"Not in the Same Boat": Navigating towards academic literacy teaching during the COVID-19 crisis

This chapter describes the experience of academic literacy teachers in their adaptation of face-to-face teaching activities to the remote mode in a university in Colombia. Students in these courses face various challenges associated with their contexts and their home areas for studying - the physical conditions, quality of internet connections, and sometimes lack of electricity. Alongside these challenges, they lack literacy skills to face the demands posed by the learning tasks they encounter in their courses. The change to remote emergency teaching due to the COVID-19 crisis represented a threat for this vulnerable population as their academic literacy teachers were not used to navigating technology-mediated environments. After intensive professional development provided by the Teaching Excellence Center, faculty designed strategies to match teachers and students' access and familiarity to technology. Teaching tasks and delivery were modified as well. Feedback from faculty recognized the complexity and difficulty of such transformations, as well as its potential for opportunities. Students were positive about the experience and recognized the role teachers played in making this transition possible. Conclusions suggest that having a unified pedagogy helped them navigate the crisis regardless of their technological or literacy needs. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021. All rights reserved.

"Let's Talk About Wellbeing!”: Fostering Interdependence in Doctoral Communities

The Ph.D. genre captures the complexity and plurality of practices generally confronting doctoral scholars, creating challenges and at times contributing to wellbeing concerns. The arrival of COVID-19 has exacerbated such challenges with its associated mandatory self-isolation and other imposed measures, leading to explicit and implicit impact on members of the doctoral community. This autoethnographic study draws upon the collective reflections of a group of researchers as they explored practical ways of fostering and supporting mental health and wellbeing within the doctoral community. Our study highlights three aspects for consideration: (a) a holistic understanding of doctoral wellbeing as key, (b) the interconnection between doctoral scholars' and staff members' well-being, and (c) communities serving as avenues to psychological wellness. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.

The show must go on(line): Livestreamed concerts and the hyper-ritualisation of genre conventions

This paper examines audience engagement at livestreamed concerts, a form of mediatised cultural consumption that saw an immense growth in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Concerts, as events that draw large groups of people with similar intentions, are the perfect location for the establishment of large-scale interaction rituals – moments of group behaviour characterised by a highly intense collective emotion. Furthermore, as social occasions, concerts are organised around a set of routine interactions that construct and define the collective experience. We argue that in moving online, the definition of the (concert) situation is highly impaired due to a context collapse. In comparing two distinct audiences (classical and Dutch popular music), the first aim of this research is to explore how these differing audiences adapt their cultural behaviour to the virtual sphere. Secondly, by adopting a microsociological perspective, we aim to broaden the theoretical understanding of virtual large-scale interaction rituals, an area becoming increasingly important due to the growth in online communication. This paper uses discourse analysis of the synchronised comments, left on livestreamed concerts on Facebook Live (n = 2,075), to examine the interaction between audience members. We find that both classical and Dutch popular music audiences use a form of hyper-ritualised interaction. In an attempt to combat the plurality of meanings online, they explicitly refer back to the central conventions of the face-to-face concert. This emphasises not only the significance of genre conventions, but also presents a form of virtual interaction distinct form interpersonal interaction.

Who are ?we?? Examining relational ethos in British Columbia, Canada?s COVID-19 public health communication

This paper investigates the multiple meanings and functions of the pronoun "we" in COVID-19 public updates by British Columbia's acclaimed Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry in 2020. Our rhetorical case study shows how "we" contributes to Henry's relational ethos by attempting to foster a communal identity with her implied audience while also distinguishing public health expertise, actions, and authority from citizens' knowledge and actions. Ambiguous uses of "we" blur the line between the knowledge and responsibilities of "we" in public health and "we" as citizens. Overall, our rhetorical analysis demonstrates the significant but ambivalent role this pronoun can play in building relations of social trust among citizens, experts, and institutions within public health and science communication contexts and it suggests the importance of judicious pronoun usage when communicators strive to foster these relations.

