Communication

Although male partner cooperation is often essential for successful use of the female condom, only a few studies have directly assessed men's experiences of using the device. We examined barriers to and facilitators of female condom use via qualitative in-depth interviews with 38 young men (18 to 28 years) in South Africa whose partners, all university students, were enrolled in a female condom intervention trial. In all, 21 men used the female condom; the remaining 17 did not attempt use. The main facilitators to female condom use were convenience of use for men, curiosity to see how female condoms compared to male condoms, enhanced sexual sensation, and perceptions of better safety and comfort of the device compared to male condoms. The main barriers were men's limited familiarity with the device, insertion difficulties, and men's concerns about loss of control over sexual encounters. We recommend that human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention and condom promotion ...

This paper proposes a media studies that foregrounds technological objects as communicative and historical agents. Specifically, I take the digital computer as a powerful catalyst of crises in communication theories and certain key features of modernity. Finally, the computer is the motor of “New Media” which is at once a set of technologies, a historical epoch, and a field of knowledge. As such the computer shapes “the new” and “the future” as History pushes its origins further in the past and its convergent quality pushes its future as a predominate medium. As treatment of information and interface suggest, communication theories observe computers, and technologies generally, for the mediated languages they either afford or foreclose to us. My project describes the figures information and interface for the different ways they can be thought of as aspects of communication. I treat information not as semantic meaning, formal or discursive language, but rather as a physical organism....

Personal testimony by survivors of genocide or persecution has long constituted the gold standard for learning about human-inflicted tragedy. The physical presence of a survivor captivates audiences and lends immediacy to catastrophes that seem both unfathomable but also eminently repeatable. The Holocaust looms large as an example. The most aggressive efforts at preserving live testimony have centered on assembling archives of video testimonies. This transformation of live testimony into a different medium generates two key questions:
1. What value can personal testimony have when disembodied and presented in a medium more manipulable by the audience (via editing, selective viewing, etc.)?
2. How can mediated survivor testimonies serve as tools for preventing and counteracting prejudice?

As survivors of genocides pass away, their firsthand testimonies increasingly will be accessible primarily through video archives. The preservation of memory through video archives also exacts a price. Once a survivor’s testimony enters the archive, it risks becoming ossified as a static monument. The video preserves the definitive record not only of that survivor’s life, but it also endures as an instantiation of archetypal narrative templates that channel perceptions into familiar storylines. As these narrative patterns become embedded as expectations, they risk obscuring or marginalizing the complex panoply of ways the survivors dealt with their situations.

This project takes Holocaust survivor testimonies as its point of departure in assessing the pedagogical challenges and opportunities of video testimonies. Discussions focus on three types of mediated testimony: early non-fiction televised chronicles of Holocaust survivors (particularly the first appearance of a survivor, on the 1953 U.S. television series This Is Your Life); archival video testimonies; and “unsettled testimony” consisting of less structured, first-person testimonies that reveal the challenges of discursive representation. The final category includes testimonies of Holocaust survivors independently recorded by the author. Each type of testimony offers distinct advantages and limitations in reducing prejudice and increasing productive engagement with the global immigration crises that many politicians continue to foment into nativism and xenophobia.

Critical examination of each medium of testimony leads to recommendations regarding how to provide more thorough, nuanced understanding of refugees and immigrants in the present. Testimony from immigrants could put into practice several key lessons gleaned from Holocaust survivor testimony. At the micronarrative level, individual testimonies can provide counterexamples to categorical generalizations about immigrants. Attention at this level focuses on providing detailed context and background to demonstrate how immigrants do not necessarily align with how they are categorized by media and politicians. At the mesonarrative level, the diversity of narratives can activate themes and characterizations absent or suppressed in collective portrayals of immigrants. Metanarrative testimony reframes immigrants by offering new narratives that can reframe the role of immigrants in society, suggesting storylines that treat immigrants as contributors rather than invaders.

How are we to understand digital objects? How are we to relate ‘cyberspace’ to physical space? This chapter attempts to provide a set of theoretical tools to understand ‘spaces’ of online interaction and what happens within them without resorting to filamentous constructions of ‘disembodied’ online interaction or to the underlying idealistic Cartesian dualism that pervades many of the theoretical positions that ostensibly refute it. To do so, I make connections between cognitive processes of human subjectivity, the embodied, gestural enactments of physical social spaces, and the social interactions that take place in online environments. The crux of the argument is that like identity, meaning and subjectivity are social phenomena: individual cognition requires social interaction. Similarly, social interaction, mediated or immediate, defines our spaces of subjectivity. This connecting of online ‘spaces’ to embodied cognition may provide a way to understand digital objects and the online interactions they enable through a reconsideration of the concept of space.

