title: Breasts are not just battlefields: Breast cancer and metaphors

authors: Malik, Sara

abstract: We analyse how breast cancer patients use metaphor with respect to their illness. The medical humanities (Whitehead and Woods, 2016) already has a rich tradition of coming to appreciate how cancer is discussed by clinicians, patients, survivors, and others. Our research hopes to extend this ongoing discussion by looking within and across two languages: English and Urdu. This research is part of a larger project (a PhD thesis) and in this presentation, we introduce preliminary corpus data and some initial findings from it. We take a corpus linguistics approach to examine how frequent metaphors are used, and we subject them to analysis through the lens of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 2006). Our corpus is collected from two different languages: Urdu (as spoken in Pakistan) and English (as spoken in New Zealand). It consists of social media language: four YouTube videos (two from each country), transcribed and translated (for Urdu). Our initial findings suggest that, as argued in previous research (Guité-Verret and Vachon, 2021), breast cancer is often framed with reference to war metaphors. However, we also reveal a number of previously undocumented metaphors, for example part-whole relationships, such as ‘if spread from breast then it has the whole body’, which refer to generic level metaphor-miscellaneous metaphors (GenM-MM) Lakoff (2006).

text: Breasts are not just battlefields: Breast cancer and metaphors We analyse how breast cancer patients use metaphor with respect to their illness. The medical humanities (Whitehead and Woods, 2016) already has a rich tradition of coming to appreciate how cancer is discussed by clinicians, patients, survivors, and others. Our research hopes to extend this ongoing discussion by looking within and across two languages: English and Urdu. This research is part of a larger project (a PhD thesis) and in this presentation, we introduce preliminary corpus data and some initial findings from it. We take a corpus linguistics approach to examine how frequent metaphors are used, and we subject them to analysis through the lens of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 2006). Our corpus is collected from two different languages: Urdu (as spoken in Pakistan) and English (as spoken in New Zealand). It consists of social media language: four YouTube videos (two from each country), transcribed and translated (for Urdu). Our initial findings suggest that, as argued in previous research (Guité-Verret and Vachon, 2021), breast cancer is often framed with reference to war metaphors. However, we also reveal a number of previously undocumented metaphors, for example part-whole relationships, such as ‘if spread from breast then it has the whole body’, which refer to generic level metaphor-miscellaneous metaphors (GenM-MM) Lakoff (2006).

year: 2023-11-29

title: Location or hukou: What most limits fertility of urban women in China?

authors: Liang, Yun

subjects: Social Sciences

abstract: China's fertility rate is below replacement level. The government is attempting to increase this rate by relaxing the one‐child policy. China faces a possible tradeoff because further urbanization is needed to raise incomes but may reduce future fertility. We decompose China's rural–urban fertility gaps using both de facto and de jure criteria for defining the urban population. The fertility‐depressing effects of holding urban hukou are more than three times larger than effects of urban residence. Less of the rural–urban fertility gap by hukou status is due to differences in characteristics than is the case for the fertility gap by place of residence.

text: Location or hukou: What most limits fertility of urban women in China? China's fertility rate is below replacement level. The government is attempting to increase this rate by relaxing the one‐child policy. China faces a possible tradeoff because further urbanization is needed to raise incomes but may reduce future fertility. We decompose China's rural–urban fertility gaps using both de facto and de jure criteria for defining the urban population. The fertility‐depressing effects of holding urban hukou are more than three times larger than effects of urban residence. Less of the rural–urban fertility gap by hukou status is due to differences in characteristics than is the case for the fertility gap by place of residence.

year: 2017

title: The thing’s revelation: Some thoughts on Māori philosophical research

authors: Mika, Carl Te Hira

abstract: In indigenous research projects, there is a strong emphasis on interviews and the analysis of the data that results. There is, however, another form of research that still calls to be fully acknowledged. Philosophical research shares some ground with empirical because it responds to a Maori history and experience of oppression. One clear area in which it may differ, though, is in how it attempts to acknowledge the presence of ‘things’, which we might call our ‘whanaunga’ (relations), even where these have been deemed by Western science to be inanimate. More importantly, philosophical research is risky because the thing continues to influence the researching self, despite the self’s eventual disengagement from the research. Philosophical research – the kind that seeks an unobtainable ground of thought – is at once aware of and tentative towards the thing. It also acts within the influence of the thing: this phenomenon for the author can be best felt when the bizarre is encountered in everyday observations.

text: The thing’s revelation: Some thoughts on Māori philosophical research In indigenous research projects, there is a strong emphasis on interviews and the analysis of the data that results. There is, however, another form of research that still calls to be fully acknowledged. Philosophical research shares some ground with empirical because it responds to a Maori history and experience of oppression. One clear area in which it may differ, though, is in how it attempts to acknowledge the presence of ‘things’, which we might call our ‘whanaunga’ (relations), even where these have been deemed by Western science to be inanimate. More importantly, philosophical research is risky because the thing continues to influence the researching self, despite the self’s eventual disengagement from the research. Philosophical research – the kind that seeks an unobtainable ground of thought – is at once aware of and tentative towards the thing. It also acts within the influence of the thing: this phenomenon for the author can be best felt when the bizarre is encountered in everyday observations.

year: 2015