Corona-Culture, second order observations

We are observing the onset of a new culture, which I call the "Corona-Culture". While it is not yet clear about the long term effects, the immediate outcomes of this culture are good to observe, like the spreading of the Corona-virus (John Hopkins CSSE) or the social distancing (The Atlantic). But all data and interpretation from these data has to be seen in there context, an observer can only see what's observable and it's not only about the observation, the presentment of the observation is also an issue. Let's start with the observation of the emerging 'corona-Culture' as data-dissemination. (Science). The article is clearly showing that data alone can't be trusted, this data has to be seen into a context. And although there seems to be a lot of fake-news around (see Politifact for this), people are checking the backgrounds, one example would be that some people set their Tinder to China (buzzfeed) to get to know more about the new Coronoa-Virus. And would you believe that a man deliberately tries to spred the virus (Newsfeed), as two sources report. (The Sun, NHK reports (in Japanese, that this person did recently). But there is more to it, the linguistic display of he facts is not neutral. Have you noticed that all of the above stated sources are inner Circle English countries? (ThoughtCo about this) The problem is that is more diffucult to check facts in another language, especially if the observer is not able to understand the language. So what to do? Confine observations to known languages? That is maybe not entirely possibly. But some case are then very difficult to decide: Have Russian media started a disinformation campaign about the new Corona-virus ? (FT reports in non-open content). But language-competence (in this case reading competence) is not all. Even in the mother tongue, difficult words are hiding. Let's analyze the title for this: "Corona", has different names, the Virus is now called SARS-CoV-2 (Wikipedia {Wp} has more, about it) and here an Identification is not difficult, but there are still a lot things unknown about the Virus and about the disease it is causing (COVID-19, Wp). However, very diffucult is the concept of 'culture', because a lot of people believe to know what 'culture' is and for what contexts this concept is standing for. The Author of this blog does not share this opinion, but nevertheless use 'culture'. And for this reason 'second order observations' are essential. The concept orginated in Cybernetics and was applied to Sociology by Niklas Luhmann (Wikpedia has an article about him). It means to observe an observer, which is not an easy thing to do, because normally simple observations are not visible. But if the observer communicates (preferably writes) this communication becomes open for a follow-up ("anschlussfähig" in German), which is (basically) the second order observation. Therefore second-order observations are also occurring in all-day live communication, but this is not referring to this or Luhmanns intention. The distinctive 'lens' (in Luhmanns terminology "Media-code") between first and second order observations is here and in Luhmanns case the quest for truth and therefore "science". It is difficult to state the whole systems-theory in one blog statement, Niklas Luhmann needed literally dozens of books for the explication of his theory, a good overview gives his magnum opus "Theory of Society" (1998/2012,3). However, the ultimate intention is here one step further: a second order observation of the contemporary culture (the 'Corona-Culture') or in simpler
application to the theory to cultural change. Why? An deeper understanding of the Corona culture would help humanity to appreciate its advantages.                      


References

Luhmann, Niklas (2012/2013), Theory of Society, translated from German "Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft" (1998), by Rhodes Berrett, Stanford UP
see for the topic also: Call for Papers: Corona & Language challenges (Language on the move) 

Image (of Life) as Language

A mediation project and its first evaluation

The workshops of Kinji Isobe with children (こども・アート)and art have already a quite long and (in Japanese) quite well documented history. The postcard-project おわりのない絵, in English drawings without an end, is going on since 2001.  This picture shows the artist with the moto of this project ("Image of Live, いのちのイメージ) in a classroom, in the background there is the motto in Swahili Taswwira ya uhai.  

