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State governance is, in many ways, a discursive practice that relies on the creation, translation, and transmission of governance-oriented texts. The act of governance by translation typically occurs in multi-ethnic, multilingual, and unified political contexts. When translation adheres to established patterns and effective regimes, it forms a governance technique known as "translation governmentality." In the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), confronted with the challenge of governing a vast territory with diverse ethnic groups speaking different languages, the Qing authorities prioritized the translation of official documents to implement this translation governmentality. Despite its significance, a comprehensive overview of official document translation in the Qing dynasty within the framework of governance by translation has not received sufficient attention. This study employs documentary analysis to understand the historical contexts of official document translations, interpret the motivations behind these translations, and reconstruct the organized regimes of translation practices in the Qing period. The findings reveal that the Qing dynasty developed a relatively organized and mature translation regime for official documents by establishing translation agencies, appointing specialized translation officials, and adopting multilingual translation modes. This governance-oriented translation regime effectively shaped the core concepts, institutional systems, and organizational mechanisms of state governance in the Qing dynasty. Additionally, it contributed to establishing the legitimacy of state governance during that era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is a vast body of work on legitimacy, we still have a limited understanding of the discursive aspects of moral legitimation. This is surprising considering the increase in morally laden societal discussions, for example related to understanding gender, rights and regulations during a pandemic, political scandals and ethics of global business amongst others. In particular, from an organization studies perspective, we lack knowledge on how journalists negotiate moral legitimation of controversial organizational decisions such as closures or shutdown decisions related to global industrial restructuring. Therefore, drawing on the critical discourse studies tradition, we examine the media coverage of controversial shutdowns in Finland over the past 2 decades. Our analysis suggests three moral legitimation types: moral engaging, moral distancing and moral surrendering. These types involve specific discursive moralization practices and strategies, and they each paint a different picture of the moral options, responsibility, and inevitability in these decisions. These types can be found in the same texts supporting each other, but they also help us understand how legitimation may involve a pattern where the most explicit reflections (moral engagement) are followed by more indirect (moral distancing) and less apparent but very powerful (moral surrendering) forms of legitimation. By so doing, we also offer a heuristic that can, with due caution, be used for analyzing other texts on adverse effects of globalization or events that might include moral and ideological conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both participation and argumentation (OECD, 2022) are important keywords in educational contexts. While participation is seen as a crucial prerequisite for education and collaborative learning in general, argumentation as a discursive practice serves to convey and negotiate—also school-specific—knowledge. This paper explores repetition in argumentative events as a technique of establishing—or even hindering—participation in terms of alignment and affiliation. It can serve as a strategy for participation by signalling responsiveness and thematic coherence—and thus inclusion. At the same time, however, studies show that repetition can also signal contradiction and rejection—and thus exclusion. So far, we know little about how exactly these functional differences are produced—especially in younger children. Therefore, the paper explores how children use repetition as a resource for negotiating participation in argumentative events. Using authentic data in the form of observations and transcriptions of audio and video recordings from child-child-interactions of 15 Hebrew- and 31 German-speaking children aged 3–6 years, we identify oral argumentative events and investigate different forms of repetitions and their respective relevance for enabling participation. Our results show that, on the one hand, minimal and partial repetitions are used by the children in an inclusive way, creating closeness between the participants. On the other hand, children use complete repetitions more as an excluding technique, displaying misalignment and disaffiliation, in order to challenge and mock each other. The findings suggest that this line of research has significant potential to provide new insights into the formation of social relationships between peers, into the prevention or establishment of participation, which itself is a prerequisite for joint learning, as well as insights into the acquisition of argumentative competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article delineates how actors invoke nationalizing accounts—accounts that turn local conditions, actions, and actors into national ones—in everyday talk. Taking the case of Japanese university scientists depicting their commercialization trajectories after the adoption of a set of policies that originated from the U.S., the article delineates how scientists stipulate what they do is Japanese. I outline the discursive practices through which they posit that the cause of others' actions, or of they themselves, derives from some kind of ethno-national distinctiveness. Interviews show how such nationalizing accounts were made through the inevitable gaps between local practices and formal global structures. Scientific and commercialization practices in Japan that deviated from the original form were explained not only through the institutional differences between the U.S. and Japan, but also through lay categories of "culture," ethno-psychology, and readily available tropes about Japanese history. In such nationalizing accounts, what the Japanese scientists did under these new, and explicitly global policies, was argued to be fundamentally Japanese because they were rooted in and caused by the ethno-national character. As new institutional theory suggests, a decoupling between formal rules and local contingencies is a hallmark of any institution. The article further shows that such decoupling could then be used as a resource for everyday nationalism. At least in some cases, the global adoption and the localization of a global form may create an opportunity to enact the nation, contributing to a discourse that posits that an imagined community is distinct and special, precisely as the world becomes more globalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been highly controversial in China and beyond. The burgeoning of social media has created an online activist field where participants utilize networked framing practices to engage in connective actions related to GMO risks. However, a dynamic perspective on the co-production of GMO risk discourses has yet to be fully explored, and it is still under debate whether such a collective interpretation is fragmented. To address this gap, this study investigates the risk-invoked GMO controversy by longitudinally exploring the structural characteristics