Kirsten Ellison

a corpus-based characterization of the range of non-sentential utterances that occur in the British National Corpus. Built on the KoS’s theory of context, it develops a grammatical and contextual analysis of a wide range of non-sequential utterances, showing that the context-oriented aspect of NSU words and constructions is quite conventional. Chapter 8 discusses extensions of previous topics of KoS in five directions. The first three are how to scale up the theory of two-person interaction to multi-party dialogue, how to generalize the theory of metacommunicative interaction to cover self-repair, and how to extend the theory to cover indirect speech acts. The fourth presents developmental evidence concerning the emergence of NSUs and sketches an account of the order of emergence, and the last one extends the dialogically oriented grammar formalism to deal with quantified NPs and anaphora in an attempt to satisfy the Reprise Content Hypothesis. In the final chapter, the author puts together all the important threads from previous chapters and links them to the issues raised in the first chapter. The author finally summarizes the main technical details in three appendices: the external world, the interactional domain and the grammatical domain. Having built up the theory of simple dialogue to multi-party dialogue, the author demonstrates in his work that adopting the interactive stance can provide a unified account of various interaction phenomena at both the macroand micro-levels. There are, however, a few inadequacies that need to be addressed in future work. First, it is still not very clear how the three domains – that is, the external world, the interactional domain and the grammatical domain – can effectively link up in real interactive utterances. Second, from a theoretical perspective, the volume attempts to develop a grammar (HPSGTTR) as a basis to formulate the theory of metacommunicative interaction and outline the basic features of a grammatical framework for dialogue. While it is applicable to some simple utterances such as interrogatives and declaratives, it is not easy to see how it can apply to more complicated communicative acts such as a sequence of utterances. Third, the relationship between language knowledge and language use needs to be discussed because, as mentioned at the beginning of this review, it has been a topic of debate for linguists over the past few decades. As a whole, this is a highly technical yet highly integrated and coherent volume. Having opened a new window onto how to build communicative interaction into the grammatical system, it will doubtless advance our understanding of how syntax, semantics and pragmatics go hand in hand in the production and comprehension of natural language.

This article is a critical interdisciplinary study of biohacking as a specific case of transhumanism and its goals of enhancement and age intervention. It focuses on the organising principles underlying the biohacking movement's relationship to ageing and technoscience. The argument traces how the historical and scientific body technologies of molecularisation, functional age, optimisation, and quantification made possible the biohacking vision of the ageing body as amenable to modification, enhancement and improvement beyond its natural limits. Conclusions consider the wider implications of biohacking by pointing out four important issues that frame our cultural ambivalence about ageing: the tension between biohacking's supposedly liberating enhancement technologies and their obeisance to a tyranny of self‐disciplinary practices and the authority of bio‐data; the social meaning of biohacking hierarchies of human value, based on modifiable fitness and enhanceable performance; the implications of the biohacking program for gendered ageism; and the ethical limits of biohacking, not only in terms of potential harms to a person but what it can mean to exceed the natural limits of life.

As a growing body of work has documented, digital technologies are central to the imagining of aging futures. In this study, we offer a critical, theoretical framework for exploring the dynamics of power related to the technological tracking, measuring, and managing of aging bodies at the heart of these imaginaries. Drawing on critical gerontology, feminist technoscience, sociology of the body, and socio-gerontechnology, we identify three dimensions of power relations where the designs, operations, scripts, and materialities of technological innovation implicate asymmetrical relationships of control and intervention: (1) aging bodies and the power of numbers, (2) aging spaces and the power of surveillance, and (3) age care economies and gendered power relations. While technological care for older individuals has been promoted as a cost-effective way to enhance independence, security, and health, we argue that such optimistic perspectives may obscure the realities of social inequalit...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the teenager perspectives of the meaning of food safety, and the implications of those meanings. Design/methodology/approach Five focus groups were conducted with students (aged 12–14) from Calgary, AB. Participants were asked what food safety means to them and probed about their views on the relationship between food safety and packaged foods. Grounded theorizing informed the analysis. Findings Food safety was described as located within the system, located within the individual and located within the edible. Key to these teenagers’ understanding of food safety is the theme of food deception – a deception promulgated by food producers, manufacturers and advertisers who lack transparency about what they are actually selling. Teenagers draw attention to the risks associated with living in an industrialized food environment, and to the tension between safety and the industry-driven motive to sell. Originality/value Individuals start to make independent decisions around food preparation and consumption as teenagers; as present and future consumers, it is valuable to learn their perspectives and knowledge about food safety. More importantly, food safety is not only simply a health-related issue but also a semantic one. This study moves beyond the knowledge deficit approach characterizing most research on the topic. Instead, it probes the range of meanings associated with food safety and how they are worked out, revealing that the teenagers’ construction of food as “risk objects” reveals different links to harm than the food safety interventions typically directed to them.

