Neriko Musha Doerr - Böcker

What happens when a group of people see things that others do not and begin acting accordingly? The Augmented Reality of Pokémon GO: Chronotopes, Moral Panic, and Other Complexities explores this question by examining what happened after Pokémon GO, a smartphone augmented reality game, was released in July, 2016. The game overlaid the world of Pokémon onto the “real” physical world, drawing 30 million players in the first two weeks. Pokémon GO has created new ways of sensing the environment, reading things around us, walking the street, and dwelling in certain areas, i.e., inhabiting the world. Through detailed text analyses of the game and auto-ethnographies of the contributing authors’ experiences playing the game analyzed from anthropological perspectives, this volume provides nuanced analyses of this new way of relating to the world: the augmented reality world of Pokémon GO. Each chapter focuses on specific aspects of this new experience of the world: the cosmology of the world of Pokémon and the multifaceted ways we relate to our environment through Pokémon GO; the notion of space and time in Pokémon GO and its interface with that of real world as it guides our actions; the phenomenology of Pokémon GO in urban walking with its complex relationships to public space, “nature” as constructed through modernity, cell phone infrastructure, and urban landscapes where insects, animals, birds, human, history, transportation infrastructure, and trash all intermingle to create its ambiance; and the game’s link to the wider social issue as it gets appropriated for “friendly authoritarian” goals of civil society, imposing various ideologies and accruing commercial gains. Through “participant observation” —all contributors have been avid Pokémon GO players themselves—this volume offers snapshots of the Pokémon GO effect from its initial stage as a social phenomenon to Spring 2018.

What happens when a group of people see things that others do not and begin acting accordingly? The Augmented Reality of Pokémon GO: Chronotopes, Moral Panic, and Other Complexities explores this question by examining what happened after Pokémon GO, a smartphone augmented reality game, was released in July, 2016. The game overlaid the world of Pokémon onto the “real” physical world, drawing 30 million players in the first two weeks. Pokémon GO has created new ways of sensing the environment, reading things around us, walking the street, and dwelling in certain areas, i.e., inhabiting the world. Through detailed text analyses of the game and auto-ethnographies of the contributing authors’ experiences playing the game analyzed from anthropological perspectives, this volume provides nuanced analyses of this new way of relating to the world: the augmented reality world of Pokémon GO. Each chapter focuses on specific aspects of this new experience of the world: the cosmology of the world of Pokémon and the multifaceted ways we relate to our environment through Pokémon GO; the notion of space and time in Pokémon GO and its interface with that of real world as it guides our actions; the phenomenology of Pokémon GO in urban walking with its complex relationships to public space, “nature” as constructed through modernity, cell phone infrastructure, and urban landscapes where insects, animals, birds, human, history, transportation infrastructure, and trash all intermingle to create its ambiance; and the game’s link to the wider social issue as it gets appropriated for “friendly authoritarian” goals of civil society, imposing various ideologies and accruing commercial gains. Through “participant observation” —all contributors have been avid Pokémon GO players themselves—this volume offers snapshots of the Pokémon GO effect from its initial stage as a social phenomenon to Spring 2018.

“Incompetence” is not an objective state lacking competence nor a kind of deficiency that needs to be filled. Rather, it is a constructed state that is productive, working in tandem with its opposite, “competence.” Perception of incompetence/competence works as what Michel Foucault (1977) calls a technology of “normalization” that pushes individuals to aspire to follow a shared norm, while hierarchically differentiating individuals according to their proximity to the aspired norm. The notion of incompetence is thus “productive” in that it turns individuals into specific kinds of “subjects” (Foucault 1977). The Politics of “Incompetence”: Learning Language, Relations of Power, and Daily Resistance further investigates other productive processes around the perception of “incompetence” specifically through its intersections with various ideologies—“academic achievement,” teacher-student hierarchy, “native speaker” ideology, normative unit thinking, and privilege of vulnerability—as such intersections generate new knowledge, new reflection on one’s assumptions and privilege, new space for marginalized language, and more. This volume opens up a new area of study—productive cultural politics of “incompetence”—by focusing on language learning in diverse contexts: Japanese as a Foreign Language classrooms in US colleges, Italian language tourism in Italy, and indigenous Maori language revitalization at an Aotearoa/New Zealand school.

How does language or culture come to be standardized to the degree that it is considered 'homogeneous'? How does teaching language relate to such standardization processes? How can teaching be mindful of the standardization processes that potentially involve power relations? Focusing on the case of Japanese, which is often viewed as homogenous in terms of language and culture, this volume explores these questions in a wide range of contexts: the notions of translation and modernity, the ideologies of the standardization of regional dialects in Japan, current practices in college Japanese-as-a- Foreign-Language classrooms in the United States, discourses in journals of Japanese language education, and classroom practices in nursery and primary schools in Japan. This volume’s investigation of standardization processes of Japanese language and culture addresses the intersections of theoretical and practical concerns of researchers and educators that are often overlooked.

What draws people to study abroad or volunteer in far-off communities? Often the answer is romance – the romance of landscapes, people, languages, the very sense of border-crossing – and longing for liberation, attraction to the unknown, yearning to make a difference. This volume explores the complicated and often fraught desires to study and volunteer abroad. In doing so, the book sheds light on how affect is managed by educators and mobilized by students and volunteers themselves, and how these structures of feeling relate to broader social and economic forces.

Written for study abroad practitioners, this book introduces theoretical understandings of key study abroad terms including "the global/national," "culture," "native speaker," "immersion," and "host society." Building theories on these notions with perspectives from cultural anthropology, political science, educational studies, linguistics, and narrative studies, it suggests ways to incorporate them in study abroad practices. Through attention to daily activities via the concept of immersion, it reframes study abroad not as an encounter with cultural others but as an occasion to analyze constructions of "differences" in daily life, backgrounded by structural arrangements.

