Boundaries Of Discourse Research Articles

Polifem między nomos oraz physis. Homer, Sofiści i „prawa ludzkiej miary” w dramacie satyrowym "Cyklop" Eurypidesa

At the height of their development and popularization, the Odyssey and the Iliad were part of a rich tradition of oral epic poetry. And while the transmission of Homer’s epics was facilitated by a Panhellenic framework, these works themselves became catalysts for the consolidation and unification of Greek culture; they shaped a shared Greek identity and a common value system. Particularly significant in this regard is the episode from Book IX of the Odyssey, namely the scene of the Odysseus-Polyphemos encounter. The island of the Cyclopes, as I argue in this article, represents a structural inversion of a civilized and orderly human community; the image of Polyphemos embodies “wildness” and delineates (or redefines) the boundaries of discourse on civilization, culture, and community. This motif anticipates, thus, the debate on nomos (“law”) and physis (“nature”) that engaged the intellectual elite of Athens, known as the sophists, around the turn of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. This article traces the reception of the Polyphemos motif within this sophistic discourse of that period. Euripides’ satyr play Cyclops, filled with allusions to the sophists who were keenly interested in the Homeric motif of the island of the one-eyed monsters, serves as the focal point for this analysis. Furthermore, I will show that Euripides uses the dramaturgical framework inspired by Homer’s epic to confront two worldviews: on the one hand, respect for tradition and values associated with ancient poetry (the attitude represented by Odysseus), and on the other, the rationalism, radicalism, and tradition-directed criticism that characterized Euripides’ contemporary political thinkers and philosophers (represented by Polyphemos).

“Be Yo’self. It’s Just a Show”: Performing Community through the Comic Grotesque in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors

Abstract Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play Neighbors, which premiered at the Public Theater in 2010, explores the history of Black representation in the theater and, subsequently, the performance of Black identity in the US through its depiction of a complex and contradictory minstrelsy that cannot easily be classified as satirical or subversive. Generating what Jacobs-Jenkins has called “wrong laughter” through contradiction, ambiguity, and ambivalence, Neighbors engages the unstable space of the comic grotesque in order to open up pathways for something new to emerge. In this play, the figure of the clown – a grotesque outlaw who moves between, within, across, and beyond boundaries – becomes a key destabilizing figure as the grotesque body becomes a site for transformation through its contradictions, oozing inconsistency and excess, and allowing a potential space for regeneration and renewal through instability and failure when the stable and the rational have failed. In its embrace of clowning and the comic grotesque, Neighbors questions the stable notion of “community,” particularly in terms of racial and historical identity, and exposes the contradictions of closed constructions, creating a space beyond the boundaries of rational discourse that may begin to engage a more complex reality.

The Crown through Catalan Eyes: The Monarchy in Polònia (2006–2021)

Catalan journalists and performers have played a leading role in pushing the boundaries of public discourse about the Spanish monarchy in a media landscape that has been riddled with taboos since the 1975 Restoration. Polònia, a political satire created in 2006 for Catalan television, frequently targets the royal family, actively contributing to the erosion of its public image in Catalonia. While early skits featuring the royal family tended to invited viewers to laugh at them, in recent years the corrupt King and his kin are increasingly seen to be mocking their subjects.

A tale of two Southeast Asian states: media governance and authoritarian regimes in Singapore and Vietnam

Political scientists have crafted intricate taxonomies to classify nations beyond liberal democracy, positioning these societies along an authoritarian continuum. Despite the pivotal role of journalists in accelerating political dynamics, there exists a lack of comparative research on media governance in these regimes. Consequently, this study scrutinizes the media governance ecosystems in Vietnam and Singapore. Vietnam is a one-party authoritarian state, whereas Singapore represents a hybrid political system. However, both countries exhibit a stable and uninterrupted rule by the respective ruling party. Our research uncovers the nuances of Singapore’s media regulation, which embeds trusted stakeholders with financial interests in key press roles to reinforce the implicit political norms. Conversely, Vietnam employs a more direct, coercive, and state-centric approach. Media actors in both nations occasionally test the boundaries of acceptable discourses, with each government’s responses being shaped by specific contexts and broader history. Reforms in Vietnam, embracing privatization and commercialization, mirror Singapore’s integration of capitalism, public ownership, and commercial interests when governing media. These findings highlight diverse yet effective authoritarian media governance strategies, unique features, and commonalities in both systems. Overall, media structures in these Southeast Asian countries have undergone profound evolutions towards more sophisticated regulatory tools to manage societal and political transformations.