and discursive power structures in the networked framing of GMO risks on social media. This study examines 356,227 GMO risk posts from 2010 to 2020 on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. A longitudinal social network analysis and computational text-mining approach are used to construct representation networks among participants based on their joint sponsorship framing practices of GMO risks. The findings suggest that there is a multipolar discussion fragmentation in the networked framing of GMO risks. However, the temporal evidence shows that the risk discussion has become increasingly interconnected and less structurally fragmented over time. In addition, this study highlights the unequal distribution of discursive power among participants; nevertheless, the analysis reveals that this inequality has shown signs of easing over the study period. Overall, this study provides a comprehensive analysis of the GMO controversy from a risk perspective and sheds light on the dynamics of networked framing practices and discursive power structures on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most salient objections against paternalism is that it is motivated by a negative judgment about other people's capacity to advance their own goals and interests. Such a negative judgment, according to this objection, is morally wrong because it denies others the status of moral equals who can rationally set and pursue their own conception of the good. Despite the popularity of this objection, I argue that it misfires because rendering a negative judgment about others' capacities does not deny them equal moral status when there is sufficient evidence for that judgment. However, I argue that in order to determine if there is sufficient evidence of the agent's incapacity, we must understand the agent's reasons for action through a rational discursive exchange with them, instead of taking perceived facts about their behavior as sufficient grounds for a negative (or positive) judgment of their capacities. In fact, I argue that if the outcome of the discursive exchange supports a negative judgment of the agent's capacities, there is a pro tanto case in favor of paternalistic interference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Slow violence is an analytical concept that reveals the unseen and unrecognised forms of violence that accumulate over time and space, leading to devastating environmental and social consequences. This paper argues that slow violence involves discursive practices that render violence-producing mechanisms and processes invisible, concealed, and misrecognised and ensure the continuance of violent systems by hindering cognitive and emotional awareness of the links between different forms of violence and social harms, and thus, any potential resistance against them. These discursive practices are identified as fatalistic normalisation, daunted managerialism, and afflictive condemnation, all of which operate in tandem to veil the links between different forms of violence and social harm. The paper provides an operational framework of slow violence to help unveil these links and pave the way towards cognitive and emotional awareness for radical social transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, cultural-political elites made competing and conflictual statements regarding LGBTI+ identities and practices in Ghana which attracted national and international attention. How do cultural-political elites discursively construct LGBTI+ discourse in postcolonial Ghana and what are the implications? This study employed qualitative methodology and engaged discourse theory and method to analyse cultural-political elites' discursive practices and stances on LGBTI+ discourse in Ghana. The analytical method is dialectical and focuses on the relationship between the data (text) and sociocultural and political context for meaning making. Social relations of knowledge and statements articulated to power-knowledge provide the analytical framework. The study demonstrates that essentialising the cultures and traditions of Ghana short of a detailed concrete contextual definition of the complex multicultural and multiethnic post-colonial nation limits the socio-cultural interpretation, understanding and stances on LGBTI+ discourse in Ghana and can lead to ambiguities and contradictions. Different social actors take divergent positions in their interpretations and understanding of LGBTI+ discourse in Ghana. Also, the study notes that attempts at understanding sexuality, especially, LGBTI+ discourse and same-sex intimacies in non-western societies requires dialogue and intercultural engagements capable of promoting human existence in a socially cohesive and harmonious manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the esteemed chambers of Westminster, the United Kingdom's members of Parliament engage in rigorous discourse regarding economic policies that have far-reaching consequences. The discourse analysis of their speeches helps us understand the formulation of financial regulations that align with the nation's evolving needs and priorities. Nevertheless, discourse analysis has been criticised for being overtly biased in as much as it cherry-picks the linguistic features it seeks to examine within a data set. Hence, the present study aims to integrate corpus linguistic tools with discourse analysis methods to prepare representative data and to construct an objective pathway for analysis, thereby establishing an impartial avenue for scrutiny while mitigating the critiques often levelled against these two distinct approaches when employed in isolation. To realise these objectives, a corpus-assisted discourse study approach is applied, focusing on the procedural obstacles in the back-and-forth journey between quantitative and qualitative analysis of the discursive representations of the British economy. The study revealed that the integration of corpus tools and discourse methods helped prepare representative data for objective analysis. The integration, also, backed the triangulation of findings and showed that the parliamentarians concentrated on two main discourses of the British economy, namely finance and hardship. The analysis of the linguistic and collocational behaviour of these discourses uncovered that alleviation, scale and source were the three semantic categories of the discursive representation of the British economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of stability has been consistently emphasized in China and the discursive use of stability is found to have legitimizing effects in Chinese newspapers, but how such political keywords are employed by the newspaper of a country that is ideologically distinct from China remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by investigating the use of stability in The New York Times' coverage of China between 1980 and 2020, drawing on critical discourse analysis (particularly, the discourse-historical approach) and sentiment analysis. A diachronic quantitative analysis demonstrates an overall negative sentiment in news reports relating to China's stability across these years, with positive sentiment evident only during the 1980s and negative sentiment prevailing from 1990 to 2020. These findings are consistent with general trends in US-China relations and US foreign policy over the four decades. Qualitative analysis reveals that negative sentiment focuses on sociopolitical and territorial issues, whereas positive sentiment focuses primarily on economic and financial aspects, indicating that the newspaper views the issue of China's stability from a politically self-interested perspective of the