Authoritative Discourse Research Articles

Introduction: Indigeneity and Latin American Anarchism

The articles in this special issue frame the question of anarchism and indigeneity as historiography, but also as a commentary on the ways in which examining Latin American pasts can inform contemporary understandings of social movements in the region and beyond. In particular, our hope is that they will provoke further interest and research into how history reflects on the ongoing efforts by revolutionaries today, and by the diverse communities with which they engage, to imagine a future devoid of authoritarian and instrumentalist discourses and practices that continue to reproduce the inequities of state power, capitalist oppression, and colonial domination. The case can be made that while its historiography is in its early stages, anarchists in Latin America historically engaged the communities in which they immersed, in some localities more successfully than others. This issue of Anarchist Studies will show that Bolivia - largely ignored in the English-language literature on the subject - and Peru demonstrated early and ongoing efforts to approach indigeneity among Aymara and Quechua peoples in urban and rural settings (see de Laforcade and Hirsch). In Guatemala, however, which is at the heart of a vast regional geography of diverse Mayan peoples ranging from Honduras to Mexico, and in which the white and mestizo populations are a distinct minority, no such tradition emerged (see Monteflores). Raymond Craib has noted that in Chile, a country on the southern reaches of the Andes that produced a vibrant anarchist culture in the early 20th century, the anarchist archives show virtually no connection between the labour movement and the southern Mapuche peoples of Araucania. Beyond the simple question of whether anarchists acknowledged and engaged in solidarity with indigenous communities, however, there is the more sensitive question raised by Mexican sociologist Josué Sansón on the 'translatability' of anarchist ideas and practices among Peruvian rural communities, which he studied. Sansón argues that the transmission was not 'unidirectional', but rather a 'space of encounter in which some Aymara and Quechua communities received and appropriated them, reinterpreting and adapting them to them their own idioms of resistance in the creation of their own autonomous movements.'

Depiction of Lenin and Stalin in Estonian Art as an Indicator of Shifts in the Soviet Authoritative Discourse

The paper provides an analysis of changes in depiction of Soviet leaders by Estonian artistsduring the period of Soviet occupation of Estonia. More specifically, changes in theiconography of Lenin and Stalin are viewed in light of Alexei Yurchak’s concept ofperformative shift of the Soviet authoritative discourse.
 During the over 40-year period of Soviet occupation conventions of depicting Leninand Stalin underwent several notable changes that more or less reflected shifts in the Sovietpolitics as well as the developments in Estonian arts. The paper argues that changes in thedepiction of the leaders amounted to the fundamental meaning and message of these works ofart. Especially from the end of the 1960s, an increasingly playful and ironic undertoneprevailed.
 In using the depictions of the Soviet leaders in Estonian art to test the aforementionedtheoretical constructions, the paper however concludes that changes in the official discoursein Estonian arts did not wholly conform to the performative shift as described by Yurchak.

Girl power in boy love: Yaoi, online female counterculture, and digital feminism in China

ABSTRACT This article employs in-depth interviews with 64 female authors of Yaoi fiction, a popular online narrative genre among young Chinese women, to examine the discursive strategies adopted in their creation of homoerotic stories, and theorize such strategies within contemporary Chinese political, cultural, and social contexts. Three discursive constructions are distilled and discussed through analysis of Yaoi fictionists’ cultural production practices: the idealization of intimate relationship, the deconstruction of the heteropatriarchal gender norm through female gaze, and the imagination of female power in negotiation with state discourse. The article then indicates the deliberate intention incorporated in the production of the Yaoi counterculture to subvert the state-backed gender hegemony. It proposes that a comprehensive understanding of contemporary Chinese feminism can only be achieved through intersectional analysis of its interactions with China’s authoritarian state discourse, and calls for closer attention to the feminist political potential brought about by digital technology.

