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This paper aims to examine tensions around play, performance and artmaking as becoming in the mix of expected and taken-for-granted discourses implicit in an after-school ceramics makerspace (Perry and Medina, 2011). The authors look closely at one adolescent girl’s embodied performance to see how it ruptures the scripts for compliant bodies in the after-school program. While these performances take place out-of-school and in an arts studio, the tensions and explorations also resonate with broader issues around student embodied, performative and becomings that run counter to normalized school expectations.

A contemporary approach to nexus analysis (Medina and Wohlwend, 2014; Wohlwend, 2021) unpacked two critical performative encounters (Medina and Perry, 2011) using concepts of historical bodies (Scollon and Scollon, 2004) informed by sociomaterial thing-power (Bennett, 2010).

Playing while painting pottery collides and converges with the tacitly desired and expected ways of embodying student in this after-school artspace. Emily’s outer-space alien persona ruptured expected discourses when her historical body and embodied performances threatened other children. While her embodied performances facilitated her becoming a fully present participant in the studio, she fractured the line between play and reality in violent ways.

As literacy researchers, the authors are in a moment of reckoning where student embodied performances and historical bodies can collide with all-too-real violent threats in daily lives and community locations. Situating these performances in the nexus of embodied literacies, unsanctioned play and thing-power can help educators respond to these moments as ruptures of tacit expectations for girlhoods in school-like spaces.

As a relatively new city by North American standards, Vancouver experienced tremendous growth in the early 20th century. Constrained by its location on a peninsula and surrounded by water, early planning and engineering decisions supportive of citizen accessibility also encouraged and reinforced walkability through strong streetcar networks, walkable neighbourhood commercial areas and the availability of single family housing. Citizen engagement in emerging walkability projects was predicated by the successful stopping of a freeway through the heart of Vancouver. As Vancouver’s planning and engineering policy developed, citizens synergistically worked with the City on several emerging projects that reinforced connection and walkability across the city. Often incepted as demonstration projects, many of these initiatives have been adopted as city policy and have applicability in other jurisdictions.The walkability neighbourhood demonstration projects described can be replicated in other municipalities to create positive impacts on walkability and city life. The effectiveness of these approaches in walkability are echoed in the innovative Olympic Village neighbourhood which housed the athletes at the 2010 Olympic winter games. Many of the concepts and best practices developed in walkable community projects have been melded in creating a successful walking environment garnering world attention. By enhancing walkability in neighbourhood projects, communities strengthened their area’s sustainability and social networks. The synergistic work between the municipality and the community is vital to the success and effectiveness of demonstration projects that can be adopted later as citywide policy.

This article describes how Finnish health education teachers verbalise and construct their teacher identity based on their lifestyle, subject area and relationships with their students.

Narrative interviews were conducted amongst eight secondary and upper secondary school teachers. The nexus analysis was used to analyse teachers' methods of teaching students information-seeking, evaluation and critical thinking skills.

The teachers' historical bodies – their skills, interests, information-seeking habits and familiar sources – impacted the chosen teaching methods. The results indicate that teacher identity is constructed along different paths and is constantly performed and transformed in the classroom through interactions with students.

The study illustrates the reconstruction of teacher identity through interaction in interviews. Teachers act as role models, information gatekeepers and trustees who guide students to choose credible health information sources.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how CEO narcissism can be related to the usage of an abnormal optimistic tone in financial disclosures. Drawing on upper echelons theory, this paper suggests a link between CEO characteristics, such as narcissism, and accounting choices, such as optimistic financial reporting language.

To measure the narcissistic trait of a CEO, the study builds on a model using a set of 15 archival indicators. The usage of an abnormal optimistic tone is assessed quantitatively when looking at firms’ 10-K filings, where “abnormal” refers to tone that is unrelated to a firm’s performance, risk, and complexity. This approach allows for the use of firm-fixed effects for a sample of US listed firms over the period 1992-2012.

The results show that CEO narcissism is significantly positively related to abnormal optimistic tone in 10-K filings. If a highly abnormal optimistic tone is present, the level of CEO narcissism is positively related to the likelihood of future seasoned equity offerings and larger future investments in research and development.

The findings are relevant for shareholders and stakeholders as well as auditors and legislators. All stakeholders should be aware of the overly optimistic reporting language resulting from CEO narcissism and need to make allowances for it when assessing firm performance based on financial disclosures.

This study is the first to show in a large-scale sample how CEO narcissism can be related to a firm’s use of optimistic language, and thus contributes to the question of how personality traits affect an organization’s financial reporting strategy.