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Over the past 25 years, a hermeneutic struggle has unfolded in English football between those spectators who wish to stand at matches and the risks associated with this practice in all-seated stadia. Amid this tension, fans have had to negotiate a neoliberal and authoritarian regime. However, the struggles of supporters against social control in football are characterized by the building of a long-term social movement against all-seating. In seeking to break down the state's disciplinary power and its marketization of football, this movement, "Safe Standing," has achieved several recent policy-based victories in the United Kingdom and Europe and is now firmly embedded within sports stadia developments and the demands of fans in North America and Australasia. Although these different contexts are temporally and culturally sensitive, they are interdependently linked through relational time frames and discursive practices that make up the modern consumption of football. This research applies relational sociology to analyze the fan networks that successfully built this movement across the U.K. fan activist scene, characterized by relational collective action, which complicates the individual and collective dimensions of activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

In this study, I explore how the subject of inclusion is constituted as intersectional in the organizational discursive practices of a civil society organization promoting migrant and refugee inclusion. Drawing on Crenshaw's notion of political intersectionality and Fraser's politics of recognition and redistribution, I analyze the political dimension of an inclusion project by showing how intersectional categories are connected to differentiated struggles and strategies of inclusion. The ethnographic study illustrates how two subject positions are constituted as being underpinned by either the logic of recognition or redistribution. Moreover, the findings show how the two strategies interact, revealing the dynamics of privilege and disadvantage at play in the inclusion project. The paper contributes to critical studies on inclusion and intersectionality in organizational contexts by extending our understanding of power dynamics and tensions as integral parts of the intersectional approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study examines the temporal dynamics shaping our understanding of search in education and the role language plays in legitimising these dynamics. It critiques the way online search is discursively constructed using home-education as a case study, and problematises how particular discourses are privileged, whom this privileging serves, as well as the likely consequences. Design/methodology/approach: The study employs Faircloughian Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as its methodological framework. Search and discursive practices were recorded during observations, search-tasks and interviews with five Australian home-educating families. Discursive features from the Google interface were also analysed. Findings: A discursive privileging of hasty search practices was identified. This was found alongside largely ineffectual search, but participants continued to discursively represent search as fast and easy. The study highlights the complex co-option of discourses surrounding online search that privilege particular temporal and commercial landscapes. Originality/value: This study contributes new knowledge regarding time as a context for understanding search behaviours, locating the perception of temporal scarcity in education within broader discursive and social structures. To date, no studies are found which investigate the temporal factors surrounding search in home-education. Increasing global reliance upon online search means the findings have broad significance, as does the proliferation of home-education induced by COVID-19. Additionally, while much work problematises the power search engines wield to privilege certain discourses, few investigate the day-to-day discursive practices of searchers affording Google and others this power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Students' understanding of nature of science (NOS) has been largely examined primarily in written or verbal modes. The visual, verbal, and written modes are essential for students' meaning‐making of NOS. However, research has sidelined the interaction among these three modes in understanding students' collaborative discourse of NOS. Informed by theories of multimodality and social semiotics, this paper investigates the interactions between the visual, verbal, and written modes as groups of students engaged in explicit‐reflective multimodal representation during NOS instruction. Utilizing a collective case study approach, we planned NOS instruction with teachers, and videotaped how each focal group of students in two grade seven classes in Hong Kong constructed multimodal representations of NOS. Multimodal discourse analysis revealed that the three modes fulfill various purposes during students' co‐construction of multimodal representations of NOS. The interaction between the three modes facilitates meaning‐making of NOS in four ways: (a) students' re‐semiotization of discursive scientific practices into their multimodal ensembles; (b) bridging students' writing of scientific reports to scientists' social certification and dissemination; (c) connecting students' decontextualized meaning‐making to contextualized meaning‐making of methods and methodological rules; and (d) facilitating students' embodied semiosis in social organizations and interactions of science. Focusing on four episodes of co‐constructing multimodal representations of NOS, we illustrate how students' meaning‐making of NOS is multimodal in nature and how various modes have their own affordances. We discuss future research directions on how multimodality can facilitate students' meaning‐making of NOS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Aim Design Methods Results Conclusion Implication for the Profession Impact No Patient or Public Contribution The purpose of this manuscript is to offer an overview of knowledge regarding Evidence‐Based Practice and implementation science. It addresses the question: What are the EBP implementation models used in nursing settings?Discursive paper.The databases were searched with the following keywords: ‘Nursing Faculty’, ‘Nurse educator’, ‘Academic’, ‘clinic’, ‘Evidence‐based implementation’, ‘evidence‐based practice’, ‘implementation’, ‘implementation science’, ‘undergraduate’, ‘nurse’. The search strategy aims to identify published studies. Eight databases were searched.There are specific implementation models for implementing EBP: the IOWA Model, the Stetler Model, the Johns Hopkins Nursing Evidence‐Based Practice Model, the Stevens Star Model, the Promoting Action on Research Implementation in Health Services (PARIHS), the Advancing Research and Clinical practice through close collaboration (ARCC) model. They were analysed according to the Nilsen classification. An evidence‐based implementation project must be structured. First, it is necessary to choose an implementation model, then identify one or more implementation strategies, and finally, plan evaluation for implementation outcome. The use of implementation science ensures successful implementation or at least highlights barriers that need adjustment. Effective utilisation of implementation science facilitates the transfer of obtained results to similar contexts.Implementation science complements the EBP process perfectly and ensures the proper implementation of evidence.EBP mentors now have the entire structure of implementation science to succeed in implementing evidence‐based data in both academic and clinical settings.The discursive paper addresses the difficulties of implementing evidence in academic or clinical settings. Implementation science is the bridge between evidence and practice. Nurses now have everything they need to implement evidence‐based practice successfully.There was no patient or public involvement in the design or writing of this discursive article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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 article explores the overlooked dimension of Ottoman colonialism through an analysis of resource extraction in the Keban and Ergani mines during the early modern era. Situated in the Kurdistan province, these mines played a pivotal role in furnishing essential minerals for the Ottoman state's fiscal and military exigencies. Departing from conventional narratives, which often emphasize discursive practices or focus solely on settler colonialism, the study adopts an extractive colonialism framework to reveal the intricate relationship between imperialism, resource exploitation, and i ndigenous resistance. Ultimately, it contributes to the burgeoning literature on the coloniality of Kurdistan by providing empirical evidence of economic exploitation, environmental degradation, and the erosion of local autonomy in the face of heightened state centralization, control, and economic expansion. [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]

