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Item Teaching literature in times of COVID: views from Sri Lanka(Govt Maharaja Postgraduate College, Chhatarpur, Madhya Pradesh, India, 2020) Fernando, DinaliThis presentation is based on the narratives of Sri Lankan teachers of literature about their experiences of teaching English literature online in times of COVID 19 in Sri Lanka. Online teaching has produced a rather polemical discourse in Sri Lanka at present, as evident most visibly in the local multimodal news media and social media. On the one hand, the affordances of online teaching are being explored, and even reified; on the other, it also records a tenacious resistance towards any form of IT-mediated education based on concerns about the “digital and social gap” of unequal access to resources. However, this discourse tends to be controlled by the powerful voices in education, largely of university academics. While they claim to speak for everyone, the voices of the teachers in primary and secondary schools who were forced to adopt online teaching methodologies almost overnight have remained conspicuously silent, perhaps even silenced, in this discourse. This presentation focuses on exploring the individual experiences of a group of teachers of English literature who transitioned to online and remote teaching since the closure of schools on March 13th 2020. Their narratives, located within their specific teaching contexts, will be analyzed. Issues of significance in teaching literature online during the pandemic, as they emerge from the teachers’ narratives, will be discussed. It is hoped that the presentation will lead to the sharing of insights into the methodologies of teaching literature within and outside the online and pandemic context, which remain a rich but unexplored area of research in our part of the world.Item World Englishes in the classroom: A critical literature review of attitudes towards variation in English among teachers of English(Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Colombo, 2020) Fernando, DinaliThe study of language attitudes has long been a significant area of research. Generally adopting social psychological approaches, language attitudes research at present is dominated by studies of attitudes towards World Englishes (AWEs) in English language teaching (ELT) contexts. Undergirded by the theoretical assumption that attitudes can determine successful language learning, these studies explore the attitudes of teachers and students of English in countries where powerful global pedagogical models, British and/or American English, compete with established local varieties within and outside the classroom. This critical literature review explores the contribution of recent research towards gaining an in-depth understanding of teachers’ AWEs. Over fifty international and local studies conducted in pedagogical contexts, mostly published between 2011 and 2019, were reviewed. Findings revealed a dominant theoretical assumption about attitudes as a stable, measurable construct and the employment of two deductive methods, the language attitudes survey and the verbal-guise test. These approaches have produced quantitative, generaliseable results that have succeeded in identifying global attitudinal trends such as the growing acceptance of local varieties alongside the persisting preference for Inner Circle pedagogical norms. Many studies also adopted a binary view of attitudes, affirming ‘positive’ attitudes while identifying ‘negative’ attitudes as deficient, with little attempt to explore ambivalence in attitudinal reactions. A silencing of teachers’ individual voices which might have shed light on their own attitudes was also observed. The literature review concludes that a more nuanced understanding of current AWEs among teachers of English in Sri Lanka based on their own experiences and worldviews might make a more meaningful contribution to English education in the 21st century characterized by competing Sri Lankan Englishes, and regional and global WEs. For this, the study recommends social constructionist and narrative approaches that view concepts such as attitudes as unfixed, volatile, contextualised, and discursively constructed by individuals.Item “Suspect Belongings”: The Traitor as a Figure of Betrayal in Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie-Rose(Women’s Studies, 2022) Manuratne, P.In The Last Resistance, Jacqueline Rose writes, “As far as nationhood is concerned, flesh and blood – or in Freud’s formula ‘blood and nerves’ is a suspect form of belonging” (22). As fresh cycles of violence erupt with deeper and darker understandings of who belongs where in a world in which vast swathes of people live as stateless or exiled people, the forms of belong- ing to the nation, the group, or the clan have become ever more suspect. In this study, the central figure for this suspect form of belonging is the traitor. I analyze Etel Adnan’s novel, Sitt Marie-Rose (1978), translated into English as Sitt Marie-Rose (1982), to examine how, as a traitor, a woman brings out the tenuousness of group cohesion and belonging in times of war. Etel Adnan is a Lebanese-American poet, painter, and novelist whose work mixes genres, disciplines, and cultural idioms. Sitt Marie-Rose is a fictional account of the real-life story of Marie-Rose Boulus (Adnan, “To Write”). Boulus