Food marketing to children is ubiquitous and persuasive. It primarily promotes foods of poor nutritional quality, influences children's food preferences and habits, and is a factor in childhood obesity. Given that food marketing relentlessly targets children in traditional/digital media and the built environment, children need critical media literacy skills that build their understanding of food marketing's persuasive effects. However, little research connects media literacy with food marketing and health, including effective strategies for teaching and evaluating such programming for children. This perspective presents the outcomes of a stakeholder meeting on best practices in teaching and evaluation on media literacy and food marketing to children. Strategies for promoting critical thinking (teaching content, teaching practices, teaching supports, and parent/caregiver involvement), and strategies for measuring critical thinking (program effectiveness and broader long-term ...

Purpose Despite the pervasiveness of teen-targeted food advertising on social media, little is known about the persuasive elements (or power) found within those ads. This research study aims to engage with the concept of “visual style” to explore the range of visual techniques used in Instagram food marketing to teenagers. Design/methodology/approach A participatory study was conducted with 57 teenagers, who used a specially designed mobile app to capture images of the teen-targeted food marketing they encountered for seven days. A visual thematic analysis was used to assess and classify the advertisements that participants captured from Instagram and specifically tagged with “visual style”. Findings A total of 142 food advertisements from Instagram were tagged with visual style, and classified into five main styles: Bold Focus, Bespoke, Absurd, Everyday and Sensory. Research limitations/implications This study contributes to an improved understanding about how the visual is used as a marketing technique to capture teenagers’ attention, contributing to the persuasive power of marketing messages. Originality/value Food marketing is a significant part of the young consumer’s marketplace, and this study provides new insight into the sophisticated nature of such marketing – revealing the visual styles used to capture the attention of its brand-aware audience.

Technologies for people aging at home are increasingly prevalent and include ambient monitoring devices that work together with wearables to remotely track and monitor older adults' biometric data and activities of daily living. There is, however, little research into the promotional and speculative images of technology-in-use. Our paper examines the ways in which the datafication of aging is offered up visually by technology companies to promote their products. Specifically, we ask: how are data visualized in promotional images of smart sensor technologies for aging at home? And in these visualizations, what happens to the aging body and relations of care? We include in our definition of smart sensor technologies both wearable and ambient monitoring devices, so long as they are used for the in-home passive monitoring of the inhabitant by a caregiver, excluding those devices targeted for institutional settings or those used for self-monitoring purposes. Our sample consists of 22...

On 17 January 2013, Wired chose the smart contact lens as one of “7 Massive Ideas That Could Change the World” describing a Google-led research project. Wired explains that the inventor, Dr. Babak Parviz, wants to build a microsystem on a contact lens: “Using radios no wider than a few human hairs, he thinks these lenses can augment reality and incidentally eliminate the need for displays on phones, PCs, and widescreen TVs”.  Explained further in other sources, the technology entails an antenna, circuits embedded into a contact lens, GPS, and an LED to project images on the eye, creating a virtual display (Solve for X). Wi-Fi would stream content through a transparent screen over the eye. One patent describes a camera embedded in the lens (Etherington). Another mentions medical sensing, such as glucose monitoring of tears (Goldman). In other words, Google proposes an imagined future when we use contact lenses to search the Internet (and be searched by it), shop online, communicate w...

Popularized by DIY scientists and quantified-selfers, the language of “biohacking” has become increasingly prevalent in anti-aging discourse. Presented with speculative futures of superhuman health and longevity, consumers and patients are invited to “hack” the aging process, reducing age to one of the many programs, or rather “bugs” that can be re-written, removed, and rendered obsolete. Drawing on recent examples from popular media and anti-aging promotional materials, I explore how the language of biohacking signals an orientation to the body that denies the acceptability of a body that is anything but optimal. In the endless strive towards the latest and greatest, the language of biohacking renders the old body obsolete, standing as nothing more than a relic of an outdated operating system.

This article explores and critiques mainstream speculative news surrounding personal technologies. We focus on news concerning bionic contact lenses, a hardware invention prototype by Google Inc promoted as a ‘future’ personal computing device. Technology is increasingly normalized and configured as inevitable through representations across consumer media outlets. In our analysis of a large corpus of online and print news coverage, we identify three rhetorical strategies that justify it as either a medical/assistive device within a discourse of health, or a device for transhuman enhancement within a discourse of transhumanism. Employing Roland Barthes’s critical theory of myth, we argue that the first medical justification obfuscates but ultimately promotes the second justification, transhuman enhancement. This transhumanist vision endorses enhancement and augmentation without an identifiable purpose or disclosure concerning how people as users might be affected in the future. New m...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the teenager perspectives of the meaning of food safety, and the implications of those meanings. Design/methodology/approach Five focus groups were conducted with students (aged 12–14) from Calgary, AB. Participants were asked what food safety means to them and probed about their views on the relationship between food safety and packaged foods. Grounded theorizing informed the analysis. Findings Food safety was described as located within the system, located within the individual and located within the edible. Key to these teenagers’ understanding of food safety is the theme of food deception – a deception promulgated by food producers, manufacturers and advertisers who lack transparency about what they are actually selling. Teenagers draw attention to the risks associated with living in an industrialized food environment, and to the tension between safety and the industry-driven motive to sell. Originality/value Individuals start to m...