Self-optimisation has arguably become a central socio-cultural trend in contemporary Western societies. The imperative to optimise our ways of thinking, feeling and interacting with others features prominently in public discourse, and a range of commercial products and services are available to assist us in our quest to become the best version of our selves. However, self-optimisation has so far received scant attention in sociological research. Addressing this knowledge gap, we aim to introduce self-optimisation as a concept for sociological analysis. We first situate self-optimisation in several closely linked strands of academic debate, on transformations of self-identity under conditions of globalisation and neo-liberal capitalism, and on the spread of a therapeutic culture. We then map the socio-cultural antecedents of self-optimisation, survey its rise as a salient public discourse and as a form of everyday practice and consider some political implications. In the conclusion, we set out an agenda for further research on self-optimisation and discuss its conceptual and empirical relevance beyond the Global Northwest. [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]

Research Summary: Recent trends toward inclusive strategy processes raise the issue of how employees acquire the discursive competence necessary to gain senior management attention. Building on the emergent dynamic attention‐based view's (DABV) emphasis on communicative interaction, we ethnographically track an inclusive strategy process in a large insurance company. We find that employees typically failed to gain CEO attention because they lacked the discursive competence to integrate their operational knowledge with the CEO's corporate themes. Employees acquired this competence by both experiential and vicarious learning. The CEO promoted employee learning more effectively by specific coaching than by generic coaching. We contribute primarily to the DABV by showing how interactions are sites for learning as well as communications and that communication channels can be both expandable and transparent. Managerial Summary: The benefits of increased employee inclusion in strategy processes depend upon participants being truly heard. This study of an inclusive strategy process in a large insurance company shows that top management attention to employee contributions cannot be assumed. Employees often fail to pitch ideas in a manner that top managers can work with. Employees learn to pitch ideas effectively both by receiving direct feedback from top management and by observing feedback on other employees' contributions. Top managers must also learn how to coach effectively, engaging with the specifics of employees' contributions rather than offering general advice. Designs for new inclusive strategy processes should include opportunities for top managers to improve their coaching and for employees to learn from both direct feedback and indirect observation. [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]