US and is also concerned about the persistence of certain dominant ideologies in American society. This study contributes to a greater comprehension of the use of political keywords in national and international news discourse, especially by the media of ideologically diverse societies. Moreover, because the application of sentiment analysis to critical discourse analysis and news discourse analysis has proven to be time-efficient, verifiable, and accurate, researchers can confidently employ it to disclose hidden meanings in texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Company profiles are increasingly used to construct the corporate brand of Fortune Global 500 Chinese Manufacturing Companies (FG500CMCs). However, the communication of the corporate brand through the company profile is not sufficiently explored. This article explored the discursive strategies that were exploited to construct the desired brand identities of the FG500CMCs. Through the approach of critical genre analysis, it is found that the branding of the FG500CMCs is realized by the strategic organization of rhetorical moves, the purposeful employment of rhetorical devices, and tactical wording. All the obligatory moves identified primarily highlight a set of attributes indicating the strengths, competitiveness, and superiority of the FG500CMCs. This projects the distinctiveness of the brand identities of the companies. The strengths, competitiveness, and superiority are constructed by deploying graduation resources, appropriating numerical resources, adopting high-end and high-tech-related terms, and exploiting endorsement, authentication, and altruism. Besides analyzing the lexico-grammatical features and discursive techniques, this article also investigates how the FG500CMCs' particular attributes and strengths are covertly conveyed through the strategic organization and distribution of the moves. This provides a more comprehensive explication and thus gives new insights into the body of knowledge on the discursive construction of corporate branding. With grounded elaboration on the tactful use of language and covert arrangement of the moves, this article also sheds light on the content design of the 'company profile' for shaping stakeholders' and the public's perception of the corporate brand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the online discourse of art organisations forges relationships between the artworld and the fields of politics and economy. Combining elements of Pierre Bourdieu's field analysis and Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis, the article analyses an elite art magazine, e-flux, and an elite art museum, IMMA, and the activities of discourses, genres, and utterances on their about pages. Its results suggest that the about pages of these organisations forge links between the artworld and the fields of politics and economy by mobilising discourse in these fields and by incorporating discourse practices from these fields. The ideological tension resulting from this interdiscursivity was found to be managed in different ways. The article thereby contributes to furthering our understanding of how discourse networks fields of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this research is to assess the economic growth and sustainable development of Ethiopia. To what extent does the Chinese investment contribute to the overall economic development of Ethiopia after the Belt Road Initiative (BRI)? What are the main focus areas for development in the region and how does the BRI initiative connect people in the country? This research examines the development process through the use of a case study and discursive analysis to know the result of the investigation. The study is deeply elaborated and the technique adds analytical and qualitative methods. Furthermore, this research attempts to highlight the key approaches and concepts of Chinese engagement in Ethiopia as it attains development in several sectors through the BRI. The BRI is successfully pioneering transport systems, roads, railways, small industries, automotive sectors, and health development programs in Ethiopia. As result, the Chinese investments bring changes to the country after the successful launch of the BRI. Furthermore, the study concludes that there is a need to initiate numerous projects to improve human, social, and economic life in Ethiopia because the country is suffering from many internal problems and China has to work to eradicate recurring problems in the country. As an external actor, the role of China gains importance in Ethiopia in the context of the New Silk Road economic engagement in the African Continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a case of internet posts discussing social issues affecting men and masculinity. Analysis of 500 posts containing masculine coded language on the subreddit r/unpopularopinion suggests that masculinity, especially when intersected with straightness and whiteness, is discursively constructed in an imagined social hierarchy where the plight of straight white men is invisible. By framing opinions as "unpopular," these posts suggest that while the poster's view may be objectively true, it is disvalued in mainstream discourses. Three key findings emerged from this analysis: First, regardless of the particular social issue discussed, efforts to reduce social inequality were negatively evaluated on average. Second, negative posts were more popular on the site; thus, amplifying the visibility of grievances. Third, masculine coded language is structured on Reddit, such that certain issues are bundled together to generate salient, interlocking themes indicating a robust meaning system. Overall, these findings suggest that criticisms of social equality are embedded within a discourse of threatened masculinity, straightness, and whiteness. This research extends past work on internet discursive practices related to masculinity and gender by showing the pervasiveness and intersectional nature of masculinity threat in digital forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the use of interpretive methodologies to study civil society networks within the field of third sector research. Interpretive methodologies situate reality as both socially constructed and negotiated and seek to understand meaning and meaning-making practices, which from a critical perspective act as forces of and derivatives of power relations. In particular, we develop the concept "interpretive engagement" to highlight a common but broadly defined focus of study in relation to civil society networks and use it as an illustrative example for highlighting the value of interpretive methods—specifically those that focus on discourses and discursive practices as forms of meaning-making—for advancing scholarship in the field of third sector research. Drawing on research in the field that employs interpretive methodologies and techniques to understand such practices, our interpretive engagement concept demonstrates how interpretive methods can address neglected areas of study in relation to the expressive functions of organized civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the far right is threatening the antifascist consensus that helped rebuild Europe and the world following World War II. Discourse studies have done much to further the understanding of the success as well as the fallacies of the discourses of far-right movements and have provided the means by which to comprehend right-wing communicative strategies. However, it has also been said that the reactions of the democratic majority and the mainstream media have contributed—mainly involuntarily—to the success of