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AbstractIrish republican feminists across twentieth-century Ireland occupied an ambivalent position in the Global North. The Irish were complicit in imperialism in the non-West or Global South. However, they also operated against an evolving backdrop of colonialism, violence and resistance, spanning the all-Ireland anti-colonial campaign, partition, and postcolonial civil war, as well as the late twentieth-century civil rights movement and ensuing ‘Troubles’ (1969–1998) north of the disputed border. Irish women were, therefore, subject to various iterations of violent patriarchy informed by British imperialism, anti-colonialism, settler-colonialism or postcoloniality. Using the texts of a small number of prominent Irish republican feminists, including Helena Molony (1883–1967) and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington (1877–1946), as well as Bernadette Devlin (1947–) and Roisin Boyd (?–) later in the century, this article examines political women’s attempts to understand their positionality and, through this, formulate their identity. To do so, I am indebted to Global South feminist and ‘feminist of colour’ epistemologies, beginning with Chandra Mohanty’s understanding of relevant terminology as denoting ‘political and analytic sites and methodologies’ rather than geographical or spatial constructs. I hope to use this theorising in a way that does not perpetrate a recolonising of ‘women of colour’ knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Good news aims to redress the balance from negative bias and contributes to a more comprehensive form of journalism. This article explores the largely ignored discursive construction of good news through news values. It first investigates the features of good news stories as against top news stories in the mainstream media, and then identifies differences in the discursive practices by the mainstream media and the good news outlets in covering the same events. The findings show that in the mainstream media, top news stories tend to highlight Eliteness and Negativity, whereas good news stories give emphasis to Personalization and Positivity. When covering the same events, reports by the good news outlets show an overemphasis on Positivity, and those by the mainstream media demonstrate a more balanced distribution of the major news values. It is proposed that good news can serve as a valuable complement to top news in the mainstream media. Reports in the mainstream media tend to be more comprehensive and informative, and the relatively shorter reports in the good news outlets pay more attention to the positive aspects of the event that are effective in uplifting the readers’ mood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reexamines the meanings and values of Lin Tianmiao's (born 1961) The Proliferation of Thread Winding (1995) through an analysis of its materialities. Lin's Thread Winding has received much attention in feminist discourse, which tends to draw attention to the symbolic manifestations embedded in the act of winding, and in textiles and domestic objects—techniques and materials often associated with "women's work" within certain Western feminist critiques of women's art. This paper moves beyond the gendered lens of interpreting Lin's art, which has built on symbolic and metaphorical readings of the underlying visual representations, and instead turn to investigate how her work can be understood from the perspective of its discursive materialities, through which the art objects produce material signs (phenomenological effects) that indicate its previous process of art making. Drawing upon new materialist theories and the notion of affect, this paper understands the materialities of Lin's work as dynamic phenomena, emerging from ongoing intertwining relationships between human and nonhuman agencies. It examines how Lin's work constitutes a series of inquisitive investigations into multiple processes of making, and how affective qualities and critical knowledge can materialize in and through this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article problematizes the ideals and norms surrounding the organization of environments for children. It investigates the understanding of the arrangement and organization of Early Childhood Education (ECE) environments, aiming to offer an alternative perspective on taken-for-granted assumptions about ideal environments for children. Using Foucault's conceptualization of discourse and power, the article examines how discursive practices shape and reshape norms and ideals of what constitutes a 'good' physical environment in ECE. Based on 145 texts published between 1969 and 2021 in an influential Swedish preschool teacher journal, the study analyzes systematic discourses on preschool environments. Key findings concern the environment's role in the governing of children. The discursive construction of ideal environments emphasizes a 'toy-free' setting with minimal framing and instruction, pointing to a discursive shift in the desired type of freedom for children: from the freedom to become a part of culture, to the freedom to change culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last decade saw the issue of polarisation garnering increased scholarly attention. While political polarisation has been almost unequivocally studied as synonymous with ideological polarisation, scholars have recently addressed polarisation along partisan lines manifesting through strong in-group favouritism and out-group unfavouritism, labelled as affective polarisation. This paper investigates patterns of affective polarisation in the Slovenian (digital) public sphere, through analysis of discourse of former Slovenian PM Janez Janša on Twitter. The affective-discursive analysis of Janša's Twitter resulted in the identification and exploration of four affective-discursive practices: Dangerous Outsider, Pride and Patriotism, Immoral and Incompetent Women and Defection. We find that through interplay of these practices and by employing strategies of discursive closure, Janša successfully fuels polarisation among partisans by solidifying divisions along the in-group-out-group axis. The paper contributes to affective polarisation literature by demonstrating how political actors condition competitive environments around different social identities thereby minimising opportunities for meaningful deliberation and debate beyond the differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children who are currently, or were previously, 'looked after' by the state, are educationally disadvantaged, with exclusion rates historically higher than in other groups in the UK. A conventional way of thinking about these children is that they have been affected by trauma and attachment issues in their early years, and that they import their problems into a neutral educational space. A less conventional explanation would be that the school itself is a key player in the production of problematic behaviours and identities that individual children may exhibit. This article attempts to demonstrate how the identity of the excluded care experienced child is formed by the discursive practices of the learning community. We ask: what are the micro-processes and cultural assumptions that might contribute to the levels of exclusion? Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights provides an interrogative framework. It is argued that the learning environment is far from neutral, and that the young Heathcliff is framed by the discursive practices of those who tell his story, most notably those who teach him whether formally or informally. By presenting this stark, fictional example, it is hoped that the 'normal' practices of the contemporary school can be defamiliarized and reconsidered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research question: Social media in sport management contexts is increasingly used to highlight social issues in sport and to advocate for change, such as expanding the opportunities for women to participate. The purpose of this study is to examine how and why people strategically used various Twitter conventions to advocate for women's cycling during the 2013 (men's) Tour de France. We draw on Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis to frame our exploration and analysis of the issue. Research methods: We analyzed the text of approximately 6000 tweets to examine the use of Twitter conventions, as discursive practices, in digital activism efforts to advance the women's cycling agenda. Findings and discussion: People used links, retweets, hashtags, direct mentions, and influencers' posts as individual discursive practices and for their collective potential to draw attention to, and advocate for, women's pro-cycling in the context of the 100th iteration of the men's Tour de France. We discuss why this was an important process in the context of women's cycling, and some of the impacts, ten years later, of this Twitter activity. Implications: Twitter conventions can be a useful digital activism tool for feminist agendas in sport. We are cautious of overstating this case as each cause will have different contexts, and the ability of trolls and other users to derail activism is ever present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse analysis (DA) has emerged as a valuable method for examining communication between participants in end-of-life (EOL) care. However, there remains a gap in synthesizing the findings of discourse analytic studies focused on communication within EOL care settings. The aim of this study was to synthesize DA studies in EOL care. A systematic review was conducted following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses (Prisma) guidelines. An electronic database of Web of Science (WOS), MEDLINE, PubMed, and Embase was performed. 14 peer-reviewed studies published in English before January 10 2024, were included. Thematic analysis identified three overarching themes: (1) caregivers’ discursive stances on EOL care, (2) discursive practices of participants in shared decision-making conversations, and (3) discursive resources in talking illness trajectories. Findings suggest that DA has the potential to provide insights into understanding communication practices in EOL care and examining an individual’s stance on issues about EOL care, thus informing clinical practice and improving patient-centered care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specific domains of modern life—social, ecological, legal—involve distinct issues of justice that often lead to a single-focused political-philosophical engagement with justice. Such engagements, argues Marianna Papastephanou, risk turning issues of justice that lie beyond the adopted perspective into discursive injustices (i.e. of silencing the Other's voice) and condemning them to invisibility. To address this risk, Papastephanou proposes a stereoscopic approach that better illuminates the many facets of justice and, concomitantly, the many instances of injustice that escape the dominant political-philosophical perspectives on justice. In the present article, I discuss Papastephanou's theory of a stereoscopic approach to justice along with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's discourse theory and notion of "nodal points." I suggest that the synergy between the two approaches enhances their efficacy: Papastephanou's theorization concretizes the implications of establishing nodal points, which, in turn, reveal how the reduction of justice to one of its facets occurs at the discursive level. Enriched by Papastephanou's theorization, discourse theory makes more visible how a stereoscopic approach to justice can unveil discursive injustices of selective and partial outlooks on (in)justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do India and Pakistan always quarrel over terrorism? The prevailing arguments more often implicate intriguing South Asian geopolitics surrounding the unresolved Kashmir dispute or pathological partition of British India in 1947 to explain this puzzle. Surprisingly, why and how the two countries verbalise terrorism has hardly been investigated in a comparative framework as a potential underpinning of this historical syndrome. This void has deprived South Asia's existing literature and public and policy debates of an understanding of the underlying determinants of the terrorism discourse. Namely, how has the discourse originated, what are its distinct metaphysics, and how it has shaped and normalised discursive practices at significant moments in the history of these two countries, and with what consequences? This article responds to these broader questions. It argues that among other vital underpinnings, the Indo-Pakistan terrorism discourse, with its origins in colonialism, functions to institute and enable rival practices of exclusionary politics, doublespeak and propaganda. More importantly, it nurtures self-fulfilling concepts of statehood deriving from a constructed "real" reality characterising an imagined geopolitical pathology that, in turn, perpetuates Indo-Pakistan imperialism. In addressing this argument, the paper makes multiple original contributions, including identifying research avenues and indicating various intersecting causes of friction that afford reconciliation possibilities to the stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Struggles over meaning are inherent to knowledge performances – the communicative accomplishment of knowledge. This study analyzes an interdisciplinary team's communication as they designed a novel information technology. It focuses on hostile knowledge performances, which are comprised of behaviors that steer group knowing by dominating communication. That communication included flooding the interactive space with monologues and interminable emails; correcting and directing, including telling people what to think; and stifling others by interrupting, patronizing, and stonewalling. This study contributes to communication theory and practice by building an account of hostile knowledge performances defined by communication that reflects domination in the communicative accomplishment of knowledge. This research makes clear the difficulties collaborators face responding to hostility and reveals more and less adaptive responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pedagogies for movement learning