COVID-19 and a Greek Catholic Hierarch's Experience of Virtual Communication with Parishioners

In this article, the author carries out a communicative and pragmatic analysis of texts and a stylistic analysis of the keywords of religious discourse. The object of the research is the discourse of the Greek Catholic Church in Slovakia. The subject of the research is the keywords and main topics in the corpus of Archbishop Milan Chautur's publications on social networks. The research methodology is based on the principles of discourse analysis, computational linguistics, linguistics 2.0, and quantitative linguistics. To realise the purpose of the research, the author uses the linguistic tool Sketch Engine, a fourth-generation concordancer, which provides quick search and statistical processing of data. For the corpus, the author refers to material from Chautur's Internet messages in the profile named "Vladyka Milan odpoveda" (Vladyka Chautur responds) over one year of the pandemic, i. e., between 2020 and 2021. Using the Simple Maths method, the author extracts keywords based on two corpora - the main one (created by the user) and the background one (built into the system). Vladyka's web-communication fits the modern trend of active communication through social networks, where it is not only used by representatives of the secular world, but also by the clergy. Considering the fact that the background corpus of Slovak Web 2011 (skTenTen11) is a language model, the author singles out the following keywords: isus (Jesus), Christ (Christ), pandemia (pandemic), kovid (Covid), bohorodicka (Virgin Mary), cerkov (Church), vakcinacium (vaccinacium), and eparchia (diocese). These words have the highest coefficient of semantic similarity (Score) of wordsfrom the studied and background corpora. Using the linguistic criterion for isolating keywords, it is possible to single out the cognitive components of the archbishop's discursive field, such as discursive dominants: human life, the Church on earth and in heaven, family.

Digitalizing a Multimodal Genre-Based Approach to Teaching Elevator Pitch: Pedagogical Implications and Students' Experiences

The health situation brought about by COVID-19 has contributed to the emergence and implementation of novel teaching formats (e.g., hybrid, online) in higher education. This scenario, characterized by the increasing use of technology and digital resources, calls for a methodological and pedagogical shift to best support the teaching and learning process. This study aims to discuss the digitalization of a multimodal genre-based approach to teaching Elevator Pitch presentations in the ESP context. In doing so, we report on the methodological adaptations needed to digitalize and implement the pedagogical proposal and the implications of its transition to an online environment. In addition, this study explores the learning experiences of students as recipients of the pedagogical proposal. Methodologically, a survey was administered to identify students' perceptions of the application of the pedagogical proposal. The results provide insights into the students' perceptions of its implementation concerning the classroom dynamics, the digital resources used, and the presentation format. The study concludes with a reflection on the implications of carrying out digitalization and the transition to online environments. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Advanced Dance Choreography System Using Bidirectional LSTMs

Recently, the craze of K-POP contents is promoting the development of Korea's cultural and artistic industries. In particular, with the development of various K-POP contents, including dance, as well as the popularity of K-POP online due to the non-face-to-face social phenomenon of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) era, interest in Korean dance and song has increased. Research on dance Artificial Intelligent (AI), such as artificial intelligence in a virtual environment, deepfake AI that transforms dancers into other people, and creative choreography AI that creates new dances by combining dance and music, is being actively conducted. Recently, the dance creative craze that creates new choreography is in the spotlight. Creative choreography AI technology requires the motions of various dancers to prepare a dance cover. This process causes problems, such as expensive input source datasets and the cost of switching to the target source to be used in the model. There is a problem in that different motions between various dance genres must be considered when converting. To solve this problem, it is necessary to promote creative choreography systems in a new direction while saving costs by enabling creative choreography without the use of expensive motion capture devices and minimizing the manpower of dancers according to consideration of various genres. This paper proposes a system in a virtual environment for automatically generating continuous K-POP creative choreography by deriving postures and gestures based on bidirectional long-short term memory (Bi-LSTM). K-POP dance videos and dance videos are collected in advance as input. Considering a dance video for defining a posture, users who want a choreography, a 3D dance character in the source movie, a new choreography is performed with Bi-LSTM and applied. For learning, considering creativity and popularity at the same time, the next motion is evaluated and selected with probability. If the proposed method is used, the effort for dataset collection can be reduced, and it is possible to provide an intensive AI research environment that generates creative choreography from various existing online dance videos.