right-wing politics. The role of the reactions of society, the democratic majority and the mainstream media in trying to counter right-wing discourses is widely underexplored. The aim of this contribution is to understand the diverse material and symbolic effects of certain practices of political contestation. It aims to help elaborate counterstrategies against the threat of the far right and to present communicative strategies against hate. With the help of such diverse authors as Foucault, Goffman or Habermas, we will show how democratic positions seem to be in an ideological dilemma in which the speech acts that try to counter far-right discourses very often produce the opposite effect. The article can help to overcome the pitfalls and performative contradictions of some discursive practices especially in public communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to map the emergence and development of a research field around the topic of "gender-based violence (GBV) against women with precarious legal status and their access to social protection in advanced welfare societies". We explore the academic knowledge production around this topic as a specific research field by using bibliometric data. We investigate the place occupied by scholars who publish in well-established journals, and their disciplines, in order to understand the relevance of different disciplines and groups of researchers in the knowledge production within the field. Our methodology includes analysis of co-authorship, cross-country collaboration, and co-citation. The search strategy is informed by discursive practices and knowledge production by influential international civil society actors (CSAs) involved in framing welfare responses to GBV against women with precarious legal status. Our results suggest that the knowledge produced in the field increased in terms of number of publications between 2010 and 2021, indicating a process of institutionalisation. Disciplines oriented towards certain groups of professionals such as clinical psychology, medicine, health, nursing, and social work, affiliated mainly to institutions in the US, Canada, and the EU, have a prominent role in knowledge production in this field. In our conclusions, we discuss the implications of these results in relation to gender studies and migration studies, along with some limitations of the use of bibliometrics software combined with an intersectionality approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I propose four considerations that might frame a history of economic consciousness from the pre-modern oikonomia to the modern economy. (1) Before the economy dominated attention in the public sphere, economic consciousness was pre-discursive. Only once economic concerns were being dealt with, discursive practices were possible. Thus economic practices, for most parts of human history, have been considered a condition rather than a locus of culture. (2) As soon as economic affairs enter the discursive sphere, they cause problems of trust and nourish a culture of suspicion. This is manifest specifically in the pre-eminence of ad-hominem arguments. (3) Modern economic knowledge results from a set of strategies that avoid, rather than deal with, this mistrust. This is apparent from the tendency of economic knowledge to be formal. The notion of the economy as an anonymous social structure emerges from this intellectual avoidance. (4) The problem of the ideology of economic knowledge is less that of hidden interests but that economists cannot assume social responsibility without losing their face as scientists and indeed reinforce the culture of mistrust inherent in modern economic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines de jure language officialization policies in Andorra and Luxembourg, and addresses how these are discursively reproduced, sustained or challenged by members of resident migrant communities in the two countries. Although the two countries bear similarities in their small size, extensive multilingualism and the pride of place accorded to the 'small' languages of Catalan and Luxembourgish respectively, they have adopted different strategies as regards according official status to the languages spoken there. We start by undertaking a close reading of language policy documents and highlight the ways that they are informed by 'strategic ambiguity', wherein certain key elements are deliberately left open to interpretation via a range of textual strategies. We then conduct a thematic analysis of individual speaker testimonies to understand how this strategic ambiguity impacts on the ways that speakers negotiate fluid multilingual practices while also having to navigate rigid monolingual regimes. In given contexts, these hierarchies privilege Catalan in Andorra and Luxembourgish in Luxembourg, particularly in relation to the regimentation of migrants' linguistic behaviour. In this way, the paper provides insights into the complex ideological fields in which small languages are situated and demonstrates the ways in which language policy is intertwined with issues of power and dominance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transdisciplinary curricula and programmes in higher education have gained traction as universities respond to the supercomplexity of contemporary crises and an accelerated pace of change. However, institutionalising such a model within traditional disciplinary structures also poses a series of challenges. This study references the Common Core at The University of Hong Kong as an exemplar for the implementation of a sustainable transdisciplinary curriculum in higher education. Our analysis draws on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts of assemblages, territorialisation, and refrains in order to clarify the flexible, dynamic, and successful institutionalisation of a transdisciplinary curriculum. Key findings illustrate how the transdisciplinary assemblage is extended through relations regulated by discursive practices, connections with heterogenous participation from university stakeholders, modulating the flow of desires through funding and the inflections of disciplinary knowledge, and appropriating the rhythms and cycles of the broader institution. This framework for analysing institutionalisation endorses an adaptable model that draws in faculty, student, and administrative participation in a (non)human infrastructural platform for creative transdisciplinary education. These insights, in turn, provide a reference point for policymakers and university administrators interested in institutional and curricular transformation that is open to unpredictable future possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social, discursive practice of othering in violent extremist discourse serves to present outgroups as distant yet real threats to the ideological and physical territories of an ingroup which a terrorist claims to represent. However, the role of grammatical choices (namely, non/transactive construction, voice, and mood) in enacting the othering act within the context of radicalisation to terrorism remains to be empirically verified. This paper explores the patterning and pragmatic functions--namely in framing situations, coercing into violence, and legitimising hostile actions against Others--of the syntactic structure of the othering utterances. The othering utterances, as realized in a set of eight public statements produced by former al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, were sorted manually and analysed qualitatively to help understand and showcase how grammar was strategically leveraged in the process of radicalisation. Results show