Australian Discourse Research Articles

Constitucionalismo de exceção, pós-democracia e o julgamento da reforma trabalhista pelo Supremo Tribunal Federal – STF

This paper will analyze the judgment of Direct Actions of Unconstitutionality ADI 5685, ADI 5938 and ADI 5794 by the Supreme Federal Court, with the objective of verifying whether the Judiciary has echoed the discourse of the economic-financial crisis and legitimately ratified the exceptional measures of austerity , with a cut in labor matters. The epistemological scientific orientation of the papper is the Ecology of Knowledge. For which it will combine resources from the French Discourse Analysis, from Bakhtin’s Marxist philosophy of language, to contributions from the Sociology of Law and the Sociology of Absences. Our research hypothesis is that such judicial decisions, permeated by the austerity discourse, are constituted as Exceptional Constitutionalism and produce the absence of labor rights. As well as the ontological degradation of its holders, the functional de-differentiation of Law and its ethical delegitimation. Such judicial decisions and the Constitutionalism of Exception are a symptom of a scenario of exception and post-democracy generated by neoliberalism. Documentary and bibliographic research techniques will be necessary.

Neoliberalism versus the market? Liz Truss, neoliberal resilience, and Lacan’s theory of the four discourses

This article uses concepts from Lacanian discourse analysis to examine the rise and fall of Liz Truss, and to draw conclusions about the nature and resilience of neoliberalism. I begin by outlining Lacan’s theory of the four discourses in relation to neoliberalism, distinguishing a ‘neoliberal master discourse’ comprising soaring rhetoric about freedom and prosperity, from a ‘neoliberal university discourse’ grounded in economic science. I argue Liz Truss represented an unusually pure form of the neoliberal master discourse, prioritising notions of freedom and prosperity over the more pragmatic focus on austerity and market discipline. However, when Truss’ discourse failed it led not to the repudiation of neoliberalism, but rather to the return of a neoliberal university discourse of austerity developed by Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt. I conclude that the relationship between the neoliberal master and university discourses is crucial to understanding the ongoing discursive resilience of neoliberalism.

Postmemory and Oral History in Josef Winkler's Die Verschleppung and Die Ukrainerin : Njetotschka Iljaschenko erzählt ihre Geschichte

abstract: Josef Winkler's fourth novel, Die Verschleppung. Njetotschka Iljaschenko erzählt ihre ukrainische Kindheit (The deportation: Njetotschka Iljaschenko narrates her Ukrainian childhood, 1983) contributes to the Austrian discourse of trauma narratives, the experience of alterity, and the representation of politically disenfranchised persons and groups, adding the aspect of forced labor, human rights violations with the emphasis on Ukraine, oral history, and postmemory. This article examines the intersection of ethics and language in Winkler's mediation of Iljaschenko's autobiography in Die Verschleppung and the 2022 reprint Die Ukrainerin. Njetotschka Iljaschenko erzählt ihre Geschichte (The Ukrainian. Njetotschka Iljaschenko narrates her story) and explores the challenges facing literary mediation while maintaining fidelity to the historicity of oral history and postmemory.

S/kinship: The relational ontology of tattoos in contemporary Australian discourse and practice

AbstractIn examining affective motivations and meanings associated with kin‐based tattooing, this article proposes a practice of ‘s/kinship’: the tangible inscription of relational personhood on the body. While research on the practice of Western tattooing has long been drawn into discourses of deviance and individual identity, little attention has been paid to the tattooing of social relations. Drawing on surveys and interview data, this article highlights the significance of kinship and other forms of relationality in tattooing, bringing attention to how these are manifested through the skin as expressions of social proximity, permanence, and porosity. In doing so an analytic approach to s/kinship is developed to foreground the practice of tattooing as an expression of relational personhood, one that highlights the permeability of personhood as a salient ontological feature in the social life of tattoos and the tattooed.