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]

The proliferation of politically motivated hate speech towards rival politicians has been rapidly increasing in Pakistan. However, the literature on political hate speech and its association with extreme ideologies is under‐theorized in the Pakistani context. We have utilized van Dijk's manipulative discourse and Walther's social approval theory to structure political hate speech and its consequences. The data was based on two Pakistani mainstream politicians' public speeches and partisans' comments available on YouTube. Findings reveal that politicians commonly exploit discursive categories, such as name‐calling, offensive metaphors and sarcasm, in their hate speech to dehumanize, ridicule and threaten their rivals. Their hateful slurs showcase extreme ideologies, such as polarization, intolerance, threat and violence. They use the hateful epithets to manipulate partisans, to sell fear of being betrayed and enslaved to the military and foreign powers, and to obtain, in exchange, audience and consent. The study theorizes that Pakistani mainstream politicians deliberately sensationalize hatred in their public speeches to harangue their rivals and foment extreme ideologies for the purpose of increasing their audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the interactional constitution of a phenomenon recurrently reported by teachers who complain about a loss of authority, a systematic delegitimization of their role. Adopting a conversation analysis informed approach to a single-case study from a corpus of parent–teacher conferences, we illustrate how challenging the teachers' expertise is accomplished by participants as an outcome of some identifiable communicative practices. Particularly, we analyze the practices of "quoting" and "referring to the expert" as interactional resources differently exploited by participants: While parents challenge the teachers' epistemic authority and lay the foundation for claiming the right to decide what do to with their son in the classroom, teachers contribute to this epistemic positioning and cede their expert knowledge-based deontic rights, that is, the right to decide the best practices to adopt in the classroom. In the discussion, we advance that the participants' interactive competence in navigating the complex epistemic landscape of the encounter profoundly impacts on the local definition of reciprocal epistemic and deontic rights and responsibilities. Indications for teachers' education are provided in the conclusion. [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]

In Mandarin Chinese, the expression nǐ kànzhe bàn ba can be employed in either 'you-decide use' (you assess and decide by yourself), whereby the speaker disclaims his/her deontic authority to the recipient in decision-making, or 'I-claim use' (you have to assess and decide cautiously), whereby he/she claims a higher degree of deontic authority than the recipient when determining a proposed action. Focusing on the 'I-claim use' of nǐ kànzhe bàn ba, this study examines how this expression is manipulated by customers to negotiate solutions for their complaints with customer service representatives in Chinese e-shopping platforms. Utilising naturally occurring data from Taobao service encounters spanning about one year, this study employs a discursive approach and finds that this expression fulfills one of a number of pragmatic functions: (1) when there is no mutual agreement on the complaint proposals, the customers deploy it to upgrade their deontic authority to orient to their own unilateral solution and refrain from further negotiations; (2) when expressing a negative evaluation, the customers use it to pre-empt potential complainables that reflect their strong deontic authority; or (3) following non-substantive rectification on the part of the agent, the customers use it to express diluted deontic authority in order to display disaffiliation and solicit more substantive proposals. By analyzing the use of this expression in e-shopping service encounters, our study contributes to understanding how deontic authority is exercised in negotiating solutions to complaints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the complementary role of Cultural Linguistics in making up for the inadequacies of linguistics‐oriented theories of humour in unpacking culturally embedded meanings in humorous discourse. On the basis of purposively sampled internet memes, it analyses different types of cultural presuppositions in some food metaphors that netizens in Nigerian online interaction appropriate to negotiate gender and class identities, which reflect inherent beliefs, shared values and communicative practices in the Nigerian world. It applies Sharifian's categorisation of the analytical tools of Cultural Linguistics―cultural schemas, cultural categories and cultural metaphors. The article concludes that mental spaces and conceptual blending are instrumental in forging a holistic conceptual approach, which can account for not only the linguistic but also cultural and discursive meanings of humour as an essentially social and interactional phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental DNA (eDNA) has risen in popularity as a genetically-based method to enumerate species in natural ecosystems, and it is well positioned to be integrated into biodiversity monitoring and conservation initiatives. While the field has made great strides in methodological development, it has largely avoided discussion of its potential inequitable social outcomes. In this paper, we argue that the social asymmetries of eDNA are under-addressed precisely because of how it is framed and valued by powerful actors who may benefit from the technology's proliferation. We use a framework of representational rhetorics to articulate the discursive process by which the biodiversity crisis is distilled into problems of data-deficiency and inefficiency in scientific articles such that eDNA offers the exact corresponding technological solution. This framing helps justify eDNA's implementation in local, global, and corporate spheres, despite the methodology's uncertainties and limitations. It may also enable future inequitable outcomes through sidelining other forms of biodiversity knowledge and enclosing biodiversity information through processes of genetic commodification and privatization. We engage with critiques of neoliberal conservation, big data, and (biodiversity) genomics made by political ecologists and feminist science and technology studies scholars to help reorient the eDNA field towards more equity-oriented discursive practices and implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite increasing attention to rapport building or management in police discourse, existing research on how and why particular types of police units such as traffic police officers manage rapport with civilians is still in its infancy. This study draws on a revised model of rapport management to scrutinize a veteran Chinese traffic police officer's discursive management of rapport with civilians during traffic law enforcement. It finds that the officer almost invariably seeks to maintain or enhance rapport with respect to diverse rapport bases through various discursive practices. It is argued that the officer's predominant positive rapport management may signify his effort to meet the requirement of civilized law enforcement in contemporary China. The findings contribute to the rapport-relevant studies in the police discourse through identifying more rapport bases managed by a veteran Chinese traffic police officer, and offering a socio-cultural account of positive rapport management. • The case study reports how a veteran Chinese traffic police officer manages rapport with civilians. • It finds that the officer almost invariably manages positive rapport through various discursive practices. • It identifies undocumented rapport bases managed by the officer. • The officer's rapport management is in line with the requirement of civilized law enforcement in contemporary China. [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]

