A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY12 start with G start with G
Video and computer games in their cultural contexts.
As the popularity of computer games has exploded over the past decade, both scholars and game industry professionals have recognized the necessity of treating games less as frivolous entertainment and more as artifacts of culture worthy of political, social, economic, rhetorical, and aesthetic analysis. Ken McAllister notes in his introduction to Game Work that, even though games are essentially impractical, they are nevertheless important mediating agents for the broad exercise of socio-political power.
In considering how the languages, images, gestures, and sounds of video games influence those who play them, McAllister highlights the ways in which ideology is coded into games. Computer games, he argues, have transformative effects on the consciousness of players, like poetry, fiction, journalism, and film, but the implications of these transformations are not always clear. Games can work to maintain the status quo or celebrate liberation or tolerate enslavement, and they can conjure feelings of hope or despair, assent or dissent, clarity or confusion. Overall, by making and managing meanings, computer games—and the work they involve and the industry they spring from—are also negotiating power.
This book sets out a method for "recollecting" some of the diverse and copious influences on computer games and the industry they have spawned. Specifically written for use in computer game theory classes, advanced media studies, and communications courses, Game Work will also be welcome by computer gamers and designers.
Ken S. McAllister is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona and Co-Director of the Learning Games Initiative, a research collective that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games.
This volume, based on the forty-third annual Georgetown University Round Table, covers a variety of topics ranging from the relationship of language and philosophy; through language policy; to discourse analysis.
Marking the return — after a two-year hiatus — of this annual collection of essays on linguistics and language education, the 1999 volume speaks to the most pressing social issues of our time. More than thirty contributors from around the world take up longstanding debates about language diversity, language standardization, and language policy. They tackle such controversial issues as the Official English movement, bilingual education, and ideological struggles over African American Vernacular English.
The 2000 Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics brought together distinguished linguists from around the globe to discuss applications of linguistics to important and intriguing real-world issues within the professions. With topics as wide-ranging as coherence in operating room communication, involvement strategies in news analysis roundtable discussions, and jury understanding of witness deception, this resulting volume of selected papers provides both experts and novices with myriad insights into the excitement of cross-disciplinary language analysis. Readers will find—in the words of one contributor—that in such cross-pollination of ideas, "there's tremendous hope, there's tremendous power and the power to transform."
GURT is nationally and internationally recognized as one of the world's star gatherings for scholars in the fields of language and linguistics. In 2001, the best from around the world in the disciplines of anthropological linguistics and discourse analysis meet to present and share the latest research on linguistic analysis and to address real-world contexts in private and public domains. The result is this newest, invaluable 2001 edition of the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics. This volume brings together the plenary speakers only, all leaders in their fields, showcasing discourse contexts that range from medical interactions to political campaigns, from classroom discourse and educational policy to current affairs, and to the importance of everyday family conversations. The contributors expand the boundaries of discourse to include narrative theory, music and language, laughter in conversation, and the ventriloquizing of voices in dialogue.
Frederick Erickson explores the musical basis of language in an elementary school classroom; Wallace Chafe analyzes laughter in conversation. William Labov examines narratives told to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, while Deborah Schiffrin compares multiple accounts of Holocaust narratives, and Alessandro Duranti considers competing speaker and audience interpretations during a political candidate's campaign tour. Robin Lakoff uncovers contrasting narratives shared by different cultural groups with respect to such current events as the O.J. Simpson trial. Deborah Tannen examines the integration of power and connection in family relationships, while Heidi Hamilton considers accounts that diabetic patients give their doctors. Shirley Brice Heath looks at discourse strategies used by policymakers to deny research findings, and G. Richard Tucker and Richard Donato report on a successful bilingual program.
Glossolalia and the Problem of Language investigates speaking in tongues in South Korea, where it is practiced widely across denominations and congregations. Nicholas Harkness shows how the popularity of glossolalia in Korea lies at the intersection of numerous, often competing social forces, interwoven religious legacies, and spiritual desires that have been amplified by Christianity’s massive institutionalization. As evangelicalism continues to spread worldwide, Glossolalia and the Problem of Language analyzes one of its most enigmatic practices while marking a major advancement in our understanding of the power of language and its limits.
Good Maya Women: Migration and Revitalization of Clothing and Language in Highland Guatemala analyzes how Indigenous women’s migration contributes to women’s empowerment in their home communities in Guatemala. This decolonial ethnographic analysis of Kaqchikel Maya women’s linguistic and cultural activism demonstrates that marginalized people can and do experience empowerment and hope for the future of their communities, even while living under oppressive neoliberal regimes. Joyce N. Bennett contests dominant frameworks of affect theory holding that marginalized peoples never truly experience unrestricted hope or empowerment, and she contributes new understandings of the intimate connections between Indigenous women, migration, and language and clothing revitalization.