Analysis of Vocabulary Use and Move Structures of the World Health Organization Emergencies Press Conferences on Coronavirus Disease: A Corpus-Based Investigation

The current study explored the vocabulary use and examined the rhetorical move structure of World Health Organization Emergencies Press Conferences on the Coronavirus Disease. Vocabulary use was described using a corpus of 140 press conferences containing 1,139,248 running words that was analysed based on three indicator variables: vocabulary level, lexical coverage, and lexical profiling. The move structure was analysed based on 70 press conferences randomly selected from the corpus to identify shared moves and steps throughout the selected press conferences. The vocabulary level and lexical coverage analysis identified that 95 per cent of the vocabulary used in the corpus came from the first 3,000 high-frequency words based on the frequency rates of the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Harmoniously, non-medical terms were extensively used across the press conferences covering 93.56 per cent of the corpus. Therefore, L2 users of English would understand most of the language used in the press conferences. According to the corpus-based move analysis, the frequency findings revealed 11 moves and their respective 32 steps. The study also established the move sequence prototypes for each stage comprising an opening stage, opening remarks, stage engagement, and closure. These results could be implemented for assisting learners in public speaking or English for business courses. © 2023 Language Institute, Thammasat University. All rights reserved.

The Shanghai Lockdown as a Chronotope: The Biopolitics of Zero Covid, Auto-Immunisation, and the Security Discourse

The lockdown reduces society to elementary data about population and territory, composes a kind of dialectic between statistics and risk analysis, and eliminates—albeit temporarily—the increasing complexity of Chinese society, which finds its best (and worst) representation precisely in the Shanghai metropolis. [...]the disciplinary grip of biopower tends to regulate and prescribe individual behaviour in the restricted space of the enclosed house, limited mobility, and ‘sanitised' daily practices. According to Bakhtin, chronotope ‘determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature' (1981: 85). Shifting the analysis from artistic representation to the social dimension, the Shanghai lockdown as a chronotope makes visible a series of historically determined power relations.

Forum: Gendered Dynamics of Academic Networks

This forum examines whether scholars' access to networks in the international studies profession is gendered and if so, the consequences of those networks for personal and professional success. Academic networks that encompass both professional and personal connections have been proposed as one solution to chilly climate issues because they provide a dual function of enhancing scholarly productivity and inclusion in the profession. The articles in the forum consider both professional (e.g. citation) and personal (e.g. mentorship, friendship) networks, as well as traditional (e.g. invited talks) and nontraditional (e.g. social media) networks. The authors show that biases that arise through the gendered nature of academic networks can be mitigated through social media, mentoring, and friendship networks. However, we must also be cognizant of other factors that create barriers for women in the profession (e.g. university prestige, parenthood, COVID-19). [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Studies Perspectives is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Making a Case for Political Technical Communication (Pxtc): TCQ

In this article, I argue that the accelerated adoption of political technology during the COVID-19 pandemic evinces exigency for a rhetorically grounded framework to teach, research, and practice political technical communication (PxTC) as a sub-discipline. As a starting point, I use a rhetorical genre studies approach to identify political social actions that separate political communication technologies into four distinct genres: election, electioneering, constituent services, and punditry.