Written for study abroad practitioners, this book introduces theoretical understandings of key study abroad terms including “the global/national,” “culture,” “native speaker,” “immersion,” and “host society.” Building theories on these notions with perspectives from cultural anthropology, political science, educational studies, linguistics, and narrative studies, it suggests ways to incorporate them in study abroad practices. Through attention to daily activities via the concept of immersion, it reframes study abroad not as an encounter with cultural others but as an occasion to analyze constructions of “differences” in daily life, backgrounded by structural arrangements.

What draws people to study abroad or volunteer in far-off communities? Often the answer is romance – the romance of landscapes, people, languages, the very sense of border-crossing – and longing for liberation, attraction to the unknown, yearning to make a difference. This volume explores the complicated and often fraught desires to study and volunteer abroad. In doing so, the book sheds light on how affect is managed by educators and mobilized by students and volunteers themselves, and how these structures of feeling relate to broader social and economic forces.

Investigating the politics of seeing and its effects, this book draws on Slavoj Žižek’s notion of fetish and Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious to offer newer concepts: “tinted glasses”, through which we see the world; “unit-thinking”, which renders the world as consisting of discrete units; and “coherants”, which help fragmented experiences cohere into something intelligible. Examining experiences at a Japanese heritage language school, a study-abroad trip to Sierra Leone, as well as in college classrooms, this book reveals the workings of unit-thinking and fetishism in diverse contexts and explores possibilities for social change.

Exploring five paradoxes in how “difference” is constructed and navigated, this book critically examines discourse and practice across race studies, language education, and global mobility, offering fresh insights into the politics of difference and possibilities for alternative engagements.

School differentiates students-and provides differential access to various human and material resources-along a range of axes: from elected subjects and academic "achievement" to ethnicity, age, gender, or the language they speak. These categorizations, affected throughout the world by neoliberal reforms that prioritize market forces in transforming educational institutions, are especially stark in societies that recognize their bi- or multicultural makeup through bilingual education. A small town in Aotearoa/New Zealand, with its contemporary shift toward official biculturalism and extensive free-marketization of schooling, is a prime example. Set in the microcosm of a secondary school with a bilingual program, this important volume closely examines not only the implications of categorizing individuals in ethnic terms in their everyday life but also the shapes and meaning of education within the discourse of academic achievement. It is an essential resource for those interested in bilingual education and its effects on the formations of subjectivities, ethnic relations, and nationhood.

This book offers alternative theoretical approaches and pedagogies that challenge the worldview that divides things/people into bounded categories/units perceived to be internally homogeneous, what it calls “unit thinking” built on the nation-state ideology. Unit thinking is problematic not only because it is inaccurate but also because it encourages an imposition of the “ideal model” (e.g., the standard language) onto people and a hierarchization based on their proximity to the “ideal” (e.g., devalued “dialects”). This book explores an alternative approach—“post-unit thinking”—by drawing on the notions of “fetish” by Slavoj Žižek and Integrationist Linguistics by Roy Harris and suggests pedagogies in fields that capitalize on “learning from difference.” Theoretically, this discussion of (post) unit thinking is of interest to researchers seeking alternatives to post-structuralist discussions of the politics of difference. This book is also a practical resource for practitioners in study abroad, service learning, and world language education.

The "native speaker" is often thought of as an ideal language user with "a complete and possibly innate competence in the language" which is perceived as being bounded and fixed to a homogeneous speech community and linked to a nation-state. Despite recent works that challenge its empirical accuracy and theoretical utility, the notion of the "native speaker" is still prevalent today. The Native Speaker Concept shifts the analytical focus from the second language acquisition processes and teaching practices to daily interactions situated in wider sociocultural and political contexts marked by increased global movements of people and multilingual situations. Using an ethnographic approach, the volume critically elucidates the political nature of (not) claiming the "native speaker" status in daily life and the ways the ideology of "native speaker" intersects and articulates, supports, subverts, or complicates various relations of dominance and regimes of standardization. The book offers cases from diverse settings, including classrooms in Japan, a coffee shop in Barcelona, secondary schools in South Africa, a backyard in Rapa Nui (Easter Island), restaurant kitchens, a high school administrator's office, a college classroom in the United States, and the Internet. It also offers a genealogy of the notion of the "native speaker" from the time of the Roman Empire. Employing linguistic, anthropological and educational theories, the volume speaks not only to the analyses of language use and language policy, planning, and teaching, but also to the investigation of wider effects of language ideology on relations of dominance, and institutional and discursive practices.

This volume explores "performative linguistic space", namely a space which ushers or hinders linguistic practices. Space is made productive as a result of individuals who bring linguistic politics from diverse spaces into new ones. By moving away from the notions of discrete units of language and linguistic communities associated with a specific space, this volume suggests a fluid productive aspect of space. It goes beyond the assumed space-linguistic community association through ethnographic accounts that mediate linguistic anthropology, cultural geography, sociolinguistics, and deaf studies.

Language standardization is problematic because it imposes the dominant group’s linguistic variety as the only correct one and promotes the idea of unit thinking, i.e., seeing the world as consisting of bounded, internally homogeneous units. This volume examines intentional practices to subvert such processes of language standardization (what we call counter-standardization practices) in language education and other contexts. By suggesting alternative classroom pedagogies, language reclamation processes for indigenous populations, and discourses about (mis)pronunciation, this volume explores more liberatory approaches: the post-unit thinking of language.