 There has been documentations of this projects, but almost all are in Japanese. In general any language has problems to document the artistic and visual aspects of art. The obvious consequence of this dilemma is to concentrate on the procedural aspects of the art production and to marginalize the sense-production of art. In this workshop it was different, because through re-descriptions (Art & Language, 506) the sense-production of art could conceptualized. In normal cases it is a problem, if several languages are involved, but especially that point was very helpful in this project, because there was not only on focus on language, but several. The big advantage in dealing with several languages is a meditated approach to sense-production via language. A bit more about the background: Kinji Isobe conducted several workshops in two elementary school in Tanzania, one was the “Shule ya Misingi na Ufundi Lusanga” in Turiani”, see pirture (in the left, below):

 In all workshops the children produced art products: they drew pictures on paper or Japan-paper (和紙, washi, the Wikipedia has an article about it), but they collectively made a paper installation. In other workshops the students should draw their "image of live", after the whole project had been explained to them, of course in Swahili. The students drew with wax crayon their personal image of live. The picture below showing a group of students showing their image of live. For the documentation all workshops were filmed and picutures were

 taken In two workshops Turiani were also worksheets used to document the picture in more depth and also give some reasons, why the children were drawing their images. The worksheet, a questionnaire in three languages, asked for the name and short description of the art product, in Swahili. The other two languages of the questionnaire were English and Japanese. Japanese was used, because the research came from Japan and the used language is Japanese. English was used to open this research internationally, which is also the reason this blog(-entry) is in English. From this questionnaire the researcher know something, about picture 17 (see above, only the number is shown). This student did draw a maize-plant (in Swahili “Hindi”) a tree, the sun and a rabbit and he was referring to Vitamin D, produced by the sun. Life is in the view of this student symbolized not by a single animal as many other students saw it, but by the interplay of different elements, a real ecological perspective. The first results show the useful of the combined approach: While art is standing for an open, self-empowering element the language element is opening a more analytical and culture-comparative perspective. This perspective is eminent at the other school project, at the Ruscentre School in Zanzibar. With not so many participants there, but the linguistic facts are especially fascinating, because the school offers a bilingual (English & Swahili) education. One of the next post will cover this situation in greater detail.    

References (more the theoretical background it in a later post or elsewhere)
Art & Language & Luhmann (1997)  
Luhmann, Niklas (2000/1997), Art as a Social System, translated from: Die Kunst der Gesellschaft by Eva M. Knodt, Stanford                                

culture of global warming

Culture and its link to the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals, link to the UN-page) has been underused as a topic (as J. Pascal, St. Wyber, E. Yildirim) stress in there article. But culture is not just an enabling factor it also one of the most blocking factors to the SDGs. Of course it can be said that socioeconomic structure of the Western (OECD-) countries is not related to their culture, this is of course a matter of definition, what is "culture", is the economy also part of the culture? If yes, then the enabling and blocking factors shed a new light to the SDGs.
This Blog argues that the lifestyle of the industrialized (OECD) countries that is responsible for global warming (BBC: How many Earth do we need?). The fact that mass-consumption in the OECD-societies make big difference, which is causing the global warming is indeed indisputable. What can and should be argued about is the big question. If mass consumption is causing the global warming, why not just stop mass consumption? But fortunately no single person or group has the power to do this. The Western socio-political system is not easy to transform and the reason for this is it enoumous complexity. The ultimate social scientist for the description of complexity, Niklas Luhmann already stated the difficulty of an anticipated change for the whole (world-)society. The society is changing and evolving constantly, but it is very difficult to change the society in an intended direction. The reason for this due to Luhmann (1986/1989) are the various functional systems, which are responsible for the functioning of the society. Science, Economy, Politics, Medicine and Education are distinct functional systems and no functional system alone, can direct the whole society. Not even Politics, not even Economics. Only co actions between different functional systems can change the society as whole. These co actions are very different to achieve. That is why the reaction of societies are taking so long. The facts of climate change are known since the 1980. At this time only a minority in the OECD-countries was protesting and the facts were spreading more and more, especially in the "Science" functional system, which is showing the world the relevant data. Also the political and economic functional system reacted: Solar energy got cheaper ("climate change project" with more information) and the Kyoto protocol was an important step for international cooperation (see the Guardian article of 2012 for some results). So something was and is happening. But on the other side the data show, that it is not enough, the climate is changing, the earth is getting warmer and warmer, and also other ecological data are bad and getting worse (the data from Raworth 2017, can be downloaded as pdf here).
Only a cultural change on a global scale could prevent a disaster. This is not going to happen on time. There a changes, important changes, but they are not sufficient and it unlikely that this global change is happening on time. But that does not mean to do nothing! The disaster is already there, but it is still time to build resilience, which is also a change, is following the same rules as all changes. It is most effective if several functional systems are involved, if there is a cross fertilization as this article in Ecology & Society states. A culture of resilience has to emerge and of course language is in the center of it.