Drawing from a collection of over 160 North American print advertisements for anti-aging skin care products from January to December of 2009, this paper examines the discourse of agelessness, a vision of esthetic perfection and optimal health that is continually referred to by gerontologists, cultural theorists, and scientific researchers as a state of being to which humankind can aspire. Employing critical discourse analysis through the use of semiotics and visual rhetoric, this paper explores the means through which anti-aging skin care advertisements present to their viewers a particular object of desire, looking, more specifically, at how agelessness is presented as a way out and ultimate transcendence of age. Through the analytical tools of semiotics and visual rhetoric, four visions of agelessness are identified and explored in this paper: Agelessness as Scientific Purity, Agelessness as Genetic Impulse, Agelessness as Nature's Essence, and Agelessness as Myth. Whether fou...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the teenager perspectives of the meaning of food safety, and the implications of those meanings. Five focus groups were conducted with students (aged 12–14) from Calgary, AB. Participants were asked what food safety means to them and probed about their views on the relationship between food safety and packaged foods. Grounded theorizing informed the analysis. Food safety was described as located within the system, located within the individual and located within the edible. Key to these teenagers’ understanding of food safety is the theme of food deception – a deception promulgated by food producers, manufacturers and advertisers who lack transparency about what they are actually selling. Teenagers draw attention to the risks associated with living in an industrialized food environment, and to the tension between safety and the industry-driven motive to sell. Individuals start to make independent decisions around food preparation and consumption as teenagers; as present and future consumers, it is valuable to learn their perspectives and knowledge about food safety. More importantly, food safety is not only simply a health-related issue but also a semantic one. This study moves beyond the knowledge deficit approach characterizing most research on the topic. Instead, it probes the range of meanings associated with food safety and how they are worked out, revealing that the teenagers’ construction of food as “risk objects” reveals different links to harm than the food safety interventions typically directed to them.

Popularized by DIY scientists and quantified-selfers, the language of “biohacking” has become increasingly prevalent in anti-aging discourse. Presented with speculative futures of superhuman health and longevity, consumers and patients are invited to “hack” the aging process, reducing age to one of the many programs, or rather “bugs” that can be re-written, removed, and rendered obsolete. Drawing on recent examples from popular media and anti-aging promotional materials, I explore how the language of biohacking signals an orientation to the body that denies the acceptability of a body that is anything but optimal. In the endless strive towards the latest and greatest, the language of biohacking renders the old body obsolete, standing as nothing more than a relic of an outdated operating system.

Drawing from a collection of over 160 North American print advertisements for anti-aging skin care products from January to December of 2009, this paper examines the discourse of agelessness, a vision of esthetic perfection and optimal health that is continually referred to by gerontologists, cultural theorists, and scientific researchers as a state of being to which humankind can aspire. Employing critical discourse analysis through the use of semiotics and visual rhetoric, this paper explores the means through which anti-aging skin care advertisements present to their viewers a particular object of desire, looking, more specifically, at how agelessness is presented as a way out and ultimate transcendence of age. Through the analytical tools of semiotics and visual rhetoric, four visions of agelessness are identified and explored in this paper: Agelessness as Scientific Purity, Agelessness as Genetic Impulse, Agelessness as Nature's Essence, and Agelessness as Myth. Whether found in the heights of scientific purity, the inner core of our genetic impulse, the depths of nature's essence, or whether agelessness itself has reached its own, untouchable, mythic status, the advertisements in this study represent one of the most pervasive vehicles through which our current vision(s) of ageless perfection are reflected, reinforced, and suspended in a drop of cream.

This article explores and critiques mainstream speculative news surrounding personal technologies. We focus on news concerning bionic contact lenses, a hardware invention prototype by Google Inc promoted as a ‘future’ personal computing device. Technology is increasingly normalized and configured as inevitable through representations across consumer media outlets. In our analysis of a large corpus of online and print news coverage, we identify three rhetorical strategies that justify it as either a medical/assistive device within a discourse of health, or a device for transhuman enhancement within a discourse of transhumanism. Employing Roland Barthes’s critical theory of myth, we argue that the first medical justification obfuscates but ultimately promotes the second justification, transhuman enhancement. This transhumanist vision endorses enhancement and augmentation without an identifiable purpose or disclosure concerning how people as users might be affected in the future. New media are subtly promoted during invention; yet, their social function, implied ideologies, and commercialized agenda are rarely challenged. We problematize these omissions, and highlight the need for critical dialogue.

Sharon Kaufman argues that our relationship to aging and time has been radically transformed within the context of what she refers to as “a dynamic modern temporality,” where the transformation and control of time have become a cultural imperative (53). With recent developments in bio-medical technology and life-extending treatments, alongside dreams of ageless futures, temporality has taken on new dimensions in the study of aging. Drawing on empirical and theoretical work, this paper critically explores the ways in which aging in time has been spatialized, conceptualized, and negotiated within the context of these shifting perspectives.