A Story of Love and Debt: The Give and the Take of Linguistic Fieldwork

When a linguist goes into the field to work with a previously undescribed language, they aim at discovering what the language is like. What we linguists take away is knowledge—reflected in our publications, presentations and scholarly reputation. What we also get is the feeling of love for the languages and for the people, and the sense of indebtedness for what we learn and get given. The language communities expect us to produce dictionaries, story books and pedagogical materials. Academia and the communities place different expectations on linguists engaged in fieldwork research. I examine these, using the example of my own fieldwork with the Tariana, an Arawak-speaking group in the multilingual area of the Vaupés River Basin in north-west Amazonia (Brazil). The focus of the paper is a pedagogical workshop jointly run by myself with my Tariana-speaking adopted family.     

Towards a Radical Body Positive

Under the auspices of the “body positive movement” there has, in recent years, been a proliferation of websites dedicated to nurturing bodily acceptance. Responding to the barrage of media images reflecting a narrow bodily ideal, the movement and its related sites provide a space to showcase bodies of all shapes and sizes. There has already been significant engagement with the question of whether these sites are helpful or harmful, asking whether they fulfill their mission of combating the very narrow definition of the ideal body with which we are constantly bombarded. Yet this project addresses an aspect of these sites that is less readily interrogated—the kinds of bodily performances actually facilitated. Looking at three US-based “body positive” websites, this work explores how the body is both conceptualized and enacted on these sites and examines how narratives of authenticity, identity, and revelation are negotiated when the body is performed and disseminated online. What it finds is that body positivity more closely mirrors than challenges a neoliberal paradigm of bodily compliance. It then proposes a way body positivity might be reimagined as a more radical project than its current state.     

The woman writer's body: Multiplicity,neoliberalism, and feminist resistance

What goes behind the scene of a woman writer's writing process? Beneath shiny finished writing products lies an arduous writing process often remain unseen to readers. The article makes visible two women writers' bodies and our embodied writing experiences through an intersectional feminist lens. Writer One is a Singapore-born, ethnic Chinese, queer migrant woman academic residing in Australia with her long-term partner. Writer Two is an England-born, Australian-British dual citizen, white heterosexual married mother of young twin children ready to kick start her academic career after her recent PhD conferment. Writer One with her fibromyalgic, traumatized, and othered bodies and Writer Two with her vulvodynia, mothering, and gendered bodies write themselves, their bodies and embodied writing experiences into existence in this article. Using autoethnographic accounts, they discuss how their multiple, chronically ill, and pained bodies influence their writing process and choice of writing topics. Specifically, they reveal how their bodies negotiate the tension between neoliberal demands imposed on their bodies and their feminist resistance efforts against constrictive forces in the knowledge production economy. Using this piece of writing as feminist resistance, they seek to reject dominant discourses, hold space, inscribe their own narratives, and call for collective feminist action with fellow women writers.     

Cognitive function in toddlers with congenital heart disease: The impact of a stimulating home environment

Infants born with congenital heart disease (CHD) are at increased risk of neurodevelopmental difficulties in childhood. The extent to which perioperative factors, cardiac physiology, brain injury severity, socioeconomic status, and home environment influence early neurodevelopment is not clear. Sixty-nine newborns with CHD were recruited from St Thomas’ Hospital. Infants underwent presurgical magnetic resonance imaging on a 3-Tesla scanner situated on the neonatal unit. At 22 months, children completed the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development-3rd edition and parents completed the cognitively stimulating parenting scale to assess cognitive stimulation at home. Level of maternal education and total annual household income were also collected. Hospital records were reviewed to calculate days on the intensive care unit post-surgery, time on bypass during surgery, and days to corrective or definitive palliative surgical intervention. In the final analysis of 56 infants, higher scores on the cognitively stimulating parenting scale were associated with higher cognitive scores at age 22 months, correcting for gestational age at birth, sex, and maternal education. There were no relationships between outcome scores and clinical factors; socioeconomic status; or brain injury severity. Supporting parents to provide a stimulating home environment for children may promote cognitive development in this high-risk population.     