In this chapter, we consider what it can look like to think of graduate school as a collective co-conspiratorial endeavor and, specifically, how it can change the way we think about ethics and professionalism, how we handle time management, and our embodied relations with each other--and ourselves.

Aim(s): To explore and describe the needs of new graduate registered nurses in a rural and remote (R&R) setting within Australia.
Background: Rural practice has distinctive challenges for nurses. Nurses make up the largest and most widely distributed health workforce in Australia, outnumbering doctors 8:1 in R&R areas.
Evaluation: Literature was used to evaluate the graduate registered nurses’ needs in R&R communities.
Key Issues: Three main themes emerged: expectations, support and workloads. Themes reflected enablers and disablers of retention of nurses as they transition from student role to new graduate practice.
Conclusion: New graduates are aware of their limitations as new practitioners. There is an expectation that their employers will provide a supportive learning environment for them to gain the skills necessary to become proficient and valuable employees.
Implications for nursing management: this commentary paper identifies the need for a structured, supported new graduate program that recognises and meets the needs, both clinical and social, of new graduate registered nurses in the R&R context.

Keywords:  Graduate nurse, rural/remote, learning environments, transition to practice, Australia.

Upon visiting the megalithic site of Ħaġar Qim in Malta, one is immediately struck by the fine workmanship of the remaining façade. However, studies on remains of a model discovered in another local megalithic site which represents a megalithic façade, indicated that today’s Ħaġar Qim façade is none other than a fraction of what should have been the original façade. A previous study showed the virtual reconstruction of the original Ħaġar Qim façade in its original setting [1]. This paper represents the visualisation of computer simulations of various lighting conditions on this construction. The façade was exposed to natural sunlight at the earliest hours of the day, followed by mid day lighting conditions leading to dusk and sunset simulations. Further to this, a hypothetical artificial fire light was also simulated and represented at various positions.
Since this is the first virtual 3D model of the Ħaġar Qim façade, it is also the first occasion to be able to view this magnificent entrance way in various situations in which the real Ħaġar Qim façade could have been visualised around 5500 years ago but cannot be experienced today.

This critical essay describes and demonstrates the uses and unique contributions of performative writing as a form of inquiry into the materialities and mobilities of sociocultural communicative phenom- ena. Embracing an Anzaldu an approach, the author utilizes Mesoamerican Aztec and Chicanx history, iconography, and mythos to argue for an ontological reimaging of where research should begin and end. As a methodological intervention, this article chal- lenges traditional impulses regarding where knowledge generation occurs, which knowledges are valid, and who counts as a valuable knowledge producer. By shifting genres, breaking grammatical rules, and creatively constructing poetics and rhythm (flor y canto), this “flight of the imagination” focuses on what Chicana, Latina, and indi- genous scholars have termed “fleshing the spirit” or “spiriting the flesh.” By embracing the soul work and spirituality of writing, this piece offers an art-based approach to methodological inquiry that functions as a sharp critique of the White capitalist cisheteropatriar- chal structure of higher education that maintains status quo under- standings of knowledge. When rerouting our methodological impulses toward a critical and decolonial telos and embracing the soul and spirit of performative writing, I argue that our first move must be to make an ontological shift in how we see the world and our place in it—we must begin and end with “theories in the flesh.”

To cite:
Wilkins, A. 2017. Rescaling the local: Multi-academy trusts, private monopoly and statecraft in England. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 49 (2), 171-185

For the past six years successive UK governments in England have introduced reforms intended to usher in less aggregated, top-down, bureaucratically overloaded models of service delivery as well as secure conditions for greater school autonomy.  Yet the ‘hollowing out’ of local government has not resulted in less bureaucracy on the ground or less regulation from above, nor has it diminished hierarchy as an organising principle of education governance.  In some cases, monopolies and monopolistic practices dominated by powerful bureaucracies and professional groups persist, albeit realised through the involvement of new actors and organisations from business and philanthropy.  In this paper I adopt a governmentality perspective to explore the political significance of large multi-academy trusts (MATs) – private sponsors contracted by central government to run publicly funded schools – to the generation of new scalar hierarchies and accountability infrastructures that assist in bringing the gaze of government to bear upon the actions of schools that are otherwise less visible under local government management.  On this account, it is argued, MATs are integral to statecraft and the invention and assemblage of particular apparatuses for intervening upon specific organisations, spaces and peoples.