This article explores the post‐Brexit increase in applications for Irish passports through descent, and in so doing, seeks to develop a social/political psychology of diasporic citizenship. It draws on a focus group and 10 individual interviews, all conducted in 2018–19; participants were all based in England and had applied, or were in the process of applying, for Irish passports through descent in the aftermath of Brexit. Analysis, using perspectives from discursive psychology, attended to both rhetoric and narratives of citizenship in participants' talk about the application process and identification with Ireland and Irishness. Participants draw on discourses of both effortfulness and essentialism in working up claims to Irish identity, with effortfulness in acquiring transnational knowledge being particularly central in rhetorically legitimizing less secure claims. The analysis thus builds on previous political psychological work highlighting the centrality of “effortfulness” to contemporary constructions of citizenship, particularly in the United Kingdom (Anderson & Gibson, 2020; Gibson, 2009). It is furthermore suggested that explicitly labeled “noneffortfulness” can act as a rhetorical marker of belonging. The implications of these findings for concepts of diasporic citizenship and debates around jus soli versus jus sanguinis citizenship in both Ireland and Britain are discussed. [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]

In our societal context, the neoliberal competitive and knowledge-oriented culture still exerts a stranglehold on teachers' sense of professional autonomy giving rise to a deficit image of them as 'excessively entitled'. The purpose of this chapter is to eschew this deficit view of teachers by bringing their agentive side to the fore. First, it explores the concept of 'excessive teacher entitlement' in terms of the prevalent characteristics of the culture of teaching in schools and the nature of authority wielded by teachers in this culture and its negative consequence on student learning using an excerpt from an English as Second Language (ESL) classroom in India where this study is set. This episode helps expose the teacher's unawareness of the gaps between their intention and action, a hallmark of excessive entitlement. Second, it juxtaposes an alternative image of 'teacher as researcher' to foreground teachers' 'transformative activist stance' which revolves around their ideological becoming in agentively striving to realise their 'best-loved self'. Framed within Vygotskian Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, the principle of 'double stimulation' provides a powerful analytical lens to unpack the complex discursive dynamics of their practice nested within historically developing contradictions. These contradictions work tacitly to drive a wedge between teachers' intentions and action making them feel excessively entitled to passively acquiesce with the existing order of things. This study provides some signposts for teacher education about creating an environment where teachers can reclaim their transformative agency freeing themselves from the 'excessive entitlement' that binds their practice to the status quo and diminishes their relationships with students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media representations of African underdevelopment are central to the communicative potential and reach of international development in the mainstream public sphere, but they are not without sustained critique and confrontation. By conceptualising the humanitarian-themed campaign – #TheAfricaTheMediaNeverShowsYou on Twitter, as an Afrodiasporic Subaltern Counterpublic, this article considers how UK African diasporic communities have utilised this digitalised environment to oppose the popular but problematic 'face of development'. Applying Nancy Fraser's counterpublics theorisation and drawing on social media ethnography and multiple participant interviews, it shows how oppositional counter-discourses among these online diasporic communities challenge problematic African representation within 'white media'. This is realised in three distinct but interrelated discursive practices: (1) Afrodiasporic solidaristic orientations; (2) Diasporic solidarism as an assemblage(d) response to development's institutionalised whiteness; and (3) Countering Africa(n) misrepresentations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction. The subject of this article is communicative resources, which are selected by partners from a huge variety of linguistic means, functional