have been affected by a gap between natural science and social science. The gap has meant that pedagogy tend to focus relatively more on either product, material context, and normative ways of moving, or process, learners, social context, and non-normative ways of moving. Here, I suggest that philosopher and physicist Karen Barad's agential realist perspective may offer a theoretical approach that can contribute to enact pedagogies for movement learning that go beyond the gap between "the natural" and "the social." Such an approach does, however, not entail a "mixture," or "blending," of natural and social science theory. Rather, the perspective is based on a particular notion of discursive practice as (re)conceptualized by Barad. This approach is illustrated in the article by an empirical example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a critical-rhetorical analysis of women’s uniform activism that went viral surrounding the 2020 Olympic Games (held in 2021), this article builds on existing feminist scholarship regarding the ideological correspondence of postfeminism and popular feminism within gendered economies of visibility. By giving primacy to the notion of personal choice, women activist athletes (and the media coverage of them) employed postfeminist discursive practices in service of a popular feminist agenda. While the foregrounding of “choice” stretched the reach of their feminism, allowing it to shapeshift to please a variety of audiences and gain notice, its deployment also functioned to undermine their political commitments. Presenting the concept of “elastic feminism” to characterize this tension, this essay explores the power and pitfalls of prioritizing the rhetorically flexible logics of choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Treating counter-disinformation activities as a discursive practice producing knowledge in specific cultural and historical contexts, this article brings a vital cultural studies perspective to an incipient Critical Disinformation Studies agenda. At the same time, it cautions against inadvertently aligning that agenda with the ‘bad faith’, right-wing populist critique of counter-disinformation practices, acknowledging their genuine potential to enhance democratic culture. It proceeds by interrogating the communicative strategies informing the proliferating Western counter-disinformation initiatives which have mushroomed in response to what is widely perceived to be one of democracy’s most potent threats, and which border on a ‘moral panic’ serving to conceal key ideological tensions. Grounded in Critical Discourse Analysis methods, a close reading of mission statements and related materials from the websites of four leading counter-disinformation units demonstrates how these texts interweave three functions – identity construction, performativity, and representation – to generate the overarching ‘discursive formation’ or ‘articulation’ constituting counter-disinformation as modern liberal democracy’s core, but also exposing its fault lines. Specifically, it shows that a failure to reconcile competing accounts of truth (as scientific rationality and normative value) indexes deeper contradictions pitting the liberal emphasis on individual freedom and capitalist efficiency against the democratic prioritizing of popular power, dispassionate observation against civic participation, and the promotion of transparency against the creeping power of surveillance. It concludes that the absolutist epistemology – a vestige of disinformation’s Cold War conceptual origins – designed to cover over these paradoxes masks the complex roles played by truth and deception in politics, thereby hindering the emergence of alternative, oppositional forms of knowledge capable of embracing truth in its radical contingency and plurality and facilitating democratic renewal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the language of digital sovereignty has become ubiquitous in Europe. However, we still lack systematic knowledge if and to what extent the discourse on digital sovereignty is accompanied by actual policy change in different areas of EU policymaking. Drawing on a range of both qualitative and quantitative methods, the various contributions to this special issue examine discursive and policy change in nine major areas of EU digital policymaking. While they find policy change towards more control of the digital across all policy areas examined, this shift is only sometimes accompanied by discursive change towards digital sovereignty. This, we argue, is the result of ideational trade-offs actors face when using the language of digital sovereignty in different venues, policy areas, or countries. Considering current geo-political and geo-economic challenges, this special issue sheds light on recent transformations of EU digital policymaking and its discursive politics in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Turkish foreign policy towards the United States (US) during the Justice and Development Party (JDP) era by using a post-structuralist approach. Post-structuralism posits that foreign policy is a political practice reflecting domestic power struggles. Moreover, subjectivities and foreign policy practices are neither universal, objective, nor predetermined, since they are co-constitutive. From this theoretical perspective, the article explores the JDP's 'foreign policy' discourse on US-Turkish relations, highlighting discursive practices in legitimising specific subjectivities, such as 'conservative' and 'Muslim' ones, as 'inherent' origins of foreign policy conduct. In two phases, 2002–2009 and 2009–2016, it analyses how changes in JDP's foreign policy preferences towards the US function to legitimise or marginalise particular subjectivities in its power struggle vis-à-vis 'Kemalist' state elites. Ultimately, the article concludes that the JDP's discourse exhibits a continuity in hegemonising the 'Islamic' subjectivity ascribed to the Turkish population, despite changes in foreign policy decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the female beauty ideal of the small foot in the Swedish press during the second half of the nineteenth century, as an object for the male gaze in fiction, as an actual fashion ideal, and as a prescribed beauty practice for women. It consists of three parts, analysing different subgenres within the press. First, I show how a male notion of the beauty and erotic attractiveness of the small foot was constructed in short stories and serial novels published in the daily and weekly press. Next, I show how this ideal was visually represented for its realization in every-day life in figures in fashion journals. Both genres presented an ideal unattainable for most women. Third, I discuss articles in dailies and weeklies giving advice on how to take care of feet, warning against ambitions to make the foot look small. Taken together, representations of female feet in the Swedish press involved a construction of the foot that also constructed women as perpetually failing in relation to the existing beauty ideal, making it part of a discursive misogynist practice, according to which women was supposed to invest in their appearance, and were