Speaking the Right Language: Transnational Rule and Symbolic Power in Dialogue Forums

ABSTRACT This article argues that the opening up of international organisations (IOs) to the participation of civil society organisations (CSOs) has not only failed to dismantle structures of rule. Rather, it should be understood as a perpetuation of rule, re-enacted in and through the everyday practices of IO-CSO interactions in dialogue forums. To make this argument, I build on Bourdieu's notion of symbolic power to conceptualise rule as a hierarchical relationship of mutual recognition, characterised by compliance and actualised through (discursive) practices. In dialogue forums, rule is enacted through the ability of dominant actors to impose meanings (classifications, categories, normative standards) as legitimate. By analysing the Civil Society Policy Forum, I show how the institutions have managed the criticism emanating from CSOs through discursive assimilation, i.e. by both opening up space for dialogue and delimiting the boundaries of political discourse, leading CSOs to accept the conditions for reproducing the institutional discourse.

Racing Religion in the Palestine-Israel Discourse

Race is a Western political project. Religious freedom is a Christian political project. The linkages between the two enabled European nations and their settlers across the globe to condemn natives, slaves, and non-European immigrants to inferior status, and in turn legalize control of their lands and bodies.1 The consequent race-religion systems of power and privilege, which inform Rabiat Akande's thesis, offer valuable insights into the racialized boundaries of contemporary Palestine-Israel discourse in the United States.2 Specifically, the racialization of Muslims and Arabs as terrorism supporters and presumptively anti-Semitic subjects them to censorship, harassment, and discrimination when they advocate for the human rights of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This essay argues that infringements on Muslims and Arabs’ dissenting speech and political activism is another way in which the racialization of religion produces a mutually constitutive form of discrimination.

Disciplinary Variations in Framing Research Articles in the Social Sciences and Humanities

Metadiscourse is now a widely used term in academic discourse analysis. How academics employ rhetorical devices to structure their texts, establish reader-writer interaction and stamp their authorial stance regarding the conventions of the disciplines, cultures, and genres has been the subject of many studies. Despite the growing prominence of the term, however, some features of it, one of which is frame markers, have gone unnoticed. Frame markers signal the boundaries in the academic discourse for the readers' understanding, and they are a crucial rhetorical feature of metadiscourse. The present study examines the deployment of frame markers in research articles written between 2010 and 2019. Based on the analysis of frame markers in a corpus of research articles across four disciplines in social sciences, there were marked variations across the four disciplines in the use of frame markers and the occurrences of their sub-categories. The findings suggested that academic communities have a decisive role in constructing text structures in research articles. The results might offer guidance to academic writers on shaping the texts that their readers find persuasive.

Bible teachers cultivate social awareness of otherness

ABSTRACT This article discusses Israeli Bible teachers’ perceptions of the ‘otherness’ and their actions in a reality in which teachers are required to balance the tension between being experts in the field of knowledge, coping with a state curriculum that promotes a faith-religious worldview, and acting as educators in promoting discourse dealing with social issues of inclusion, respect, and tolerance for the ‘other’. The research is qualitative-interpretive, based on interviews with 13 teachers. It focuses on describing and explaining Bible teachers’ perceptions and interpreting their actions. Findings point to two main perceptions: (1) A perception that transcends the boundaries of biblical academic discourse and fosters a moral dialogue of integration, tolerance, openness, and awareness of the ‘other’ as part of the Bible teacher’s role. (2) A perception focused only on biblical discourse and refrains from dealing with issues of ‘otherness’ in the lesson. This research offers new tools and courses of action to implement these perceptions. Its conclusions may encourage teachers to develop pedagogical flexibility and an ability to navigate through issues of ‘otherness’ while responding to social, value, and moral issues that arise spontaneously in the multicultural dialogue in Bible lessons.