Jean Baudrillard sees in today’s simulation the model ‘of a real but without origin or reality: a hyperreal’. With the hyperreal, the individual is unable to distinguish what is real and what is not. In this article, I argue how the pervasiveness of media, in the form of mobile phones, tablets with their applications and social networking sites, singularly or in unison create and sustain the existence of the hyperreal. They succeed at once through an imagined call for urgency and an implosion of meaning that cannot be contained. This type of media is a priori a form of simulation, and has not only erased the boundaries that exit between the real and the unreal but has also developed as a site accountable for continual deference of the being-in-theworld, forcing on the latter a perpetual existence in the hyperreal.

Nitin Sinha's work is a significant contribution to the history of communication in modern India. Focusing on eastern India – Bihar, specifically, Sinha draws out the interdependence of spatial transformation and communication networks in nineteenth-century India. In addition to material aspects of geography and knowledge production, however, the author uses networks of exchange and flow to emphasize the physicality of space.

Abstract – In the article the governmental informational politics concerning providing electoral publicity is analyzed. The list of information that must be accessible for an electorate and gives citizens an opportunity to carry out the realized choice is defined.

This paper adopts a critical discourse analysis in combination with in-depth interviews of 55 people to examine three representative cases of Internet subcultures created and practiced by Chinese netizens from 2009, in order to define the formats, strategies and tactics of these subcultures in relation to the broader mainstream political culture. The paper finds that the Chinese subculturists employ tactics of homophony and neologism made possible by the highly contextual Chinese language; the participants are aware of the appropriation of traditional Confucian ethics by the Party-state to legitimize its rule and devise targeted strategies of resistance accordingly; but their cynical attitude towards the dominant political culture prevents them from affecting real political change beyond mere defiance at the semiotic level.

... Dedicated in loving memory to Cates Anderson Gossett and Linda Murray ... To my friends and colleagues, particularly Sydnye Allen, Silvia Bartolic, Scott Blackwood, Candace Boheme, Lila Bouchet, Maggie Brubaker, Melissa Curran, Kristin Doyle, Andy Fiegel, Lynn French ...

In this paper I discuss in a critical manner what I believe to be some of the more interesting contributions of Anthony Steinbock’s book Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl. I will thus refer mainly to his clarification of the constitution of familiar and alien objects or states of affairs through appropriation and transgression. In connection with this I will try to put forward some of the advantages and implications of a phenomenological approach to the problem of historicity in terms of generativity.  However, I will also discuss some of the limitations and problems of Steinbock’s approach. I believe that most if not all of these problems are related to his understanding of the relationship between static, genetic and generative phenomenological methods. Therefore I will devote some lines to discuss this issue and to rethink some of Steinbock’s main theses under the light of another way of understanding the relationship between these methods as well as the task of the philosophical inquiry proposed by phenomenology.

The early broadcast era and our current platform era bear some striking resemblances, but one parallel looms large: In the 1940s, we lost a key battle to build a potentially liberating and wondrous medium—and we are on the cusp of doing so again. Then as now, commercial operators defined the terms by which we could use our core communication and information infrastructures. While reaping tremendous profits from the public airwaves, a few corporate firms became the sole providers for much of the nation’s media.

Abstract:  This paper presents an argument for considering issues of class in analyses of communicative planning projects. In these projects, class interests tend to be obscured by the contemporary preoccupation with the class-ambiguous category of “community”. Through a case study of a project of urban redevelopment at King's Cross in London, we conceptualize and map class interests in an urban redevelopment project. Three aspects of the planning process that contain clear class effects are looked at: the amount of office space, the flexibility of plans, and the appropriation of the urban environment as exchange or use value. These aspects structure the urban redevelopment but are external to the communicative planning process. The opposition to the redevelopment has in the planning discourse been articulated as “community”-based rather than in class-sensitive terms. We finally present three strategies for reinserting issues of class into planning theory and practice.