Earticle

This paper reads Claire Keegan’s Foster through the lens of feminist ethics of care (Gilligan, Noddings, and Ruddick), examining how attentiveness formed in deprivation is reconfigured as relational responsiveness within foster care and later tested as responsibility after the child returns home. It argues that care in Foster is not a matter of provision but a relational practice realized through the cared-for’s responsiveness within specific relational conditions. The well scene marks a turning point where vulnerability becomes responsiveness through endurance within care rather than through the removal of danger. After returning home, the repeated phrase “Nothing happened” is interpreted as responsive silence that minimizes relational damage within a context of accusation and interrogation. Finally, the girl’s utterance “Daddy” prioritizes relational safety in the face of possible violence, showing that care persists as an ongoing ethical commitment rather than a resolved outcome.

This paper examines how Lewis Nkosi’s Mating Birds exposes the racialized myth of the hypersexual Black male embedded in South Africa’s system of internal colonialism. The novel shows how a Black man’s desire for a white woman is immediately rendered criminal through apartheid law and public discourse. By drawing on Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, Pierre Bourdieu, and Sander Gilman, the study analyzes how legal, educational, and scientific institutions construct a “regime of truth” that marks Black male sexuality as deviant while idealizing white womanhood. Particular attention is given to the Immorality Act, courtroom rhetoric, and psychiatric evaluation, all of which recast desire as pathology and legitimize punitive control. Nkosi’s use of retrospective narration and the recurring image of the mating birds further reveals the symbolic violence that sustains racial hierarchy. Through these strategies, the novel uncovers the mechanisms through which sexual politics function as a central tool of internal colonial domination and invites a critical reconsideration of race, desire, and justice in apartheid South Africa. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that Nkosi's novel not only exposes but actively dismantles the ideological foundations of apartheid's racial and sexual order.

This study examines the ecological correlation between the water crisis and the impoverishment of women, focusing on Bessie Head’s novel When Rain Clouds Gather. In the narrative, the drought—exacerbated by the climate crisis—intersects with patriarchal power structures, imposing a harsh dystopian reality on social others, women, children, and nature. In Golema Mmidi, a “village of women” marginalized by patriarchal ideology, the female inhabitants bear the brunt of environmental devastation. Driven by the urgency of survival, they eventually embrace outsider-led development initiatives centered on cash crops and the implementation of water infrastructure. However, this transition, sustained by women’s labor, paradoxically disrupts the hydrological cycle and reinforces capitalist structures. In conclusion, Head cautions that women’s efforts to overcome the water crisis risk being trapped in the pitfalls of development discourse.

This paper analyzes British child welfare measures in The Child in Time by Ian McEwan through the central event of the disappearance of five-year-old Kate, the daughter of the protagonist, Stephen Lewis. From the outset, the narrative unfolds Kate’s missing and explores the aftermath of this traumatic event at both the private and public levels. Stephen, as a victim of this irreversible loss and as a writer of children’s literature, takes part in a government committee responsible for publishing the Authorized Child-Care Guidebook in the socio-political context of post-Margaret Thatcherism. His dual identity enables a critique of absurdity of the child welfare measures and the Guidebook shaped by New Right and neoliberal economic world-views, which push marginalized members of society to the periphery. In the body of the paper, the focus will be placed on the concept of “bare life” among marginalized children, particularly girls, considering the gender of the missing child, Kate. Throughout the argument, theoretical frameworks such as biopolitics, Agamben’s concept of homo sacer, ideological state apparatuses such as the family, and post-structuralist discourse theory will be employed to reveal the underlying realities behind the Guidebook.

This meta-analysis investigated the accuracy of English proficiency self-assessment (SA) among EFL learners in South Korea by synthesizing 13 independent study samples. The results revealed a robust overall mean correlation of r = .676 between SA and objective criterion measures, indicating a large effect size and validating SA as an accurate evaluative tool in the Korean context. Moderator analyses clarified that this accuracy is context-dependent: elementary and tertiary students demonstrated higher consistency than secondary students, and learner-centered instruments significantly outperformed teacher-led tools. Additionally, the provision of explicit rater training and the reporting of high reliability for external measures were identified as key factors for enhancing SA accuracy. Among language domains, writing tasks exhibited the strongest correlation. These findings underscore the necessity of treating SA as a learnable skill and integrating it into a learner-centered instructional framework to foster metacognitive awareness and learner autonomy. The study concludes that while publication bias was minimal, systematic training and the use of reliable benchmark measures are essential for maximizing the diagnostic value of self-assessment in language education.