styles, rhetorical techniques, and subject activities, and through which a common semantic space between individuals is generated.Methodology and sources. As a methodological platform we propose the principles of praxis-oriented social semiotics. Being one of the relatively late trends of semiotic research, social semiotics focuses attention not so much on signs or sign systems as on social signifying practices as regular, repetitive, recognisable types of actions: the actions of communication participants are endowed with the properties of sign systems through which relations between individuals are discovered, made visible and meaningful. The mechanisms of meaning production, from the point of view of the participants of the event, are analysed using the concept of ‘discursive practices’, understood as speech actions in order to solve a variety of practical interpersonal tasks.Results and discussion. As an individual learns a variety of interpersonal discursive practices, different relational systems become available to him/her. Specific discursive practices allow individuals to present different versions of their self, justify their actions, maintain dominance and/or subordination relations, thus demonstrating mastery of the communicative situation. Following the principles of praxis-oriented social semiotics, it can be argued that interpersonal relationships involve what can be called a discourse of trust, personal involvement in relationships, intimacy/closeness.Conclusion. The described symbolic regulators allow not only to semiotically comprehend the social positions of interacting parties, but also to offer self-control procedures and an arsenal of communicative actions to the participants of interpersonal communication as means of behaviour management in situations of interpersonal communication.

This study addresses the issue of the linguistic explication of the concept of HEALTH within contemporary domestic media discourse. An investigation has been conducted into the functioning of the conceptual name — the lexeme ‘health’ — through linguistic material derived from contexts extracted from newspaper corpora within the National Corpus of the Russian Language. A corpus-based discursive analysis methodology was employed. Conceptual-metaphorical models that enrich the meaning of the concept and expand its semantic scope have been identified. It is demonstrated that the semantic transformations of the lexeme ‘health’ in its discursive realization reveal reflections on the understanding of the abstract concept of HEALTH as a resource, substance, physical object, mechanism, container, living entity, and more. It has been established that the augmentation of the semantic volume of the concept in contexts of attributive and genitive compatibility illustrates the dissemination of notions regarding health as a normal state or functioning of various entities across a wide array of spiritual, moral, psychological, emotional, social, political, economic, financial, industrial, natural, and cultural domains, including the operational sphere of devices, household items, instruments, and mechanisms. The study concludes with the assertion that the analyzed concept possesses a representative value potential linked to the cognitive dominance of normativity.

This study critically examines gender equality planning (GEP), which has been obligatory in all Finnish comprehensive schools since 2015. GEP has been welcomed as a promising method of systemizing perspectives on gender in Finnish basic education. A regionally representative, discretional sample of gender equality plans (N = 140) was analysed using a critical discourse approach to examine how these plans discursively bent, stretched, fixed or shrank the meaning of gender equality along with the consequences of these approaches for equality promotion. The analysis shows that the GE plans constantly bent and stretched equality to separate it from gender and fixed it to free-floating gender equality measures, which left gendered power relations undisturbed. Consequently, equality promotion was represented as depoliticized. However, through the shrinking, the contextual construction of gendered power relations was recognized, and GEP exhibited the potential to politicize gender equality. In this paper, we argue that GEP has potential in gender equality promotion if the planning processes recognize contextual construction of gendered power relations and if equality promotion is not reduced to technical measures. Otherwise, the tool might actually impede equality rather than promoting it.

