this paper, we examine the phenomenon of pseudo history through a consideration of its origins in travellers’ tales and its current manifestation with particular reference to two practitioners: Anatolii Fomenko and Gavin Menzies. One can attribute much of their popular success to their capacity to appeal to both democratic principles and nationalism, and to make effective use of new media, especially the internet.

Nationalist imaginings of the Russian past

Konstantin Sheiko — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:59:23 PST

The Iraqi "Other": Iraqi Nationalism and the American Occupation

Stephen M. Brown — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:59:19 PST

Soldier of the revolution: Joseph Stalin and the legacy of the Russian Civil War of 1918-20

Stephen M. Brown — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:59:09 PST

The Soviet legacy and leader cults in Post-Communist Central Asia: the example of Turkmenistan

Stephen M. Brown — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:59:06 PST

Post-communist Russia and anti-Americanism: has the West lost Russian public opinion?

Stephen M. Brown — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:59:03 PST

Post-Communist Russia’s place in the international system has constituted a matter of intense academic interest since the end of the Cold War. In 2006, the relationship between the West and Russia cooled markedly in response to changing political alliances among the successor states of the former Soviet Union and Russia’s alleged use of its oil and gas resources for political purposes. Richard Pipes has warned that the West should not trust Russia because both its political elites and public opinion are hostile to Western values. This paper will argue that public opinion in Russia has been, and remains, mostly favourable towards the United States, Europe and the liberal democratic political system associated with the ‘West’ and that anti-Americanism, a discourse considered to be widespread in Europe, remains relatively weak in Russia. While many Russian politicians and ideologues have urged Russians to view the West as both foreign and hostile, a majority of the general public has steadfastly resisted. Sympathetic to Europe and unenthusiastic about new wars, Russia’s general public has proved a surprisingly resilient ally both for a pragmatic Russian foreign policy and for the West.

The Green Constituency - Evidence From Cunningham

Damien Cahill — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:58:59 PST

Mechanised Horsemen: Red Cavalry Commanders and the Second World War

Stephen M. Brown — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:58:56 PST

Klim Voroshilov and the Red Cavalry: Reassessing the Most Incompetent Man in the Red Army

Stephen M. Brown — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:58:52 PST

Genres, registers, text types, domains and styles: Clarifying the concepts and nevigating a path through the BNC jungle

David Y. W. Lee — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:48:52 PST

In this paper, an attempt is first made to clarify and tease apart the somewhat confusing terms genre, register, text type, domain, sublanguage, and style. The use of these terms by various linguists and literary theorists working under different traditions or orientations will be examined and a possible way of synthesising their insights will be proposed and illustrated with reference to the disparate categories used to classify texts in various existing computer corpora. With this terminological problem resolved, a personal project which involved giving each of the 4,124 British National Corpus (BNC, version 1) files a descriptive "genre" label will then be described. The result of this work, a spreadsheet/database (the "BNC Index") containing genre labels and other types of information about the BNC texts will then be described and its usefulness shown. It is envisaged that this resource will allow linguists, language teachers, and other users to easily navigate through or scan the huge BNC jungle more easily, to quickly ascertain what is there (and how much) and to make informed selections from the mass of texts available. It should also greatly facilitate genre-based research (e.g., EAP, ESP, discourse analysis, lexicogrammatical, and collocational studies) and focus everyday classroom concordancing activities by making it easy for people to restrict their searches to highly specified sub-sets of the BNC using PC-based concordancers such as WordSmith, MonoConc, or the Web-based BNCWeb.