Fashioning groups that inhabit society’s fringes: the work of Australian VET research into disadvantage

ABSTRACT Describing various demographic characteristics of disadvantaged students, the programs they study and their employment outcomes is a significant area of research interest in the vocational education and training (VET) sector. This article offers a preliminary exploration of how groups are problematised and the consequent influence on VET research into disadvantage in Australia. Creating categories provides the historical and political contexts that allow specific practices and descriptors to become dominant. The major methodological approach used is a post-structuralist discourse analysis of policy documents, government VET reviews and published research into equity groups. It is argued that rather than envisaging VET research into disadvantage as a repetitious recounting of these groups’ lack of access to vocational education and training, other important agendas are being served by the continued inquiries into people that experience inequity. The influence of long-standing Australian discourses that valorise, mostly male, individual responsibility to be a self-regulating citizen who maintains ongoing employment ensures that policymakers require updated productive expert research into the population to support the specialist discourses of disadvantage.

Exploring Citizen Participation in Smart City Development in Mexico City: An institutional logics approach

We explore smart city development, with a focus on the modalities of citizen participation, using an institutional logics approach. Taking Mexico City as our case study, we describe the presence and dynamics of several logics influencing smart city development. At an organizational level we identify the bureaucratic and technocratic logics underpinning the practices of the governmental agency leading smart city development. Characterized by centralization and the pursuit of efficiency, and framed by a discourse of austerity and financial control, these logics promote a modality of citizen participation that is limited and unidirectional in nature, with citizens positioned largely as users. At a supra-organizational level, we identify a logic of active citizen participation in urban governance that is formalized in city laws. However, this logic is itself entangled in a logic of clientelism and patronage, manifested through networks of power. These logics work synergistically to limit broader, inclusive citizen participation in, and realization of benefits from, smart city agendas. We conclude that a richer understanding of institutional logics enhances the analysis of the social construction of the smart city in particular, situated contexts.

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

The politics of consumption as discursive space: structures, actors, and interactions in the modern age

ABSTRACT This special issue on the ‘politics of consumption’ in the modern age revisits the political approaches adopted within consumption history in the last twenty years. New directions to explore in the future study of the politics of consumption are identified, here defined as the discursive process through which consumers and consumption become framed and politicized by state- and/or market-driven actors for wider societal frameworks and goals. In what follows, the complex interrelations between politics and consumption will be interrogated from a variety of perspectives by combining insights from a diverse range of cases throughout the North Atlantic World from the early nineteenth-century until the 1980s. The five contributions all apply fundamental theories, concepts and methodologies from political history, investigating topics such as the municipal regulation of meat consumption, parliamentary debates about consumer citizenship, food propaganda among expat communities, anti-imperial sartorial practices and discourses of consumer austerity in times of economic crisis. The articles reunited here underline the centrality of power dynamics in shaping consumers and consumption, observable on all levels and affecting all actors, hence emphasizing the necessity to reckon with these often hidden but very real forces in historical research on consumption.

The Chinese Invasion: Settler Colonialism and the Metaphoric Construction of Race

ABSTRACT The arrival of Chinese immigrants during the Australian goldrushes of the 1850s precipitated a vehement backlash, culminating in legislation to restrict their immigration. Contemporary Australian press discourse focused on Chinese racial difference, with immigrants metaphorically constructed as invaders, influxes and hordes of barbarians. This article argues that Chinese immigrants were racialised through pre-existing metaphoric language of deviance and threat, while the metaphors became simultaneously codified as signifiers of racial difference. It further argues that this characterisation resulted from settler-colonial anxieties about legitimacy, which intensified due to Chinese immigration. The consequent racialisation of Chinese immigrants functioned as a means to displace both the violence of settler-colonial invasion and lower-class white deviance, facilitating the construction of the egalitarian white Australian subject.