derided and ridiculed when they did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 2021, Singapore Press Holding (SPH), the country's newspaper conglomerate, announced its restructuring into a not-for-profit entity in response to the global decline of the news industry. The government pledged an annual S$180m budget to the new SPH Media Trust (SMT), raising concerns about the ability of the news entity to break away from government control, but these were dismissed with political assertions that editorial independence had 'always existed'. This paper analyses the government-led public discourses surrounding SMT, highlighting a two-prong narrative approach: obfuscate the social role of the media in Singapore, and downplay the need for accountability over public funding for SMT. Applying a Foucauldian framework for evaluating discursive practices in governance and measuring these narratives against public service journalism scholarship, this paper probes the constructed determinants of journalism's social role in Singapore. It proposes that similar evaluations can be applied to discourse about journalism in other societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural heritage is a central domain for key populist themes of threats to national identity and protection of ‘the majority’ against cosmopolitan, ‘wokist’ elites. The article explores how differing government discursive strategies towards populism influence heritage policies. It takes the case of contested public statues. In France, the government has adopted a discursive strategy of ‘patriotic Republicanism’ that reduced the discursive space for contestation and policy has remained largely unchanged. But in Britain and Hungary, governments have increasingly adopted populist discourses, leading to countervailing discursive coalitions, contestation and change in agendas and decisions in both populist and non-populist directions. The proposition developed is that national governments pursuing populist discursive strategies triggers anti-populist discursive coalitions, with contestation and changes in agendas, institutions and individual decisions. Conversely, governments developing their own nationalistic discourses reduces the scope for populist ones but also leads to freezing of existing policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis study investigates the discursive devices deployed by the late former Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe, to represent social actors in his speeches, in order to unveil how these devices and the ideologies in them are mobilized to maintain political power and garner popular support. The data for the study comprise his: 2002 world summit on sustainable development speech in South Africa, 2005 party manifesto speech in Zimbabwe, 2003 Non-aligned speech in Malaysia, and 2007 UN speech in New York. These were subjected to qualitative analysis with insights from Teun A. van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of Critical Discourse Analysis. The study reveals that Mugabe uses discursive polarization strategies to emphasize positive things/de-emphasize negative things about his in-group (himself, Zanu-PF, the majority black, majority Zimbabwean supporters, and the third-world country allies), but emphasizes negative things/de-emphasizes positive things about the out-group (the minority white Zimbabwean land grabbers, the USA, the UK, Tony Blair, George Bush, etc.). The discursive strategies identified were used to pursue land ownership, anti-imperialist, revolutionary, and Marxist ideologies. The study concludes that these strategies were employed by Mugabe as linguistic, rhetorical and political strategies to maintain power and mobilize the support of majority black Zimbabweans for years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situated in the curriculum space created by the recent enhancements to First Nations content is the opportunity for teachers to better connect with First Nations perspectives. Using constructivist theory methodology and drawing on two studies, a small qualitative school-based study of teachers who teach in the early years of schooling, and a large-scale study of professional development across two Australian states, the paper explores teachers’ preparedness to teach First Nations content. The tenets of critical literacy frame the discussion and are positioned as reflective tools that can be used to support the ‘settler teacher’ in self-reflection. Audio-recorded transcripts of planning sessions, a teacher survey, comments from feedback forms and researcher memos form the data sets. Findings from the study necessitate discursive practices for the development of teacher knowledge, dispositions, and confidence, and highlight the imperative for teacher critical self-reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing calls for increased communication scholarship that interrogates power in stigma processes, we develop a critical postmodern approach to stigma management communication (SMC) theory and demonstrate how it can be used in the context of difficulty orgasming. Semi-structured interviews with mostly white, cisgender women experiencing orgasm difficulties in mixed-sex relationships (N = 31) revealed how dominant discourse creates an idealized standard of sexual behavior that stigmatizes women with orgasm difficulties, and how stigma management strategies act as discursive practices that reify, resist, and transform the status quo. We extend SMC theory by articulating a critical postmodern approach that can be used to interrogate power in stigma processes, and by illuminating how stigma management strategies are enacted in varied ways and toward different ends. Practically, our findings underscore the need for multifaceted interventions aimed at addressing the underlying causes of stigma and offer recommendations for reducing stigma through health campaigns, programming, and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The invisible object, in the eighteenth century, is not an evidence. It is the result of textual and semantic learning. Which concrete strategies are used to construct and depict objects out of sight? How do we make them a cognitive reality acceptable to a scientific community? This paper first highlights the conditions for the emergence of a field of microscopic knowledge and its epistemological consequences. Then we consider the microscopic gaze in terms of learning, situated between the act of observation as such and discursive practices. We conclude by studying a concrete case of "negotiation of the invisible" in a correspondence between Carl Linnaeus and John Ellis concerning corpuscles observed in mushroom infusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore purposive institutional change and the role of institutional entrepreneurs in initiating and driving relational learning processes. Supplementing new institutionalist theory with an institutional learning lens and using a longitudinal set of rich qualitative interview and observation data, we investigate how institutional entrepreneurs engage in transformational work to effectuate change in dominant institutional logics, thus transforming the institutional field. We