Réforme du régime de prévention en SST au Québec : analyse critique, sensible au genre et aux autres sources d'inégalités

Nous examinons le potentiel et les conditions de l'efficacité de dispositions clés de la réforme du régime québécois de prévention introduite par la Loi modernisant le régime de santé et de sécurité du travail (LMRSST) en septembre 2021. Pour ce faire, nous mobilisons la typologie en deux axes proposée par Tucker (2007) afin de caractériser la citoyenneté au travail en SST, et ce, dans une version renouvelée par une perspective sensible au genre et autres sources d'inégalités. D'une part, nous traitons des changements à la participation représentative, à l'influence des travailleur.euse.s et au contrôle interne, ajoutant l'examen de la protection de toutes les personnes au travail (sans égard à leur statut d'emploi) et de la responsabilisation le long des chaînes de valeur. D'autre part, nous traitons du contrôle externe et proposons de tenir compte de la couverture des risques souvent invisibilisés du travail des femmes. Le projet de loi initial reproduisait cette sous-estimation de certains types de risques. Devant l'opposition, l'adoption de dispositions clé a été reportée et un régime intérimaire établi. La LMRSST permettra, à terme, la couverture de l'ensemble des secteurs d'activité par des mécanismes de prévention (contrôle interne) et de participation représentative des travailleur.euse.s;au prix cependant d'un risque de conformité formelle plutôt que réelle quant au contrôle interne, un niveau variable d'influence des travailleur.euse.s et de l'affaiblissement de plusieurs conditions d'efficacité des mécanismes de participation. On peut anticiper des obstacles à l'exercice de leurs droits par les travailleur.euse.s non syndiqués et des petits établissement. Le Réseau de santé publique n'a plus un accès systématique aux établissements et on ne sait rien sur les ressources dont celui-ci comme l'inspectorat disposeront. Il reste à voir dans quelle mesure les travaux réglementaires paritaires à venir apporteront des avancées en prévention et en même temps, renforceront plutôt que d'affaiblir la citoyenneté au travail. Précis Nous examinons le potentiel et les conditions de l'efficacité de dispositions clés de la réforme du régime québécois de prévention introduite par la Loi modernisant le régime de santé et de sécurité du travail (LMRSST) en septembre 2021. Pour ce faire, nous mobilisons la typologie proposée par Tucker (2007), et ce, dans une version renouvelée par une perspective sensible au genre et autres sources d'inégalités sociales. L'analyse du contenu du régime de prévention défini par la LMRSST s'appuie sur un état des connaissances quant à la portée et aux limites des stratégies étatiques en prévention, une revue de littérature sélective examinant l'application, la portée et les limites du régime pré-LMRSST et sur l'examen des mémoires déposés à l'occasion des consultations publiques sur le projet de loi.Alternate :We examine the potential effectiveness of key provisions of the Québec prevention regime as reformed by the Act to modernize the occupational health and safety regime (AMOHS) in September 2021. We expand Tucker's (2007) two-axis typology characterizing citizenship at work to include a perspective sensitive to gender and to other sources of inequalities such as class and race. In this expanded model, the right to representative participation, worker influence and internal control extends to all workers (regardless of employment status), and includes accountability along value chains. In the expanded model,risks addressed by the prevention regime, and subject to external control, include often invisibilized risks associated with women's work. In the face of opposition to the initial reform bill, which underestimated the risks associated with women's work, adoption of key elements of the reform – the provisions on preventive and participatory mechanisms – was postponed and an interim regime established. The AMOHS will eventually allow for worker participation mechanisms aimed at increasing internal control in all sectors. This, however, comes with a risk that internal control will result in cosmetic rather than substantive compliance, lead to inconsistent levels of worker influence and undermine some of the conditions that underpin effective participation mechanisms, especially for non-unionized workers and those in small establishments. Further, the Public Health network has lost systematic access to workplaces, and it is not known what resources will be available to it or to the inspectorate. It remains to be seen whether the ongoing joint regulatory process to determine future preventive and participatory mechanisms will strengthen prevention and at the same time bolster, rather than weaken, citizenship at work.