Making Ordinary People Actors in National History

This paper analyzes a recent exhibit in Vietnam’s national ethnology museum which depicted ordinary people’s everyday experiences during the postwar, pre-reform era in Hanoi, an era which was full of hardship and had rarely been discussed publicly prior to this. The exhibit narrated a critical yet nostalgic representation which favored the experiences of ‘ordinary citizens’’ above official discourses about this period. I argue that the exhibit designers aimed to pose ordinary citizens as significant actors in national history, thereby narrating Vietnam’s modern history in a new way. In the course of critically examiningthe past and the present, the exhibit pushed the boundaries of social criticism and public discourse, and showed that museum exhibits are not neutral spacesfor the production of knowledge but, rather, can become sites which mediate indirect negotiation between people and the state and re-interpret the past forthe present and the future.
 
 Keywords: museums, politics of memory, personal narratives, subsidy system, Vietnam

Amazigh-Arabic Code Switching in Amazigh Radio Discourse: Frequency and Structure

Language contact has been one of the most interest-arousing disciplines for linguists, especially sociolinguists. The study of language contact explores mainly the nature and the outcome of the contact between languages or varieties in a bi- /multilingual setting. When speakers of different languages interact, they may use different varieties back and forth to convey and communicate their messages. This reciprocal interchange between two languages or varieties is called code-switching (CS hereafter). The present study attempts to document the nature of code switching between Amazigh and Arabic in the Amazigh radio discourse. The data of the study consists of three radio talk-shows that were aired in two different Amazigh radio broadcasts, so the source language is supposed to be Amazigh. The Amazigh variety involved in the talk-shows is Tashelhit as all the participants come from the Souss region where this variety is used. Therefore, we investigated the intervention of Arabic into the Amazigh discourse through CS. An integrated approach with both qualitative (structural analysis) and quantitative (frequency distribution) methods of analysis was adopted for the purpose of this paper. The results of the study reveal that the rate of Amazigh-Arabic CS is very high. It takes place at different discourse boundaries and involves various syntactic categories. It seems to be a natural linguistic behavior among Amazigh bilinguals. Besides, the analysis demonstrates that both Arabic and Amazigh interchange the role of matrix language (ML) and embedded language (EL) in the light of Myers-Scotton Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model (1993).

Od duchowości do literatury. Aspekty pamięci w publicystyce Wadima Borisowa

This paper depicts a category of memory in the works by Vadim Borisov, a historian of the Orthodox Church and a literary critic, whose fate in the communist period was strictly connected to the political activity of A. Solzhenitsyn. The most known works by Borisov are primarily devoted to various issues of the Soviet people in the philosophical and historical perspective, but they also stress the problem of memory very clearly. The author of the article characterises several aspects of the phenomenon juxtaposing them with the theories proposed by contemporary memory scientists. The scrutiny shows that Borisov's deliberations surpassed the boundaries of political discourse underlining cultural and religious dimensions of the given problem which have become an important subject under consideration of many subsequent scholars.

ВІЗУАЛЬНА СПАДЩИНА ВАДИМА ЩЕРБАКІВСЬКОГО — ПЕРШОДЖЕРЕЛО ВИВЧЕННЯ ГЕНЕЗИ УКРАЇНСЬКОГО САКРАЛЬНОГО БУДІВНИЦТВА, НАРОДНОГО МИСТЕЦТВА ТА ЕТНОГРАФІЇ (ЗА АРХІВНИМИ МАТЕРІАЛАМИ ІН НАН УКРАЇНИ)

