Papers by Anders Steinvall
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc eBooks, 2022
Volume 6 A Cultural History of Color in the Modern Age covers the period 1920 to the present, a t... more Volume 6 A Cultural History of Color in the Modern Age covers the period 1920 to the present, a time of extraordinary developments in colour science, philosophy, art, design and technologies. The expansion of products produced with synthetic dyes was accelerated by mass consumerism as artists, designers, architects, writers, theater and filmmakers made us a ‘color conscious’ society. This influenced what we wore, how we chose to furnish and decorate our homes, and how we responded to the vibrancy and chromatic eclecticism of contemporary visual cultures.The volume brings together research on how philosophers, scientists, linguists and artists debated color’s polyvalence, its meaning to different cultures, and how it could be measured, manufactured, manipulated and enjoyed. Color shapes an individual’s experience of the world and also how society gives particular spaces, objects, and moments meaning. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Color examines how color has been created, traded, used, and interpreted over the last 5000 years. The themes covered in each volume are color philosophy and science; color technology and trade; power and identity; religion and ritual; body and clothing; language and psychology; literature and the performing arts; art; architecture and interiors; and artefacts. Volume 6 in the Cultural History of Color set. General Editors: Carole P. Biggam and Kirsten Wolf
Nordic Journal of English Studies, Mar 23, 2023
IGI Global eBooks, Dec 19, 2022
University of Malta. Islands and Small States Institute, May 1, 2020
Recent research in the Seychelles speaks of a "growing crisis of masculinity", manifest... more Recent research in the Seychelles speaks of a "growing crisis of masculinity", manifested in statistics such as a ten-year life expectancy difference in favour of women, alarmingly high levels of substance abuse amongst younger men, and underachievement of boys in schools. According to the authors, males are generally disempowered by stereotypical views of males as "irresponsible", "unreliable" and "secondary to women". Similar gender patterns have been observed in other ex-slavery Creole cultures such as the small states in the Caribbean, and some scholars argue that these structures have historical origins dating back to slavery. In this study, we seek to explore aspects of Seychellois stereotypes of masculinity through so-called matched-guise experiments. Through digital manipulations of voice quality, we produce identity-warped male and female versions of the same monologue recording – a short apology. We then asked respondents to listen to the recordings and respond to the same in a short online questionnaire, where we ask questions relating to their impressions of the apology and the speaker. Dimensions here include honesty-dishonesty; politenessimpoliteness; weakness-strength; and reliability-unreliability. Differences in results of responses to male and female versions of the apology give strong indications that Seychellois stereotypically view males as dishonest, unreliable, lazy and careless. We discuss potential origins and consequences of such constructions, and propose awareness-raising measures for how these destructive historically produced scripts of gender can be rewritten. A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Raising of Awareness through Virtual Experiencing (C-RAVE). Wallenberg Foundation
Recent research in the Seychelles speaks of a "growing crisis of masculinity", manifest... more Recent research in the Seychelles speaks of a "growing crisis of masculinity", manifested in statistics such as a ten-year life expectancy difference in favour of women, alarmingly high levels of substance abuse amongst younger men, and underachievement of boys in schools. According to the authors, males are generally disempowered by stereotypical views of males as "irresponsible", "unreliable" and "secondary to women". Similar gender patterns have been observed in other ex-slavery Creole cultures such as the small states in the Caribbean, and some scholars argue that these structures have historical origins dating back to slavery. In this study, we seek to explore aspects of Seychellois stereotypes of masculinity through so-called matched-guise experiments. Through digital manipulations of voice quality, we produce identity-warped male and female versions of the same monologue recording – a short apology. We then asked respondents to listen t...
Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 3rd Conference stein(DHN 2018), Helsinki, Finland, March 7-9, 2018, 2018
L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature
Writing has been identified as a challenge for students with reading difficulties. This study con... more Writing has been identified as a challenge for students with reading difficulties. This study contributes to previous research by exploring argumentative writing in L1 (Swedish) and L2 (English) in a group of students with reading difficulties in upper secondary school. Participants were 19 students with typical reading, 19 students with poor decoding, and 9 students with poor comprehension. A majority of students attended vocational programmes. Written text quality was assessed by using an adapted version of Jacobs et al.’s (1981) analytic scoring scheme including content, organisation, cohesion, vocabulary, language use, spelling, and punctuation. Students with reading difficulties (regardless of reader subgroup) were found to perform poorly in all categories in both L1 and L2, with spelling being particularly challenging in L1, and cohesion, language use, spelling, and punctuation in L2. Significant differences were found between students with poor comprehension and students with...
Research Methods for Creating and Curating Data in the Digital Humanities
This paper presents further innovative use of virtual worlds under the pilot stages of ASSIS (A S... more This paper presents further innovative use of virtual worlds under the pilot stages of ASSIS (A Second Step in Second Life), a project funded by Umeå University. One of the aims of the project is to make use of the affordances offered by Second Life in order to raise sociolinguistic language awareness among teacher trainees and other students studying courses in sociolinguistics. Several experiments were conducted where creative use of the avatar in combination with so-called “voice morphing ” (a tool which allows the voice of the speaker to be distorted so that a male speaker can sound more feminine and vice versa) allowed students to enter the virtual world incognito in order to “experience ” a different linguistic identity. Activities were conducted in cross-cultural settings involving students from Sweden and Chile. The paper presents the initial stages of development of a model for how language awareness issues can be internalised through first-hand experience in virtual worlds.
Open Linguistics
This study explores how stereotypical preconceptions about gender and conversational behaviour ma... more This study explores how stereotypical preconceptions about gender and conversational behaviour may affect observers’ perceptions of a speaker’s performance. Using updated matched-guise techniques, we digitally manipulated the same recording of a conversation to alter the voice quality of “Speaker A” to sound “male” or “female.” Respondents’ perceptions of the conversational behaviour of Speaker A in the two guises were then measured with particular focus on floor apportionment, interruptions and signalling interest. We also measured respondents’ explicit stereotypical gender preconceptions of these aspects. Results showed that respondents perceived the male guise as having more floor apportionment and interrupting more than the female guise. Results also indicated that the respondents had explicit stereotypes that matched these patterns, i.e. that interrupting and taking space were deemed to be stereotypically male behaviour, while signalling interest was deemed to be a female featu...
Psychology Learning & Teaching
This qualitative study introduces a pedagogic design which addresses the challenging task of teac... more This qualitative study introduces a pedagogic design which addresses the challenging task of teaching and learning self-awareness and critical reflection in the teaching of psychology. The context of the study was a course in personality psychology for first year students, and the topic of interest was how the perception of personality is affected by gender stereotypes. The pedagogic design included the recording of a mixed-sex dialogue, which was then digitally altered for pitch and timbre producing two gender-switched versions of one single recording. Students were divided into two groups who listened to one of the two different voice alterations, and were given the task to rate the personality traits of male or female sounding versions of the same character. In the subsequent debriefing seminar, students were presented with the data from their ratings. These results were then used as a reference point for inter-group discussion, and later students were also asked to reflect over ...
Educare - vetenskapliga skrifter
From a structural perspective, some English accents (be they native or foreign) carry higher stat... more From a structural perspective, some English accents (be they native or foreign) carry higher status than others, which in turn may decide whether you get a job or not, for example. So how do language teachers approach this enigma, and how does this approach differ depending on the cultural context you are operating in? These are some of the questions addressed in this article. The study is based on a matched-guise experiment conducted in Sweden and the Seychelles, a small island nation outside the east coast of Africa, where respondents (active teachers and teacher trainees) were asked to evaluate the same oral presentations on various criteria such as grammar, pronunciation, structure etc. Half of the respondents listened to a version that was presented in Received Pronunciation (RP), while the other half evaluated the same monologue presented by the same person, but in an Indian English (IE) accent. Note, that careful attention was paid to aspects such as pacing, pauses etc. using...
Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal
We explored gender stereotypes among Swedish university students (N = 101) who were studying a co... more We explored gender stereotypes among Swedish university students (N = 101) who were studying a course in psychology, using a matched-guise experimental design. The gender identity of a speaker in a dialogue, manifested by voice, was digitally manipulated to sound male or female. Responses to the recordings indicated that a speaker with a male voice was rated as significantly less conscientious, agreeable, extraverted, and open to experience than was the same speaker with a female voice. Regarding social behavior, there was a tendency for the speaker with a male voice to be rated as more hostile than was the same speaker with a female voice. The study findings suggest that stereotype effects, rather than real behavioral differences, may have an impact on perceived gender differences.
Open Linguistics
The article offers an account of two projects conducted at Örebro University and Umeå University,... more The article offers an account of two projects conducted at Örebro University and Umeå University, Sweden, which are aimed at raising awareness of issues related to linguistic stereotyping using matched-guise-inspired methods (Raising Awareness through Virtual Experiencing [RAVE] funded by the Swedish Research Council and a Cross-Cultural Perspective on Raising of Awareness through Virtual Experiencing (C-RAVE) funded by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg foundation). We provide an overview of the methods used in university courses, with the aim to raise awareness of how stereotyping can affect our perception. We also give a more detailed account of the findings from two case activities conducted in Sweden and the Seychelles. Here the response patterns indicate that the perceived gender of a voice as well as the accent (native vs non-native) do affect respondents’ judgements of performance. We were also able to show that discussions and reflections inspired by these response patterns l...
This paper presents further innovative use of virtual worlds under the pilot stages of ASSIS (A S... more This paper presents further innovative use of virtual worlds under the pilot stages of ASSIS (A Second Step in Second Life), a project funded by Umeå University. One of the aims of the project is to make use of the affordances offered by Second Life in order to raise sociolinguistic language awareness among teacher trainees and other students studying courses in sociolinguistics. Several experiments were conducted where creative use of the avatar in combination with so-called "voice morphing" (a tool which allows the voice of the speaker to be distorted so that a male speaker can sound more feminine and vice versa) allowed students to enter the virtual world incognito in order to "experience" a different linguistic identity. Activities were conducted in cross-cultural settings involving students from Sweden and Chile. The paper presents the initial stages of development of a model for how language awareness issues can be internalised through first-hand experience in virtual worlds.
Whether we are aware of it or not, language is at the heart of the mechanisms leading to stereoty... more Whether we are aware of it or not, language is at the heart of the mechanisms leading to stereotyping and inequality. It is one of the major factors that we evaluate when we meet others, and it has ...
Kapitlet undersoker 'Key-stroke logging' samt 'peer-based intervention' som verty... more Kapitlet undersoker 'Key-stroke logging' samt 'peer-based intervention' som vertyg for att utveckla oversattning som utbildningsmoment
Language is closely connected with identity in a number of distinctive ways. Not only is language... more Language is closely connected with identity in a number of distinctive ways. Not only is language closely linked to nationality, but we also make conscious and unconscious associations of language output and group identity (class, gender, generation, ethnicity) whenever we meet someone. It has long been demonstrated that individuals are judged in terms of intellect and other character traits on the basis of their voice quality, intonation and accent, something which will affect ‘identification’, the ongoing, interactive process of identity construction that takes place during all human interaction (Cavallaro & Chin, 2009; Fuertes et al. 2012; Deutschmann, Steinvall & Lagerström, 2011) This chapter gives an account of methods for raising awareness of language issues and identity (stereotyping for example) using digital media. We shall discuss how working in a virtual world environment with digital representations of speakers (avatars), we used avatar manipulations and so-called voice...
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Papers by Anders Steinvall