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That's Funny! The humorous effect of misappropriating disciplinary-specific semiotic resources
Uppsala University. (Physics Education Research)ORCID iD: 0000-0003-3244-2586
Umeå University.
2014 (English)In: The first Conference of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics, Lund, Sweden, 25-27 Sept 2014, 2014, p. 50-51Conference paper, Oral presentation only (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

The socialization of disciplinary outsiders into an academic discipline has been described both in terms of becoming fluent in a disciplinary discourse (Airey, 2009; Airey & Linder, 2009; Northedge, 2002) and achieving disciplinary literacy (Airey, 2011, 2013; Geisler, 1994). In this paper we investigate disciplinary boundaries by documenting the responses of academics to a semiotic disciplinary hybrid. The hybrid we use is the Physikalisches Lied, a bogus piece of sheet music into which disciplinary-specific semiotic resources from the realm of physics have been incorporated to humorous effect.

The piece is presented to three distinct disciplinary focus groups: physicists, musicians and a group of academics who have had little contact with either discipline. In order to elicit disciplinary responses that are free from researcher prompts, each focus group is first asked the simple, open-ended question What do you see here? Once discussion of this question is exhausted the focus groups are asked to identify as many puns as they can—essentially all the disciplinary items that they feel have been misappropriated—and to attempt to explain what this means from a disciplinary standpoint. The differences in the responses of the three groups are presented and analysed.

We argue that semiotic material focused on by each of the three groups and the nature of the explanation offered, provide evidence of the degree of integration into the disciplines of physics and music. Our findings shed light on the process of becoming a disciplinary insider and the semiotic work involved in this process.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2014. p. 50-51
Keywords [en]
Humour, positioning, disciplines, physics, music
National Category
Didactics Physical Sciences
Research subject
Humanities
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-44418OAI: oai:DiVA.org:lnu-44418DiVA, id: diva2:821984
Conference
The first Conference of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics, Lund, Sweden, 25-27 Sept 2014
Available from: 2015-06-16 Created: 2015-06-15 Last updated: 2016-05-30Bibliographically approved

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Airey, John

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf