The story behind this issue There is a well-known saying that goes "The criminal always returns to the crime scene" and implies that people (whether criminals or not) return to a place, an act, an experience important to them, either to remember and relive the "good old days" or to commit the same "crime", or both. Remembering and reviving our "criminal" past, we thus return to political humour research after our first edited volume (Tsakona & Popa 2011b). The first reason for our return was the kind invitation of the organisers of the 2012 ISHS Conference, in Krakow, Poland, to put together a panel on political humour. The second reason was the participants of the panel and their contributions. It seemed that research on political humour continued (and continues) to attract several scholars coming from diverse theoretical and methodological backgrounds and offering new, refreshing insights on the political dimensions of humour. We consider it worth mentioning here that, if our panel at the conference consisted of 12 papers, these papers were less than half of the papers on political humour presented in the whole conference. A close look at the conference schedule reveals that political jokes and cartoons, ethnic humour, political satire, and political entertainment appear to be among the most popular topics currently investigated by humour scholars. This special issue includes 6 of the papers which were part of the political humour panel in Krakow one year ago. In the present introduction we will try to discuss some recent developments in the analysis of political humour, as brought to the surface by recent publications. We will try to avoid long references to concepts and issues that were extensively discussed in Tsakona & Popa (2011b), even though some overlapping may eventually be inevitable. Hopefully, the papers included here and the ensuing discussion will allow us to shed some new light on political humour and to open new horizons to future political humour researchers.
Chinese international students are attending higher education institutions in the United States in ever-increasing numbers, and librarians must consider their cultural, sociopolitical, and linguistic backgrounds in information literacy instruction. This exploratory study examines how Chinese international students at a public American university describe, understand, and interpret information literacy concepts, such as authority, through qualitative vignettes and in-depth interviews. The findings of this study further the use of vignettes as a methodological tool in academic librarianship and help librarians resist one-size-fits-all information literacy instruction by addressing and building upon students' cultural understandings and practices of information literacy that they bring into the classroom.
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