英语文化渗透式教学的实践与探讨

语言与文化具有紧密的联系。英语教学不应以通过考试为目的,而应注重提高实际生活中运用语言能力和交际能力。本文强调教学过程中应加强文化的渗透,利用多种渠道使学生了解中西文化的差异,并对英语教学中应注意的问题进行分析和探讨。     

加强高职院校文化艺术教育的若干思考

切实加强大学生文化艺术教育,是全面推进素质教育、促进大学生全面发展和健康成长的重要途径。本文在简要分析高职院校文化艺术教育现状的基础上,论述了高职院校开展文化艺术教育的作用和意义,进而提出了加强高职院校文化艺术教育的策略。     

利用图书馆资源优势推广农村文化信息化建设

本文在分析利用图书馆资源推进农村文化信息化建设中存在的主要问题的基础上,提出以图书馆现有资源和设施为依托,更新观念,加大投资力度,建立城乡援助模式进行农村文化信息化建设：     

用优秀文化培育和熔铸民族精神——近百年优秀文化的历史轨迹与改革开放30年的伟大实践

每个时代的优秀文化,都融注着每个时代新的民族精神。社会发展和历史进程都一再表明：中华民族自强不息的民族精神,已经深深地熔铸于中华民族的生命力、创造力和凝聚力之中,这是中华民族得以绵延千载、生生不息的精神动力,更是凝聚中华民族空前力量的无尽源泉。     

‘Making democracy a reality’? The politics of decentralisation and the limits to local democracy in Ghana

Through a case study of Ghana, this article focuses on the relationship between decentralisation and local democracy. The Ghanaian constitution emphasises decentralisation as the key means to ‘making democracy a reality’, reflecting the view common amongst international development agencies that decentralisation enhances local democracy and leads to more responsive government. This article questions such views and investigates whether decentralisation in Ghana has led to increased political participation at the local level and to downwardly accountable local government. Empirical findings are two-fold. On the one hand, relatively high levels of participation in local democratic processes are indicated. On the other, accountability mechanisms have not been strengthened, with a number of limitations and shortcomings identified at local level that undermine citizens’ attempts to hold local government and their elected representatives to account. Yet, in seeking to explain this delinkage between participation and accountability, such local issues do not provide a full explanation. Attention is thus refocused on the national context, where structural obstacles to devolved government are identified in the form of legal, political, administrative and fiscal constraints. Such obstacles are not easily overcome, however, due to the politics of decentralisation, notably central government's reluctance to relinquish control over its powers. Recent proposals for reform in Ghana's decentralisation system are considered, but political change is unlikely given the built-in advantages to the ruling party, whichever is in power. Without such reforms, though, local democracy is likely to remain more appearance than reality.     

The Culture of Interest: A Proposed Addition and Revision of the Three‐Culture Model

Negotiation and conflict resolution theorists have classified world cultures according to three types for the purpose of describing and predicting some of the ways in which individuals and groups within broad, geographically based cultural groups behave in conflict and negotiation‐related situations. These three broad categories, called “cultural syndromes,” have described these cultures according to the relative value they place on these three concerns: honor, face, and dignity. Based on our examination of the literature on the cultural dimensions of negotiation and conflict management, our own practice, and an analysis of literature and practice pertaining to the place and utility of the honor, face, interest, and dignity attributes within and between cultural groups , we propose a reformulation of this typology. Our reformulation would replace the broad “dignity” category with a new category that we call “interest,” which we believe better characterizes Northern European and North American cultures. We also argue that a cultural orientation toward dignity is universal and not geographically unique and is thus shared by all three cultures. This new formulation, we believe, more accurately characterizes the global range of orientations toward negotiation and conflict resolution and would, if adopted, help scholars and practitioners better understand culturally divergent conflict orientations and behaviors as well as the ramifications of such differences for negotiation and conflict resolution practice.     

Accountability in Public Management Networks: An Analysis of Cost Monitoring in Chicago Municipal Networks

Public management networks (PMNs) continue to proliferate as governance becomes more complex, and so does the need to hold them accountable. Agency and collaboration theories provide a solid foundation, but additional constructs are necessary to adapt to this dynamic era. Building from Bovens et al. (2008), the authors offer an ecological framework of third-party accountability that incorporates a number of prominent accountability theories under the same construct. Employing a mixed-methods research design that examines eight local PMNs in the Chicago region, the study finds that an exemplar accountability mechanism—additional cost monitoring—occurs more often in situations predicted by the framework. Additionally, qualitative interviews of network participants suggest that cost structures can differ by network type, which is verified quantitatively.     

Contested Resource Extraction,Anti-Corporate Protests and the Politics of Movement Alliance in Bangladesh

Why do activist groups form alliances and why do some alliances later fall apart? This article asks these questions in the context of a popular mobilisation against resource extraction in Bangladesh. It focuses on the dynamics of a strategic alliance between a locally organised community mobilisation against a British mining company and an urban radical activist group, known for its anti-capitalist activism, to explore the subsequent collapse of the alliance and the demobilisation of one group. Based on the qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with activists and organisational documents, the article probes the underlying causes of rupture. Although several individual and organisational factors are identified, it is argued that Bangladesh’s confrontational political culture and its authoritarian party system played a critical role, with local activists vulnerable to co-optation or being silenced by powerful political actors. The article contributes to social movement scholarship by emphasising that specific political cultures can undermine efforts to build strategic alliances between diverse social movement organisations.     

Accountability in Public Service Quasi‐markets: The Case of the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme

Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) represents the latest in a worldwide shift towards individualised funding models for the delivery of care services. However, market‐based models for care deliveries bring new considerations and dilemmas for accountability. Drawing on previous work by Dickinson et al. (2014), we examine a range of accountability dilemmas developing within the early implementation of the NDIS. These relate to accountability for the following: care outcomes, the spending of public money, care workers, and advocacy and market function. Examining these accountability dilemmas reveals differences in underpinning assumptions within the design and on‐going implementation of the NDIS, suggesting a plurality of logics within the scheme, which are in tension with one another. The contribution of this paper is to set out the accountability dilemmas, analyse them according to their underpinning logics, and present the NDIS as having potential to be a hybrid institution (Skelcher and Smith 2015). How these dilemmas will be settled is crucial to the implementation and ultimate operation of the scheme.     

Call me Caitlyn: making and making over the ‘authentic’ transgender body in Anglo-American popular culture

A conception of transgender identity as an ‘authentic’ gendered core ‘trapped’ within a mismatched corporeality, and made tangible through corporeal transformations, has attained unprecedented legibility in contemporary Anglo-American media. Whilst pop-cultural articulations of this discourse have received some scholarly attention, the question of why this ‘wrong body’ paradigm has solidified as the normative explanation for gender transition within the popular media remains underexplored. This paper argues that this discourse has attained cultural pre-eminence through its convergence with a broader media and commercial zeitgeist, in which corporeal alteration and maintenance are perceived as means of accessing one’s ‘authentic’ self. I analyse the media representations of two transgender celebrities: Caitlyn Jenner and Nadia Almada, alongside the reality TV show TRANSform Me, exploring how these women’s gender transitions have been discursively aligned with a cultural imperative for all women, cisgender or trans, to display their authentic femininity through bodily work. This demonstrates how established tropes of authenticity-via-bodily transformation, have enabled transgender to become culturally legible through the wrong body trope. Problematically, I argue, this process has worked to demarcate ideals of ‘acceptable’ transgender subjectivity: self-sufficient, normatively feminine, and eager to embrace the possibilities for happiness and social integration provided by the commercial domain.