Contact Zone
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Contact Zone
In a 1991 keynote address to the Modern Language Association titled "Arts of the Contact Zone", Mary Louise Pratt introduced the concept of "the contact zone." She articulated, "I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today". Pratt described a site for linguistic and cultural encounters, wherein power is negotiated and struggle occurs. Although when introduced this term was in the context of literacy and literary theories, the term has been appropriated to conversations across the humanities and has been used in the context of feminist theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory and in discussions of teaching and pedagogy. The contact zone is similar to other concepts that address relationality and contiguity such as positionality, standpoint theory, perspectivism, in ...
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Modern Language Association
The Modern Language Association of America, often referred to as the Modern Language Association (MLA), is widely considered the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature. The MLA aims to "strengthen the study and teaching of language and literature".About the MLA"
''mla.org'', Modern Language Association, 9 July 2008, Web, 25 April 2009.
The organization includes over 25,000 members in 100 countries, primarily academic scholars, s, and s who study or teach lan ...
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Northwest Coast Art
Northwest Coast art is the term commonly applied to a style of art created primarily by artists from Tlingit, Haida, Heiltsuk, Nuxalk, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka'wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth and other First Nations and Native American tribes of the Northwest Coast of North America, from pre-European-contact times up to the present. Distinguishing characteristics Two-dimensional Northwest Coast art is distinguished by the use of formlines, and the use of characteristic shapes referred to as ''ovoids'', ''U forms'' and ''S forms''. Before European contact, the most common media were wood (often Western red cedar), stone, and copper; since European contact, paper, canvas, glass, and precious metals have also been used. If paint is used, the most common colours are red and black, but yellow is also often used, particularly among Kwakwaka'wakw artists.Bill Holm, Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1965 Chilkat weaving applies formline de ...
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Urban Vitality
Urban vitality is the quality of those spaces in cities that are capable of attracting heterogeneous people for different types of activities throughout varied time schedules. The areas of the city with high vitality are perceived as alive, lively or vibrant and they tend to attract people to carry out their activities, stroll or stay. However, the areas of low vitality repel people and can be perceived as unsafe. The urban vitality index is a measure of this quality and in recent years it has become a fundamental tool for planning urban policies, especially for the intervention of spaces with low vitality. In addition, it is used for proper management of spaces with high vitality, as the success of certain areas can lead to processes of gentrification and touristification that, paradoxically, end up reducing the vitality that made them popular. The concept of urban vitality is based on the contributions of Jane Jacobs, especially those of her most influential work, ''The Deat ...
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First Contact (anthropology)
In anthropology, first contact is the first meeting of two communities previously without contact with one another. Notable examples of first contact are those between the Spanish Empire and the Arawak in 1492; and the Aboriginal Australians with Europeans in 1788 when the First Fleet arrived in Sydney. Such contact is sometimes described as a "discovery", such as the British and United States did by creating the legal theory of the "Doctrine of Discovery". It is generally the more technologically complex society that is able to travel to new geographic regions to make contact with those more isolated, less technologically complex societies. However, some object to the application of such a word to human beings, which is why "first contact" is generally preferred. The use of the term "discovery" tends to occur more in reference to geography than cultures; for an example of a common discovery debate, see Discoverer of the Americas. The fascination with first contact has gone thr ...
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Translanguaging
Translanguaging can refer to a pedagogical process of utilizing more than one language within a classroom lesson or it can be used to describe the way bilinguals use their linguistic resources to make sense of and interact with the world around them. The term "translanguaging" was coined in the 1980s by Cen Williams (applied in Welsh as ''trawsieithu'') in his unpublished thesis titled “An Evaluation of Teaching and Learning Methods in the Context of Bilingual Secondary Education.” Williams used the term to describe the practice of using two languages in the same lesson, which differed from many previous methods of bilingual education that tried to separate languages by class, time, or day. In addition, Vogel and Garcia argued that translanguaging theory posits that rather than possessing two or more autonomous language systems, as previously thought when scholars described bilingual or multilingual speakers, bilinguals and multilingual speakers select and deploy their languages ...
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Interculturalism
Interculturalism is a political movement that supports cross-cultural dialogue and challenging self-segregation tendencies within cultures.John Nagle, Multiculturalism's Double-Bind: Creating Inclusivity Cosmopolitanism and Difference. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009. P. 169. Interculturalism involves moving beyond mere passive acceptance of a multicultural fact of multiple cultures effectively existing in a society and instead promotes dialogue and interaction between cultures. Interculturalism is often used to describe the set of relations between indigenous and western ideals, grounded in values of mutual respect. Origin Interculturalism has arisen in response to criticisms of existing policies of multiculturalism, such as criticisms that such policies had failed to create inclusion of different cultures within society, but instead have divided society by legitimizing segregated separate communities that have isolated themselves and accentuated their specificity. It is based o ...