Development and validation of the Early Executive Functions Questionnaire: A carer-administered measure of Executive Functions suitable for 9- to 30-month-olds

Executive functions (EFs) enable us to control our attention and behavior in order to set and work toward goals. Strong EF skills are linked to better academic performance, and greater health, wealth, and happiness in later life. Research into EF development has been hampered by a lack of scalable measures suitable for infancy through to toddlerhood. The 31-item Early Executive Functions Questionnaire (EEFQ) complements temperament measures by targeting cognitive and regulatory capabilities. Exploratory Factor Analysis (n = 486 8- to 30-month-olds) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (n = 317 9- to 30-month-olds) indicate Inhibitory Control, Flexibility, and Working Memory items load onto a common “Cognitive Executive Function (CEF)” factor, while Regulation items do not. The CEF factor shows strong factorial measurement invariance for sex, and partial strong factorial measurement invariance for age. CEF and Regulation scores show limited floor and ceiling effects, good internal consistency, short-term stability, and convergent validity with carer-report measures of attentional control. The EEFQ is sensitive to developmental change. Results indicate that the widely overlooked period between late infancy and early toddlerhood may be a sensitive period for EF development. The low-resource demands of the EEFQ afford the possibility to study emergent EFs at scale; opening up new opportunities in basic developmental and intervention research.     

Globalisation and the ‘Internal Alchemy’ in Chinese Martial Arts:The Transmission of Taijiquan to Britain

Taijiquan (t’ai chi ch’uan) is a Chinese martial art that has grown substantially in popularity and global reach since the mid-twentieth century. Known as an ‘internal’ martial art that combines combat techniques with meditation and longevity practices, it has influenced, and been influenced by, the global dissemination of Chinese medical and therapeutic techniques. Like other martial arts, its pedagogy and techniques were changed significantly in early twentieth century China and later during the Cultural Revolution, in line with ideals of physical fitness as a tool for social reform and nation building. In the mid-twentieth century, taijiquan migrated West, becoming aligned in the 1960s and 1970s with Western interest in holistic health, Asian meditative systems and Chinese martial arts, but its martial techniques were little known until the 1980s and 1990s. British taijiquan illustrates the complex outcomes of globalisation processes, resulting in the establishment of different hybrids. There is evidence of the transmission of simplified systems promoted by the Chinese government; of innovative adaptations, developed to suit Western needs; and practices that appear to have survived suppression in mainland China, to be reconfigured in the West. These varied outcomes have been enabled by diverse channels of transmission and by colonial relationships, for example between Britain and Hong Kong, whilst the opening of mainland China in the 1980s has added further exchanges and complexities. In Britain (as in China), at the start of the twenty-first century, taijiquan is mostly practiced with therapeutic and meditative aims, and its naturalistic perspective on human well-being and ageing resonates with current debates in preventative medicine and public health. As a ‘traditional’ martial art, taijiquan has a less predictable future, which will be influenced by the degree to which it engages with the competitive sporting arena of official Chinese wushu (martial arts) and the extent to which martial arts become subject to formal regulation. The future identity of taijiquan will depend on the ways that technical and cultural control is negotiated between continents and on the interest shown by the global scientific community in the value of taijiquan for understanding health and well-being.     

Divorce and Adult Psychological Well‐Being: Clarifying the Role of Gender and Child Age

Substantial evidence indicates that marital dissolution has negative consequences for adult well‐being. Because most research focuses on the average consequences of divorce, we know very little about factors that moderate this association. The present study tests the hypothesis that the effects of marital dissolution on adult well‐being are greatest for those with young children in the home at the time of marital dissolution. Analysis of data from the National Survey of Families and Households (N= 4,811 men and women married at the baseline interview) supports this hypothesis, especially among women. For women without young children, marital dissolution appears to have few negative consequences for psychological well‐being. Differential exposure to secondary stressors that accompany marital dissolution partly explains these patterns.     

Work–Life,Diversity and Intersectionality: A Critical Review and Research Agenda

Work–life issues have important implications at both organizational and individual levels. This paper provides a critical review of the work–life literature from 1990 onwards through the lens of diversity, with a particular focus on disparities of power induced by methodological and conceptual framings of work and life. The review seeks to answer the following questions: What are the gaps and omissions in the work–life research? How may they be overcome? To answer these questions, the review scrutinizes blind spots in the treatment of life, diversity and power in work–life research in both positivist and critical scholarship. In order to transcend the blind spots in positivist and critical work–life research, the review argues the case for an intersectional approach which captures the changing realities of family and workforce through the lens of diversity and intersectionality. The theoretical contribution is threefold: first, the review demonstrates that contemporary framing of life in the work–life literature should be expanded to cover aspects of life beyond domestic life. Second, the review explains why and how other strands of diversity than gender also manifest as salient causes of difference in experiences of the work–life interface. Third, the review reveals that social and historical context has more explanatory power in work–life dynamics than the micro‐individual level of explanations. Work–life literature should capture the dynamism in these contexts. The paper also provides a set of useful recommendations to capture and operationalize methodological and theoretical changes required in the work–life literature.