Foucault on psychagogy and the politics of education

For the past half-century, critical pedagogy has represented perhaps the most influential response to traditional ‘banking’ models of education and the political obedience and social conformity they are purported to engender. Precisely because of its lasting impact, however, it has tended to overshadow other possible visions of the critical political potential of education. In this article, I trace the origins and development of a distinctive yet under-discussed concept in Michel Foucault’s late ethical work – psychagogy – to pursue an alternative depiction of education as a critical political practice. Attending to the origins and meaning of psychagogy in Foucault’s work is valuable, I argue, for two reasons. On the one hand, the concept offers a vision of political education that avoids reproducing problematic juridical binaries – truth and ideology, rationality and irrationality, absolved and condemned – that Foucault believed inhered in Enlightenment-era conceptions of emancipation. On the other hand, it demonstrates how political problems of our present might be rendered workable not only through recourse to the authoritative discourses of experts or collective demands of revolutionaries, but also through exercises in subjectivity formation that are rather more quotidian, experiential, and conditional in nature.

On the Other Side of the “Vnenakhodimost'” Principle: The Event of the Revolution and the Problem of Metalanguage in Soviet Thought of the 1960s

Analizing a number of texts devoted to the significance and fate of the Russian revolution, we can study the functioning and problematization of ideological discourse in the reflection of late Soviet intellectuals on the foundations of the Soviet world and the metalanguage paradoxes that this reflection produces. The articles by E. Ilyenkov, M. Lifshits, G. Pospelov, M. Gefter offer different configurations of the same semantic field, in which the beliefs, values, and methodologies of the authors enter into complex relationships with an authoritative language that defines the very layout of this field. Building a kind of theodicy of revolution, the authors are forced to separate the “state of things” from the project-language, by which it is described and transformed. From the very beginning, the communist project is considered precisely as a world-historical one; the Russian revolution, as the authoritative discourse says, has “world-historical significance”. But at the same time, the very event of the revolution is an act of extreme territorialization, radical pragmatization of the theory, and even a break in it. The idea of foundation is forced to combine in two proportions two modes of interpretation and therefore two types of appropriation: a revolutionary project as a teleological form of world history and the theory of this history, and what the project addresses as a local system, faced with a certain limitation. The very point of revolution turns out to be the intersection point of two or more genealogical logics, which have to be brought to unity by a special effort. Our analysis shows that an attempt to critically legitimize the Soviet project as a whole leads to deterritorialization, a kind of vnenakhodimost'of the project itself and, conversely, to a partial territorialization of its problems.

Moments of resistance: An internally persuasive view of performance and impact reports in non-governmental organizations

This study considers the role of accounting in moments of resistance in day-to-day institutional contexts. It does so by drawing on the perspectives of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1984, 1986) – a Russian philosopher who sought to understand the notion of dialogue in everyday communicative practices. We study these moments of resistance within the context of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – organizations affected by authoritative discourses of accountability that seek representative, tangible and verifiable understandings of impact and performance. Within our empirical study, we show how accounting reports related to performance and impact gradually moved along a continuum from being received in authoritative mode to internally persuasive mode and how, as a result, resistance to an authoritative discourse of accountability was created and maintained. We found that this was enabled through the reception and promotion of accounting’s subjunctive possibilities.

The End of Global Constitutionalism and Rise of Antidemocratic Politics

ABSTRACT Drawing upon the idea of “constitutional antagonism” this article offers a critique of the liberal cosmopolitan framing global constitutionalism and its response to the rise of antidemocratic and “populist” authoritarian politics. Liberal cosmopolitan approaches to global constitutionalism generally pay inadequate attention to the ways in which neoliberal ideology and rationality have come to dominate the fragmented networks and structures of global constitutionalism and the connected emergence of an anti-cosmopolitan and authoritarian discourse of “nationalist neoliberalism”. Against the limits of liberal cosmopolitanism, and against the twin threats of neoliberal transnational governance and neoliberal nationalist, interstate conflict, it is argued that if an idea of transnational or global constitutionalism is to be held onto and retain any value then it must be based upon socially transformative ideas of egalitarian and ecological social justice and enacted through legal and political strategies and struggles that attempt to actively displace neoliberal ideology and rationality.

