James Slotta
Biographic Data
| ID | 200163 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Slotta |
| GIVEN NAMES | James |
| FAMILY NAME | Slotta |
| SIGNATURE | SLOTTA J |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4130-5938 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 66 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Integrating AI-enhanced 4C/ID scaffolding into rural STEM education: Supporting complex problem solving and learning outcomes
Rural students often face limited exposure to multidisciplinary knowledge and insufficient training in complex problem-solving (CPS) skills. To address this gap, this quasi-experimental study adopted a progressively integrated multidisciplinary STEM approach based on the Four-Component Instructional Design (4C/ID) model, with Large Language Models (LLMs) embedded as adaptive scaffolding in one experimental condition. A total of 120 Grade 6 studen…
Intelligibility as a sociolinguistic variable: The entanglement of the social and the semantic in multilingual practice
Among language users, it is a commonplace that multilingual speakers switch between languages to make themselves intelligible. Yet, sociolinguistics has had surprisingly little to say about this. This neglect traces back to early efforts to carve out a niche for the field by focusing on contexts where social rather than semantic factors like intelligibility shape multilingual practice. As fruitful as this approach has been, here I argue that it h…
The ups and downs of space and time: Topography in Yupno language, culture, and cognition
Much prior research has investigated how humans understand time using body-based contrasts like front / back and left / right. It has recently come to light, however, that some communities instead understand time using environment -based contrasts. Here, we present the richest portrait yet of one such case: the topographic system used by the Yupno of Papua New Guinea, in which the past is construed as downhill and the future as uphill. We first s…
Developing Global Competence in Global Virtual Team Projects: A Qualitative Exploration of Engineering Students’ Experiences
The incorporation of digital learning and teaching tools has been recognized as presenting an opportunity to maximize access, quality, and inclusion, especially when it comes to international education. Unanticipated events, such as the COVID 19 pandemic, can result in profound disruptions to teaching and learning, and the use of these tools can provide mitigation to these disruptions. This paper reports on the design and study of an InVEST globa…
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics that investigates the ways language is tied to the contexts in which it is used. Pragmatics thus coalesces as a distinct and coherent domain of inquiry only in relation to the study of language abstracted from its use in context, the prime focus of both twentieth‐century linguistics and philosophy of language. Investigation of standard pragmatic issues such as deixis, presupposition, speech acts, implicatures…
Endangered languages and porous selves
The Annotated Donald Trump: Signs of Circulation in a Time of Bubbles
Bubbles," "silos," "cocoons," "echo chambers" are labels now commonly used by media commentators and citizens alike to lament the divided communicative condition of the US electorate. Taken as an indicator of the state of liberal democracy in the United States, anxieties about bubbles bespeak the continued potency of the intertwined social and communicative imaginaries of an "American public" forged through common participation in a public sphere…
The pragmatics of kin address: A sociolinguistic universal and its semantic affordances
This paper focuses on an understudied sociolinguistic variable - the use of proper names as opposed to kin terms in address. We present findings from a survey of 80 speech communities that reveals a striking regularity in the way these two noun-phrase types are used. Where kin terms alternate with names in address, kin terms are always used for senior kin and names for junior kin. The strong cross-cultural uniformity of this alternation is not ea…
Can the subaltern listen? Self-determination and the provisioning of expertise in Papua New Guinea: Can the subaltern listen
Voice is a major concern in contemporary liberal-democratic politics, one that stresses the political importance of speaking ("giving voice," "speaking up"). But in the Yopno valley of Papua New Guinea, where NGO and government projects are expanding, people's sense that they are losing control of their future has led them to worry about their capacity to listen, not their capacity to speak. In largely acephalous villages, people's self-determina…
The perlocutionary is political: Listening as self-determination in a Papua New Guinean polity
J. L. Austin's influential dissection of speech acts into locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts has given rise to much scholarly attention to illocutionary acts and forces. While the perlocutionary facet of speech acts has gone largely undiscussed by philosophers and linguists, folk theories of language often attend closely to the relation between speech and its consequences. In this article, I discuss one conception of perlocutions…
Phatic Rituals of the Liberal Democratic Polity: Hearing Voices in the Hearings of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
The truth and reconciliation commissions of Latin America and Africa are paradigms of transitional justice, often regarded as part of the process of transitioning from authoritarian to democratic rule. But truth commissions are also common in first-world settler states, which raises the question of what 'transition' such commissions effectuate in Canada, Australia, and the United States. This paper examines the efforts of Canada's Royal Commissio…
