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Romance has the reputation of being an opiate for the masses. This paper intends to analyze if it is indeed a fantasy imposed from above or if there is room for negotiation. The chosen space is vampire romance writer J. R. Ward's forum. Power will be discussed through the lens of Foucault's Panopticon and de Certeau's productive consumption, among others.

The article explores Barack Obama’s most notable speeches after becoming president. The authors intend to write a sequel to their 2009 paper Yes We Can: A New American Identity in the Speeches of Barack Obama, which looked at Obama’s campaign discourse, and investigate if his rhetoric has changed in the first half of his mandate.

In the age of technology, communication through emojis and stickers was replaced by memes and gifs in the blink of an eye. As teachers, the authors of this paper have asked themselves how these swift changes might affect our classes. If students communicate more and more through memes, would integrating them into our lessons lead to a better comprehension? To investigate this possibility, we built a concise grammar exercise involving two meme templates and had the students build two passive voice memes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present article is to look at the different ways and affiliated exercises of teaching oral expression to first year Translation Studies and PR students taking the practical course in view of developing the professional and transversal competencies highlighted in the course syllabus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an insight into the efforts of two teachers trying to put together a textbook, called English for Social Sciences. The teachers are myself and a friend, Ramona Bran, who is an English language teacher at the Faculty of Sociology and Psychology, within the West University of Timisoara, where I also used to work until the autumn of 2015. This book came with some challenges due to our target audience, our students, but also our styles of teaching which impinged on what we taught. This paper looks back at how these challenges were overcome and how we adapted to the changes necessary to come up with the book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facebook has become a prevalent means of interaction between university students and their teachers. In this paper, the author argues that this informal connection, although seemingly unavoidable in today's technological context, may have lasting repercussions on the teachers' role in the classroom and the way their relationship with the students develops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the on-line forum of popular fiction writer J. R. Ward from the point of view of Jean Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality.It analyzes this hyperreal contact zone between author and fans as a space where borders and identities become blurred, and recreated, a space where we may be able to talk across our differences and find common points of interest through our fantasies, to paraphrase Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture, a space where the powerful and the disenfranchised struggle over meaning and validation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]