Working Across Difference: Theory,Practice and Experience

Back in October 2015 I had the opportunity to chair the book launch for all three works discussed in this review essay. At the event, Shirley Anne Tate said, “Black feminist theory is the theory”. The comment referred to how it is not ‘just’ that Black feminist theory is typically marginalised within institutional contexts and academic scholarship, ‘even’ within critical, feminist and poststructural work, but also to highlight the capacity of Black feminist scholarship to unpick and destabilise the known and knowable in ways that are profoundly ontological, and which offer potential routes to meaningful social change through the hard task of working across difference. The three books reviewed here by Shirley Anne Tate, Suryia Nayak and Shona Hunter are theoretically rich and complex in breadth, scope and range, drawing on extensive Black feminist scholarship, as well as critical race, critical feminist, psychosocial, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, decolonial and poststructural approaches. Each book is embedded in everyday practices and social processes, offering multi-layered movement across different spatial-social and affective scales in ways that allow ‘big’ insights to emerge from the locatedness and particularity of human experience. They are reviewed in turn and some concluding comments identify important commonalities across the texts.     

高等学校毕业论文教学环节改革研究与实践

为了提高本科毕业论文的质量,可以在保证选题一致性的前提下,整合本科学年论文与毕业论文的写作时间,在学年论文阶段完成自主选题和资料收集的前期工作,毕业论文在此基础上进一步拓展和探讨.     

词块教学法应用于大学英语写作教学的行动研究

区别于传统的教学模式,词块教学法在改善语言使用的连贯性、地道性、流畅性方面具有一定的优势.通过阶段性的课堂教学的行动研究,调查了解了学生的词块掌握能力;通过教学活动的不断调整和改进,试图寻找一种更有效的方法来提高学生的词块意识及其在写作中的词块运用能力.     

Adivasi and peasant: Reflections on Indian social history

This essay looks at recent historical approaches to tribal societies in India and examines their political implications. Building on this criticism, it synthesizes a range of secondary literature in history and anthropology, in an attempt to formulate an alternative approach that locates tribal societies within the wider framework of south Asian history and is capable, at the same time, of marking changing patterns for different periods of the past. Finally it examines the way the word peasant is used in historical writing in order to show that the special history of tribal societies and their conversion into peasants in the colonial period is fundamental to an understanding of contemporary Indian society.     

基于建构主义学习理论的教学改革实践研究——以非计算机专业数据库课程为例

数据库是一门实践性很强的计算机课程,如何构建良好的学习情景使学生积极参与到教学活动中来,并将数据库理论应用到软件开发实践中,是该课程教学过程设计的关键.采用“主导-主体”教学模式,并将建构主义理论指导下的项目教学法引入数据库小组开发教学实践中,提高了学生的学习兴趣和课程的教学效果.     

Writing from Experience: The Place of the Personal in French Feminist Writing

Through a discussion of the work of Marie Cardinal and Annie Ernaux, this article aims to problematize the anglophone academic world's tendency to associate French feminisms predominantly with avant-garde or highly theoretical texts. The work of Ernaux and Cardinal is presented alongside a discussion of its reception by readers and critics in France, and by academics in English-speaking countries. The first part of the article identifies aspects of Ernaux's and Cardinal's works which cannot be encompassed within a critical framework based on the dichotomy between naive realism on the one hand and the politically and linguistically radical text on the other. Ernaux's plain language, for instance, is clearly very unlike the linguistic experimentation of ‘feminine writing’ nonetheless the emphasis on social class in her writing constitutes a political intervention which is at least equally valid.The reception study in the second part of the article provides further evidence of the relevance to gender politics in France of Cardinal's The Words to Say It (1975) and texts published by Annie Ernaux in the 1980s and 1990s. The ambivalent response of critics seems to indicate the troubling nature of writing which combines the codes of realism and autobiography (or autobiographical fiction in Cardinal's case) with the depiction of taboo subjects such as menstruation, or a daughter's response to her mother's debilitating illness and death. The article also charts the widespread popularity of these texts in France, particularly with women readers, and gives some examples of the pleasures described in letters to the authors. In conclusion, we argue that the ambivalent space between popular and high culture occupied (albeit differently) by Ernaux and Cardinal may be particularly effective in terms of gender politics, and that even in the late 1990s, the personal may be as political as ever.     

Research and Practice in Three Areas of Social Competence:

Authors of applied research on social competence have generally concentrated on three areas: social assertion, interviewing skills, and conversational ability. Researchers and practitioners hold some similar and some different perspectives regarding a number of methodological variables within this literature. These studies are reviewed, and conclusions are offered about areas of strengths and future research needs and trends.     

On Moving the Table: Reflections on an Author-Meets-Reader Session

Through a commentary on the enriching experience of receiving feedback through the Brewing Legal Times author-meets-reader session in February 2018, this piece reflects on the intellectual generosity and scholarly labour that makes such sessions an important form of academic social reproduction.     

Beyond the Millennium: Black Women's Writing

Nasta's piece forms part of an oral contribution to the plenary session of the conference in which a variety of speakers discussed the many questions that the conference had raised. It focuses specifically on the location and history of black women's writing in Britain and attempts to address issues that have dominated critical and theoretical discussion for some years. The question as to how far we have moved on in our reading and assessment of these literatures is discussed; also the fact that perhaps debates we now see as being contemporary were also current in the experiences of earlier representations of Britain from a black or Asian perspective. Nasta makes some tentative suggestions in terms of how we might move forward.