Critical Discourse Analysis of Covid-19 Vaccine News in the English and Arabic Media

The virus takes a toll on people worldwide regarding the economy and social life, control the spread of this virus and taking the vaccine are most problems faced by the governments. This article examines the news coverage of the Coronavirus vaccine, focusing on the Covid-19 vaccine and how it has been exploited politically and ideologically in the English and Arabic media (BBC and Al-Jazeera). Since there are limited researches of CDA on the vaccine discourse in the media (how the vaccine is portrayed), this study aims to contribute to the researches in CDA about Covid-19 vaccine discourse. Fairclough's (1995) three-dimensional critical discourse analysis was utilised as a foundational framework to investigate the amount to which power is linguistically expressed persuasively in every discourse of different media genres using particular lexical, rhetorical, and pragmatic methods. A qualitative approach was used to analyse the selected data (two discourses from each media type). The findings revealed that the governments, through media, had used linguistic features to persuade people's minds, convincing them to take the vaccine as the only solution. The ethical appeal, cultural, societal and religious is very well generated in the discourse of both media genres.

Facing Adversity Together: Toward a Genre of Organization- Stakeholder Resilience Discourse

Organizations, such as universities, face a variety of adversities, challenges, or disruptions that call for resilience to be enacted. Resilience is an important communicative process that relies on organizations and their stakeholders to collaboratively make sense of and respond to a given adversity, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to identify the shared characteristics that organizations use in their communication surrounding adversity, we completed a genre analysis of the messages created by Big 10 Universities to welcome stakeholders to the 2020–2021 academic year. Through our analysis we uncovered commonalities that make organization-stakeholder resilience discourse distinct—(1) defining a shared relationship, (2) detailing steps to regain a sense of normalcy, and (3) describing the outcome of enacting resilience. Based on these findings, we propose a genre of organization-stakeholder resilience by highlighting the role of communication in cultivating resilience through the emphasis on discursive relationships that exist between organizations and stakeholders. © The Author(s) 2022.

Music and Stress During COVID-19 Lockdown: Influence of Locus of Control and Coping Styles on Musical Preferences

The imposition of strict lockdown by the government of India during the first outbreak of COVID-19 had a remarkable impact on the well-being/wellness of the citizens. Studies around the globe demonstrated music as one of the effective strategies to enhance well-being during the lockdown. However, response to stressful events is modulated by individual characteristics like coping styles and locus of control (internal/external dependence) which have received little attention. The present chapter examined the use of music to cope with COVID-19 lockdown by these individual traits and their musical preferences during this period. A factor analysis yielded four music dimensions preferred by the participants during the lockdown: intense and electronic;cultural, emotional, and melodious;Indian contemporary and popular;and devotional music. Among the music genres, new and old Bollywood music were the most preferred genres. Participants with a higher internal locus of control, emotion, and problem-focused coping style demonstrated greater use of music in coping with stress. Problem-focused coping showed significant positive correlations with all the music dimensions, and emotion-focused coping style correlated with intense and electronic music;cultural, emotional, and melodious music;and devotional music. Internals showed no correlation with the different music genres. Externals showed a preference for intense and electronic and Indian contemporary and popular music. Listening to music had a significant positive effect on people high in emotion-focused and problem-focused coping styles and internal locus of control. However, it was not necessarily effective for people endorsing high external locus of control and avoidant coping. It implies that it can be used as a self-administered tool and therapeutically for people who engage in these coping styles and locus of control. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The discursive (re)construction of social relations in a crisis situation: A genre analytical approach to press conferences on COVID-19 in China.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has imposed a great threat both to people's health and to social relations. By following the theoretical constructions of critical genre analysis and critical discourse analysis and drawing on the 35 press conferences on the COVID-19 outbreak in China, this paper explores how the discourse of press conferences is used by the Chinese government as a means of crisis management to (re)construct social relations. The analysis of the data reveals a hybridity of social relations reproduced discursively between such social actors as government institutions, the general public, medical institutions or staff, and COVID-19 patients, and a distinct feature of interdiscursivity of the discourse of press conferences on COVID-19, with descriptive, instructional, strategic, and evaluative discourses being the most frequently employed. It is also found that political, professional, social, and cultural forces are interwoven with each other to contribute to the interdiscursivity of the discourse of press conferences and the hybridity of social relations constructed thereof.

