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Friday, January 5, 2024

Call for Papers: Special Issue on “Kindness in Higher Education: Fostering the Human(e) Element of Teaching and Learning” - Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching (ISSN 2591-801X) (Academic Journal - Special Issue)



Introduction

The Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching (JALT) is pleased to announce a forthcoming special issue on “Kindness in Higher Education: Fostering the Human(e) Element of Teaching and Learning”.

This issue aims to explore the essential aspects of Garrison’s (2016) Community of Inquiry model, with a specific focus on the three forms of ‘presence’: social, cognitive, and teaching. We seek to investigate how these elements play a pivotal role in fostering productive and meaningful learning experiences in diverse higher education settings while embracing and nurturing the humane aspect of education.

Theme and Scope
As the landscape of higher education undergoes a transition back to full on-campus, online, and hybrid teaching environments, the challenge of cultivating purposeful pedagogies, enhancing student engagement, and implementing authentic assessment methodologies becomes ever more critical. This special issue is designed to synthesise contemporary research, insightful analysis, debates, and provocations centred around the theme of fostering humane, socially present learning environments.


Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
  •  Social presence and learning outcomes: Exploring the impact of social presence on student engagement, collaboration, and learning outcomes in various higher education settings.
  •  Cognitive presence and pedagogical strategies: Investigating the relationship between cognitive presence and effective pedagogical approaches that promote deep learning and critical thinking.
  • Facilitating teaching presence in hybrid and online settings: Examining the role of teaching presence in hybrid and online courses, and its impact on the quality of instruction and student learning experiences.
  •  Authentic assessment techniques: Presenting innovative assessment methods that align with authentic learning experiences, promoting a deeper understanding of course content.
  •  Humanising learning environments: Discussing strategies for creating inclusive and empathetic learning spaces that value and respect individual learner identities and experiences.
  •  Student perspectives on social and cognitive presence: Inquiring into students’ perspectives on the importance of social and cognitive presence in their learning journey.
  •  Leadership in higher education and learning environment design: Analysing the role of institutional leaders in fostering socially and cognitively rich learning settings.

Submission Guidelines

We invite submissions from teaching practitioners, academic scholars, leaders in higher education, and graduate research students. Manuscripts should be original and unpublished works adhering to the JALT’s guidelines for authors and the article template.


Please ensure that your submission addresses the theme and scope of the special issue. All manuscripts will undergo a rigorous double-blind peer-review process to ensure the highest quality and relevance of the published articles.


Important Dates
  • Submission of full article due – Monday 8th January 2024
  • Editorial comments/peer review of article due – Monday 12th February 2024 ? Submission of final article due – Monday 6th May 2024
  •  Expected publication – mid-June 2024

Submission Process & Article Classification
All submissions should be done electronically via the dedicated Online Submission Form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdfSfbEz2tZrzFrwW0J8BQy3udmR2UzAbemAX1XK4hlxDFlRw/viewform?usp=sharing) following the indicated instructions no later than Monday 8th January 2024. You will be required to upload your paper in a single Word file (up to 3MB in size). Please rename your file as ‘JALT Kindness Special Issue_Your Full Name’ prior to submission. The types of submissions that are eligible for consideration in this special issue include:
  •  Research and review articles (4,000 to 8,000 words)
  •  Brief articles (1,000 to 3,000 words)
  • Case studies and good practice examples (3,000 to 6,000 words)
  • Educational technology reviews
  •  Book reviews
  • Other types may be considered. Please email Dr Fiona Tang for further discussion.

Guest Editors (listed alphabetically by last name)
Professor Tania Aspland, Kaplan Australia and New Zealand/Co Editor-in-Chief of JALT Vanessa Stafford, Kaplan Business School Australia
Dr Fiona Tang, Kaplan Business School Australia
Dr Shanthy Thuraisingham, Kaplan Business School Australia

Inquiries
For any inquiries or further information regarding the special issue, please contact Dr Fiona Tang at fiona.tang@kbs.edu.au

References
Garrison, D. R. (2016). E-learning in the 21st century: A community of inquiry framework for research and practice. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315667263



Dr Fiona Tang

Call for Articles on The reception of literary works: between translation and paratext - Dec 2024



