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This commentary offers a concise description of the structure revealed in the discourse about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but that also serves as a condition of the possibility for such events to happen. The points of view that this structure provides are relational, interdependent, and mutually constructed, and they are labeled as the Citizens, the Authorities, and the People. All these positions are structured in such a way that provides their subjects with a source of enjoyment. The positions can be described as follows: fetishism of the Citizens, who almost invent their guilt without being held responsible; sadism of the Authorities, whose urge to make more and more atrocious decisions demand to repeatedly dismiss or shift the blame; masochism of the People, who accept their responsibility for anything without having a clear idea about the contents of decisions that were made in their name. In regards to communal guilt, it is crucial to take this level of enjoyment into account, in order to refuse sinking into emotions and avoiding using the language of guilt and shame. However, to simply switch to the language of understanding and responsibility instead is not enough. The language we need to seek is the one that would allow us to directly address the inadequacy of this distorted political arrangement—not some kind of metalanguage, but, on the contrary, a common language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In mathematics education, there is general agreement regarding the significance of mathematical literacy (also quantitative literacy or numeracy) for informed citizenship, which often requires evaluating the use of numbers in public policy discourse. We hold that such an evaluation must accommodate the necessarily fragile relation between the information that numbers are taken to carry and the policy decisions they are meant to support. In doing so, attention needs to be paid to differences in how that relation is formed. With this in mind, we investigated a public discourse that heavily relied on numbers in the context of introducing, maintaining, and easing the rules and regulations directed to contain the spread of the virus SARS-CoV-2 during the first epidemic wave of COVID-19 in Germany with its peak in early April 2020. We used a public-service broadcasting outlet as data. Our theoretical stance is affiliated with post-structuralist discourse theory. As an outcome, we identified four major related strategies of using numbers, which we named rationalisation, contrast, association and recharging. In our view explicit attention to these strategies as well as identifying new ones can aid the task of furthering critical mathematical literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines discursive strategies used by police and politicians to describe and justify the application of penalty notices to minor criminal offences. Critical discourse analysis is used as an analytical tool to show how neoliberal economic thinking has informed the prism through which infringement notices have been rationalised as a legitimate alternative to traditional criminal prosecution, while also highlighting the contradictions inherent in neoliberalism as an ideology through which to view the embrace of legally hybrid powers in the criminal justice system. Discursive strategies identified in the article include the use of ideological keywords ordinarily associated with free market economics and managerial efficiency; the adoption of militaristic vocabulary and metaphors in representations of policing and space; the strategies of assimilation and formulation to represent police views as uniform and coherent; and the use of nominalisations to legitimise the lack of procedural safeguards attached to infringement notices. The logic of—and the language ordinarily associated with—the domain of private business, the 'free market', and deregulation has infiltrated the criminal justice sphere. In addition, the naturalisation of neoliberal economic discourse in political and police representations of infringement notices produces and sustains important ideological effects, by disguising the ways in which the expanded use of administrative sanctions in public order policing intensifies state power at the expense of due process of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policymakers often engage in blame avoidance behaviour that affects the ways in which they structure their organisations, adopt policies and operating routines, and present their work to the public. The linguistic aspects of such behaviour have received relatively little academic attention. In this paper, I seek to advance blame avoidance scholarship by introducing to its analytical toolbox useful conceptual instruments from linguistically informed discourse studies. Based on a multidisciplinary literature review, I show how the discursive study of policy-related blame games is situated within the wider scholarship dealing with a variety of blame phenomena. I provide an inventory of the micro-level building blocks of blame games: discursive strategies of persuasion, and narratives of cause, failure, and scandal. I suggest that by treating government blame games as mediated ‘language games’, policy scholars can complement the analysis of various political variables traditionally discussed in policy literature with detailed understanding of the micro-politics of presentational blame avoidance. [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]

In rural Cambodia the rampant allocation of state land to political elites and foreign investors in the form of “Economic Land Concessions (ELCs)”—estimated to cover an area equivalent to more than 50 % of the country’s arable land—has been associated with encroachment on farmland, community forests and indigenous territories and has contributed to a rapid increase of rural landlessness. By contrast, less than 7,000 ha of land have been allotted to land-poor and landless farmers under the pilot project for “Social Land Concessions (SLCs)” supported by various donor agencies. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in two research sites in Kratie Province, this article sheds light on the mechanisms and discourses surrounding the allocation of ELCs and SLCs. Our findings suggest that large-scale and non-transparent land leases in the form of ELCs are discursively justified as land policy measures supporting national development, creating employment opportunities in rural areas, and restoring “degraded” and “non-use” land, while SLCs are presented by the government and its international donors as a complementary policy to reduce landlessness, alleviate rural poverty, and ensure a more equitable land distribution. We argue that the SLC pilot project is a deliberate strategy deployed by the Cambodian ruling elite to instrumentalize international aid agencies in formalizing displacement and distributional injustices, in smoothing the adverse social impacts of their very own land policies and in minimizing resistance by dispossessed rural people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at understanding how “ethical public issues” are created, and dealt within a public arena. Here, we view ethical public issues as social constructs, which are the results of issue framing contests. Such an approach will enable us to understand how ethical public issues emerge and are shaped by strategizing actors (including firms, NGOs, the media, and governments), in an attempt to impose their own definition and preferred solution to the issue. We also propose key factors which explain the success of a framing attempt, and evidence of such success. The empirical case of the labor conditions in West Africa’s cocoa industry is used to illustrate this theoretical framework and methodological approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]