propose that institutional entrepreneurs, by skilfully utilizing discursive and material practices to catalyze reciprocal learning processes, can introduce a new institutional logic and ensure its adoption and internalization by pivotal actors and stakeholders. We illustrate these dynamics using a municipality situated in Northern Finland as an example. The municipality has successfully managed to transform its food services as part of efforts to develop more sustainable regional economies and communities. It offers a rare case of successful purposive institutional change and an interesting best practice example both nationally and internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the male body-biased gaze in serial fiction in the Swedish press 1850–1890, by using the concept of the body flâneur as an analogy to the well-known city flâneur. The normative construct of the body flâneur was a discursive practice, normalising the male gaze in media representations in period still poor on visual representations. It gave authors an opportunity to describe, in detail and in an educated manner, female bodies as aesthetic objects. It had a twofold educational function. First, the body flâneur taught readers, both female and male, what the ideal female body looked like and how it could be detailed in words, but also that the woman was a natural object of scrutiny, and a field of expertise. Second, it presented to readers to various conceivable female reactions to being stared at. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many mothers with intellectual disabilities lose their parental rights due to child welfare (CW) concerns. Despite the growing interdisciplinary scholarship on parenting with intellectual disabilities, there is scant research that has explored the discursive practices embedded within CW or family courts involving mothers with intellectual disabilities. The aim of this study is to explore portrayals of mothering with intellectual disability in CW court reports filed in Québec, Canada. A three-level critical discourse analysis was performed, focusing on 10 reports that were retrieved from a publicly available legal database, and their larger discursive societal context. Analysis highlighted unequal power relations as discursive practice underpinned by the following discursive patterns: (1) The ideal caregiver vs the unfit mother (2) Devalued voices of mothers with intellectual disability (3) Professionals as holding authoritative knowledge and (4) Decision-making based on the best interest of the child. Revealing the hidden ideological assumptions embedded in discourse can help to challenge and confront injustice faced by mothers with intellectual disability within the CW system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at de-Europeanization as a progressive disengagement between domestic authorities and EU actors manifested through their discourses. The authors view discursive disengagement as consisting of two major aspects: Discursive opposition between domestic authorities and the EU reflected in their conflicting statements and the intensification of this discursive opposition, whereby the domestic authorities' discourses shift from defensive to offensive ones. The authors trace the respective developments based on the case of Georgia, looking at the discursive interaction between domestic and EU actors in the Georgian TV media from July 2021 to June 2022. The research has revealed Georgian authorities' discursive opposition to EU actors behind the façade of seemingly pro-European statements. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, this discursive opposition has escalated and become offensive. The authors use quantitative content analysis to map actor-discourse networks, as well as critical discourse analysis to reveal deeper layers of de-Europeanization discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies on the transnationalisation of public spheres have explored how interdependent relationships, particularly in the European Union context, foster the cross-national synchronisation of public discourse. However, there is a dearth of research on non-Western contexts. Thus, this study aims to examine the extent to which discursive interrelatedness (i.e., interdiscursivity) has been established in the global South within the BRICS framework. Specifically, the study focuses on three BRICS countries, namely Brazil, India and South Africa. A content analysis of discursive articles on international issues (n = 2,607) published by daily newspapers in these three countries between 2011 and 2019 was conducted. As expected, a significant focus on American issues and speakers was found in the sample. The findings suggest that South Africa (21.6%) monitors its BRICS partners more frequently than India (17.6%) and Brazil (11%). Chinese actors' arguments and opinions are the most cited within the BRICS framework. Indian public discourse has the highest penetration of Chinese speakers (18.9%). Overall, BRICS interdiscursive synchrony is limited and segmented, being developed mainly around China and Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This multi-authored article offers accounts of how programmes for teaching music theory within the Western-notated tradition were created in two UK higher education institutions. These accounts are followed by two more discursive reflections on the nature and purpose of music education today, advocating the importance of listening skills and inclusive pedagogies. The article is framed by an introduction and conclusion contextualising the issues raised in relation to a selection of prior contributions to Music Education Research and comparing approaches to music literacy and theory teaching as represented in recent music theory conferences in the UK and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dialogic teaching – in which teachers and students address controversial issues – has become increasingly common in school education to promote civic participation in deliberative democracy. This study addresses this question: when leading whole-class discussions on controversial issues, what discursive moves could teachers adopt to enact two-sided discussions that address conflicting perspectives? The present study analyzed data from an intervention study promoting dialogic teaching of controversial issues in the Morality and Law subject in fourth-grade (9- to 10-year-olds) elementary classrooms in China. We identified and analyzed episodes from transcripts of video-recorded classroom interactions in which the teachers employed a variety of discursive moves to encourage students to consider, negotiate, and debate opposing positions. Our analyses revealed that the teachers did not directly instruct students to consider opposing perspectives but guided their exchange of multiple perspectives. The teachers also partnered with students in the knowledge construction process by directly questioning, countering, or critiquing students' arguments. Implications for encouraging teachers' spontaneity and improvisation during dialogic teaching, as well as for using challenging, controversial topics to promote two-sided whole-class discussions, are addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Issue collects five articles that are located in the present global context, and draw on methods from across critical discourse studies (CDS) to examine the interaction between material realities of climate change and discursive communication between different Parties and non-Party stakeholders in multimodal ways and on multiple platforms. To this end, it draws on discourses such as the UN speeches, UN documents, EU green deal policy, official documents submitted by African countries to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and news reports in China and Australia. In these studies, diverse social and linguistic concepts were utilized and revisited to better inform the use of linguistic and/or visual symbols in different types of public discourse. This Special Issue aims to take the field a step further by showing the importance of carrying out more international research to expand our knowledge of the global, regional, and local discourse and ideologies that shape what we come to know and understand as climate change and how it is to be addressed. We envisage it will bring significant theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights into the relations between language use, discursive practice, and social practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine the emergence of discourses on the indigenous during the postrevolutionary period in México (1920–1940), focusing on the Lake Pátzcuaro region, an iconic national landscape, and an indigenous region in central west México. Understood in terms of practice, this paper uses landscape as a lens to examine questions of identity, discourse, and power, emphasising its relational, constructed nature. It focuses on the set of discursive practices known as indigenismo. The central idea posed in this paper is that although postrevolutionary indigenismo served as a tool for governance, it also provided a language for the indigenous people to articulate their demands, enabling the articulation of indigenous identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the United Nations no longer classifies Puerto Rico as a colony, Puerto Rico poses theoretical and empirical challenges to inquiries about national identity within (post-)colonial situations. Gazing through a sociohistorical lens, the present study explores how beliefs about legitimate membership criteria relate to self-identified Puerto Ricans' understanding of their and in-group others' national identity. By contextualizing current perceptions of national identity as linked to an emergent Puerto Rican nationalism throughout the nineteenth- and twentieth-century, this paper relates individual-level conceptions of membership criteria to institutional and discursive interventions, thereby contributing to studies of national identity in colonially (un)settled times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores multilingual international students' narratives of mobility and socialisation through online discursive spaces of interview conversations. Drawing upon an ecological approach to transnational narratives, the researcher analyzed international students' multiscalar interactions and transformations in sociospatial practices. The analyses provide ethnographic accounts of the participants' translingual discourses, transcultural trajectories, and translocal community lives that involve transnational connections across temporal and spatial borders. The findings also suggest that interview conversations with peers promote international students' dynamic narrations of their life experiences of multilingual mobility in continuously evolving ecological communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we analyze the problematization of immigration in citizenship education in Chile. Drawing on Foucault's genealogy of problematizations, we explore the conditions under which curricular discourses about immigration shifted from a historical phenomenon that emphasized "the civilization process" during the 19th century to a more recent positioning of immigration as a problem of social inclusion in the 1990s. We propose that immigration was produced as a problem of social inclusion because of the existence of an "immigrant-free national community" narrative that racializes populations. To pinpoint the origin of this narrative, we trace discursive practices regarding immigration by analyzing the social studies curriculum, policy recommendations, and political statements regarding immigration. We argue that the shift from conceptualizing immigration as a historical phenomenon to a problem of social inclusion was possible since the neoliberal discourses of the 1990s created hesitations about the "immigrant-free national community" narrative. The social inclusion narrative posits that, in a globalized world, the Chilean national community, supposedly untouched by immigration, would be unavoidably at risk because of (new) immigration influxes. Immigration became a problem, and citizenship education was positioned as a solution to deal with the perceived expansion of cultural diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following its substantial diversification over the past two decades, graphic literature now occupies numerous symbolic locations within both the artistic field and other areas of representation and social discourse. While notably (auto)biographical, testimonial, and non-fictional graphic storytelling has contributed to the medium's increased legitimization and visibility, it has also become fertile in addressing complex political issues such as war, displacement, and migration. Yet these newly "engaged" productions of a polysemic medium touch on several complex, partly interrelated questions. On the one hand lingers the reduction to the solely illustrative, on the other the suspicion of simplification and superficiality – all of which cannot be easily dismissed when graphic texts become simple pre-texts for other presumably extra-textual matter: identity, politics, society, and so on. However, like in the case of literature, certain forms of fictionalization and aesthetic play may meet with (ethical) reservations for topical issues which seem to rather call for "serious" and "factual" attention. And, of course, discursive and visual expression entertains a multiple relationship, where one may compensate for, double, or strategically contrast the other. Informed by such interrogations about the specificity of the medium and the intricacy of its new "engaged" formats, this essay focuses on the graphic work on migration and displacement of selected contemporary Francophone authors (Edmond Baudoin and Troubs, Yvan Alagbé, Jean-Philippe Stassen) and discusses several ways of representing and reflecting on death of migrants and refugees in these narratives. It will demonstrate that writing about such sensitive problems does not have the same scenographical implications, nor does it trigger the same (empathetic and critical) response as drawing them. This ultimately reveals that the aesthetic and political relevance of these graphic works lies in the medium's characteristic interplay between text and image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the