Poli-femo n. 28

The reception of literary works: between translation and paratext

In a complex and stratified reflection on the reception of a literary work, the role of translation occupies a central position: it often represents a first encounter with foreign literature for the reader. Analysed from the perspective of literary reception, the study of translation may be conceived as a space for linguistic, literary and historical analysis of the phenomenon of translation itself, as the analytical models developed by the group of scholars of the Tel Aviv School, especially during the 1970s, serve to remind us.
We must also consider that in the general space in which the reception of the translated text takes place, we can observe highly heterogeneous factors that affect the work from perspectives that are more or less closely related to it: there are title changes, the publication of shortened editions, and editions in translation for a young audience of works that were originally written for an adult audience. These choices have repercussions on the act of translating and on the reflections it generates on literary and aesthetic issues - from lexical contributions to stylistic changes, through genre crossings from a source literary tradition to a target literary tradition - as well as on socio-cultural issues.
This stratified and heterogeneous overview also requires the consideration of other aspects through which the publishing phenomenon and the dissemination of literary works are explored. This means focusing on phenomena and aspects of the publishing sector, but also of the commercial, material or strictly intellectual spheres, aimed at influencing, conditioning and orienting the reading and 'consumption' of literary works through their translation. These are aspects that support the translation with a parallel, accompanying discourse, which feeds the so-called paratext, through which multiple editorial, authorial, critical, and translation issues can be expressed.
If, on the one hand, every correct interpretative practice reminds us that the translated work does not enjoy a fully autonomous status because it is linked to a source text from which it is inseparable, on the other hand, the palimpsestic nature of the accompanying paratext, rich in accessory information that hybridises the translated work, is configured as a privileged literary space for the construction of a cultural reading of the translated work, an aspect that determines the manner of its reception.
Within this multifaceted and dialectic scenario, the reception of the translated literary work is the product of nodal passages, ranging from interlinguistic transposition to cultural transition, to the representation of what is perceived as "other", in the long-distance dialogue established between the imaginaries of reception and the image of the "other" of which the translated work is the symbol and expression. These are operations that, in fact, in their fulfilment, attest to the at least dual, truly hybrid nature of the literary work in translation, a hybrid nature that can be found in the meshes of the translation itself as well as in the entire paratext accompanying it, as Gérard Genette reminds us in his renowned founding study on this subject.

Reflecting on all this will make it possible to define and position a proposal for reflection on the reception of literary works, understood both as a continuation of the studies and practice of translation, and as a broader cultural reading project, in which, thanks to the voices of the paratext, we find the signs - linguistic, aesthetic, imagological - of the mentalities, ideas, and cultural universes that come into contact in different historical periods and which, through this complex system of voices, converse and produce effects at a textual level.

Topics and issues that may be addressed include:

o The material conditions of the production and dissemination of a translation: ideology, censorship, imagery
o Literary and aesthetic issues: cultural terminology, changes in style, changes in genre
o Reception and image of the "other" in the authorial paratexts of translated texts
o Editorial paratexts and communication strategies of translated texts
o Voices in translated texts: authors, translators, critics, graphic designers, as forms of authorial hybridity
o Plasticity, visual paratextuality and literary reception
o Paratextuality: between text and discourse
o Linguistic and cultural transitions in the translation process: forms of referential hybridity
o Reception of the foreign intertext as a form of poetic hybridity
o Specialist journals, literary blogs, social media and their role in the dissemination and reception of translated texts

Further proposals for study on the subject put forward by those intending to collaborate in the publication will be seriously examined by the Scientific Committee, in order to widen the field of exploration undertaken in this issue of the Magazine. Contributions will be accepted in Italian, English and French.
To this end, the Editorial Board proposes the following deadlines: a preliminary and essential step is to send an abstract (min.10/max.20 lines), keywords and a brief curriculum vitae of the proposer, to redazione.polifemo@iulm.it by 15 March 2024 (absolute deadline).
Authors will receive confirmation of the acceptance of their contributions from the Editorial Office by 25 March 2024.
The deadline for submitting contributions is 15 June 2024.
All contributions will be subject to double blind peer review. After passing the peer-review phase, the contributions that will be accepted must be no longer than 35,000 characters in length, including spaces and footnotes.
The issue, edited by Prof. Paolo Proietti and Prof. Giovanna Zaganelli, will be published in December 2024.



CALL FOR BOOK PROPOSALS: Routledge Book Series – Academics, Politics and Society in the Post-Covid World-

 The biomedical crisis of COVID-19 has opened up a floodgate for other kinds of crises like communal violence, racial discrimination, geographical hierarchies, socio-political hegemonies, academic exclusivities, etc. These crises are catalyzing massive geo-political shifts of the various epistemological and ontological frameworks of knowledge production across the globe. The shifts are bound to influence patterns of thinking and doing in a post-COVID era. This book series will focus on various forms of academic, social and political transformations that are expected to take place in a, post-COVID world, with respect to the various crises. The advent of COVID-19, has resulted in major shifts affecting pedagogical frameworks, curricular structures, institutional infrastructures, evaluation patterns, international policies, political ethics, communal relations, gender existence, racial connotations, mental health and physical well-being. These are transformations that will continue to take place in a post-COVID era. Keeping these shifting scenarios at the forefront, this book series will critically analyze various forms of transformation that take place in academic, social and political systems across the globe.

