Critical Reading (critical + reading)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Searching for Belonging , An Analytical Framework

GEOGRAPHY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2010
Marco Antonsich
Belonging is a notion both vaguely defined and ill-theorized. Scholars in various social disciplines often take this notion for granted, as if its meaning is somewhat self-explanatory. Others tend to equate it with the notion of identity, citizenship, or both. By relying on a critical reading of an extensive literature across academic disciplines, this study aims to offer an analytical framework for the study of belonging. I argue that belonging should be analyzed both as a personal, intimate, feeling of being ,at home' in a place (place-belongingness) and as a discursive resource that constructs, claims, justifies, or resists forms of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion (politics of belonging). The risk of focusing only on one of these two dimensions is to fall in the trap of either a socially de-contextualized individualism or an all-encompassing social(izing) discourse. The open question is whether the increasing cultural and ethnic diversification of contemporary societies can lead to the formation of communities of belonging beyond communities of identity. [source]


Karl Barth on the Ascension: An Appreciation and Critique

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, Issue 2 2000
Douglas Farrow
This exposition of Barth's doctrine of the ascension in Volume IV of the Church Dogmatics,,one of the major works of ascension theology', begins by highlighting some central themes in representative patristic and modern discussions of the ascension and then provides a close and critical reading of the Dogmatics. Of special interest are questions regarding Barth's understanding of the specificity of the Christ-event, the structure of his doctrine of reconciliation, the relation of ontology and soteriology, and the function of the doctrine of the ascension in a thoroughly a posteriori theology. [source]


Exposing the ,Second Text' of Maps of the Net

JOURNAL OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION, Issue 4 2000
Martin Dodge
Maps have long been recognized as important and powerful modes of visual communication. In this paper we examine critically maps which are being produced to represent and promote information and communication technologies and the use of cyberspace. Drawing on the approach of map deconstruction we attempt to read and expose the ,second text' of maps of the Net. As such, we examine in detail a number of maps that display, with varying degrees of subtlety, the ideological agendas of cyberboosterism and techno-utopianism of their creators. A critical reading of these maps is important because they are widely reproduced and consumed on the Internet, in business and governmental reports, and in the popular press, all too often without a detailed consideration of the deliberate and intended messages being communicated. As we illustrate, many of these maps not only promote certain ideological messages but are often also poor in terms of cartographic design, with many containing serious ecological fallacies. We restrict our analyses to maps at the global scale. [source]


An Application of Score Equity Assessment: Invariance of Linkage of New SAT® to Old SAT Across Gender Groups

JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL MEASUREMENT, Issue 2 2006
Jinghua Liu
The College Board's SAT® data are used to illustrate how the score equity assessment (SEA) can help inform the program about equatability. SEA is used to examine whether the content change(s) to the revised new SAT result in differential linking functions across gender groups. Results of population sensitivity analyses are reported on the linkage of the new SAT critical reading (CR) prototype to an old SAT verbal (OV). Based on the criteria used in this study, population invariance was achieved with respect to gender groups. [source]


In These Days of Female Evangelists and Hallelujah Lasses: Women Preachers and the Redefinition of Gender Roles in the Churches in Late Nineteenth-Century Australia

JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY, Issue 1 2002
Shurlee Swain
The presence of two women amongst the seventeen international revivalists who visited Australia in the period 1863 and 1912 has been seen as unremarkable by religious historians, or read as evidence that the Christian churches were outside, or perhaps even in advance of, the nineteenth-century struggle for women's rights. However, only representations of their performance remain, representations which, this article argues, attempted to normalize both their presence and their message. A more critical reading of contemporary reports would suggest that the way in which female evangelists were reported should be seen as intrinsic to the attempt by church leaders to contain and control women's expanding role. The success of their endeavours rendered female evangelists largely invisible but the lengths to which they went to discount the challenge the female evangelists mounted to conventional constructions of gender, provide evidence of its power. [source]


The Story Catches You and You Fall Down: Tragedy, Ethnography, and "Cultural Competence"

MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2003
Janelle S. Taylor
Anne Fadiman 's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (Noonday Press, 1997) is widely used in "cultural competence" efforts within U.S. medical school curricula. This article addresses the relationship between theory, narrative form, and teaching through a close critical reading of that book that is informed by theories of tragedy and ethnographies of medicine. I argue that The Spirit Catches You is so influential as ethnography because it is so moving as a story; it is so moving as a story because it works so well as tragedy; and it works so well as tragedy precisely because of the static, reified, essentialist understanding of "culture" from which it proceeds. If professional anthropologists wish our own best work to speak to "apparitions of culture" within medicine and other "cultures of no culture," I suggest that we must find compelling new narrative forms in which to convey more complex understandings of "culture." [medical education, cultural competence, tragedy, ethnography, theories of culture] [source]


Kiwi Icons and the Re-Settlement of New Zealand1 as Colonial Space

NEW ZEALAND GEOGRAPHER, Issue 2 2002
KATIE PICKLESArticle first published online: 28 JUN 200
ABSTRACT This article offers a critical reading of the celebratory biographical and autobiographical texts for three ,kiwi icons'. It argues that kiwi icons signal the enduring influence of British colonialism upon national imaginings , through a process that I term ,re-settlement'. I demonstrate how representations of Barry Crump, Sir Edmund Hillary and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, prominent New Zealanders during the 1990s, are entwined with dominant constructions of New Zealand society. Further, I explore how these kiwi icons are constructed to serve the quest for nationhood; an endeavour, it is argued, that is about the reinvention of settlement mythology that involves the continuation of particular narratives of colonisation from the past. [source]