Based on more than twenty months of fieldwork, the study begins with an ethnographic investigation of how economic policies force Indigenous women into migration for wage work. To survive, many, like the three young women profiled in this ethnography, are forced to leave their schooling, families, and highland homes to work in cities or other countries. They might work, for example, as vendors, selling crafts to tourists, or as housekeepers or waitresses. Their work exposes them to structural violence, including anti-Indigenous slurs, sexual harassment and violence, and robbery.
Furthermore, the women are pressured to wear Western clothing and to speak Spanish, which endangers Indigenous culture and language in Guatemala. Yet the Indigenous migrant women profiled do not abandon their Indigenous clothing and language, in this case Kaqchikel Maya. Instead, they find inspiration and pride in revitalizing Kaqchikel traditions in their hometowns post-migration. As women attempt to revitalize Kaqchikel Maya language and clothing, they seek to earn the title of “good” women in their home communities.
Unpacking women’s daily activisms reveals that women attempt to retain their language and clothing and also collectively seek to make space for Indigenous people in the modern world. Bennett reveals that women find their attempts at revitalization to be personally empowering, even when their communities do not support them.
This book provides vocabulary, conversation tips, language learning tips, and discussion activities to help students debate on a wide variety of fairly non-controversial topics, from dining in or eating out, using the phone or e-mail, type A or type B, fiction or non-fiction, love at first sight or love over time, to diet or exercise.
Along with the discussion activities, the book contains some reading, writing, and vocabulary activities.
Each of the 30 units includes:
pre-debate discussion questions
new vocabulary words
a reading that outlines both sides of the debate
comprehension questions
discussion activities that include expressions used in debate-related speech acts and those pertaining to language learning
writing assignments
idiom and vocabulary review.
Geoffrey K. Pullum's writings began as columns in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory in 1983. For six years, in almost every issue, under the banner "TOPIC. . .COMMENT," he published a captivating mélange of commentary, criticism, satire, whimsy, and fiction. Those columns are reproduced here—almost exactly as his friends and colleagues originally warned him not to publish them—along with new material including a foreword by James D. McCawley, a prologue, and a new introduction to each of these clever pieces. Whether making a sneak attack on some sacred cow, delivering a tongue-in-cheek protest against current standards, or supplying a caustic review of some recent development, Pullum remains in touch with serious concerns about language and society. At the same time, he reminds the reader not to take linguistics too seriously all of the time.
Pullum will take you on an excursion into the wild and untamed fringes of linguistics. Among the unusual encounters in store are a conversation between Star Trek's Commander Spock and three real earth linguists, the strange tale of the author's imprisonment for embezzling funds from the Campaign for Typographical Freedom, a harrowing account of a day in the research life of four unhappy grammarians, and the true story of how a monograph on syntax was suppressed because the examples were judged to be libelous. You will also find a volley of humorous broadsides aimed at dishonest attributional practices, meddlesome copy editors, mathematical incompetence, and "cracker-barrel philosophy of science." These learned and witty pieces will delight anyone who is fascinated by the quirks of language and linguists.
What a big brain we have for all the small talk we make. It's an evolutionary riddle that at long last makes sense in this intriguing book about what gossip has done for our talkative species. Psychologist Robin Dunbar looks at gossip as an instrument of social order and cohesion--much like the endless grooming with which our primate cousins tend to their social relationships.
Apes and monkeys, humanity's closest kin, differ from other animals in the intensity of these relationships. All their grooming is not so much about hygiene as it is about cementing bonds, making friends, and influencing fellow primates. But for early humans, grooming as a way to social success posed a problem: given their large social groups of 150 or so, our earliest ancestors would have had to spend almost half their time grooming one another--an impossible burden. What Dunbar suggests--and his research, whether in the realm of primatology or in that of gossip, confirms--is that humans developed language to serve the same purpose, but far more efficiently. It seems there is nothing idle about chatter, which holds together a diverse, dynamic group--whether of hunter-gatherers, soldiers, or workmates.
Anthropologists have long assumed that language developed in relationships among males during activities such as hunting. Dunbar's original and extremely interesting studies suggest otherwise: that language in fact evolved in response to our need to keep up to date with friends and family. We needed conversation to stay in touch, and we still need it in ways that will not be satisfied by teleconferencing, email, or any other communication technology. As Dunbar shows, the impersonal world of cyberspace will not fulfill our primordial need for face-to-face contact.
From the nit-picking of chimpanzees to our chats at coffee break, from neuroscience to paleoanthropology, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language offers a provocative view of what makes us human, what holds us together, and what sets us apart.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press