Barcelona’s housing policy under austerity urbanism: a contribution to the debate on degrowth and urban planning

ABSTRACT The housing policy of Barcelona, the Plan for the Right to Housing (2015–2020), implemented by the anti-austerity local government of Barcelona en Comú, relates closely to degrowth imaginaries and norms. It incorporates vacant housing to the public housing stock, develops a special unit for attending evictions and other residential emergencies, and introduces support for promising yet marginal tenure forms such as co-housing or leasehold estate. However, a critical analysis of this policy reveals strong contradictions and limitations. Given the existing uneven socio-spatial dynamics of a global city such as Barcelona, the well-established power relations in the production of urban space, and the still-dominant discourse of austerity, the local government’s actions remain precarious. However, albeit both promising and contradictory, Barcelona’s housing policy proves to be a useful case for developing degrowth planning principles and tools for urban housing policy and beyond.

Ostracism and nationalism in the workplace: discursive exclusionary practices between cultural and geographic neighbors

So far, management research on mechanisms of exclusion of employee groups has mainly applied constructs of racism to understanding issues of origin-based ostracism. This research has primarily focused on issues faced by employees whose heritage is markedly different from the heritage shared by the norm group in the given socio-cultural, linguistic, and geographical setting. Against this backdrop, the present study investigates how ostracism plays out when the heritages involved are similar, as exemplified by German employees in Austria. Study 1 examines the discursive production of Austrian stereotyping of Germans in the usage of different terms of reference for ‘Germans’ in Austrian discourse. A corpus analysis of online comments on newspaper sites highlights the implicit Austrian need for delineation against Germany. Study 2 analyzes Germans’ perception of Austrians’ exclusionary linguistic practices and how this impacts on their employment experience and turnover intention. A quantitative analysis of survey data from 600 German nationals employed in Austria reveals that the degree of exposure to these demarcating practices is associated with lower job satisfaction, a higher burnout level and an increase in turnover intention. This study is amongst the first to shed light on the central role of nationalism and national identities in organizational mechanisms of exclusion.

The dubious logic of sacrifice: motherhood, crisis, and social reproduction in Advantageous (2015)

ABSTRACT A number of independent science fiction films released since the Great Recession feature relatively unexceptional protagonists in dystopian scenarios, thereby shifting the conventional focus of the genre from heroic action to small-scale personal and domestic dramas. This article argues that by juxtaposing issues of broader environmental degradation with more intimate private narratives of social reproduction, such films point to the limits of neoliberal austerity discourses that have become increasingly dominant since the 2008 economic crisis. Among these is Advantageous (dir./co-writ. Jennifer Phang, 2015), about the struggles of a middle-aged single mother, Gwen Koh (Jacqueline Kim, also co-writ.), to raise her young daughter Jules in a technocratic society characterized by rampant unemployment, feminist backlash, environmental ruin, and socioeconomic stratification. Using a blend of close textual analysis, genre study, and cultural critique, I argue that Phang’s film offers a timely vision of the ways in which mothers can be compelled to make drastic sacrifices for the upward mobility of their children. In combining the domestic tropes of maternal melodrama with the macroscopic concerns of dystopian science fiction, Advantageous makes openings for an immanent critique of the strivings of virtuous neoliberal subjects in the face of eviscerated notions of social solidarity and collective purpose.

Treaties and re-setting the colonial relationship: Lessons for Australia from the Treaty of Waitangi

Colonial hegemony distinguishes relationships between the Australian state and Indigenous nations. British government was violently established and there was no accommodation with the Indigenous populations to allow settlement to proceed, as occurred through treaties in Canada and New Zealand. Indigenous arguments for treaties in Australia are, however, well established. Notwithstanding some Commonwealth and state and territory governments considering such agreements over the past 40 years, none have been concluded, and more modest forms of recognition have been alternatively proposed. In 2015, following extensive Indigenous advocacy, the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition appointed a Referendum Council to consult on an amendment to the Commonwealth Constitution to recognise Australia’s first peoples. The recommendation of a Voice to Parliament and a Makarrata Commission to oversee truth telling and agreements to allow ‘coming together after a struggle’ suggested a transformative ambition beyond the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition’s expectations. Makarrata does not stipulate treaties as an ideal form of agreement, but in raising the possibility, the Council added to the concept’s political momentum. This article discusses the place of treaties in contemporary Australian discourse, including treaty negotiations that are in progress in Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory. It uses examples from New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi to discuss their possibilities and limits in Australia. From these examples, two overarching arguments are made. Firstly, that treaties are potentially transformative, not because they may settle historical grievances, but because their required mutual recognition of each party’s enduring political standing means that they define ongoing, just terms of association. Secondly, the substantively different political arrangements that they presume mean that they are not merely instruments of egalitarian justice and are instead concerned with the distribution of political authority – Indigenous authority over their affairs and through a distinctive and culturally contextualised state citizenship.