Defining Core Vocabulary and Tracking Its Distribution across Spoken and Written Genres : Evidence of agradience of variation from the British National Corpus

David Y. W. Lee — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:48:49 PST

A corpus-based EAP course for NNS doctoral students: Moving from available specialized corpora to self-compiled corpora

David Y. W. Lee — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:48:45 PST

This paper presents a discussion of an experimental, innovative course in corpus-informed EAP for doctoral students. Participants were given access to specialized corpora of academic writing and speaking, instructed in the tools of the trade (web- and PC-based concordancers) and gradually inducted into the skills needed to best exploit the data and the tools for directed learning as well as self-learning. After the induction period, participants began to compile two additional written corpora: one of their own writing (term papers, dissertation drafts, unedited journal drafts) and one of ‘expert’ writing, culled from electronic versions of published papers in their own field or subfield. Students were thus able to make comparisons between their own writing and those of more established writers in their field. At the end of the course, participants presented reports of their discoveries with some discussion of how they felt their rhetorical consciousness was raised and reflected on what further use they might be making of corpus linguistics techniques in their future careers. This paper gives an overview of how this course was structured, presents the kinds of discoursal and other linguistic phenomena examined and the sometimes surprising observations made, and reports on the pluses and minuses of this corpus-informed course as a whole, seen from the point of view of both learners and instructors.

Making a bigger deal of the smaller words: function words and other key items in research writing by Chinese learners

David Y. W Lee — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:48:42 PST

In many mainland Chinese universities, undergraduate students specializing in English language and applied linguistics are required to write a dissertation, in English, of about 5000 words exploring some aspect of original research. This is a task which is of considerable difficulty not only at the genre or discourse level but also at the lexico-grammatical level. The teaching of academic writing in Chinese universities tends to focus on general discourse-level features such as “move” structures, while the more micro, form-focused knowledge and skills are comparatively underexplored and usually based on intuition or an arbitrary selection of features.

This paper presents a data-driven, pedagogically oriented analysis of a corpus of 78 Chinese undergraduate dissertations alongside 2 comparison native-speaker corpora, focusing on characteristically problematic areas, as revealed through keywords analyses and complementary qualitative investigations of collocations and word clusters. Most of the overuse of words and phrases turns out to involve function words and high-frequency “common” words which are typically not the focus of academic writing instruction. These usages are highly patterned rather than random, thus being in principle amenable to teaching using a data-driven pedagogical approach. The paper argues that by systematically deriving potential teaching items from a learner corpus, EAP writing pedagogy can be more needs-based and learner-centered, which are two facilitating conditions for successful form-focused instruction.

Corpus Linguistics with BNCweb: A Practical Guide

Sebastian Hoffmann — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:48:38 PST

Corpora and discourse analysis: New ways of doing old things

David Y. W. Lee — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:48:35 PST

Publisher's note: Methods of approaching the study of discourse have developed rapidly in the last ten years, influenced by a growing interdisciplinary spirit among linguistics and anthropology, sociology, cognitive and cultural psychology and cultural studies, as well as among established sub-fields within linguistics itself. Among the more recent developments are an increasing 'critical' turn in discourse analysis, a growing interest in historical, ethnographic and corpus-based approaches to discourse, more concern with the social contexts in which discourse occurs, the social actions that it is used to take and the identities that are constructed through it, as well as a revaluation of what counts as 'discourse' to include multi-modal texts and interaction. "Advances in Discourse Studies" brings together contributions from leading scholars in the field, investigating the historical and theoretical relationships between new advances in discourse studies and pointing towards new directions for the future of the discipline. Featuring discussion questions, classroom projects and recommended readings at the end of each section, as well as case studies illustrating each approach discussed, this is an invaluable resource for students of interdisciplinary discourse analysis

What corpora are available?

David Y. W. Lee — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:48:31 PST

Human In/Security on a Universal Scale

Isabella Bakker — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:33:11 PST

Crises, Tensions, and Contradictions

Timothy DiMuzio — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:33:07 PST

The themes of Part III involve the social consequences of financial crises, new forms of flexible accumulation, the constitution of global labor regimes, deepening processes of commodification associated with sex trafficking and the informal arrangements and legal orders that sanction their existence. A common thread is that a more disciplinary neo-liberal world order corresponds with more precarious forms of social reproduction, intensified exploitation and human insecurity. This is a world where, for example, Gandhi’s ethical imperative to provide security to the most vulnerable is far too frequently, perhaps increasingly, ignored.

Governance and World Order

Timothy DiMuzio — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:33:03 PST