was a Syrian Christian social worker in Beirut who was abducted and killed by the Christian Militia during the early stages of the Lebanese Civil War. At once martyr and traitor, she gives a body to the political and sexual anxieties associated with the traitor. In this paper, I put Adnan’s novel in conversation with psychoanalysis, drawing on the study of traitors by Sharika Thiranagama and Tobias Kelly to examine how the figure of the traitor can be gendered. A female traitor’s betrayal destabilizes not only the tenuous lines of group cohesion or national belonging but also the implicit sexual forms of bonding present in such groups. This inner undoing provokes vicious violence: “we do not want to hear the unsettling news that might come from anywhere else. We are never more ruthless than when we are trying to block out parts of our mind” (23), writes Rose. I take the figure of the traitor, in this case the female traitor, as a figure for that inner unsettling of our enchantment with ourselves and our nation. Thus, the novel renders visible the vulnerability and tenuousness of national belonging: Adnan pro- poses a model of love that upsets the fragile but hardened brotherhoods, leading to other solidarities that transcend the love of the same (brother) by introducing sexual difference, the woman, and the traitor (Manuratne 160–219).Item Embodying (dis)abilities: The Renegotiation of Pedagogical Practices by Women Undergraduates with Disabilities during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Sri Lanka(King's College London (KCL) University, 2022) Niles, Sabreena; Rathnayake, IsuruThis study explores the potential to renegotiate pedagogical practices in light of the unprecedented transformations necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic, through centralising discourses surrounding the body in relation to women undergraduates with disabilities in Sri Lanka. While recent studies have engaged with the heightened sense of marginalisation experienced by individuals with disabilities during this immobilising pandemic, a significant lacuna exists in its involvement with the Sri Lankan higher education sector. Simultaneously, while research on gender responsive education during the Covid-19 pandemic in South Asia has dwelt on the impact of worsening economies and rising domestic abuse upon the education of women, there appears to be inadequate emphasis on the intersections of women and disabilities, particularly in Sri Lanka. The present study thus gathers data from semi-structured interviews conducted with an eclectic group of six women undergraduates with disabilities from three state universities, which is examined using theoretical and conceptual frameworks related to critical disability, feminist and pedagogical theories. While the study highlights the debilitating consequences of functioning in a culture that is disabling for women with disabilities, it dwells on the subversive potential of their bodies (which are constructed within normative discourses on (dis)ability and knowledge), to interrogate ideologies and practices that shape the education system. It further contends that such subversive bodies demand a critical engagement with encroaching neo-liberal values that define our pedagogical practices through laissez-faire economic policies, exposing in that process cracks that may otherwise remain invisible. The study identifies such embodied experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic as critical to rupturing assumptions of women undergraduates with disabilities. It further posits that their bodies may function as sites that dismantle the strict categorisation and hierarchisation of knowledge, thereby challenging and expanding disciplinary boundaries. The study, subsequently, reinterprets the Covid-19 pandemic as a critical point of departure for women undergraduates with disabilities and other marginalised social fractions in Sri Lanka.Item War and Its Objects: Reflections of the Sri Lankan Civil War in S. P. Pushpakanthan’s Art(https://www.tandfonline.com/pb-assets/Global/tfo_logo-1444989687640.png, 2021) Manuratne, Salwatura Acharige Prabha MadhuwanthiThis paper examines visual texts by the Sri Lankan artist S. P. Pushpakanthan, whose art is positioned at the intersection between the effects of war and its material effect on objects. Two research questions frame this paper: what knowledge(s) about violence do Pushpakanthan’s texts produce as reflecting, reflected objects? how do these texts challenge anthropocentric views of objects and violence and create an esthetics of the “democracy of objects,” as Levi Bryant would put it? To answer the first, I turn to what Steven Miller has called “violence worse than death.” Miller proposes that violence targets more than the death of a single, delimited life, and sees violence as being directed toward the totality of the living and non-living world. To answer the second, I draw on Object-Oriented Ontology, implied closely by the artist’s own description of his work as being about the “ontology of the object.” In Pushpakanthan’s art, objects function as a visual coda for violence; they are traces, not only of the immediacy of killing, but the totality of the violence against all things. The esthetics of such an ontology is a formal reflection of the affective effects of violence of war that destroys much more than mere life.