Laïcité and multiculturalism: the Stasi Report in context1

THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2009
Murat Akan
Abstract French republican universalism , expressed most strongly in the principle and practice of laïcité, and multiculturalism have constituted opposite poles on questions of citizenship and integration. The report of the Stasi Commission on laïcité on 11 December 2003 and the following legislation on the donning of religious symbols in French public schools have once again, spurred debates over the meanings and practices of laïcité. The report and the law have been interpreted in different ways. Some have presented them as a reaffirmation of a historically constituted laïcité under new circumstances, others as a divergence from the real problems of racism, unemployment and gender inequality. In this article, I offer an alternative reading by supplementing a critical reading of the report with an analysis of its historical and immediate institutional context. I evaluate the Stasi Report in its immediate context of institutional change, and in the historical context of selected developments concerning laïcité since the 1905 law separating churches and State. I argue that the Stasi Report marks a fundamental break with French republican universalism, and I show that this break occurred contemporaneously with key gestures of multiculturalism: the establishment of the French Muslim Council and the creation of Muslim high schools under contract with the French state. This double movement to narrow the boundaries of laïcité, and for the state to expand the boundaries of identity-specific, Muslim public institutions and private schooling constitutes a reorganization of the public sphere in France which qualifies as a move towards multiculturalism. [source]


Building the Powerful 10-Minute Office Visit: Part II.

THE LARYNGOSCOPE, Issue 1 2001
Beginning a Critical Literature Review
Abstract Objective This is the second part in a series of sequential Tutorials in Clinical Research. The objective of this tutorial is to introduce methods of searching the vast stores of information now available, to review some of the computer resources available, to reintroduce the concept of an a priori design for the search, and to reveal the need for assessment of the clinical importance and validity of each pertinent article found. Study Design Tutorial. Methods An open working group has been formed with the specific aim of surveying and translating the large volume of complex information on research design and statistics into easily understood, useable, and non-threatening tutorials for the busy practitioner. The hypotheses under which this work is conducted are highly intelligent, but extremely busy, surgeons are interested in evidence-based medicine and will increase personal participation in critical reading of the literature, pending an expanded familiarity with clinical research design and statistics. Results Available resources for literature searching, methods of quick personal overviews, and quick question-specific reviews are discussed. Additionally, the methods, with examples, of beginning a critical literature review are presented. Conclusions Rapid, personal, critical literature review requires succinct formulation of the question, efficient search for the best available evidence, and critical appraisal of the pertinent individual articles to determine if sufficient evidence exists to support a clinical contention. [source]


Introducing undergraduate students to science

BIOCHEMISTRY AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY EDUCATION, Issue 2 2010
Paulo De Ávila Jr.
Abstract Understanding the scientific method fosters the development of critical thinking and logical analysis of information. Additionally, proposing and testing a hypothesis is applicable not only to science, but also to ordinary facts of daily life. Knowing the way science is done and how its results are published is useful for all citizens and mandatory for science students. A 60-h course was created to offer undergraduate students a framework in which to learn the procedures of scientific production and publication. The course's main focus was biochemistry, and it was comprised of two modules. Module I dealt with scientific articles, and Module II with research project writing. Module I covered the topics: 1) the difference between scientific knowledge and common sense, 2) different conceptions of science, 3) scientific methodology, 4) scientific publishing categories, 5) logical principles, 6) deductive and inductive approaches, and 7) critical reading of scientific articles. Module II dealt with 1) selection of an experimental problem for investigation, 2) bibliographic revision, 3) materials and methods, 4) project writing and presentation, 5) funding agencies, and 6) critical analysis of experimental results. The course adopted a collaborative learning strategy, and each topic was studied through activities performed by the students. Qualitative and quantitative course evaluations with Likert questionnaires were carried out at each stage, and the results showed the students' high approval of the course. The staff responsible for course planning and development also evaluated it positively. The Biochemistry Department of the Chemistry Institute of the University of São Paulo has offered the course four times. [source]


The reflexive self and culture: a critique

THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2003
Matthew Adams
ABSTRACT This article attempts to engage with a tendency in the theorization of social change and self-identity, evident in the work of a number of contemporary social theorists, to place an extended process of reflexivity at the heart of modern identity. As symptomatic of ,neo-modern' accounts of selfhood, critical readings of Giddens, Beck, Castells and some aspects of social theory more generally, and their account of modern reflexivity's relationship to culture, are assessed. In light of these criticisms, ways in which culture might still play an important part in the shaping of identity are considered. The relationship between language, culture and reflexivity, drawing from philosophy, sociology and G. H. Mead's own brand of social psychology, are all utilized in establishing a critique of the role Giddens and others designate for culture in the constitution of the contemporary self. By potentially repositioning self-identity in its connection to culture, the overall bearing of reflexivity upon the processes of self-identity is thus questioned. It is argued that a culturally-situated, yet fluid and multifarious account of self-identity is a necessary analytical and normative alternative. [source]


Capitalist models and social democracy: the case of New Labour

BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 3 2001
David Coates
Some of the more critical readings of the adequacy and effectiveness of New Labour in power have been developed by scholars willing to link arguments about the trajectory of Labour politics to wider arguments about the character of the contemporary global economy and the space within it for the construction and development of distinctive capitalist models. Mark Wickham-Jones and Colin Hay in particular have made that linkage in a series of important writings on the contemporary Labour party. Their arguments are here subjected to critical review, and set against a third position on New Labour and global capitalism: one informed by the writings of Ralph Miliband on British Labour and by the arguments of Leo Panitch and Greg Albo on the limits of the ,progressive competitiveness' strategies associated with ,Third Way' social democratic governments. [source]