Towards crisis protection(ism)? COVID-19 and selective de-globalization

Purpose Drawing on Wendt’s (1995, 1999) thin constructivist approach to international relations this paper aims to critically examine how the measures taken by the Australian Government to protect the country from coronavirus (COVID-19) have prompted politicians and opinion-makers to mobilize globalizing and de-globalizing discourses towards divergent conceptualizations of national resilience. Design/methodology/approach The paper examines 172 Australian political and media articles, which focus on both COVID-19 and globalization/de-globalization published between February and June 2020. The data were imported to NVivo to enable in-depth thematic analysis. Findings The paper develops the concept of crisis protectionism to explain how COVID-19 has been mobilized in discourses aimed at accelerating selective de-globalization in Australia. Selective de-globalization is inductively theorized as involving material structures (i.e. border closures), ideational structures (i.e. national identity) and intersubjectivities (i.e. pre-existing inter-country antagonisms). Research limitations/implications The paper relies upon publicly available data about Australian discourses that relate to a unique globally disrupting extreme event. Practical implications Crisis protectionism and selective de-globalization are important to multinational enterprises (MNE) that operate in essential industry sectors (e.g. medical supply firms), rely upon open borders (e.g. the university sector) and for MNEs entering/operating in a host country experiencing antagonistic relationships with their home country. Originality/value The paper extends Witt’s (2019) political theorization of de-globalization towards a socialized theory of de-globalization. By rejecting liberal and realist explanations of the relationship between COVID-19 and de-globalization, this study highlights the importance and endogeneity of non-market risks and non-economic logic to international business and MNE strategy.

Allies or at-risk subjects?: sexual minority women and the “problem” of HIV in Lesbians on the Loose

ABSTRACT Sexual minority women are largely invisible in Australian HIV discourses, where their sexual identities are erased under heterosexist exposure categories. The dominance of these risk categories means there is no way of knowing how many sexual minority women are living with HIV in Australia. In this article, I draw on Carol Bacchi’s “What is the Problem Represented to Be?” (WPR) methodological approach to explore how sexual minority women are (not) spoken to as particular kinds of subjects in 2014–2017 editions of Australia’s largest LGBTQ women’s magazine, Lesbians on the Loose. Through an analysis of both their explicit representation in the magazine and the silencing of their identities, practices, and desires, I suggest that sexual minority women emerge, first, as allies to sexual minority men and people living with HIV and, second, as “at-risk” of contracting HIV themselves.

Collective Security and a New World Order: Justifying Australia's Participation in the Persian Gulf Crisis, 1990‐91

In response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990, Australia's Labor government committed a naval task force to participate in the enforcement of sanctions, and subsequently, the Gulf War to expel Iraq from Kuwait. The Australian government justified its response to the Persian Gulf crisis in various ways, including the threat it posed to national and international security, and by employing representations of Australian identity and the radical Otherness of Saddam Hussein. The paper considers these aspects, then focuses on two ostensibly complementary justifications. Firstly, the rapid commitment was represented as a necessary act of collective security connected to revitalisation of the United Nations. Secondly, it was justified as contributing to the development of a post‐Cold War new world order (NWO), framed within Australian regional security interests and shaped by the US alliance. The paper argues that the Australian discourse melds the justifications, despite collective security, based on UN leadership, sitting uneasily with a NWO premised on US leadership, without having to attend to the tensions between the two justifications.