that the act of othering in the dataset operates within the victimization and injustice frameworks to morally sanction antagonism and aggression via: (i) overt othering, where transactive construction, only declarative mood and active voice are used, and (ii) covert othering, in which nontransactive construction, any mood type, and passive voice are utilized. Overt othering foregrounds, through assertions and statements of presumed facts, the negative agentive role of Others and the diagnostic framing of the causal relationships between Others and negative experiences. Covert othering backgrounds this agentive role to place prominence on immoral actions and to serve in the motivational function of framing. The grammatical patterns provide evidence of the strategic character of OBL's verbal aggression and how different mood types tend to construct the directive, illocutionary point of the utterances and to enact prognostic framing. The analytical strategy aids in threat assessment and preventing radicalisation by sensitizing assessors to, first, the kind of semiotic clues to engagement in the social and discursive process of radicalisation where utterances count as calls for action and activators of a reality of deontology, and, second, to the social functioning of terrorist texts in: (i) promoting putative readers' awareness of particular outgroups, and (ii) ideological positioning and encouraging and legitimating violence that is liberty, loyalty and care metavalues-based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse on teachers as agents of school change has recently emerged in educational policies in many countries, emphasizing teacher-led educational reforms. The meaning of this rhetoric is quite vague; its practical meaning is revealed by analyzing how teachers' roles are normalized in educational policies. With a Foucauldian approach, this study aims to critically analyze teacher images produced and distributed by South Korea's educational reform policies over the last 20 years. This study addresses two research questions: (1) Under the rhetoric of teachers as agents of school change, what teacher images have been created by Korean educational reform policies over the last 20 years? (2) What are the non-discursive conditions that have led to the establishment of the teacher images presented in educational reform policies? To this end, 94 policy documents from the 5 Korean governments were collected and analyzed. The study results verified a contradictory character of policy discourse in that policies stating teachers as agents of school change appear to empower teachers to reform education, which is not true in reality. The results also revealed complex mechanisms enabling certain policy discourses to be formed by analyzing the formation process of particular teacher images produced by educational policies in relation to non-discursive conditions. Furthermore, this study showed that particular teacher images circulated by educational policies can regulate teachers' everyday practices, contributing to understanding the way educational policies exert their power. Finally, the implications of the findings were presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Huw Price's subject naturalism has emerged as a leading pragmatist position within recent debates surrounding philosophical naturalism. Unlike orthodox views which tend to be guided by metaphysical questions about the "place" of, for instance, the mind, meaning, and morality within the natural world, subject naturalism focuses philosophical attention on language-users and the functions that certain concepts play within discursive practices. This paper considers two objections to subject naturalism and argues that they can be overcome by looking to the methodological insights of philosophical genealogy. Although Price occasionally characterizes his project as a kind of genealogy, he offers little explanation of what such a methodological orientation is supposed to involve. I suggest that subject naturalists ought to remedy this theoretical lacuna by looking to the work of Bernard Williams. On the one hand, doing so can serve a diagnostic function: Williams' conception of genealogy affords a perspective from which subject naturalism's explanatory inadequacies are more clearly understood. On the other hand, Williams' elaborated conception of genealogy represents a path by which the subject naturalist can overcome the shortcomings discussed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National parks and other large protected areas play an increasingly important role in the context of global social and environmental challenges. Nevertheless, they continue to be rooted in local places and cannot be separated out from their socio-cultural and historical context. Protected areas furthermore are increasingly understood to constitute critical sites of struggle whereby the very meanings of nature, landscape, and nature-society relations are up for debate. This paper examines governance arrangements and discursive practices pertaining to the management of the Danish Wadden Sea National Park and reflects on the relationship between pluralist institutional structures and pluralist, relational understandings of nature and landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on students' mathematical discourse emerging from interactions in the digital environment GeoGebra, in which one can construct virtual objects that realize mathematical signifiers and then interact with them. These virtual object realizations can become dynamic interactive mediators (DIMs) that influence the development of the learners' mathematical discourse. In this case study, I analyze in fine detail the discourse developed by two dyads of students in response to an unfamiliar interview question. One dyad came from a class in which GeoGebra was not part of classroom practice and included students who, according to the teacher's evaluation, were standard-to-high achieving. The other dyad was from a generally demotivated and low-achieving class in which GeoGebra had become part of classroom practice. The analyses, focused especially on the low-achieving dyad, are guided by the question of how DIMs shaped these students' discourse. According to the analysis, these students ended up succeeding where standard-to-high-achieving peers did not. Moreover, the detailed analysis of the ways in which the DIMs supported this dyad's learning showed mechanisms that may be general rather than specific to this one case. This suggests that appropriate integration of DIMs into the teaching and learning of high school algebra can be beneficial for low-achieving students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, greater acknowledgement has been given to climate change as a cultural phenomenon. This paper takes a cultural lens to the topic of climate change, in which climate-relevant understandings are grounded in wider cultural, political and material contexts. We approach climate-relevant accounts at the level of the everyday, understood as a theoretically problematic and politically contested space This is in contrast to simply being the backdrop to mundane, repetitive actions contributing to environmental degradation and the site of mitigative actions. Taking discourse as a form of practice in which fragments of cultural knowledge are drawn on to construct our environmental problems, we investigate citizens' accounts of climate-relevant issues in three culturally diverse emerging economies: Brazil, South Africa and China. These settings are important because greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are predicted to significantly increase in these