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]

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the global power structure entered a period of geopolitical transition. An evolved vision in the twenty‐first century shows the arrival of the geopolinomic order based on the combination of economic, political and territorial codes. Geopolinomic codes, in synergy with the global political economy, regulate the territorial and infrastructural arrangement of the world order in periods of geopolitical transition between hegemonic and emerging powers. Spatialization of power politics requires going through a set of geopolitical representations and this adds a thin discursive layer to the territorial hegemonic order. I argue that the development of geopolinomic codes allows for a more significant infusion of political economy through the centrality of territorial communication networks. A country with more manoeuvring power in adjusting geopolinomic codes and its triple levels can change the balance of global power structures in its favour. [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]

In her work and on the basis of archival material, the author presents and analyzes the discursive practices of writers gathered in the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia, and articulated through the work of its governing bodies – Congresses, Assemblies, and the Presidency – throughout 1985. Namely, that year, at the 9th Congress of Writers in Novi Sad, one part of Serbian writers, gathered in the Association of Writers of Serbia, opened and actualized the so-called Kosovo issue within the Union, by constructing uniformly structured, and persistently repeated ideological narrative about the endangerment and persecution of Serbs in Kosovo, claiming that it was – genocide. The paper presents and summarizes the main features of the aforementioned congress, which indicate that the Yugoslav socio-political crisis of the early 1980s deeply affected the Union during 1985 and that it revealed deep conceptual divisions among Serbian and other writers in Yugoslavia. The dividing line was built around the rejection of the 1974 Constitution and the denial of national-cultural and republican identities and borders within Yugoslavia, on the one hand, and their defense and plea for them, on the other. The text seeks to clarify what the concept of freedom of literary creation and politicization of literature, which was advocated and defended by the Serbian cultural intelligentsia at the 9th Congress, essentially meant, as well as to point out that the period of the 1980s was marked by the ambition of writers to affirm themselves as significant socio-political factor through criticism of dogmatic and repressive political authorities of socialist selfgovernment. The author then focuses on the work of the Literary Union Presidency during 1985, and on the discursive practices of some Serbian writers, gathered in the Association of Writers of Serbia and the Association of Writers of Kosovo, articulated through The Open Letter and other letters of the UKS administration, which insisted on further opening of the so-called Kosovo issue and made serious accusations against the Albanian administration of the Kosovo Writers' Association. This encouraged the continuation of the crisis production process within the Union. She concludes that behind all of these discursive efforts was a concrete goal of recentralizing the federal literary organization, mastering the Kosovo literary association and discursively supporting the Serbian political elite, which at the same time, at the federal political level, insisted on opening and resolving the so-called Kosovo issue and the issue of unity of the Serbian federal and state unit within Yugoslavia. The author started from the hypothesis that (war) violence, specifically that in Kosovo, against Albanians, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was conceived, among other things, in the words of the Serbian humanistic intelligentsia, which produced discursive/ideological knowledge through which interpreted the past and present of the national community and which aimed to encourage national mobilization and homogenization and put them at the service of a certain political project – the recentralization of the Yugoslav state, of Serbia, strengthening and unification of the imagined and scattered Serbian national-cultural society in Yugoslavia. Through the aforementioned discursive knowledge, a stigmatic image of the barbaric Albanian Other was built, which served to legitimize his exemption from the legal order, i.e. the imposition of a state of emergency and the normalization of violence in Kosovo throughout 1990s. Given that the aim of this paper was to give a meticulous overview of a conjuncture episodes in the work of the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia during 1985 and discursive strategies that would lead to its disintegration in the continuation of the process, and since this topic is still largely subject to politicization, the author let the sources “speak” in the text to the greatest extent possible.