Diálogos entre Ciência e Arte: Uma leitura a partir da obra de Remedios Varo para um Ensino sobre as Ciências

As pesquisas da educação científica indicam a necessidade de um ensino sobre as ciências que possa discutir os processos da mesma a fim de se distanciar de visões ingênuas e deturpadas. Dentro desta perspectiva, defendemos o diálogo entre ciência e arte como forma de entender o conhecimento científico como cultura de determinado local e época. Seguindo essa abordagem, faremos uma leitura, a partir de fontes primárias e secundárias, de alguns quadros da obra da artista surrealista espanhola Remedios Varo que ajudam a refletir sobre questões que permeiam a ciência. Para a leitura, traremos o contexto da artista junto a temas que a ciência esteve envolvida no século XX. Por fim, suscitaremos algumas questões combinadas a sugestões dessa leitura para o ensino, com o intuito de promover discussões que possam problematizar a ciência a fim de nos afastarmos de discursos cientificistas e autoritários.

Dancing from policy to pedagogy in China: Transgressions, surveillance and resistance from students, teachers and institutional leaders

This article investigates the challenges that tertiary educators face when seeking to implement education-policy reforms in China. Our qualitative study presents the narratives of tertiary dance educators from eight universities who have actively sought to shift their pedagogical practices as acts of transgression. Their stories reveal the ways that teachers experience pressure to perpetuate authoritarian teaching practices, from their students, from other teachers, and from their institutional leaders. Viewing this learning culture through a Foucauldian lens, we critically question how an authoritarian discourse pervades the tertiary dance education system. Through this, we identify how surveillance and a continual sense of comparison (between students, teachers and institutions), sustains authoritarian pedagogies and inhibits individual teachers’ approaches to educational reform.

Teachers\u2019 Coordination of Dialogic and Authoritative Discourses Promoting Specific Goals in Socioscientific Issue-Based Teaching

The integration of socioscientific issues (SSI) into science teaching requires that teachers manage classroom discussions in which various perspectives are considered and students’ contributions are recognized. The present study aimed to provide knowledge of how classroom discussions on SSI can be structured and implemented to pursue specific teaching purposes. In this study, two secondary science teachers’ employment of communicative approaches during four discussions on SSI was analysed. In the studied context, communicative approaches can be described as involving various or only a single perspective on SSI and as being either interactive or non-interactive. The results elucidate how teachers can make purposeful use of different communicative approaches to facilitate students’ decision-making while promoting complexity in their reasoning. The results also show how teachers can promote cumulativity, in terms of their recognition of students’ contributions to discussions. It is proposed that teachers can use the concept of communicative approaches as an analytical tool to reflect on and develop aspects of teaching practice in relation to the goals that they wish to achieve.

Authoritative discourse in advanced studio lessons

The purpose of this paper is to explore authoritative discourses in advanced studio lessons. Authoritative approaches have been described variously as systematic instruction, direct teaching and teacher-centred, and they appear to be widely accepted in music education, and sought by advanced students. Concerns have been raised in general education theory about the limitations of such approaches, but they have been little researched in the context of studio teaching. This qualitative case study seeks evidence of authority in advanced studio behaviour, through Bakhtin’s account of dialogism and authoritative discourse and theories related to direct instruction. Specifically, an analysis is made of a single studio lesson given by an expert saxophone teacher to an undergraduate student. The terms of inquiry are focused on features of lesson dialogue, including representations of others as emblems of authority, the teacher’s initiation of tasks, student responses and teacher feedback. The study identifies internally consistent patterns of behaviour that provide abundant evidence of teacher-centred approaches to advanced studio tuition, which draw attention to the teacher’s personal expertise, privilege her perspective and convey a sense of her authority. However, the observed studio practices are found to be complex and sophisticated, with features of cognitive scaffolding that are inconsistent with authoritative discourse. It is argued that authoritative approaches are contingent on the subject matter, with their productivity contingent on the balance and match between participants’ expertise, commitment and purpose.