countries in the future. We conducted semi-structured interviews with a range of citizens in each country using a narrative approach to contextualise climate-relevant issues as part of people's lifestyle narratives. Participants overwhelmingly framed their accounts in the context of locally-salient issues, and few accounts explicitly referred to the phenomenon of climate change. Instead, elements of climate changes were conflated with other environmental issues and related to a wide range of cultural assumptions that influenced understandings and implied particular ways of responding to environmental problems. We conclude that climate change scholars should address locally relevant understandings and develop dialogues that can wider meanings that construct climate-relevant issues in vernacular ways at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diversity of vulnerability conditions, that have prevented children and adolescents from exercising their right to school education, also produces a diversity of cultural references of the public that comes to Basic Education programs for Youth and Adults in developing countries. This diversity often forges appropriation processes of numeracy practices that defy the rationality assumed by hegemonic mathematics and confront us with the insufficiency of not only the syntactic approach, but also the semantic resources in school mathematics teaching. Focusing on events occurring in classrooms of different programs that I have been accompanying in Brazil, I identify and analyze tensions, disputes, and complementarities among the signification efforts being referenced in syntactic, semantic or pragmatic dimensions of language games that constitute the discursive interactions in these contexts. My analysis is based on theoretical tools of language studies that invest in reflections on pragmatics and, as in Wittgenstein's later works, assume that meaning is determined by use, allowing scholars to approach linguistic signification as a social phenomenon and numeracy practices as discursive practices of social subjects in interaction. The findings provide evidence to further discuss the complexity of the classroom, to which the vulnerability of the students' living conditions adds decisive elements, challenges and possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social science research on the anthropomorphisms of computers and robots has been devoted to studying intellectual anthropomorphism, emotional anthropomorphism, bodily anthropomorphism, and the limits of computer and robot anthropomorphism. Although these represent important patterns for studying the anthropomorphisms of computers and robots, there are other important patterns. The limitation of anthropomorphism is one of these patterns. The limitation of anthropomorphism is a discursive practice which places limits on anthropomorphism. Discursive practices are interactional and practical activities for making sense of who and what we encounter. In this article, I analyze the limitation of anthropomorphism as another important activity to investigate. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a robotics research group, I show the importance of the limitation of anthropomorphism by documenting how it contributes to research group identity. In the final section, I describe some implications for future studies of the anthropomorphisms of computers and robots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contends that penal substitutionary atonement, and its necessary connection between sin, wrath, and punishment, influences the political discourse and practices around America's wars on drugs. In this work, the author is guided by Ryan LaMothe's proposals for pastoral political theology. She suggests that his initial question of "what's going on" in the political realm could include surfacing theology's influence upon political discourses and practices. The author begins by reviewing the history of assigning a spoiled moral identity to marginalized groups through America's wars on drugs. She pays special attention to the current conflation of immigration and drug rhetoric targeting Hispanics. She then considers penal atonement theory and its connection to punitive justice. The author suggests three aspects of the worldview surrounding this theory that motivate a distinct lack of care for those who commit acts deemed immoral: (1) no mercy outside of punishment, (2) pain is essential to justice, and (3) the law is implacable to commonsense reasoning. The necessity of punishment, including the animus of God's personal wrath against the sinner for affronting God's holiness, smooths the way for "tough on crime" stances against those stigmatized as morally corrupt. The apparent commonsense connection between sin and punishment hampers responses to drug selling or using that could engage alternative forms of care and justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Saba Mahmood's untimely passing on March 10, 2018 was a tragic loss for family, friends, and colleagues, as well as for cultural anthropologists inspired by her scholarship over the past two decades. Her influence has been no less far-reaching in contemporary Islamic and gender studies, as well as the anthropology of ethics. It is against the backdrop of her legacy that this essay seeks to pay homage to and critically reflect on Mahmood's scholarship. It focuses on and assesses Mahmood's contributions as an anthropologist of Islam, subjectivity, and ethics, paying particular attention to the debates that have emerged in the wake of her scholarship on the ethics of piety, the ambivalent nature of subjectivity, and the meanings of freedom and tradition. The assessment suggests that there is an unresolved tension between Mahmood's experience-near reflections on the ethical care of the pious self, on one hand, and her more sweeping critiques of freedom and the liberal project. The essay concludes with some thoughts on where the anthropology of Islam is moving with regard to ethics, plurality, and the ambivalence of subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that the debates over which norm constitutes assertion can be abandoned by challenging the three main motivations for a constitutive norm. The first motivation is the alleged analogy between language and games. The second motivation is the intuition that some assertions are worthy of criticism. The third is the discursive responsibilities incurred by asserting. I demonstrate that none of these offer good reasons to believe in a constitutive norm of assertion, as such a norm is understood in the literature. Others who have made similar arguments conclude that assertion does not exist at all—that there is no such thing as assertion. I disagree: we do not have to relinquish the category of assertion just because it is not normatively constituted. There are alternative ways to understand and individuate assertion that do not rely on a constitutive norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws upon thirteen months of ethnographic research in a Chicago pawnshop to show how prices of objects in pawnshops are actively, socially negotiated using what I term discursive strategies of valuation. Three kinds of discursive strategies of valuation emerge repeatedly in the data: a. references to the specific material attributes of the objects, b. references to the unique biographical histories of the objects, c. reference to the financial need and (relative) social positioning of the customer involved in the negotiation. Examining these strategies reveals the relationship between socially contingent and culturally constructed perceptions of value and the production of price. I find that rhetorical strategies can and do affect price, within limits. Perhaps most surprisingly, the data show that discursive strategies emphasizing a lower socio-economic status can inflate the value, and ultimately the price, of an object during negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marie Ståhl and Anita Hussénius have defined what discourses dominate national tests in chemistry for Grade 9 in Sweden by using feminist, critical didactic perspectives. This response seeks to expand the results in Ståhl and Hussénius's article Chemistry inside an epistemological community box!