This chapter captures the extent to which journalism fields marginalize African journalists in the coverage of international events unfolding on the continent. This marginalization leads to a continuation of bifurcation in the field that was also present during colonization. It shows that the effect of this bifurcation is that African audiences primarily learn about events happening across the continent from the Global North as opposed to African journalists. Chapter 4 shows how African journalists are marginalized in their fields and how they understand and explain this marginalization.

The theory of common ground is an important analytical tool in linguistics and intercultural pragmatics. Common ground has applicability in the characterization of speech acts and allows for distinguishing, for example, between an assertive, which requires a dynamic common ground, and a declarative that depends more on appropriate contextual factors for a successful realization. The theory of common ground is intrinsically linked to how knowledge relates to language and how a discourse advances between interlocutors. As such, the creation and maintenance of common ground has consequences for our stance on knowledge and what we KNOW, BELIEVE, DESIRE, and our INTENTIONS for action. There are many kinds of knowledge and a relevant portion of these are framed within a discourse situation, with common ground. We discuss the interfaces and relationship between situation, context, common ground, and knowledge including cultural knowledge, drawing on the thinking of Malinowski and Firth, and others. The challenges addressed are: (a) how do we ground the notions of context and common ground and their contents, with the appropriate level of specificity? (b) how do we represent them in such a way to become operationally useful in linguistic analysis? and (c) how do we show how context and common ground contribute to utterance meaning?

Multimedia learning from multiple documents involves the construction of new knowledge, beliefs, or opinions from more than a single source of information. First, we introduce the specific discourse processes that come into play when considering multiple-source documents as opposed to single-source texts or multimedia documents. We focus on the definition and role of sources, and on the semantic and rhetorical relationships at an intertextual level. Then we examine learning from multiple documents from a cognitive standpoint. We define two core principles: the sourcing principle and the multiple document integration principle. Finally, we examine some implications of these principles for a general theory of text-based learning and for instructional practice throughout the K12 and higher education curricula.

This chapter puts forward the main point of the book: to propose a new “way of seeing” (Johns) international legal scholarship. One of its principal claims is that a focus on the ‘microlevel’ of international legal scholarship changes our understanding of what it means to make law. This has significant implications for what we scrutinize and how; for what we think matters to the way international legal knowledge comes about and what it is we do as legal scholars. What it entails is an “attentiveness” (Orford) to the particular, individually spoken and written word, as well as to the part played by the individual scholar who utters it. The introduction roughly outlines the cyberwar discourse, but mostly situates the book in scholarship about doctrine as well as scholarship about the (socio)linguistics of academic knowledge construction. It also details how it takes up Anne Orford's call for a “turn to description” and relates that turn to practice theory, linguistics and ethnographic work on and in international law.