How epidemiologists exploit the emerging genres of twitter for public engagement

With the COVID-19 global pandemic, epidemiologists and other public health professionals have become important sources of insight for the general public. One popular means for reaching public audiences is the microblog Twitter. Understanding how prominent professionals tweet–and what might contribute to the visibility or reach of their tweets–can reveal insights into the emerging digital genres scientists use for communicating across specialist and non-specialist domains. Toward that aim, this study examines the use of Twitter by ten epidemiologists during a one-month period in 2020, focusing specifically on those with a strong following on the platform. The research analyzes 143 high- and low-engagement tweets in several genre-related areas: tweet types and elements;tweet topics, purposes, and audiences;and author identities. The study demonstrates that “tweeting science” involves the use of a range of emerging Twitter genres and identities that together engage diverse audiences for purposes. The paper also discusses the implications of this research for genre theory and ESP instruction.

Their Worlds Felt Smaller: Rebuilding Classroom Communities in Pandemic Times

Byrnside and Davis discuss how teachers can rebuild their classroom communities during the pandemic. The students' eagerness to distance themselves from their descriptions of adolescents initially caught them off guard. As a preservice teacher in an independent study clinical placement in the fall of 2021, they wanted to design a unit that would respond to the needs of these learners, especially after a year of tumultuous shifts between remote, hybrid, and in-person learning. As schools reopened, there was a need for students and teachers to understand anew what it means to take up work central to the English language arts classroom--critically reading and responding to texts and contexts--work that gains nuance in dialogic classrooms.

Forum: Gendered Dynamics of Academic Networks

This forum examines whether scholars' access to networks in the international studies profession is gendered and if so, the consequences of those networks for personal and professional success. Academic networks that encompass both professional and personal connections have been proposed as one solution to chilly climate issues because they provide a dual function of enhancing scholarly productivity and inclusion in the profession. The articles in the forum consider both professional (e.g., citation) and personal (e.g., mentorship, friendship) networks, as well as traditional (e.g., invited talks) and nontraditional (e.g., social media) networks. The authors show that biases that arise through the gendered nature of academic networks can be mitigated through social media, mentoring, and friendship networks. However, we must also be cognizant of other factors that create barriers for women in the profession (e.g., university prestige, parenthood, COVID-19).

User preferences towards select attributes of digital reading: An exploratory study post pandemic

The pandemic called COVID 19 has altered the ways in which people think, act, and believe and what not. Though morbidity and mortality are the biggest causes for concern, one cannot ignore the effect such a pandemic has over the other aspects of life. One such aspect is reading. While digital reading keeps on gaining further significance due to the pandemic, it becomes necessary to investigate the various facets of the same. Hence the study was conducted with the aim of examining the user preference towards select attributes of reading in the digital format. The present study is a descriptive research using primary data collected through questionnaire. The sample size was 100. It was found through Garrett ranking analysis that the most and least preferred format was 'pdf' and 'azw' respectively. The same for genre was fiction and poetry, whereas for device it was laptop and tablet. Chi-square tests were conducted for testing hypothesis. It was found through analysis that age and occupation had significant association with format and genre respectively. This finding presents a new perspective on digital reading user preferences over the previous studies for the fact that individual groups were focussed here. The magnitude of differences identified through data analysis shows that it is utterly necessary to regard each characteristic with special focus to maximise on the efficiency front from the view point of service provider as well as user. The limitation of the present study is the non-representative nature of the sample. © 2022 Universidad Tecnica de Manabi. All rights reserved.