- Discursive exclusions and inclusions in the Swedish national tests in chemistry, by using different facets of gender awareness. The first facet-Gender awareness in relations to the test designers' own conceptions-highlighted how the gender order where women are subordinated men becomes visible in the national tests as a consequence of the test designers internalized conceptions. The second facet-Gender awareness in relation to chemistry-discussed the hierarchy between discourses within chemistry. The third facet-Gender awareness in relation to students-problematized chemistry in relation to the students' identity formation. In summary, I suggest that the different discourses can open up new ways to interpret chemistry and perhaps dismantle the hegemonic chemistry discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on theory from critical language policy literature, this article explores the impact of discourses on in-migration on Welsh language policy. By focussing on discursive debates surrounding the subject of in-migration, the article analyses how a range of actors produce and reproduce discourses on in-migration in Wales and how these discursive struggles impact on policy. It argues that, while certain actors have been able to construct a powerful discourse on in-migration through language debates, others have failed to make their voices heard and their views on the subject have been silenced. This unequal access to the production of discourse is not incidental; it is indicative of wider power structures at play within bilingual or multilingual language communities. Therefore, while the study focusses on Wales, the article highlights a theme that is relevant to all minoritized language groups, that of the interrelationship between policy, politics and power. It also stresses the importance of adopting an approach to language policy that takes into account both structure and agency alike, and confirms that language groups should not be conceptualised by number of speakers using categories such as 'dominant', 'subordinate', 'majority' and 'minority', but rather by issues of power and status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research reported in this study examines the very first time the participants planned for and enacted science instruction within a 'best-case scenario' teacher preparation program. Evidence from this study indicates that, within this context, preservice teachers are capable of implementing several of the discursive practices of science called for in standards documents including engaging students in science investigations and constructing evidence-based explanations. The participants designed experiences that allowed their students to interact with natural phenomena, gather evidence, and craft explanations of natural phenomenon. The study contends that the participants were able to achieve such successes due to their participation in a teacher education program and field placement, which were designed using a comprehensive, conceptual framework. Video of the participant's teaching and annotated self-analysis videos served as the primary data for this study. Implications for future research and elementary science teacher education are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study highlights the importance of cognition-affect interaction pathways in the construction of mathematical knowledge. Scientific output demands further research on the conceptual structure underlying such interaction aimed at coping with the high complexity of its interpretation. The paper discusses the effectiveness of using a dynamic model such as that outlined in the Mathematical Working Spaces (MWS) framework, in order to describe the interplay between cognition and affect in the transitions from instrumental to discursive geneses in geometrical reasoning. The results based on empirical data from a teaching experiment at a middle school show that the use of dynamic geometry software favours students' attitudinal and volitional dimensions and helps them to maintain productive affective pathways, affording greater intellectual independence in mathematical work and interaction with the context that impact learning opportunities in geometric proofs. The reflective and heuristic dimensions of teacher mediation in students' learning is crucial in the transition from instrumental to discursive genesis and working stability in the Instrumental-Discursive plane of MWS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Coaching - Theorie & Praxis is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Coaching - Theorie & Praxis is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Coaching - Theorie & Praxis is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Large-scale assessment, such as the Programme for International Assessment (PISA), plays an increasingly important role in current educational practice and politics. However, many scholars have questioned the validity and reliability of the tests and the extent to which they actually constitute trustworthy representations of students' knowledge. In the light of such critical voices the present article adopts a sociocultural perspective of human knowledge and action in order to explore the encounters between students and the science test assignments with which their knowledge is tested. Of particular interest in this study are the described 'real-life situations' presented as the relevant background in which scientific literacy is assessed in PISA. According to the sociocultural theoretical onset the methodology used to approach the students' meaning making of the image of science as portrayed in the test were collaborative situations in which students work in small groups with units of PISA assignments, enabling a study of student-assignment encounters in action. The data we worked with consists of video-recordings from 71 Swedish 15-year-old students working with three released units from the PISA science test. According to our analysis, the 'real-life situations' described in the test emerge as problematic in the students' meaning-making. This is demonstrated for instance by the students' positioning themselves as being different from and opposed to the fictional pictured students who appear in the backstories of the test. This article provides examples of how the scientific and academic language used by the fictional students in the assignments mediates distance and resistance among the students. The fictional students' use of strict scientific language and methods in day-to-day life situations leads them to be perceived as 'little scientists' and as elite stereotypes of the scientific culture. We conclude that, by using assignments of this type, measurements of students' knowledge in science run the risk of becoming a measurement of cultural consistency regarding how well students will overcome the hurdles of scientific cultures. We mean that all though understanding the scientific culture is an important goal for science education, there is a problem that the assessment organizations communicate