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- Cultural citizenship, education and media literacy on the imagined European North-South AXIS: Finland and Portugal in contextPublication . mattos-parreira, merjaFinland and Portugal are both peripheral European countries, at the fringes of the European Union. This paper sets out to discuss and compare some of the ways Portuguese and Finnish citizens are construed through present–day media literacy, be these distinctions historical and geographical, cultural, technological, educational or even ethical by character. The idea of education (“Bildung”) as a stronghold of civilization used to lean on the concept of a nation-state that is constituted by the citizens of this nation–state. But nowadays citizens are being overruled by the technological changes and contemporary university students, then, may be seen as representing a positive paradigm shift from citizens of a specific nation–state to cosmopolites of a global civilization. The processes of construing and producing knowledge have been radically transformed by the information technologies: the open access approach makes it possible to shift the traditional classroom learning almost entirely to on line work. “In five years, the best lectures will be found on the internet free of charge, lectures that are better than in any universities”, predicted Bill Gates some time ago in Techonomy Conference. Future citizens need to solve complex, ill-defined problems and learning becomes increasingly a combination of face-to-face instruction with computer-mediated learning environments. But when some of the traditional values and practices of pursuing knowledge are nowadays rapidly being discarded, they are often being replaced by market–state doctrines of education and of humanity, thus producing identities of entrepreneurship, often unwilling to participate in enhancing general social welfare.
- Hegemonies of expatriate identities in Portuguese English-language pressPublication . mattos-parreira, merjaMy article is about reader’s identity construction in “readers write” texts published in Portuguese English-language newspapers, The Anglo-Portuguese News (The APN), The News and The Algarve Resident at the turn of the Millenium. The keyword concept of my approach is textual identity construction through a transdisciplinary approach – i.e., culture, society and language. My linguistic theoretical framework follows the Australian School of Systemic Functional Linguistics, founded by Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan. I examine the theme of identity construction by combining several disciplinary orientations and establishing relationships between them. My basic theoretical argument on identity construction is that, first of all, it is always a relational concept and it is built upon the notion of difference. Difference is actually central for the existence of all meanings. Binary oppositions are no doubt over-simplified because there is always one who dominates; the dimension of power – and the continuous negotiation of it - is omnipresent in all cultural activities. Besides, we only construct meanings (remember Voloshinov’s notions of dialogism and heteroglossia) and ourselves (psychoanalytic stance, for instance) through a dialogue with the other. The so called tourist experience (which would include the category of the expatriate as a long-term tourist) can also be considered as a search for a difference between “one’s normal place of residence/work and the object of the tourist gaze”, as John Urry (1990: 11) has argued.