Динаміка цифрового політичного дискурсу РФ

In the digital world, political actors have been getting plenty of possibilities for a direct communication with society, without mass media participation. In democratic countries formats and structures of official discourses has been transforming in order to use the possibility. However, changes in authoritarian discourses are not studied properly. In the paper Russian political discourse transformation is considered (four indicators are taken into account). The interrelations of official (president’s site) and non-official (internet-site «Lenta.ru») is observed between 2005-2019. The analysis is conducted with computer programs, written in Python. The calculation of the indicators (emotionality, negativism, intertextuality (direct and indirect) shows, that the discourse has low activity. There is no rapprochement between the official and non-official components. Thus, the reorientation of the official discourse towards direct communication and the discourse usage for the political struggle is indistinctive. Low level of political interrelations, which may be explained with some peculiarities of Russian political regime, leads to low indicators of emotionality and negativity for the official (0,03; 0,03) and non-official (0,2; 0,19) discourses. Additionally the direct intertextuality isn’t typical for Russian official discourse – it’s true for the whole period of observation (0,003), direct intertextuality has been less salient since 2010 (0,9). The indicators for the non-official discourse are larger (0,04 – indirect; 0,15 – direct), although, in comparison with other democratic states, these number are enough for reach forums of ideas functioning in the political sphere. Thus, as a rule, Russian political actors don’t create messages, attractive for audiences, in order to disseminate the texts in both official and non-official discourses. To sum up, texts’ formats and structure transformation is indistinctive for Russian political discourse, and in the digital reality this makes the direct interrelations between political actors (officials) and society a problematic one.

Monological practices, authoritative discourses and the missing “C” in digital classroom communities

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine teacher decisions surrounding opportunities for student voice, experiences and beliefs in digital classroom communities. The teachers’ decisions reflect monologic rather than dialogic teacher pedagogies which prompted the authors to ask the following question: What led to these teacher-centered practices in digital environments? Design/methodology/approach Authoritative discourses in school policies and a missing connection between critical pedagogies and teachers’ technology practices are examined in light of teachers’ decisions to engage in monologic and/or dialogic teaching practices. The authors propose professional development and research that emphasize pedagogy that supports student voice as foundational to practices involving digital literacies. Findings Examination of the teachers’ decisions showed monologic practices void of student opportunities to critically engage in digital environments. Dominant discourses imposed through protectionist and digital citizenship policies of schools as well as lack of opportunity through professional development to connect critical pedagogy to technology impacted the teachers’ decisions. Originality/value Current research surrounding teachers’ digital literacies uses the TPACK framework to examine technology integration practices. Missing is a critical component that addresses and works to dismantle the dominant discourses and power structures in digital communities (Author, 2018). The authors build on research in critical digital literacies to argue for adding the critical missing “C” into the TPACK framework (C-TPACK) to move researchers and educators to consider pedagogies that examine ideologies at work in digital communities to provide opportunities for student voice.

Interpretative Paths: The media circulation of Bolsonaro’s statements and the construction of the sexist and authoritarian discourse

Interpretative Paths: The media circulation of Bolsonaro’s statements and the construction of the sexist and authoritarian discourse

“Commodity Sui Generis”

The article traces trends in Soviet economic discourse from the 1920s until perestroika. We examine the works of leading political economists of this period through the lens of debates on market exchanges under socialism—the central theoretical issue of the political economy of socialism. The discursive structure underlying the debates can be traced back to the writing of the first Soviet textbook on political economy, personally supervised by Joseph Stalin. Our purpose is to assess the impact of this textbook on subsequent discussions of the role of commodity production and market exchanges in a socialist economy. The story suggests that Soviet economic discourse was neither homogeneous nor stable. Rather, it consisted of several subdiscourses of different levels of authoritativeness allowing for a certain stable core as an attribute of any authoritative discourse, as well as for more flexible elements that adjusted the structure to new political and ideological challenges.

Resistance of the Postmodern Turkish Novel to the Return of Nationalism

My aim in this paper is to survey the journey of Turkey’s postmodern historical fiction, referred to as “historiographic metafiction” by Linda Hutcheon (1988). This genre of postmodern fiction designates a narrative with two predominant features: (a) it is principally a retelling of a historical occurrence from a counter-position against the supposed factuality of the original story, and (b) it contains the self-reflexivity of its author, which enables him/her to question the boundary between fact and fiction, if there is any at all. Obviously, Hutcheon’s conception of this particular category of postmodern fiction was mainly derived from an approach which stresses inherent narratological characteristics in the writing of history, as argued by Hayden White and other historiographers. My research questions in this study are: How successfully is historiographic metafiction used by postmodernist writers in Turkish literature? When we consider the rise of nationalism in Turkey and in the world, can postmodern literature offer an alternative to authoritative discourses? Has postmodernism been able to challenge traditional representations in Turkey? An analysis of selected works of contemporary Turkish literature will supply an answer to these questions.