the results as representations of students' knowledge in science. This study adheres to research that advises caution in not over-interpreting the PISA results and stresses that understanding students' 'knowledge' about science is much more complex than what is communicated by the international assessment organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how epideictic rhetoric and argumentation may be interrelated in a general-interest newspaper framed as a single discourse produced by a collective author. In more specific terms, the view advanced here is that newspaper as whole has an epideictic dimension which, in terms of argumentation, is the fundamental or predominant one. The usefulness of this approach is twofold. In terms of rhetoric, to explore the applicability of epideictic rhetoric to journalistic discourse; and in the field of journalism studies, the goal is to draw on the theory of epideictic rhetoric so as to refine the conceptualization of the nature of argumentation in the newspaper as such. Given this twofold perspective, the account of newspaper discursive practices will be general, and the classical and contemporary epideictic theory will be briefly summarized. However, the outcome of this analysis is an example of a fruitful encounter between the two fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well established that teacher-student interactive talk is critically important in supporting students to reason and learn in science. Teachers' discursive moves in responding to student input are keys to developing and supporting a rich vein of interactive discussion. While initiation-response-evaluation (IRE) sequences have been shown to dominate science classroom discourse patterns worldwide, teacher 'prompts' are important for opening up opportunities for reasoning and higher level learning. This paper describes the analysis of video sequences for five expert elementary teachers across three countries to develop a coding scheme for these teachers' 'discursive moves' to guide and respond to student inputs, that unpacks more completely the strategies they use to develop interactive discussion. The analysis showed varied patterns of knowledge transaction, with teacher discursive moves serving three broad purposes: to elicit and acknowledge student responses, to clarify and to extend student ideas. The patterns of talk were also related to the dialogic-authoritative distinction in analysis of talk, to show that this distinction is only clear for particular types of expert practice. While the particular moves teachers use vary across parts of lessons we argue that they are revealing of teachers' particular beliefs and of systemic constraints, and that there exist patterns in the use of the discursive categories that capture how expert teachers build deeper level knowledge in classroom interactive talk. We describe ways in which the analysis can inform science teacher education and the professional learning of teachers of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small-group discussions involving students and their teacher that focus on meanings constructed during the mathematics lessons or solutions to problems produced in these lessons offer great potential for debate and argument. An analysis of the epistemological nature of knowledge can give deeper insight, to gain a better understanding of the emerging discontinuities in argumentations, negotiations, and clarifications about contentious meaning differences that arise. In most cases mathematical interactions between students and a teacher about contentions are very fragile and seem to be handled more or less directly-by side-stepping to another topic or by resolving via the teacher's authority, for example. Therefore, the maintenance of such negotiation processes in mathematics teaching is a specific challenge for students and the teacher. The type of closure of these processes seems to be related to the emerging maintenance processes. In this paper, small-group discussions are interpretatively analyzed in the three steps 'Initiation-Maintenance-Closing' with the focus on fundamental (dialogical) learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore a conceptual frame for analyzing mathematics classroom discourse to understand the way authority is at work. This case study of a teacher moving from a school where he is known to a new setting offers us the opportunity to explore the use of the conceptual frame as a tool for understanding how language practice and authority relate in a mathematics classroom. This case study illuminates the challenges of establishing disciplinary authority in a new context while also developing the students' sense of authority within the discipline. To analyze the communication in the teacher's grade 12 class in the first school and grade 9 class early in the year at the new school, we use the four categories of positioning drawn from our earlier analysis of pervasive language patterns in mathematics classrooms-personal authority, discourse as authority, discursive inevitability, and personal latitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Journal of Early Childhood is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay argues that medical and health humanists interested in the rhetorical work of publics can extend their research by attending to embodiment and infrastructure. In addition to discussing how such strategies are illustrated in the essays appearing in this special issue, I relate them to the rhetorical study of personal health records (PHRs) as described in consumer-directed arguments. I conclude by posing two questions to health and medical humanists: 'How do discursive constructions of publics and more specific instantiations of embodied experiences mutually shape each other?' and 'What do the infrastructures of health and medical users look like and involve in their enactment?' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Only a few studies have dealt with the challenge of bridging the linguistic gap between the dialogic realm and the talk of disengaged students. Bridging this gap is particularly relevant to the CSCL community since one of its utmost aims is to promote the dialogic. This study aims to articulate how to harness the CSCL design and affordances to enhance dialogic pedagogy with disengaged students. Using temporal analysis of philosophical discussions for children, we focus on three disengaged 8th grade students participating in successive discussions mediated by a CSCL tool (Argunaut), and follow the way they talk with their peers in the classroom. The study shows the gradual emergence of the dialogic among those students. We describe the transition of their talk moves, from initially reproducing the way they talk to adopting dialogical norms. To explain this we conceptualize the notion of carriers of discursive norms and discuss its transformative role in dialogue. The dialogic transition was made possible by the pedagogical design and the design of the CSCL tools. These affordances allowed the students change the meaning of the conversational building blocks of space, silence, addressee, and the ethics of talk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of demonization and hate speech by the Front Pembela Islam (FBI) in Indonesia to legalize violent attacks to individuals and organization that they consider to be religiously deviant or sinful. It states that the discursive frame from the Majelis Ulama Indonesia has enabled FBI to avoid being recognized as terrorist organization because of their violence and demonization campaigns. The civil and uncivil modes of the discourse and praxis of FBI were also discussed.