process of othering through the creation of the 'enemy image' in the context of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in Ilham Aliyev's speeches delivered between 2016 and 2020. Based on narrative and discourse analysis of the speeches, this article demonstrates the main discursive practices used by Aliyev to dehumanize Armenians. These analyses uncover three main components: identification of Armenians as the sole menace for Azerbaijan and Azerbaijanis, depiction of Armenians as non-human and barbaric in essence, and stressing the superiority of Azerbaijan to eliminate the threat emanating from Armenians. Limiting itself to a state-backed dominant narrative, this article also highlights the connection of the dehumanization process of Armenians with the power legitimation dynamics in Azerbaijan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of tourism destination evolution has been enriched in recent years by the adoption of concepts from Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG). The aim of this article and those constituting this special section is to further develop this field of research by discussing recent developments within EEG and Tourism Studies, paying special attention to the nature and impact of trigger events and transformative moments that represent a turning point in the evolution of destination development paths. We consider the role of reproductive and transformative agency, and different types of destination path plasticity. Three key issues and areas for future research are identified: the role of human agency, the co-evolution of tourism with other development paths, and the importance of utilising political economy perspectives, including legitimation and discursive practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilising discourse analysis to evaluate Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Lavrov's public speeches as part of public diplomacy, this study deconstructs the discursive practices of Russian political elites in Russia--Japan relations. The data analysis demonstrates that, when speaking from a position of power, Putin and Lavrov delegitimise Japan's political decision-making sovereignty and the role of the Japanese public in the negotiation process. This article argues that even though the discursive practices of Russian political elites are oriented towards a foreign public, the impact on their domestic legitimacy is greater. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nationalist arguments justify contemporary border walls around the world. But what happens when nationalism defines the border as a dividing line and mandates its openness to link with ethnic kin beyond the state's borders? In Hungary, Viktor Orbán's government built an anti-immigration fence along the southern border, separating the country from a large Hungarian community in northern Serbia. To avoid the clash with Hungary's transborder nationalism, Orbán advanced a new geopolitical storyline that explained the border/migration crisis of 2015 as a 'Muslim invasion of Christian Europe'. The narrative shifted the border's meaning from a dividing line of the transborder Hungarian nation to a defensive line and civilisational rampart of 'Christian Europe'. This discursive-analytical study of Orbán's geopolitical reasoning captures how the border's meaning changed over several months. The paper represents a critical geopolitical contribution to the border studies literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article specifically focuses on the dialectic of identity of elderly people in the context of religious, cultural, and medical epistemology of death and dying. By discussing traditional religious ideologies and contemporary medical practices appertain to death and dying, this article provides fresh insights into the discursive practices that shape elderly people's sense of identity. This hermeneutic study explores the culture of medicalized death and spiritually oriented death in the philosophical framework of Hindu doxography which entails the process of shaping and making sense of identity of dying Hindu Elderly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human geography has a history of engaging with place-based-quality products through a variety of concepts such as terroir, geographical indicators (GIs), and fictive places. While the efforts necessary to construct a "taste of place" have been explored, it remains unclear how a "taste of place" is established, and by whom. The article explores how relations between quality, products, and places are produced on the ground. More specifically, it addresses the question of what it takes to reconfigure a "taste of place." Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2017 concerning a coffee producer in Burundi, the article shows how Burundian coffee was reconfigured from an inferior commodity coffee to a sought-after specialty coffee. The findings show that reconfiguring "a taste of place" requires both material and symbolic quality attributes. By underlining the importance of material quality attributes that are place-dependent, it provides a different angle to the discursive approach to "taste of place" in human geography. The author concludes that creating a "taste of place" requires taming space into a consumable representation of place through discursive and material practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the discourse surrounding the transnational flows of South Korean popular culture, known as Hallyu (the Korean Wave), and its relationship to the country's soft power through a discourse analysis of Korean news and social media. Specifically, the study explores how Hallyu was addressed as Korea's soft power tool during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it gained even greater popularity overseas through digital means. The study questions how local cultural intermediaries, such as journalists, critics and YouTubers, have engaged with the Hallyu phenomenon. Although Hallyu is often considered a core component of Korea's soft power, aimed at increasing its influence in overseas reception points, there is a lack of studies on the meanings of Hallyu as a discursive construct in the Korean mediascape. Therefore, this study explores how Korean news and social media perceive and represent the global circulation of their local cultural content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the sociocultural context of China, this study applies a textual analysis to the coverage of Paralympic champions on China Central Television's sports channel from 2008 to 2019. Three discursive themes through which Paralympic champions are portrayed are identified. When viewing Paralympic sports through the lens of social model and critical perspectives, the portrayal of para-athletes as national heroes represents Paralympic champions as a commendable group that contributes to the establishment of the national identity and reputation, while the supercrip portrayal of these champions as superhumans connects them to non-disabled society. Their depiction as self-reliant figures establishes a role model for retired athletes in the Chinese context, meanwhile also