Neoliberalism, the Far Right, and the Disparaging of “Social Justice Warriors”

AbstractThis paper examines the cultural politics of a conjunctural moment where the terms of neoliberal hegemony have been destabilized and the far right has been reinvigorated. Instead of simply assuming the “end” of neoliberalism, I explore the potential ideological and communicative affinities between neoliberal political rationality and online media practices that exemplify the emboldening of racist, misogynistic, and authoritarian discourses. I ground the argument by examining how the notion of social justice has been articulated in two distinct contexts: in disparaging representations of “social justice warriors” that originally circulated in “alt-right” sub-cultures, but which have since been increasingly mainstreamed, and in the critique of social justice formulated by the neoliberal theorist Friedrich Hayek. After clarifying my core argument about neoliberalism and the far right, I end by reflecting on how the figure of the social justice warrior has also been a site of intra-left antagonisms.

Trust Me, I Am a Doctor: Discourse of Trustworthiness by Chinese Doctors in Online Medical Consultation

ABSTRACT As a key notion in medical consultation, trustworthiness has been the attention of an array of research, focusing on its significance for the patient-doctor alliance as well as the success of communication in between. Despite its importance, scant effort has been made previously about the actual discourse through which trustworthiness is achieved, in particular for online medical consultation in Chinese. The aim of this research is to investigate the linguistic structures of Chinese doctors’ narratives for trustworthiness construction in online medical consultation. We use the Internet-based dataset collected from 120 ask.com. It is found that doctors’ trustworthiness discourse can be categorized into two types: authoritative discourse and attitudinal discourse, with the former specifically realized by expertise-oriented discourse through medical jargon and experience-oriented discourse with the help of individual experience and collective experience, and the latter by including affection-oriented discourse through doctors’ respect for patients, behavior-oriented discourse by means of doctors’ avoidance of imposition on patients and cognition-oriented discourse with the aid of doctors’ disagreements. Meanwhile, detailed linguistic and para-linguistic means to realize these discourses are analyzed to offer some insights into the appropriate discourses of trustworthiness for the doctors both online and offline in Chinese medical consultation scenario.

On the conditions of authority in academic publics

AbstractThe discourse of some of the most powerful public figures in today’s world is often incoherent and nonsensical. Incoherent yet authoritative discourse shows that authority does not rest in language but results from non‐linguistic and pre‐textual conditions. The non‐linguistic and pre‐textual conditions are exemplified in an Australian case‐study of a media debate between the Immigration Minister and a refugee, drawing on research by Smith‐Khan (2019a, 2019b). Two such conditions are then examined with reference to academic publics. First, I ask which languages do or do not carry authority, before moving on to speaker identity as a condition of authority. The close association between English and academic excellence has resulted in diminishing the authority of academic publications in languages other than English. The same is true of publications by women and people of colour. I close by reflecting on referencing practices as forms of extending authoritativeness to voices in excluded languages and from excluded scholars in academic publics.

A Metatheatrical Reading of Baroque and Neobaroque Texts: Entremés del retablo de las maravillas (1615) and De donde son los cantantes (1967)

This article examines the diachronic use of metatheater in Cervantes’s Entremés del retablo de las maravillas (1615) and “La Dolores Rondón,” the second tale in Severo Sarduy’s novel, De donde son los cantantes (1967). Both works are structured as a play-with-in-a-play, including the internal theatrical pieces and the external debates, where the authors problematize literary language/representation in their respective times. This article further explores the organizational differences between metatheatrical Baroque and Neobaroque texts. In the Entremés, two charlatans trick a group of villagers fearful of the “limpieza de sangre” into seeing marvelous scenes. This Baroque play suggests the omnipresence of the Spanish Empire, while criticizing the trendy performance of comedia nueva in Cervantes’s time. “La Dolores Rondón,” by comparison, fails to deliver a coherent piece of theater. Following the tradition of the Cuban “choteo,” the characters humorously demonstrate that all “realities” are fictional and that the text progresses without the guidance of chronological or poetic order. Sarduy’s Neobaroque narrative seeks to break away from authoritative literary discourse and to repudiate the logocentrism embedded in Latin American epistemology.