Analogy and axiomatics

A paradoxically conservative aspect of recent moves to "international-ize" the practice of American studies has been the way in which this turn toward the international has taken the national for granted. At the very moment that Americanists have been striving to disentangle disciplinary subject matter from the constraints of a static and border-oriented view of world space, calls to internationalize disciplinary practice have been reifying national boundaries and sorting scholarly activity by physical locations and national academies. In this article, we engage with this paradox by focusing on the ways in which dominant geographies of American studies practice are produced and sustained discursively. Our argument is that much U.S.-based writing about "international" or "global" American studies not only essentializes existing borders and subject positions, but also works to naturalize the idea that the U.S.-based Americanist position is simultaneously domestic and universal, while American studies as practiced elsewhere is by contrast foreign and located.1 Our aim is to destabilize the dominant geography that naturalizes the existing organizational forms and spatialized hierarchies of the field worldwide and limits the ways in which its futures can be imagined and debated. On the basis of our premise that different conceptualizations of global geography recognize and validate different kinds of scholarly interaction, we argue that a more self-conscious and theoretically informed geography of American studies practice would not only make it possible to acknowledge a greater variety of currently existing but practically invisible flows of work, ideas, and knowledge, but would also open up new opportunities for future collaborations of currently unimagined kinds across different kinds of distance.2 Our argument is made in the tradition of the critical geography of academic knowledge production and directed toward embedded space-producing practices current within the interdisciplinary work of American studies.3 As geographer Lawrence Berg has argued, "given the radically changing geographies of 'America'. . . there is no better time than the present moment to interrogate the relationships between the production of 'American' space and the spatialized cultural politics of knowledge production in American Studies."4 [End Page 1019] We offer this essay as a contribution to what Berg calls "the hard work of developing an explicit analysis and re-imagining of the spatialities of American Studies." Following Berg and other critical geographers, we believe that the hard work has to be done in this order: theory and analysis first, reimagining and reconstructing second, because only by rendering visible the everyday practices that currently reproduce and naturalize the dominant geography of American studies will we become able to identify that geography and generate alternatives. The geography of American studies practice is far more than a matter of location: most crucially, it is a matter of the ways in which space is produced through routine scholarly activities. The spatialization of American studies practice is different from, and separable from, the spatialization of American studies subject matter, and it is equally open to reconceptualization. Even when the subject matter of American studies remains organized in terms of a center/margin model, the practice of American studies does not have to be spatialized in the same way, with U.S.-located concerns and institutions normatively positioned at the center. In fact, it is the disciplining power of this center/margin model to shape and limit the agenda for American studies worldwide that we most want to question here. Our goal is to render visible a taken-for-granted scholarly geography predicated on bordered national identities that enables the Americanist tendency to conflate subject matter with practice, a conflation that renders the U.S. academy the domestic "home" of the discipline. This geography facilitates the division of the world of American studies into two halves, separating U.S.-based (domestic) practice from American studies as practiced everywhere else (foreign). "International American studies," in this configuration, all too often becomes either another way of saying "American studies abroad" or a term used to refer to interactions linking the domestic center to the...

BackgroundManually keeping up-to-date with regulations such as directives, guidance, laws, and ordinances related to cell and gene therapy is a labor-intensive process. We used machine learning (ML) algorithms to create an augmented intelligent system to optimize systematic screening of global regulations to improve efficiency and reduce overall labor and missed regulations.MethodsCombining Boolean logic and artificial intelligence (i.e., augmented intelligence) for the search process, ML algorithms were used to identify and suggest relevant cell and gene therapy regulations. Suggested regulations were delivered to a landing page for further subject matter expert (SME) tagging of words/phrases to provide system relevance on functional words. Ongoing learning from the repository regulations continued to increase system reliability and performance. The automated ability to train and retrain the system allows for continued refinement and improvement of system accuracy. Automated daily searches for applicable regulations in global databases provide ongoing opportunities to update the repository.ResultsCompared to manual searching, which required 3–4 SMEs to review ~115 regulations, the current system performance, with continuous system learning, requires 1 full-time equivalent to process approximately 9,000 regulations/day. Currently, system performance has 86% overall accuracy, a recommend recall of 87%, and a reject recall of 84%. A conservative search strategy is intentionally used to permit SMEs to assess low-recommended regulations in order to prevent missing any applicable regulations.ConclusionCompared to manual searches, our custom automated search system greatly improves the management of cell and gene therapy regulations and is efficient, cost effective, and accurate.

Existing studies conducted on education have aimed to contribute to educational reforms by focusing mostly on students. Both in Turkey and throughout the world, further studies are required to analyze teachers in addition to students, particularly teachers' knowledge base needs further investigation. Educational research should not necessarily be associated only with those conducted by collecting data in the field. Meta-synthesis studies that offer general outlooks on previous studies are also required in the field of education. To address this gap in the literature, this article aims to analyze studies in Turkey that have investigated pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in the field of mathematics education.The concept of pedagogical content knowledge was first introduced by Lee S. Shulman at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in 1985. Shulman (1986) argued that there was an imbalance between content knowledge and general pedagogical knowledge and that no relation had been established between these two types of knowledge; he described this deficiency as the missing paradigm. With an effort to eliminate this deficiency, Shulman (1987) defined PCK as the special combination of content knowledge and pedagogy. Shulman conceptualized PCK in two categories. The first category is the knowledge of teaching strategies and representations that suggest how to organize, represent, and adapt the subjects that are taught. The second category is the knowledge of students' subject understanding at different levels. These two components are the unique professional expertise of teachers who act as the bridge connecting content and pedagogical knowledge.Despite the fact that Shulman's conceptualization of PCK is considered a cornerstone in the literature, he was later criticized by scholars working in this field. Depaepe, Verschaffel, and Kelchtermans (2013) collected the criticisms directed at Shulman's PCK model under five categories. The first was the lack of a theoretical and empirical basis for the presence of PCK as a separate category in the knowledge base of teachers. The second was related to his static view of PCK as a type of factual knowledge that could be acquired and applied independently from the classroom context. The third criticism arose from the concern of researchers about the possibility of theoretically and empirically distinguishing PCK from content knowledge. The fourth was that Shulman conceptualized PCK in a very narrow framework under two categories. The fifth one relied on the argument that PCK cannot be normative, as it can vary according to culture.In accordance with the criticisms in the literature, several scholars from different subject areas restructured Shulman's PCK model in different ways in an attempt to clarify the borders between PCK and other types of knowledge. In this context, the first studies on PCK were conducted by Shulman's colleagues (Grossman, 1990; Marks, 1990). Grossman, one colleague of Shulman, expressed PCK, which Shulman had framed too narrowly, by widening it. Grossman (1990) divided PCK into four components: (a) knowledge of students' understanding, (b) knowledge of teaching strategies, (c) knowledge of teaching purposes, and (d) knowledge of curriculum. Grossman expanded Shulman's PCK model by adding knowledge of teaching strategies and knowledge of curriculum as separate components in PCK.Marks (1990), another colleague of Shulman, divided PCK into four components in light of his empirical study's findings: (a) knowledge of subject matter, (b) knowledge of students' understanding, (d) knowledge of teaching media, such as materials, books, and so on, and (d) knowledge of teaching processes. Marks argued that these four components were not independent from each other but that they intensively interacted with each other. He advocated his argument, expressing that a mathematics teacher, when deciding whether or not the examples of mathematical operations in a course book are sufficient, reflects to a certain extent his/her knowledge of media for content education, knowledge of teaching processes, and knowledge of students' content comprehension. …