Browsing by Author "Achugar, Mariana"

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    The affective construction of others' experience: A cross-cultural comparison of youth's responses to a film about the Uruguayan dictatorship
    (2021) Achugar, Mariana; Baeza Duffy, Patricia
    Popular culture connects us to people who have other histories and cultures. This qualitative study aims to analyze how the representation of others' suffering in films affects youths' empathy towards others different from them in terms of generation and cultural distance. We explore how empathy is expressed as semiotic processes of feelings and meanings in a contrastive cross-cultural case study. Using data collected from two college level language classrooms in two different countries (Uruguay and Chile) from two groups (one of regular university students and one of study abroad students), we contrast youths' responses to a film about violations of human rights during the Uruguayan military dictatorship (Migas de Pan, 2016). The film's representation of the violation of human rights experienced by young people during the dictatorship enables audiences to identify with the protagonist in spite of the temporal and cultural distance that separates them. Our findings suggest that the semiotic construction of feelings distinguishes the degree and intensity of youths' understanding of others' experiences. The conclusion discusses how personal trajectories and sociocultural identities influence the meaning making process of past experiences. Finally, we explore possible educational implications of these findings. (c) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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    The Discourse of History: A Systemic Functional Linguistic Perspective
    (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Achugar, Mariana; Hao, Jing; Martin, J.R.
    Taking a Systemic Functional Linguistic perspective, this book explores how language builds our knowledge about the past and gives value to historical events, thereby shaping contemporary culture. It brings together cutting-edge research from an international team of scholars to provide a detailed study of texts from three different world languages (English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese)– revealing how the discourse of history is constructed in these languages. Each chapter provides examples and step-by-step analyses of how knowledge and value are constructed in history texts, drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics to develop theory and description in relation to text analysis. It also makes connections with disciplinary literacy and history education, showing how linguistic findings can benefit the teaching and learning of historical literacy. Providing theoretical and analytical foundations for studies of the discourse of history, it is essential reading for anyone interested in literacy, discourse analysis, and language description.