T he Lord of the Rings is a fantastic and magically woven narrative of adventure, courage, and friendship. Romance and mystique abound in the physical and spiritual journey that a small hobbit makes with a Fellowship of eight other members of Middle Earth. Of course, this world, not unlike our own, suffers from greed, misused power, and war. In other words, it is a world dominated by men. Ident...

This book focuses on modern, highly developed East Asian societies and their social issues, particularly ones that are related to family and health. The examples are from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Myanmar, Singapore, and the Pacific Islands, while references are made to contrasting examples in other Asian societies, especially China, because of its regional and global importance as well as it...

Patient-centeredness can be considered a popular, and at the same time "fuzzy", concept. Scientists have proposed different definitions and models. The present article studies scientific publications that discuss the meaning of patient-centeredness to identify different "discourses" of patient-centeredness. Three discourses are presented; the first is labelled as "caring for patients", the seco...

The absolute hegemony of international code of (academic) communication has resulted in the development and spread of the discoursal voice of the culture form which historical English has emerged, and, as a consequence, any violation from the generic conventions and thinking patterns born out of such a discourse has resulted in the deprivation of non-native thinkers form active participation in...

In his article "Discourses and Models of Intermediality" Jens Schröter discusses the question as to what relations do different discourses pose between different "media." Schröter identifies four models of discourse: 1) synthetic intermediality: a "fusion" of different media to super-media, a model with roots in the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk with political connotations, 2) formal (or...

Previous studies have suggested that focusing an element can enhance the activation of the focused element and bring about a number of processing benefits. However, whether and how this local prominence of information interacts with global discourse organization remains unclear. In the present study, we addressed this issue in two experiments. Readers were presented with four-sentence discourse...

Contemporary popular culture proposes new ideological associations between time, ageing, the body and personal identity projects. In a range of magazine texts, television shows and associated websites, several commercialised discourses equate ageing, and women’s ageing in particular, with the ‘ look’ of ageing. They project a version of personal ageing that is reversible and repairable, on the ...

In this paper, we explore the discourses on sexuality that a sample of parents drew upon when they talked about teenage sexual self-presentation and conduct. The sample consisted of 43 parents (32 mothers and 11 fathers) of young people aged 10-19 years. Data were gathered using in-depth interviews and were analysed using a strategy known as modified analytical induction. Findings indicated tha...

The thesis examines the level of historical analysis in the works of two third/ninth century Muslim historians, al-Baladhuri and at-Tabari, including their underlying legal, political and socio-economic concerns as manifested in their narratives. By comparing and contextualising their histories regarding the caliphate of ‘Umar, in relation to their social institutions and scholarly disciplines,...

The first step towards automating the measurement of deliberative communication is to analyze the content of a debate. In this paper we develop a novel visual method that allows to determine content-based episodes within discourses. Our framework reveals interesting subsequences of discourses that help to automate the measurement of deliberative communication.