2026-06-29
María Belén Marín Conesa
Weddings have become elaborate, costly events shaped by social expectations and media influence, particularly from bridal magazines. This study analyses the persuasive strategies in Bridal Guide , a leading U.S. magazine, focusing on its emotional lexicon. Using a mixed-method approach, emotional expressions are identified, classified by valence (positive/negative) and categorised by grammatical function. Results show a dominant use of positively charged language, especially adjectives, while negative terms are used sparingly but strategically within problem-solution structures. These discursive patterns intensify positive appeals and subtly promote consumerist behaviours. Emotional language thus emerges as a key persuasive tool, reinforcing idealised notions of marriage and the perceived necessity of wedding-related consumption. This analysis contributes to understanding how bridal media sustain gendered social expectations and commercial pressures around weddings.
2026-06-29
Andrea Fernández García
This paper explores the ethics of solidarity that pulses through Pam Muñoz Ryan’s Esperanza rising (2000) and Mañanaland (2020) as a response to the inherited colonial structures that shape the characters’ lifeworlds. Drawing on decolonial and postcolonial feminist frameworks, as well as Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández’s there modes of solidarity –relational, transitive, and creative–(2012), this ethical orientation foregrounds the protagonists’ development into socially committed and future-oriented adolescents. Through their journeys, they learn to inhabit the perspectives of others, interrogate beyond what is known, and build alliances across differences for the sake of a better future, thereby challenging the logic of coloniality. Ultimately, this paper highlights the timely contribution of these YA narratives in inviting young readers to imagine a more just and compassionate world, instilling a much-needed sense of hope in today’s increasingly polarized global landscape.
2026-06-29
Aida Rosende-Pérez
Drawing on feminist scholars Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, and Sara Ahmed, this article explores zones of abjection in relation to socio-geographic “waste-lands” in the US –“waste-lands” understood as territories populated by subjects rendered disposable in the nation’s purging of its “waste matters”. Employing Emer Martin’s novel Baby zero (2007) as a map orienting us across these terrains, the article examines how such spaces “become”, how they are constituted in and through abjection and, relatedly, disgust as affective reaction. I argue that in its depiction of Leila, a child migrant in the US, and her precarious dwelling in the House with No Anus as a radical zone of abjection, Baby zero offers a trenchant reflection on the necropolitics that characterize the ethos of neoliberal states and societies such as that of the US, ultimately mounting a sustained critique of its gendered and racialized nature and violent consequences.
2026-06-29
Sidoní López Pérez
2026-06-29
Xavier Martin-Rubió, Laia Lacasa-Cervelló, Irati Diert-Boté
Language ideologies, which influence how speakers perceive and value linguistic varieties, are closely intertwined with self-concept, as the way language users see themselves may influence their identity construction and their engagement with such varieties. Accordingly, this paper examines the positioning of four pre-service English teachers along a spectrum of language ideologies, ranging from native-oriented to intelligibility-oriented ideologies, and the ways these ideologies relate to their self-concepts as English as a Foreign Language (EFL) users. The participants interviewed were students enrolled in BA English Studies programs at two Spanish universities (two in Catalonia –Alfonso and Laila– and two in Andalusia –Ana and Nacho). Several small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2006) emerged in participants’ semi-structured interviews, which were qualitatively analyzed using Narrative Positioning Analysis (Bamberg, 1997). Findings revealed nuanced variations in their EFL self-concepts and ideologies towards intelligibility-nativeness, although a preference for native-speakerism appeared to dominate. Their language ideologies were observed to mediate their self-concepts, pushing them to reconcile their idealizations of native speaker norms and their growing recognition of intelligibility discourses. Overall, despite the limitations of this study, these localized narratives illustrate the diverse and sometimes contradictory landscapes of EFL learners’ self-concepts and ideologies, positioning them along the native-oriented to intelligibility-oriented continuum.
2026-06-29
Moussa Pourya Asl
This article explores the politics of quotidian resistance in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Oleander girl (2013) using Michel de Certeau’s theorization of tactics and strategies. It conceptualizes space and time as active, contested terrains where subaltern agency is enacted through subtle, embodied, and affective practices. The protagonist, Korobi Roy, resists patriarchal, caste-bound, and diasporic-nationalist constraints not via overt confrontation, but through micro-gestures –secret readings, sartorial transgressions, strategic silences, spatial reappropriations– that tactically infiltrate and refunction the architectures of control. These acts, often dismissed as inconsequential, cumulatively inscribe an alternative cartography of belonging, one that refuses full legibility within dominant frameworks. By analyzing Korobi’s navigations across Kolkata’s domestic interiors and post-9/11 New York’s securitized streets, the study shows diasporic female subjectivity can be constituted in –and through– interstices of hegemonic systems. In doing so, it reframes agency as immanent to constraint, privileging opacity, improvisation, and affective insurgency over visibility or strategic sovereignty.
