Browsing by Person "McKinlay, A."

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'Some People It's Very Difficult to Trust': Attributions of Agency and Accountability in Practitioners' Talk About Integration
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2014-09-02) Kirkwood, S.; McKinlay, A.; McVittie, Chris
The concept of 'integration' plays an important role in policy and practice regarding the settlement of migrants, yet the term is used in a variety of ways. This article examines how practitioners who support the integration of refugees in Scotland construct 'integration' at the community level to justify or challenge particular policies and sets of social relations. Analysis shows that integration can be worked up in contexts involving (i) descriptions of 'us' and 'them' in relation to a single community, (ii) social inclusion of those in multiple communities, or (iii) group level intercultural contact. Each version of integration is bound up with different attributions of agency for advancing integration and attributions of blame for current problems. Instead of relying upon a concept that is so open to multiple uses, local organizations might usefully specify outcomes in terms of social actors and interactions. 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Mutually Constitutive Relationship between Place and Identity: The Role of Place-Identity in Discourse on Asylum Seekers and Refugees
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2013-11) Kirkwood, S.; McKinlay, A.; McVittie, Chris
Recent discursive research has shown that constructions of place may function to regulate social relations and reinforce particular notions of belonging. However, extant discursive research on place-identity has so far neglected the mutually constitutive relationships between constructions of place and identity in legitimising people's presence. To address this gap, this study, undertaken in Scotland, applies the notion of place-identity to the discursive analysis of interviews with asylum seekers and refugees, people who work in organisations that support asylum seekers and refugees and locals who live in areas where asylum seekers and refugees tend to be housed. The analysis suggests that constructions of asylum seekers' and refugees' countries of origin as dangerous, and the host society as relatively problem-free, function to constitute their identities as legitimate and to justify their presence in the host society. Moreover, constructions of place may work to portray refugees and asylum seekers as benefiting the local community and as belonging more than certain other locals. In contrast, constructing the host society as 'full' functions to oppose their presence through portraying them as not being able to belong. This demonstrates the mutually constitutive roles of place and identity in legitimising or resisting people's movement and belonging. 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
What is in a text and what does it do: Qualitative evaluations of an NLG system - The BT-Nurse - Using content analysis and discourse analysis
(2011-09) Sambaraju, Rahul; Reiter, E.; Logie, R.; McKinlay, A.; McVittie, Chris; Gatt, A.; Sykes, C.
Evaluations of NLG systems generally are quantiative, that is, based on corpus comparison statistics and/or results of experiments with people. Outcomes of such evaluations are important in demonstrating whether or not an NLG system is successful, but leave gaps in understanding why this is the case. Alternatively, qualitative evaluations carried out by experts provide knowledge on where a system needs to be improved. In this paper we describe two such evaluations carried out for the BT-Nurse system, using two different methodologies (content analysis and discourse analysis). The outcomes of such evaluations are discussed in comparison to what was learnt from a quantitiave evaluation of BT-Nurse. Implications for the role of similar evaluations in NLG are also discussed. 2011 Association for Computational Linguistics.