(book) References

Luhmann, Niklas (1989), Ecologicial Communication, translation of "Oekologische Kommunikation" (German original 1986), by J. Bednarz Jr., University of Chicago Press 
Raworth, Kate (2017), Doughnut economics : seven ways to think like a 21st century economist. Vermont: White River Junction.
            

Invention of happiness

Some things seems to be completely universal, because at least one word for this concept or even a lot of words exist in various "linguacultures" (Risager 2007 has backgrounds of this concept). But it is indeed difficult to conclude the universality of the concept from language usage alone. However, like the ubiquitous phenomenon "language", word for emotions like "happiness" can also be seen as an an invention, as a product of social evolution. In case of "language" D. Gramling (2016) writes about the "Invention of Monolingualism" and proves quite convincingly in the field of culture studies, that modern monolingualism in the most OECD-countries is a historical product, a fact that Anderson (2006) researched and called in print-cultures "Imagined communities". Compared to "language" or "monolingualism", "Happiness" is likely even more difficult to research, because it is impossible to find out, what people really feel. But claiming Happiness for the people of a country as the US-declaration independence in the phrase "Life, Libery and pursuit of happiness" (see Wikipedia for historical backgrounds) is not a claim for individual happiness, but an objective for society. Values (like Happiness as a collective virtue) were in traditional societies before, related to religious values and hence to transcendent spheres. But with the pursuit of happiness the matters of the earth, the "lifeworld" the human lifespan got recognized (see Wikipedia for this often used concept in German, the concept is here used sociologically). It would be overly simplistic to reduce the historical mission of the US only to this one statement ("pursuit of happiness"), but the great success of this concept seems to be obvious and indubitable. What were the consequences of this successful concept? It could be argued that they are disastrous: Mankind is overusing the earthly basis of its existence (see: How many earth do we need?) Some are still optimistic that dystopian futures can avoided (like Steven Pole in the Guardian) other like James Lovelock (also in the Guardian) are more pessimistic. Some Nitzschean scholars (religiously inspired or not) could call this whole problem "Nihilistic" (see Wikipedia for the lexical field of this multilayered concept). But under the condition there are not only technical problems related to climate change, but also problems of values, how are these going to handled? Antinatalism seems to be a solution for the earth, but is not a solution for human happiness.
 References:

• Anderson, Benedict (2006), Imagined communities, Verso (London)  
• Gramling, David (2016), The Invention of Monolingualism, Bloomsbury
• Risager, Karen (2007),Language and Culture Pedagogy: From a national to a Transnational Paradigm, Multilingual Matters

                        

