SAGE Podcast

While transnationalism has emerged as a growing area of interest in Writing Studies, the field has not fully examined how migrants' movement across national borders shapes their literacy practices. This article offers one answer to this question by reporting on an ethnographic study of the transnational religious literacies of a community of undocumented Brazilian immigrants in a former mill town in Massachusetts. A grounded theory analysis of (a) participants' accounts of their literacy experiences before and after migration, (b) their writing, and (c) ethnographic observations reveals the following: As participants crossed a border and were excluded from state documentary projects, they began to write within other literacy institutions, namely, transnational churches, that have historically documented subjects and whose reach extends across national borders. The author concludes that as the field of Writing Studies continues to explore transnational literacies, it would do well to take into account the materiality of national borders, which can shape possibilities for written communication in a global context.

Judith Clair, Boston College, interviews Sandra Waddock, Boston College, about her article, "We Are All Stakeholders of Gaia: A Normative Perspective on Stakeholder Thinking."

Glenn Withiam talks to Ioannis Pantelidis about his article, "Electronic Meal Experience: A Content Analysis of Online Restaurant Comments" published in the Nov 2010 issue of Cornell Hospitality Quarterly.

The theory and practice of corporate communication is usually driven by other disciplinary concerns than the field of organizational communication. However, its particular mind-set focusing on wholeness and consistency in corporate messages increasingly influence the domain of contemporary organizational communication as well. We provide a formative and critical review of research on corporate communication as a platform for highlighting crucial intersections with select research traditions in organizational communication to argue for a greater integration between these two areas of research. Following this review, we relax the assumptions underlying traditional corporate communication research and show how these dimensions interact in organizational and communication analysis, thus, demonstrating the potential for a greater cross-fertilization between the two areas of research. This cross-fertilization, as we will illustrate, enriches the theorization of corporate and organizational communication and may better link micro- and macro level analyses.

Mark Wilson, Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, gave the Messick Memorial Lecture on Measurement Models at the 2006 Language Testing Research Colloquium. The paper is published in issue 28(4) of Language Testing, and Mark joins us on Language Testing Bytes to talk to us about his research in this field.

In this podcast, Lisa Archibald talks about her two papers on working memory and language impairments, both published in 27/3 of Child Language Teaching and Therapy.

Informally recognized by the tribal council in 1821, the 86-character Cherokee writing system invented by Sequoyah was learned in manuscript form and became widely used by the Cherokee within the span of a few years. In 1827, Samuel Worcester standardized the arrangement of characters and print designs in ways that differed from Sequoyah's original arrangement of characters. Using Worcester's arrangement as their sole source of evidence, however, scholars and Cherokee language learners have misunderstood the syllabary by viewing it through an alphabetic lens. Drawing on 5 years of ethnohistorical research, this article opens with a brief history of Sequoyah's invention to show the ways Worcester's rearrangement bent the Cherokee writing system to the orthographic rules of the Latin alphabet, thus obscuring the instrumental logics of the original script. Next, a linguistic analysis of the Cherokee writing system is presented in an effort to recover its instrumental workings. Adding a new perspective to research on American literacy histories in general and scholarship on the Cherokee syllabary in particular, the author argues that the Cherokee language demands a writing system uniquely Cherokee, one practiced outside of an alphabetic influence and capable of representing underlying meaning and sound with each character.

In this podcast, Editor Julia Muennich Cowell discusses the contents of the Oct 2011 issue of The Journal of School Nursing.

Editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists speaking about the history of the journal and the Doomsday Clock

Michael Keaney interviews Doug Dowd about his article, "What is Coming Around the Corner?"

The development of the Internet and computer-mediated communications has fostered the growth of a wide range of deviant sexual behaviors along with deviant subcultures that support and approve of these behaviors. Some of these practices pose little risk to public safety, though acts such as pedophilia and the creation and distribution of child pornography have significant negative ramifications for victims. A growing literature has examined the function of the Internet for child pornography distribution, social networks of pedophiles, and tactics of child solicitation. Few, however, have explored the utility of the Internet to develop a subculture of pedophiles and its role in fostering attitudes and justifications for relationships with children. This study will explore the subcultural norms and enculturation of the pedophile community using a qualitative analysis of five Web forums run by and for pedophiles. The findings suggest that the values of the pedophile culture support and encourage emotional and, in some cases, sexual relationships with boys and girls in virtual and real settings. Implications for the study of pedophiles and the role of the Internet are explored.

In this podcast, Dr Aubyn Stahmer discusses her research (published in Autism: 2011, volume 15, issue 5) on social inclusion and early intervention with toddlers in a pre-school community program (hosted by Dr Laura Crane)

Ambivalent sexism theory was incubated during a series of phone conversations, a scouting visit, and some pilot testing before Peter arrived at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (then Susan's home institution) for the 1993–1994 academic year. We had already started work on our new, theory-based measure (a year was too short to start and complete such a project). Had we known that others had already begun constructing contemporary sexism scales (including Janet Swim, with whom Peter had gone to graduate school at the University of Minnesota, and Rupert Brown, whom Susan knew from trips to Europe), we might never have pursued the course we took. In this case, ignorance was an advantage.

In this podcast, guest editors Joy Stackhouse and Jannet Wright talk about their special issue in 27/2 of Child Language Teaching and Therapy on evaluating intervention and service provision in schools for children with speech, language and communication needs.

This study investigates the prediction accuracy of anticipatory pupil dilation responses in humans prior to the random presentation of alerting or neutral sounds. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that the autonomous nervous system may react prior to the presentation of random stimuli. A total of 80 participants, who were matched according to gender to take into account individual differences, were asked to listen to a random sequence of 10 neutral and 10 alerting sounds. Their pupil dilation was continuously recorded and the diameter of their pupils was used to predict the category of sound, alerting, or neutral. The pupil dilation of both males and females predicted alerting sounds approximately 10% more accurately than would be expected by chance, whereas neutral sounds were predicted at the chance level. This result was confirmed using a frequentist and a Bayesian statistical approach. Following the results of the study, practical and theoretical implications of these results are discussed.