Talking about Gender: The Conversational Construction of Gender Categories in Academic Discourse:
The paper explores the nature of academic discourse, paying particular attention to the construction of gender categories within students' conversations. A different approach to the investigation of the links between language and gender is taken to that adopted in previous research in the area. Rather than attempting to define gender differences in talk, or to characterize the interactional styles of men and women, or to explore how gender is `done' in interaction, a discursive conversation analytic approach is taken in order to explore the ways in which participants themselves talk about gender. Small groups of three to four undergraduate and postgraduate students were video-recorded during seminar/tutorial sessions. The data were transcribed and analysed. How `gender', as a societal category, is occasioned in the discussions is illustrated, along with the possible effects on the task execution.
We study the impact of disruptions on traffic networks, and the relaxation of the system after the removal of the disruption. We model the steady-state density along the disrupted route using a simple phenomenological model. We then combine this model with domain wall theory to analyze the transient behavior of the system. We compare the predictions produced by these macroscopic models with simulations of a stochastic cellular automaton model.