Guest Editorial: Conceptualizing Justice and Counter-Expertise

ABSTRACT

Systemic injustices exclude counter-experts from telling their stories and influencing the collective imagination. Four papers and some discussant essays illustrate the ways in which counter-experts cross boundaries to contest knowledge claims, legal institutions, and forms of data in order to resist various forms of injustice. Literature on counter-expertise, socio-technical imaginaries, and epistemic injustice highlights how marginalized groups are prevented from participating in the process of collective imagining. A definition of counter-expertise and a new typology of counter-expertise demonstrate how marginalized groups navigate boundaries to pursue epistemic justice. The four papers in the special issue exemplify the ways in which counter-experts navigate identity politics. To combat epistemic injustice within our field, STS scholars can be more inclusive with teaching, mentoring, reviewing and other forms of scholarly gatekeeping.     

EXAMINING THE USE OF PHOTO ESSAYS ON STUDENTS’ WRITING ABILITY

This study examined the use of a visual approach as an organizing framework for the planning and execution for the writing of various discourse styles. Low literacy achievement students in 6th and 7th grade showed increased competence in different writing styles when they planned, photographed, and “story‐boarded” photo essays as compared to situations when they merely wrote on assigned topics. Analysis for the 69 students in this study was done by repeated measures design. Three raters evaluated students’ compositions using the Diederich Rating Scale. There were consistent findings of nonsignificant main effects, while there were significant interactions of writing scores with time of treatment for the areas of content, mechanics, and total composition score     

Learning to pause: Fidelity of and biases in the developmental acquisition of gaps in the communicative signals of a songbird

The temporal organization of sounds used in social contexts can provide information about signal function and evoke varying responses in listeners (receivers). For example, music is a universal and learned human behavior that is characterized by different rhythms and tempos that can evoke disparate responses in listeners. Similarly, birdsong is a social behavior in songbirds that is learned during critical periods in development and used to evoke physiological and behavioral responses in receivers. Recent investigations have begun to reveal the breadth of universal patterns in birdsong and their similarities to common patterns in speech and music, but relatively little is known about the degree to which biological predispositions and developmental experiences interact to shape the temporal patterning of birdsong. Here, we investigated how biological predispositions modulate the acquisition and production of an important temporal feature of birdsong, namely the duration of silent pauses (“gaps”) between vocal elements (“syllables”). Through analyses of semi-naturally raised and experimentally tutored zebra finches, we observed that juvenile zebra finches imitate the durations of the silent gaps in their tutor's song. Further, when juveniles were experimentally tutored with stimuli containing a wide range of gap durations, we observed biases in the prevalence and stereotypy of gap durations. Together, these studies demonstrate how biological predispositions and developmental experiences differently affect distinct temporal features of birdsong and highlight similarities in developmental plasticity across birdsong, speech, and music.

Research Highlights

• The temporal organization of learned acoustic patterns can be similar across human cultures and across species, suggesting biological predispositions in acquisition.
• We studied how biological predispositions and developmental experiences affect an important temporal feature of birdsong, namely the duration of silent intervals between vocal elements (“gaps”).
• Semi-naturally and experimentally tutored zebra finches imitated the durations of gaps in their tutor's song and displayed some biases in the learning and production of gap durations and in gap variability.
• These findings in the zebra finch provide parallels with the acquisition of temporal features of speech and music in humans.

     

EARLY AND CURRENT READING AND SPELLING PRACTICES OF GIFTED SPELLERS

This study continued investigating the early reading and spelling experiences as well as the spelling practices of the finalists in the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee, specifically the 1987 spellers who were considered gifted spellers. Two open-ended questionnaires were used: one for the parents of the spellers and one for the spellers. A follow-up telephone interview was conducted with a random sample of respondents. Results indicated that gifted spellers showed an early interest in language arts activities with 86% of the parents reporting that their children could read prior to formal schooling. The spellers considered themselves avid readers and indicated sophisticated metacognitive awareness whether reading or spelling. Results that suggested the spellers passed through developmental spelling stages far earlier than average children and relied on visual memory strategies, word meanings, and saying/writing words to master the orthography replicated findings from an earlier study.