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Cross-cultural Communication
Cross-cultural communication is a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavor to communicate across cultures. Intercultural communication is a related field of study. Origins and culture During the Cold War, the economy of the United States was largely self-contained because the world was polarized into two separate and competing powers: the East and the West. However, changes and advancements in economic relationships, political systems, and technological options began to break down old cultural barriers. Business transformed from individual-country capitalism to global capitalism. Thus, the study of cross-cultural communication was originally found within businesses and government, both seeking to expand globally. Businesses began to offer language training to their employees and programs were developed to train employees to understand how to act when abroad. With ...
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Autoethnography
Autoethnography is a form of ethnographic research in which a researcher connects personal experiences to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. It is considered a form of qualitative and/or arts-based research. Autoethnography has been used across various disciplines, including anthropology, arts education, communication studies, education, educational administration, English literature, ethnic studies, gender studies, history, human resource development, marketing, nursing, organizational behavior, paramedicine, performance studies, physiotherapy, psychology, social work, sociology, and theology and religious studies. Definitions Historically, researchers have had trouble reaching a consensus regarding the definition of autoethnography. However, it generally refers to research that involves critical observation of an individual's lived experiences and connecting those experience to broader cultural, political, and social concepts. Autoethnogra ...
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Portland Museum Of Art
The Portland Museum of Art, or PMA, is the largest and oldest public art institution in the U.S. state of Maine. Founded as the Portland Society of Art in 1882. It is located in the downtown area known as The Arts District in Portland, Maine. History The PMA used a variety of exhibition spaces until 1908; that year Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat bequeathed her three-story mansion, now known as the McLellan House, and sufficient funds to create a gallery in memory of her late husband, Lorenzo De Medici Sweat, who was a U.S. Representative. Noted New England architect John Calvin Stevens designed the L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Galleries, which opened to the public in 1911. Over the next 65 years, as the size and scope of the exhibitions expanded, the limitations of the Museum's galleries, storage, and support areas became apparent. From 1960 to 1962, Donelson Hoopes served as its director. In 1976, Maine native Charles Shipman Payson promised the Museum his collection of 17 paintings b ...
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James Clifford (historian)
James Clifford (born 1945) is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work combines perspectives from history, literature, history of science, and anthropology. Biography He grew up in New York City and was for thirty-three years Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz until his retirement in 2011. Clifford and Hayden White were the first faculty directly appointed to the graduate-only department at UC-Santa Cruz. Clifford served as department Chair from 2004–2007, and was the founding director of UCSC's Center for Cultural Studies. He has been a visiting professor in France, England and Germany and was elected to the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences in 2011. James Clifford is the author of several widely cited and translated books, including ''The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art'' (1988), ''Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century'' (1997), and ''Returns: ...
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Mary Louise Pratt
Mary Louise Pratt (born 1948) is a Silver Professor and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. She received her B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Toronto in 1970, her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1971, and her PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1975. Her first book, '' Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse'', made an important contribution to Critical Theory by demonstrating that the foundation of written literary narrative can be seen in the structure of Oral Narrative. In it Pratt uses the research of William Labov to show that all narratives contain common structures that can be found in both literary and oral narratives. In her more recent research, Pratt has studied what she calls contact zones - areas in which two or more cultures communicate and negotiate shared histories and power relations. She remarks that contact zones are "so ...
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Patricia Bizzell
Patricia Bizzell, Ph.D. is a Professor of English, emerita, and former Chairperson of the English Department at College of the Holy Cross, United States, where she taught from 1978 to 2019. She founded and directed the Writer's Workshop, a peer tutoring facility, and a writing-across-the-curriculum program. She directed the College Honors and English Honors programs and taught first-year composition, rhetoric and public speaking, nineteenth-century American literature, and women's literature. A scholar and writer, Bizzell has authored or co-authored half a dozen books, written dozens of articles and book chapters, composed more than a dozen book reviews and review essays, and presented a large number of papers at academic conferences. Bizzell is the 2008 winner of the CCCC Exemplar Award, and former president of Rhetoric Society of America. Areas of Scholarly Focus Bizzell's research interests include the question of how the increasing diversification of academic discourses affe ...
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