2026-06-29
José Jaime Pérez-Segura, Isabel López-Cirugeda, Rosa María López-Campillo, Raquel Sánchez-Ruiz
This study addresses the influence of individualised feedback on the performance of student teachers as EFL learners in oral and written comprehension of (1) the gist, (2) specific information, (3) inferences, and (4) misleading information. Forty-five student teachers were assessed before and after the application of the teaching method along six sessions. The experimental group performed receptive-skills activities based on the typology of their previous mistakes, while the control group did similar generic activities regardless of their mistakes. An in-built Audience Response System (ARS) website was employed for data collection. Both groups obtained similar results in reading, but the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in the listening skill, especially in avoiding misleading information. An exploratory analysis by gender hints at more positive effects of the intervention for women, but more information is required to clarify this and unravel the potential of ARS procedures for personalised formative assessment for language learning purposes.
2026-06-29
Nguyen Huu-Chanh, Thai Khac-Minh
2026-06-29
Luisa Fidalgo Allo
2026-06-29
Katarzyna Piątkowska
Recent discussion in linguistics indicates that English as a lingua franca can be analysed from the perspective of Construction Grammar (CxG). However, research on ELF has not focused on emerging patterns viewed as constructions. Instead, the majority of studies on spoken ELF so far have used Conversational Analysis to examine communication in ELF. Thus, in this paper spoken-language phenomena in ELF are viewed from the perspective of Interactional Construction Grammar (ICxG), which integrates CxG and Conversation Analysis. ICxG has been implemented only in research on conventional languages. The present study suggests that it can also be used in the analysis of spoken phenomena in ELF if we treat a turn as a construction. Therefore, the paper presents the results of a corpus-based study of I think it is construction in spoken ELF, demonstrating that it can be treated as a construction.
2025-12-29
Isabel González-Díaz
This article explores the mixed and distressing feelings represented in Kacen Callender’s 2020 young adult novel Felix ever after , drawing on affect theories to highlight the potential that resignifying negative feelings can have for transgender youth. Along with reflecting on the transformative force of assertively managing bad feelings like anger or fear, the article analyses how the novel underscores the empowering effects that finding resilient care webs can have for young transgender individuals, particularly when confronting transphobia and questioning their identity.
2025-12-29
Alejandro Sánchez Cabrera
This article introduces neoaustenism as a metamodern-feminist sensibility rooted in Jane Austen’s fiction and paradigmatically articulated today through Taylor Swift’s songwriting. While other metamodern-rooted discourses such as neoromanticism revive a largely male genealogy of longing and melancholy, neoaustenism retrieves a specifically feminine grammar of irony, self-reflexivity, and relational ethics. Grounded in affect theory and the ethics of care, the concept reframes vulnerability as a shared resource that turns personal wounds into collective agency. The article first situates neoaustenism within metamodern oscillation and the affective turn. It then traces a gendered genealogy of sentiment from Austen’s heroines to Swift’s layered lyrical voices, showing through close reading how Swift’s songwriting translates Austenian irony and care into pop rituals that foster horizontal communities through reflective nostalgia, audience co-authorship, and embodied practices. Finally, this article argues that neoaustenism holds potential beyond Swift and offers a critical horizon for (re)imagining feminine identity and resilience in neoliberal culture, thus inviting further interdisciplinary inquiry.
2025-12-29
Jorge Diego Sánchez
This article studies Indian writing in the English language published in English newspapers (Indian, Bangladeshi, British, US) during the first wave of the Covid-19 outbreak in India (March 22–May 25, 2020). The selected authors include Arundhati Roy, Tishani Doshi, Anuradha Roy, and Prayaag Akbar, to illustrate the transnational consequences of the Covid-19 outbreak in different areas of India and analyse the narratology of resilience to articulate ethical knowledge against regional, national, and international stereotypes. I propose the concept transformative hope as an oppositional complaint (Bargués et al., 2024; Braithwaite, 2004; Giroux, 2004) against political and representational systems of domain articulated against the capitalist politics of who can afford to survive. This study shows a possible subversive resilience (Bracke, 2016; Darías-Beautell, 2020; Fraile-Marcos, 2020a; O’Brien, 2015) that, together with writing and reading, can implement alliance, rather than affiliation, and praises an ethical and transformative hope that dissents against the resilient appropriation of neoliberalism to benefit from tragedies like Covid-19.
2025-12-29
Ana Mª Fraile-Marcos
Taking as a starting point the idea that literature can function as an epistemological medium in its capacity as a testing ground where experiments in the good life can be imagined, aesthetically realized, and critically interrogated, this article turns to speculative fiction as a genre suitable for the exploration of cognitive frameworks that may lead to hopeful futurities amidst the ground-shifting transformations of the Anthropocene, supporting not only the continuity of life, but also the good life. It examines the representation of the ethics of care at the Anthropocene’s tipping point in recent speculative fiction from Turtle Island/Canada, namely, Métis Cherie Dimaline’s young adult novel The marrow thieves (2017) and its sequel, Hunting by stars (2021), and settler Canadian Rebecca Campbell’s short story cycle, Arboreality (2022). It argues that they critique the modernist nature/culture divide underpinning the disasters of the Anthropocene while reworking the notion of the good life from alternative Indigenous and new materialist relational approaches.