Doing Nonideal Theory About Gender in Global Contexts

Doing interlanguage analysis in school contexts

In second language acquisition (SLA) research it is well-known that interlanguages are autonomous and rule-governed linguistic systems whose grammar cannot be described simply in terms of errors and deviations from L2 norms. However, assessment practices at school, both formative and summative, heavily rely on counting errors and scoring them based on various types of ‘gravity’. Carrying out a ...

Doing Much About Nothing

One of the interesting problems concerning experimental results is what happens when an experiment gives a null result, when the phenomenon expected is not observed. Is it because the experimental apparatus and the associated analysis procedures cannot detect or measure the phenomenon in question or is it because the phenomenon is not present? This is a real problem in the practice of physics. ...

Doing gender, doing categorisation: Recent developments in language and gender research

In this paper, I consider the potential of membership categorisation analysis, an empirical tool in ethnomethodological inquiry, for language and gender researchers. To date, there has been no sustained attempt to incorporate this kind of approach into gender and language work. It is virtually ignored in feminist sociolinguistics, where the majority of research gets done and is seldom considere...

Relational Reasoning about Contexts

Doing something about physician burnout.

Burnout aff ects more than half of practising physicians and is on the rise. When burnout was seen as a crisis of wellbeing—aff ecting physicians’ personal lives and work satisfaction—it garnered little public sympathy and could be dismissed as the whining of a privileged class. Now that evidence suggests that burnout negatively aff ects physicians’ eff ectiveness and availability to patients, ...