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Music and physics don't mix!: What the humorous misuse of disciplinary-specific semiotic resources can tell us about disciplinary boundaries
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Uppsala University.
Umeå University, Faculty of Science and Technology, Department of Science and Mathematics Education. (UMSER)
2014 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Becoming part of 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 the semiotic resources 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
Aarhus university , 2014.
Keywords [en]
semiotics, disciplinary affordance, disciplinary literacy
National Category
Didactics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-89114OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-89114DiVA, id: diva2:718634
Conference
The 5th International 360 Conference. Encompassing the multimodality of knowledge, May 8-10 2014, Aarhus University, Denmark
Funder
Swedish Research CouncilAvailable from: 2014-05-21 Created: 2014-05-21 Last updated: 2018-06-07Bibliographically approved

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Berge, Maria

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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