JALT-National: Language Policy on the ground

The annually JALT-National Conference (2019, URL) is really amazing big, but is not easy to focus on the most important point of view. What is it? Seeing friends or working with colleagues on projects with could be helpful for the students. For the students future political projects, like working against global warming (Wp Portal) is somehow vitally important.In this context it is important to consider that Jalt is not only a national, but also a international conference, with corresponding traffic. (Gurdian has an article about this). Sure, foccussing on climate chance and climate justice is everywhere important, but what is the special contribution of an organization like JALT? What has the fight for climate justice to do with language policy in Japan? The first point is reflexive and has to do with the use of language, more specific with English as a "hypercentral language" (as de Swaan 2001 calls it). This means that the climate justice is a global issue, therefore it also an issue for a global language. The second point is that environmental issues are taken serious in JALT (URL: environmental comimittee). But of course no conference would be the most environmental friendly solution, but then the core activities of JALT would not take place. And that is what I call: "Language policy on the ground", which is related to the first point (global communication), but JALT is working to bridge global (English) and local communication. In this sense the agency of the learner is really central (more on this has Benson 2011), but the agency of the teachers also. Of course teachers should do their job properly and this sense "efficacy" is important. However, is more teacher efficacy a solution for the problem of climate chance. Efficacy is compatible with a top-down paradigm. But teacher's (and learner's) agency is solution for groundbreaking chances, which are inevitable. Only changes from the ground and on the ground can cause the necassary paradigm shift. Of course there has to be a comination of bottom up and top down approaches for an overall change. While there is no shortage of (partly) really good top down programs, like the SDGs from the UNO (URL), bottom up change are not that easy to find. One approach, combining top down and bottom up in language learning is the CEFR. Also in the case of the CEFR top down approaches (from governments or big organizations) are more prominent then bottom up inputs. Therefore the CEFR & LP SIG (inside JALT) is forstering bottom up approaches. This is not new. The novelty of our approach now is that we try to forster a more local and networked approach, which continuing communications. Our forum (15.25h-16.55h, Room 904) on Sunday (3.11.2019) is scheduled to provide this.... 

References:

Benson, Phil (2011), Teaching and Researching Autonomy, 2. ed., Pearson 
de Swaan, Abraham (2001), Words of the world: The Global Language System, Blackwell 

            

Why has it to be culture in the first place?

There is no single human being, who is not affected by culture, but there is also no single human being, who has an overview about "culture". The reason for this can be called with one word "superdiversity" (Arnaut et al 2017), which is yet another word for heterogeneous concepts. This blog concentrates especially on the linguistic aspects of culture, which are itself highly complex. Fortunately science (in broad sense, with includes here humanities as well) provides us with the means to explore deeper layers of culture and unveils its complexity. Especially ethnographic studies (more in Paltridge & Startfield 2016) possess the means to show instrumental aspects of culture, which offer valuable tools to Companies or other Institutions (e.g. publishers). One illustration seen at my own University

(Chukyo University in Nagoya, in the entrance of Building No.5): The picture gives an impression about  Linguistic Landscapes in Japan, a field about which already research exists (Backhaus 2007, Blommaert 2013). But what does it mean, "Linguistic Landscapes in Japan"? Although there are some characteristic patterns in Japan, especially the predominant use of Japanese throughout Japan there are also important differences inside the country. While there is maybe no culture of the building No.5 of the Chukyo-University, there is a culture of that  University, which relates to this picture, because there are languages, which are taught in the Faculty of International Liberal Studies (only Russian is unfortunately missing). Therefore this picture is an expression of the local culture. Whereas this very description is in English has an explicit relation to global culture. "English" has here the status of a lingua franca language, here some backgrounds about Lingua franca (Blog "Meditations"), especially for English (The history of English). In this moment of history, there is still (and again) struggle for the role of progressive Internationalists and its culture (Mafalda Dâmaso, The progressive post). While "culture" can be magic concept, for addressing the connection between local and translocal issues it still an open question, how a global culture could look like.
 
References:

• Arnaut, Karel / Karrebaek, Martha Sif / Spotti, Massimiliano (2017), Engaging Superdiversity: The Poisis-Infrastructures Nexus and Language Practices in Combinational Spraces. in: Engaging Superdiversity.Recombining Spaces, Times and Language Practices, Bristol: Multilingual Matters 
• Backhaus, Peter (2007), Linguistic Landscapes, A Comparative Study of Urban Multilingualism in Tokyo, Multilingualism Matters  
• Blommaert, Jan (2013), The Sociolinguistics of Globalization, Cambridge University Press 
• Paltridge, Brian & Sue Starfield (2016), Ethnographic Perspectives on English for Academic Purposes Research  in: The Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes, Hyland, Ken / Shaw, Philip (eds) p 378-393