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]

Despite the growing body of literature on hashtag feminism in Western contexts, there is still a significant gap in our knowledge of the ways that feminist hashtag movements are developed in authoritarian societies. Moreover, we do not know much about the mechanisms by which a feminist hashtag movement is disrupted, particularly in non-democratic regimes. Drawing on and contributing to the hashtag feminism literature, we undertook a discursive approach to examine #rape on Persian Twitter to address these gaps. Findings showed that #rape was a space for Iranian users to share abusive experiences, but they went further to discuss barriers of disclosing sexual assault as well. Developing resistive strategies and raising awareness about other muted groups such as LGBTQIA+ were other discursive practices in articulating #rape. This article also pushes forward the existing literature on hashtag feminism by providing empirical analyses of the ways that a feminist movement is disrupted. [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]

Rewilding is regularly connected to re-enchantment. In some rewilding projects, ecological restoration merges with narratives of wonder, enchantment and spirituality. While rewilding's association with re-enchantment appears as part of its appeal, it is also criticised as anthropocentric, escapist or naive. This article aims to formulate a thorough conceptual understanding of rewilding as re-enchantment by situating it within the critical framework of (dis)enchantment developed in the early 20th century by Weber and Horkheimer and Adorno. Connecting this framework to contemporary, phenomenologically inspired accounts of enchantment and critiques on the mechanisation of nature, this article aims towards a new perspective on rewilding as a critical discursive practice of re-enchantment. Rewilding, like re-enchantment, can be seen as a valuable attempt to formulate alternatives to the modern paradigm and programme of disenchantment. Situating rewilding within a broader cultural context and historical perspective, this approach allows for assessing rewilding as part of modern (counter-)culture at large. Moreover, through a detailed account of (re-)enchantment in rewilding on a phenomenological, theoretical and relational level, this article gradually develops a conceptual understanding of re-enchantment as a valuable concept for ecological restoration and cultural transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The study aims to understand interactions between social metacognitive regulation and collaborative problem solving, in particular, problem representation, in the design of virtual learning environments. The phenomenon is investigated in an online learning environment that uses a videoconferencing system, based on the recording of verbal interactions. The participants were students of a course on learning and technology, from two initial teacher education programs at a public university. The methodological strategy used was discourse analysis, from the perspective of discursive psychology. Three models of discursive interaction were characterized, namely: individual disconnection, individual connection and group connection. The recognition or not of one's own and others' versions of problem representation fosters discursive dynamics that strengthen or not the agreement and consensus and the relationships of solidarity and trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text is a review of the book "Michel Foucault. Truth, Ethics, and Subjectivation" edited by Nelson F. Roberto-Alba. The book focuses on the key concepts of Foucault's thinking, such as discursive practices, rules of veridiction, procedures of governmentality, and forms of subjectivation. Foucault modified his approach in his later years, shifting from the genealogy of the modern subject to the analysis of forms of problematization of sexual morality in antiquity and Christianity. The book offers a fresh perspective on power, focusing on the concepts of truth, subjectivation, ethics, and politics. It also analyzes the relationship between spirituality and truth in Foucault's thinking. [Extracted from the article]

The climate crisis is an urgent issue that requires immediate and significant international action and is tightly connected to several other global problems such as biodiversity loss, economic inequality, and countercurrents to democracy. Therefore, enabling the construction of an agentive role in relation to the crisis is a crucial task for education. According to the national core curriculum, Finnish social studies teaching should aim for active democratic citizenship. The article analyses the linguistic construction of agency in relation to climate issues in social studies textbooks from a discursive perspective, examining the rhetoric of positioning and addressing the reader as an active agent. The article draws an overall image of agency regarding the climate in textbooks and examines its implications. Four categories of orienting to the crisis and constructing agency in relation to it are identified: (1) constructing agency against the crisis; (2) stating the unsustainable nature of the current system; (3) enlisting ways of making an impact in general; and (4) representing the absence of crisis. Based on the findings, this article suggests that textbooks do not fully utilise their status as a forum for imaging our capacity to act to stop the climate crisis and, therefore, fall short of the goals set in the curriculum. [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]

This paper describes a new leadership coaching model that was delivered as part of Manchester city region's delivery of the Department for Education's Early Outcomes Fund. The coaching model explicitly paralleled the relational practices that are increasingly shaping early intervention policy and practice. Goodwin's theory of professional vision (1994) and Shotter's theorisation of with-ness (2011) provided the conceptual lens for this paper. The coaching facilitation aimed to afford the emergence of a new way of seeing leadership by scrutinising events of relational practice between participants in the coaching sessions (using video recording and review) and creating discursive practices using strengths-based analysis. We exemplify the coaching model using notes from a collaborative ethnographic evaluation of the six half-day group coaching sessions, surfacing how a new way of seeing silence may have seeded a new 'object of knowledge' in the group's emerging professional vision of leadership in the early years. [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]