Revelations of the World: Transnationalism and the Politics of Perception in Papua New Guinea
Like many over the past century, people in the Yopno Valley of Papua New Guinea have experienced a burgeoning of connections with people across great geographical distances. Building on Benedict Anderson's well-known discussion of the nation as a "community" imagined in part through the realist framing of newspaper reporting, novels, censuses, and so on, I argue that revelation is an interactional frame central to an emerging global imaginary in …
Dialect, trope, and enregisterment in a Melanesian speech community
Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place - By Rupert Stasch
Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place . Rupert Stasch . Berkeley : University of California Press , 2009 . xv + 317 pp . There is a joke about a French speaker, a German speaker, and an American, each arguing for the superiority of their own language. The French speaker begins by saying that couteau is the best word for "knife" because the sound of it captures the sharpness of a knife. The German, beside himself, says tha…
The Annotated Donald Trump: Signs of Circulation in a Time of Bubbles
Bubbles," "silos," "cocoons," "echo chambers" are labels now commonly used by media commentators and citizens alike to lament the divided communicative condition of the US electorate. Taken as an indicator of the state of liberal democracy in the United States, anxieties about bubbles bespeak the continued potency of the intertwined social and communicative imaginaries of an "American public" forged through common participation in a public sphere…
Can the subaltern listen? Self-determination and the provisioning of expertise in Papua New Guinea: Can the subaltern listen
Voice is a major concern in contemporary liberal-democratic politics, one that stresses the political importance of speaking ("giving voice," "speaking up"). But in the Yopno valley of Papua New Guinea, where NGO and government projects are expanding, people's sense that they are losing control of their future has led them to worry about their capacity to listen, not their capacity to speak. In largely acephalous villages, people's self-determina…
Phatic Rituals of the Liberal Democratic Polity: Hearing Voices in the Hearings of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
The truth and reconciliation commissions of Latin America and Africa are paradigms of transitional justice, often regarded as part of the process of transitioning from authoritarian to democratic rule. But truth commissions are also common in first-world settler states, which raises the question of what 'transition' such commissions effectuate in Canada, Australia, and the United States. This paper examines the efforts of Canada's Royal Commissio…
The pragmatics of kin address: A sociolinguistic universal and its semantic affordances
This paper focuses on an understudied sociolinguistic variable - the use of proper names as opposed to kin terms in address. We present findings from a survey of 80 speech communities that reveals a striking regularity in the way these two noun-phrase types are used. Where kin terms alternate with names in address, kin terms are always used for senior kin and names for junior kin. The strong cross-cultural uniformity of this alternation is not ea…
The perlocutionary is political: Listening as self-determination in a Papua New Guinean polity
J. L. Austin's influential dissection of speech acts into locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts has given rise to much scholarly attention to illocutionary acts and forces. While the perlocutionary facet of speech acts has gone largely undiscussed by philosophers and linguists, folk theories of language often attend closely to the relation between speech and its consequences. In this article, I discuss one conception of perlocutions…
Dialect, trope, and enregisterment in a Melanesian speech community
Revelations of the World: Transnationalism and the Politics of Perception in Papua New Guinea
Like many over the past century, people in the Yopno Valley of Papua New Guinea have experienced a burgeoning of connections with people across great geographical distances. Building on Benedict Anderson's well-known discussion of the nation as a "community" imagined in part through the realist framing of newspaper reporting, novels, censuses, and so on, I argue that revelation is an interactional frame central to an emerging global imaginary in …
Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place - By Rupert Stasch
Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place . Rupert Stasch . Berkeley : University of California Press , 2009 . xv + 317 pp . There is a joke about a French speaker, a German speaker, and an American, each arguing for the superiority of their own language. The French speaker begins by saying that couteau is the best word for "knife" because the sound of it captures the sharpness of a knife. The German, beside himself, says tha…
Dialect, trope, and enregisterment in a Melanesian speech community
Revelations of the World: Transnationalism and the Politics of Perception in Papua New Guinea
Like many over the past century, people in the Yopno Valley of Papua New Guinea have experienced a burgeoning of connections with people across great geographical distances. Building on Benedict Anderson's well-known discussion of the nation as a "community" imagined in part through the realist framing of newspaper reporting, novels, censuses, and so on, I argue that revelation is an interactional frame central to an emerging global imaginary in …
The perlocutionary is political: Listening as self-determination in a Papua New Guinean polity
