Perspectives on the Popularisation of Natural Sciences in a Diachronic Overview

Perspectives on the Popularisation of Natural Sciences in a Diachronic Overview
Author: Eleonora Chiavetta
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2014-05-02
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1443860034

This volume combines strands of research currently being debated in linguistic scholarship, such as the issue of specialized discourse, the issue of knowledge dissemination, and the issue of the versatility of genres. It presents some of the relevant findings of an Italian National Research Project focusing on specialized discourse, which involved researchers and scholars from several Italian universities. Discursive popularisation is here analysed with regard to the domain of natural sciences, particularly focusing on botany and gardening. Another relevant feature of the book is the diachronic approach used in discussing the issue of popularisation. The authors of the volume focus on their research following their own methodological choices, and, as such, investigate critical discourse analysis, genre analysis, and corpus analysis. All the authors, however, apply a diachronic perspective to their study. Chapters, therefore, span from the dissemination of science in the 17th century English scientific community, through the Late Modern English Period, to the end of the 19th century, throughout the 20th century, up to the present day. Within the common frame of natural sciences, each author develops a specific topic such as Irish botanical terminology; the development of garden notebooks; the manipulation of Darwin’s theory of evolution; the role played by the Puritans in promoting a plain and clear English scientific prose; Darwinism in the 20th and 21st century British press; and scientific popularisation in Nobel lectures.

The Freedom of Speech

The Freedom of Speech
Author: Miles Ogborn
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2019-10-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 022665771X

The institution of slavery has always depended on enforcing the boundaries between slaveholders and the enslaved. As historical geographer Miles Ogborn reveals in The Freedom of Speech, across the Anglo-Caribbean world the fundamental distinction between freedom and bondage relied upon the violent policing of the spoken word. Offering a compelling new lens on transatlantic slavery, this book gathers rich historical data from Barbados, Jamaica, and Britain to delve into the complex relationships between voice, slavery, and empire. From the most quotidian encounters to formal rules of what counted as evidence in court, the battleground of slavery lay in who could speak and under what conditions. But, as Ogborn shows through keen attention to both the traces of talk and the silences in the archives, if enslavement as a legal status could be made by words, it could be unmade by them as well. A deft interrogation of the duality of domination, The Freedom of Speech offers a rich interpretation of oral cultures that both supported and constantly threatened to undermine the slave system.