advocating a logic of independence from state-sponsored welfare across divergent fields related to disability. Thus, disabled persons are incorporated into discursive systems directed by the state, media, and society in the interactions among politics, social norms, and the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting Karen Barad's material-discursive feminism, this paper investigates how human/non-human elements intra-act and blur together across time and space to produce the phenomena and paradoxes of Women's Economic Empowerment (WEE). Based on historical analyses of WEE and work with Walmart and other corporations involved in WEE, the author reveals how corporate-based WEE interventions unfold from historically-based and on-going entanglements of actors, discursive practices, an array of tangible and intangible elements (e.g. documents, systems, feedback loops) and marketing devices (e.g. commitments, metrics, stories, human transparency, myths). This paper expands views on agency and discourse, and advances understandings of WEE/CSR by making these complex intra-activities visible. It considers the role discursive practices and actors – including the author – play in these intra-activities and the effects of resultant (in)visibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses patterns of media representations of Turkish youth during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially, during the early lockdowns. We focus on media narratives as discursive practices, with the pandemic being the main object of these narratives. Building upon a thematic analysis of mainstream news media, we suggest that discursive representations portray young people along the axis of responsibilities and vulnerabilities. Along this axis, there lie three types of representations: (i) responsibilization of youth to deal with the health crisis, (ii) socio-economic vulnerabilities, and (iii) socio-cultural impoverishment. Viewing through this lens, we argue that representations of youth in news media during pandemic times maintain the recurrent figures of the youth that are conceived through the terms of the 'myth of youth' and 'denied citizenship' at the same time. To the extent that young people are recognized and praised as instrumental figures of crisis management, their vulnerabilities are partially or completely disregarded. Thus, youth in pandemic times emerges as a figure that is both instrumentalized and obscured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines national responses to the introduction of a strong policy coordination tool by the European Commission: the European Semester. The tool was introduced in 2012 in reaction to the economic crisis to prevent unsustainable policy choices within EMU. It sets annual country-specific recommendations for economic policies, which the Member States are expected to implement when drafting national budgets. We study the uptake of the policy tool in three disparate Member States: Finland, Spain and France in 2013. The article explores how national parliaments tackle the challenge imposed on national sovereignty by the powerful tool. We investigate the discursive practices and justifications evinced by national politicians on policy proposal in the parliamentary debate on annual state budget. Politicians balance between contrastive normative frameworks by operating on evasive discursive formulations and performative silences, which point to a deafened legitimation work and double commitment within the multilevel polity of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aligned with critical geopolitics, this article examines the unevenness of geopolitical outreach in the discursive representations of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) by conducting qualitative and quantitative analysis of Chinese diplomatic authorities' Web site postings in fifty-two African countries. This study not only illustrates the spatiality and temporality of different agencies' discursive practices in Africa, but also diversifies Chinese outreach to Africa in the China–Africa and BRI study fields. Specifically, the Chinese diplomacy does not simply unfold through formal geopolitics played out at traditional diplomatic sites, but also involves geopolitical outreach at both local African and domestic Chinese media sites as well as via the diplomatic institutional networks. Nevertheless, the discursive representations do not necessarily correlate with the diplomatic relationships between China and African countries; neither are they oriented by the "resource" narratives and China's imports from African countries. More likely, the market status indexed by population and Chinese exports to African countries significantly correlates with the discursive representations. The study also demonstrates the spatial unevenness of Chinese geopolitical outreach among primary countries, strategic countries, and ordinary countries in Africa, which to some extent counters the popular narratives of bilateral relationships between China and respective African countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two studies were conducted to examine gender differences in the discursive political engagement on Twitter. Study 1 analysed about 5.6 million English tweets regarding nine political issues and one non-political issue. It found that, compared with men's tweets, a higher proportion of women's tweets are retweets, and that the majority of women's retweets originate from men. The results may indicate that women have arelatively lower level of political efficacy and/or sense a higher level of environmental risk than men when participating in political discussions on Twitter. They may also indicate that men have a more significant influence than women on Twitter. Study 2 collected 225 survey responses from the adults in the U.S. via Qualtrics's online panel. The results partly support the findings of study 1, showing that on average, women have a lower level of perceived political efficacy than men, which affects the likelihood of their political expression along with a feeling of communal support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale data and data visualizations are ubiquitous now in the stories that shape our society. In particular, these stories influence youth and families' communication and understanding of scientific, social, and personal issues. Consequently, we need to better understand how youth and families can engage and learn with the tools that generate such narratives. This study reports on a qualitative analysis of 13 data discussions with families that used data visualization tools to explore georeferenced data connected to their family migration histories. We developed the Co-Construct, Situate, Advance a Theory (CSAT) model, from family cases, which details the discursive and interactional processes by which families tell personal stories grounded in data displays. Extending earlier studies of storytelling as theory-building in family conversations, our model provides an understanding of families' discursive practices around data exploration. We discuss implications for family learning with data technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]