University Studies

Few things are as important as the food we eat. "Conversations in Food Studies" demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary research through the cross-pollination of disciplinary, epistemological, and methodological perspectives. Widely diverse essays, ranging from the meaning of milk, to the bring-your-own-wine movement, to urban household waste, are the product of collaborating teams of interdisciplinary authors. Readers are invited to engage and reflect on the theories and practices underlying some of the most important issues facing the emerging field of foodstudies today. Conversations in Food Studies brings to the table thirteen original contributions organized around the themes of representation, governance, disciplinary boundaries, and, finally, learning through food. This collection offers an important and groundbreaking approach to food studies as it examines and reworks the boundaries that have traditionally structured the academy and that underlie much of food studies literature.

This book highlights the phenomenon of social media use in university studies based on its participants’ lived experience. It will appeal both to academics and practitioners interested in the human factors in the study environments saturated with technologies of social media. This book reveals multiple, sometimes contradictory dimensions of the phenomenon. The contradictions acquire a binary Janus-faced characteristic of uncertainty and paradox. Social media use in university studies also causes changes in experiencing time, space and relations. Teacher research participants sometimes perceive their time as stress or an additional load, which shows that social media use in university studies demands a new approach to teacher workload and its regulation. There is also the necessity of the sensitive democratic teacher—student pedagogical relationship. This book proves that the pedagogical relationship and human creativity essentially belong to the human living world and are still at the heart of the technological “cyborgian” existence.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1884.

This book highlights corpora use in teaching foreign languages in university education. It will appeal to both academics and practitioners interested in the process of teaching foreign languages at more advanced levels while applying corpus analysis and building tools for corpus annotation. It provides a detailed case study of analyzing the terminology of constitutional law in both English and Lithuanian as an example to illustrate the possibility of integrating corpus analysis tools into the process of teaching foreign languages in university education. The book reveals that initial linguistic knowledge is essential when teaching and learning foreign languages at more advanced levels while applying corpus annotation. In addition, it shows that, even though the use of new corpus software is perceived as a positive, there are still certain issues to be solved in this regard, such as the constant renewal of public computers in universities and the technical and methodological support for teachers while using corpora tools.

Since its inception as an institutionalized discipline in the United States during the 1980s, performance studies has focused on the interdisciplinary analysis of a broad spectrum of cultural behaviours including theatre, dance, folklore, popular entertainments, performance art, protests, cultural rituals, and the performance of self in everyday life. Performance Studies in Canada brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the national emergence of performance studies as a field in Canada. To date, no systematic attempts has been made to consider how this methodology is being taught, applied, and rethought in Canadian contexts, and Canadian performance studies scholarship remains largely unacknowledged within international discussions about the discipline. This collection fills this gap by identifying multiple origins of performance studies scholarship in the country and highlighting significant works of performance theory and history that are rooted in Canadian culture. Essays illustrate how specific institutional conditions and cultural investments – Indigenous, francophone, multicultural, and more – produce alternative articulations of “performance” and reveal national identity as a performative construct. A state-of-the-art work on the state of the field, Performance Studies in Canada foregrounds national and global performance knowledge to invigorate the discipline around the world.

In the last decade, the development of new technologies has made innovation a fundamental pillar of education. Teaching innovation includes the evolution of both teaching and learning models to drive improvements in educational methodologies. Teaching innovation is a pioneer in the understanding and comprehension of the different teaching methodologies and models developed in the academic area. Teaching innovation is a process that seeks validation in the academic and teaching communities at universities in order to promote the improvement and its practices and uses in the future characterized by digital development and data-based methods. Teaching Innovation in University Education: Case Studies and Main Practices features the major practices and case studies of teaching innovation developed in recent years at universities. It is a source on study cases focused on teaching innovation methodologies as well as on the identification of new technologies that will help the development of initiatives and practices focused on teaching innovation at higher education institutions. Covering topics such as didactic strategics, service learning, and technology-based gamification, this premier reference source is an indispensable resource for pre-service teachers, lecturers, students, faculty, administrators, libraries, entrepreneurs, researchers, and academicians.

This collection explores the highly contested relationship of religious studies and theology and the place of each, if any, in secular institutions of higher education. The founding narrative of religious studies, with its sharp distinction between teaching religion and teaching about religion, grows less compelling in the face of globalization and the erosion of modernism. These essays take up the challenge of thinking through the identity and borders of religious studies and theology for our time. Reflecting a broad range of positions, the authors explore the religious/secular conceptual landscape that has dominated the modern West, and in the process address the revision of the academic study of religion and theology now underway.