Possible Themes:

With respect to the questions, this book series on the post-COVID world looks forward to receive proposals for monographs on the following (not limited to) thematic dimensions:

•          Pedagogical Frameworks

•          Curricular Structures

•          Institutional Infrastructures

•          Evaluation Patterns

•          Digitization/Non-Digitization

•          Epistemological Inclusivity

•          Anti-Racism

•          International Relations and Exchanges

•          New forms of Solidarities

•          New forms of Fragmentations

•          Internal and International Policy Making

•          Mental Health and Physical Wellbeing

•          Equity and Sustainability (educational, social, environmental, etc.)

•          Social and Cognitive Justice

•          Paradigm Shifts

Important Points to be kept in Mind by the Authors:

a.      The authors are encouraged to send proposals for short as well as long monographs.

b.      The monographs should be written between 40,000 (minimum word limit) and 1,00,000 words (maximum word limit).

c.       There are no fixed deadlines (proposals to be received on a rolling basis).

d.      Kindly send the proposal form (to be sent over email to the interested authors), CV (not more than 5 pages) and a sample chapter to the following email ids: 

Prof. Lewis Gordon (lewisgordon@gmail.com), 

Prof. Rozena Maart (rozmaart@gmail.com), 

Dr. Epifania Amoo-Adare (eamooadare@gmail.com

Dr. Sayan Dey (sayandey89@yahoo.com). 

All queries and proposals should be sent to all the email ids. 

Call for Chapters: The Multiverse in Popular Culture - University Press of Kansas

 




The University Press of Kansas has expressed interest in publishing a book of essays about representations of the multiverse in popular culture.  The theory of the multiverse – the premise that our known universe if merely one iteration of an infinite number of alternate universes – has recently emerged from scientific obscurity to become a common trope of popular fiction.  Everything Everywhere All at Once won 2022’s Academy Award for Best Picture, multiversal timelines are a central feature of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and representations of parallel realities in television shows such as SlidersFringeDr. Who, and Rick & Morty have familiarized this radical concept for mass-audiences.  The emergent popularity of the multiverse as a narrative device resonates with critical theories about the "worldmaking" of fiction, the postmodern dissolution of metanarratives, and Deleuzian networks of multiplicity, and it is informed by literary precedents in Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, and Italo Calvino.  From a political perspective, multiverse narratives reflect the fractured reality of American political discourse, a condition acknowledged in references to “the Fox News Cinematic Universe” and the Trumpiverse.  The multiverse also reflects the ontology of the Internet, with its countless variations on a single meme, which sometimes disappear or are retroactively rewritten, or that even wobble into uncanny real-world instantiations.  The Internet provides a kind of parallel reality that we all have one foot in all of the time, and our daily exposure to this disruptive state of being certainly influences contemporary ontologies.  Narrative itself, with its long history of representing parallel realities and also of essentially being a parallel reality, may provide the most compelling expressions of these ontologies, as well as the most promising insights about how to navigate and communicate across them. 

We seek proposals for chapters that discuss representations of the multiverse in popular culture.  We particularly welcome close readings of individual films, television episodes, graphic novels, online videos, or other popular texts that address the political, cultural, and/or philosophical implications of specific representations of the multiverse.

Please submit 300-word chapter proposals to Randy Laist at rlaist@bridgeport.edu by February 29, 2024.

Contact Information

Randy Laist

University of Bridgeport

rlaist@bridgeport.edu

Contact Email
rlaist@bridgeport.edu

Call For Book Chapters: Beyond Networks of Domination: Rethinking Machinic Media, Digitality & Cinema of our Times

 Editors: Ananya Roy Pratihar(IMIS,Bhubaneswar), Saswat Samay Das (IIT, Kharagpur) & Shashibhushan Nayak(GP Nayagarh)

The biopolitical schemas for restructuring machinic networks of Media, Digital, and cinema do not stand as productive mimicries of mediations prerequisite for effecting an anthropological clearing (with Cracks, throws and blows, as Sloterdjik puts it) or grafting some kind of symbolic unity on chaotic materiality. Rather, such schemas act as ambivalent double-pincered mechanisms, turning loose incessant networked flows on the one hand, only to reduce them to domesticable or governable totalities on the other. If Deleuze & Guattari show how such networks lead to the creation of a control or surveillance society committed to colonizing what Husserl calls Lebenswelt (the life world), reducing its pulsations to algorithmic dividuals, Donna Haraway and Manuel Castells show how an interplay between desiring networks of media, digitality and cinema leads to the production of what they call informatics of domination when it is coupled with biopolitical agendas. Thinkers such as Nancy Fraser indicate how progressive networks in neoliberal societies bear a Janus face, hiding underneath their progressive orientation a regressive economy of ideas, opening up an uncompromising field of dialectical contradictions that turns networked flows, passages, archipelagos and routes to dispositif or worse dead ends.