J. L. Austin's influential dissection of speech acts into locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts has given rise to much scholarly attention to illocutionary acts and forces. While the perlocutionary facet of speech acts has gone largely undiscussed by philosophers and linguists, folk theories of language often attend closely to the relation between speech and its consequences. In this article, I discuss one conception of perlocutions…
Phatic Rituals of the Liberal Democratic Polity: Hearing Voices in the Hearings of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
The truth and reconciliation commissions of Latin America and Africa are paradigms of transitional justice, often regarded as part of the process of transitioning from authoritarian to democratic rule. But truth commissions are also common in first-world settler states, which raises the question of what 'transition' such commissions effectuate in Canada, Australia, and the United States. This paper examines the efforts of Canada's Royal Commissio…
Can the subaltern listen? Self-determination and the provisioning of expertise in Papua New Guinea: Can the subaltern listen
Voice is a major concern in contemporary liberal-democratic politics, one that stresses the political importance of speaking ("giving voice," "speaking up"). But in the Yopno valley of Papua New Guinea, where NGO and government projects are expanding, people's sense that they are losing control of their future has led them to worry about their capacity to listen, not their capacity to speak. In largely acephalous villages, people's self-determina…
The pragmatics of kin address: A sociolinguistic universal and its semantic affordances
This paper focuses on an understudied sociolinguistic variable - the use of proper names as opposed to kin terms in address. We present findings from a survey of 80 speech communities that reveals a striking regularity in the way these two noun-phrase types are used. Where kin terms alternate with names in address, kin terms are always used for senior kin and names for junior kin. The strong cross-cultural uniformity of this alternation is not ea…
The Annotated Donald Trump: Signs of Circulation in a Time of Bubbles
Bubbles," "silos," "cocoons," "echo chambers" are labels now commonly used by media commentators and citizens alike to lament the divided communicative condition of the US electorate. Taken as an indicator of the state of liberal democracy in the United States, anxieties about bubbles bespeak the continued potency of the intertwined social and communicative imaginaries of an "American public" forged through common participation in a public sphere…
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics that investigates the ways language is tied to the contexts in which it is used. Pragmatics thus coalesces as a distinct and coherent domain of inquiry only in relation to the study of language abstracted from its use in context, the prime focus of both twentieth‐century linguistics and philosophy of language. Investigation of standard pragmatic issues such as deixis, presupposition, speech acts, implicatures…
Endangered languages and porous selves
The ups and downs of space and time: Topography in Yupno language, culture, and cognition
Much prior research has investigated how humans understand time using body-based contrasts like front / back and left / right. It has recently come to light, however, that some communities instead understand time using environment -based contrasts. Here, we present the richest portrait yet of one such case: the topographic system used by the Yupno of Papua New Guinea, in which the past is construed as downhill and the future as uphill. We first s…
Developing Global Competence in Global Virtual Team Projects: A Qualitative Exploration of Engineering Students’ Experiences
The incorporation of digital learning and teaching tools has been recognized as presenting an opportunity to maximize access, quality, and inclusion, especially when it comes to international education. Unanticipated events, such as the COVID 19 pandemic, can result in profound disruptions to teaching and learning, and the use of these tools can provide mitigation to these disruptions. This paper reports on the design and study of an InVEST globa…
Intelligibility as a sociolinguistic variable: The entanglement of the social and the semantic in multilingual practice
Among language users, it is a commonplace that multilingual speakers switch between languages to make themselves intelligible. Yet, sociolinguistics has had surprisingly little to say about this. This neglect traces back to early efforts to carve out a niche for the field by focusing on contexts where social rather than semantic factors like intelligibility shape multilingual practice. As fruitful as this approach has been, here I argue that it h…
Integrating AI-enhanced 4C/ID scaffolding into rural STEM education: Supporting complex problem solving and learning outcomes
Rural students often face limited exposure to multidisciplinary knowledge and insufficient training in complex problem-solving (CPS) skills. To address this gap, this quasi-experimental study adopted a progressively integrated multidisciplinary STEM approach based on the Four-Component Instructional Design (4C/ID) model, with Large Language Models (LLMs) embedded as adaptive scaffolding in one experimental condition. A total of 120 Grade 6 studen…
Sociology (8 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (5 works) · Linguistics (5 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (5 works) · New guinea (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Ethnology (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Politics (4 works)