‘Neoliberal feminism’: Legitimising the gendered moral project of austerity

This article focuses on how middle-class women identify with ‘neoliberal feminism’ within the context of UK austerity by drawing on interviews with 17 women in Leeds, London and Brighton during 2014 and 2015. The article argues that the way in which these women identify with, understand and discuss whom feminism is important for, converges with a range of values present in the austerity discourse. In line with the principles of ‘late modernity’, feminism is spoken through an individualised lifestyle discourse, with an emphasis on the need to be resilient and have a positive mental attitude to deal with forms of inequality. Due to the particularity of the context, women create distance, and classed and racialised distinctions away from women who are suffering in the current context. This distancing is crucial to the maintenance of the austerity project, since, instead of helping to put an end to gender inequality, this form of feminism aids the legitimation of hierarchical relationships and gendered socio-economic inequalities. This is produced via a form of indifference towards those who are understood as ‘bad subjects’, perceived as being unable to manage and who are thus undeserving of help. Mapping out the contours of the entanglement of feminist narratives with an anti-emancipatory narrative is thus crucial for widening understandings of the politics of austerity and contemporary engagements with feminism.

Refugees and asylum seekers in Australian print media: A critical discourse analysis

ABSTRACT The occupational possibilities available to refugees and asylum seekers upon arrival in Australia are influenced by the discourses in Australian print media that shape knowledge, attitudes, and subjectivities, including which people and what occupations are ideal and possible. This paper sought to expose and challenge discourses constructing subjectivities and shaping the occupational possibilities or occupational injustices for refugees and asylum seekers within the Australian context. A critical discourse analysis of Australian local and national newspapers was conducted. A theoretical framework constructed from the work of Foucault and Fairclough was applied, with findings informed by an occupational science perspective. Three core subjectivities were identified in the print media discourse: wretched identities, suspicious fugitives, and cultural usurpers. These constructions highlighted the way in which discourses within the Australian print media can limit occupational possibilities for refugees and asylum seekers to those occupations relevant only to survival, surveillance, or assimilation. Implications for occupational possibilities may include occupationally restrictive boundaries upon resettlement and justification for excluding refugees and asylum seekers from Australian society. The disempowering nature of these subjectivities reflects aspects of Australian discourses that should be and can be challenged.

Australia and China: Framing an Ambivalent Relationship

ABSTRACTAustralians have become increasingly familiar with China in the decades since the Whitlam government (1972–1975) formally recognised the People’s Republic of China. The government instructed its first Ambassador that Australia wanted “friendship, cooperation and mutual trust, comparable with that which we have, or seek, with other major powers”. This represented a significant shift in the way that China was framed in Australian discourse. However, Australian ambivalence towards China persists. The main argument presented in this article is that the persistence of ambivalence is linked to Australia’s transactional economic embrace of China. This embrace is neoliberal orthodoxy, which shapes Australia’s understanding by the creation of meaning in the China discourse. Evidence for this proposition is drawn from research in the field of Cognitive Science. The article concludes that this orthodoxy, within which all policy approaches are framed, means that Australian engagement with China broadens but cannot commensurately deepen – leaving ambivalence towards China relatively unchallenged.

‘A Woman’s Tongue’: Representations of Gender and Swearing in Australian Legal and Media Discourse

This article considers historical and contemporary representations of the relationship between gender and swearing in Australian obscene language trials. An examination of language ideologies articulated in media and legal discourse in nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia reveals how swearing by women was often depicted as unladylike, and swearing in the presence of women, considered undesirable. Commonly-articulated ideas about gender and swearing prevalent in this period have become naturalised over time, so that they form part of judicial ‘common sense’ in contemporary offensive language jurisprudence. In addition, the idea that swear words are especially offensive when uttered in the presence of women has functioned to legitimise the criminal punishment of swear words used by Indigenous women towards police. The article argues that there is a need to recognise the presence of gendered language ideologies in discourse, including the role they play in maintaining hierarchies and obscuring cultural differences.