However, while tracing the historical genesis of networks to colonialism or stressing their subsequent bio-politicization, materialist thinkers such as Deleuze & Guattari, Haraway, Braidotti, or Katherine Hayles do not posit de-essentialized expressions of networks as a kind of insidious metaphysical grammar. Rather, they view networks as actual expressions of machinic materiality and posit faith in the inter-related dynamism of networks to lead humanity out of the morass that humanist reductive mediation of such dynamism leads us to. Deleuze and Guattari turn towards stressing the deterritorializing capacity of networks. The stress they put on the need for finding new weapons of resistance against the biopolitical manipulation of networks only supplements this capacity, for with their conviction that even primary assemblages such as signs or senses arise out of the workings of an abstract machine immanent to these assemblages, they seem least inclined towards indicating that such weapons needs to be dialectically opposed to networks and may be used to arrive at a utopian anthropological clearing beyond them. As Guattari says, "There are material machines and immaterial machines, technical machines and imaginary machines, desiring machines and abstract machines, machine inside the machine, nested like fractals…Guattari advocates viewing machines in their complex totality in all their (networked) avatars and resists attempts to essentialize them or the assemblages they compose. 

Thinkers such as Latour stress the necessity of having broader, bigger and more effective networks comprised of human and non-human actants to release us from the humanist organization of society that leads us to deadlocks. Haraway rethinks the clarion call by Deleuze to find new weapons of resistance only to put forward the machinic and networked figure of Cyborg as the new war machine, a machinic assemblage that she calls the cat’s cradle, which synthesizes the organic and the non-organic, the machine & the body and the physical and the non-physical.

Similarly, thinkers such as Patricia Pisters foreground the machinic orientation of minor films. They view such orientation as nurturing the potential to both abolish clichés, dullness, and normative subjectivation and transform subjects puppeteered by representationalist populist cinema into what they call super-jects who might bear the potential to create a new world order.

Is then becoming a pure network, nodes of machinic connections or Haraway’s string figures, the only rejoinder against the biopolitical restructuration of Networks? One needs to remember that networked movements such as the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement and most recently, the Gezi Park protests in Turkey have failed to bring about the required shift, let alone create fresh ethical bindings between the chaotic multitudes and that many social commentaries claim that such networked protests have large bark, but no bite.

However, then, is there any alternative to combating networks with networks, pitting open-ended ecosophical networks against crampy and claustrophobic networks of neoliberalism, with the redundancy of classical Marxist struggle against the biopolitical machinery? How does critical disclosure of schizoanalytic desire to blur the libidinal and political economy divide help us, with Berardi and Fisher putting forward such ampliative networks as effective tools, meant both for mapping and effecting a revolutionary breakthrough, a Kairos, in relation to the current scenario? With experimentations in media, digitality and cinema constituting the liminal zone of nomad science, will creating a Spherological unity among such sciences effect a deterritorializing rupture with the current predicament. With creative thinking making way for the untimely, can we have an alternative mechanism of resistance to grassroot the flows, as Manuel Castells puts it?

We invite papers that could both extend and critique the experimental media, digitality and cinema of our times. Simultaneously, we also need papers that reflect the potential for reinventing the schizoanalytic or experimental mode of media, digitality and cinema in order to do justice to Deleuze’s clarion call for finding new weapons of resistance.

Submissions

Abstracts of about 200 words, including six keywords, a 50-word bio-note, institutional affiliation, and contact details, should be emailed by 01 March 2024 to shashienglish@gmail.com as a single MS Word document attachment.

Chapter requirements: A chapter should be 4000-5000 words, including footnotes and bibliography adhering to the MLA 9th edition.

Important Dates:

Deadline for abstract submission: 01 March 2024

Abstract selection notification: 30 March 2024

Complete Paper Submission: 01 October 2024

Contact Information

Dr. Shashibhusan Nayak

MLA Bibliography Fellow

Contact Email
shashienglish@gmail.com