ACCS 2018 Panel – Fearful Futures and How to Navigate Them

Next week I’m going to be heading to Japan to attend the Asian Conference on Cultural Studies with some of my UEA colleagues from the School of Education and Lifelong learning.

The conference theme is: ‘Fearful Futures: Cultural Studies and the Question of Agency in the Twenty-First Century’. It looks like an amazing event, with some really interesting panels and speakers. The full programme can be found here . It’s a provocative and interesting theme to tackle that speaks to the current climate, and I’m really interested to see the sorts of research and discussions that come out of the event!

Our panel details are below. We’ll be tweeting about the event on our joint twitter page (@CCSEResearch), so follow along if you’re interested! If you’re in attendance, come and see us! I’m excited about the event, and have to say, our symposium sound pretty damn awesome.

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Call for Papers: Digital Culture and Education

 

A call for papers is out for a special edition of Digital Culture & Education, an international open access peer-reviewed journal. I recently got named as an editor of the journal and am really happy to be helping to launch this exciting special edition.

Full information can be found here, feel free to email me for a discussion about it!

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La plume de ma tante… What French language lessons can tell us about current UK digital skills education

A quick French lesson

Over the last few days I’ve been mulling over the state of digital skills education in the current UK educational system, reflecting on a phrase that I randomly heard for the first time in forever on a BBC podcast – “La plume de ma tante”.

For those not familiar, ‘la plume de ma tante’ was a phrase commonly used in French language teaching in the UK for the first half of the 20th teaching. It translates literally as “the quill of my Aunt”, and it was for a long time one of the very first things every British student of the French language would learn in a French lesson.

You might be thinking to yourself that it is a really odd phrase to learn at the beginning of a French language course, and you would be entirely right. It was used as a functional example of French grammar. The phrase shows how the definite article and possessive adjectives change form according to gender. A useful grammar lesson for sure, and one that has useful applications for a study of the language, but nonetheless ‘la plume de ma tante’ was such an obscure phrase it was fairly useless if you wanted to learn practical French phrases.

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