Photographs and negatives of V. Scherbakivskyi are an important source for studying the genesis of Ukrainian sacred construction, architecture, folk art, and ethnography. They are the basis for the restoration of the artistic tradition, remain relevant, and go far beyond the boundaries of historiographical discourse. The goal is to publicize and analyze information about Vadym Shcherbakivskyi's negatives, which are stored in the funds of the Institute of Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, to show his familiarity with photographic practice, to highlight their value for architecture, folk art, ethnology, and church history. The object of the study is the legacy of V. Scherbakivskyi's negatives, collected by the Museum of the National Academy of Sciences. The subject is the practice of using visual material by Vadym Shcherbakivskyi to study the genesis of Ukrainian sacred construction, folk art, ethnography and to restore the artistic tradition. Methods: comparative-historical analysis is used for the reconstruction, study and research of certain ethnographic territories of Ukraine; synchronous and diachronic — to characterize the content variability of its photo-fixation, its use for building the genesis of Ukrainian sacred architecture and its origin. The article highlights the cooperation of V. Shcherbakivskyi with the National Academy of Sciences, his scientific research in Galicia at the beginning of the 20th century. and in the Poltava region, it is shown how the collected visual sources allowed V. Shcherbakivskyi to assert the existence of an independent "Ukrainian church style", that the Ukrainian artistic tradition is a confirmation of national identity, it is highlighted how his photo-fixation of Ukrainian church architecture became an important factor in the breakdown of the Great Russian piece in appropriation other people's achievements. It is shown how visual sources serve as artifacts for the study of architecture, folk art, ethnology and Church history, the tasks set for the processing and digitization of photos and negatives of V. Shcherbakivsky and the publication of an album for the 150th anniversary of his birth.

Transgenderism: Bioethical Issues

The article analyses bioethical problems related to the concept of transgenderism and its understanding in the framework of biomedical discourse. The concept of “transgenderism” is linked with medicine, and gender dysphoria (International Classification of Diseases, 11th Edition) in particular. At the same time, the concept of transgenderism interacts with the social context. The article shows that the perception of transgenderism and transgenders by society has an impact both on the medical discourse and the notion of transgenderism in its context, and on the perception of “ordinary” people, or cisgender people, which is due to the gradual normalization of transgenderism. Thus, the concept of transgenderism requires an interdisciplinary approach and ethical, philosophical and bioethical consideration. Since the analyzed concept is directly related to medical problems, this study is based not only on bioethical studies, but also on sources in the field of medicine and sociological studies related to medicine. The article also analyzes the problem of applying the biomedical principles nonmaleficence" and principle of autonomy by Beauchamp and Childress, that have specifics applied to transgender children. This is due to the connection of transgenderism with another problem that lies in the interdisciplinary field —suicide. A number of studies on the quality of life of transgender people, as well as encyclopedic literature, mention suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts of transgenders. The article shows how the reinterpretation of transgenderism and its normalization change the boundaries of medical discourse, deducing transgenderism and suicide from medicine. The author concludes that the normalization of transgenderism and the change of its place in the medical discourse entails not only a transformation of medical discourse, but also affects other concepts like suicide, changes the approach to the treatment of transgender children, making the therapy of such children questionable from bioethical viewpoint.

«Затерянные в космосе» от 1965-го к 2018-му: формирование киборганических сообществ

Comparing the representations of a family in the 1965–1968 scientific television series Lost in Space and its 2018–2021 remake, the article explicates the worldview principles of the family building as a cyborganic community from the perspective of contemporary philosophical anthropology. The conceptual framework is based on Donna Haraway’s work on identity and community formation. Her ideas are considered in the context of new ontologies. The article attempts to ontologize the anthropological issues. Here, the interpretation of Donna Haraway’s approach is not limited to feminist theory or gender studies and correlates with such philosophical projects as Ernst Kapp’s philosophy of technology, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, Dilan Trigg’s phenomenology of horror and Timothy Morton’s object-oriented ontology. Both the 1965–1968 TV series and the 2018–2021 remake demonstrate that the family is the basis of society, equally necessary for survival on the Earth and on other planets. Both TV series represent a “planetary” family, that is, an exemplary family reflecting all of humanity. However, the worldview principles of assembling the family as a community differ in the two series. While in the original series, the representation of the Robinson family does not transcend the boundaries of the modern discourse of a family, the assemblage of the family in the remake unfolds within an approach that goes beyond the legacy of modernity and emphasizes cyborgization and the cyborganic community building.

Brexit як ключове слово британського політичного дискурсу

This case study examines the neologism Brexit, defined in OED as "the (proposed) withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union and political processes associated with it." Coined in May 2012, this word quickly gained media currency in the United Kingdom and abroad. The political coinage has become an internationalism, i.e., it has achieved global recognition and entered other languages in its original meaning and form. After an unprecedented surge in use (by astronomical 3 400%), Brexit was declared the 2016 word of the year by Collins Dictionary and gained entry to the Oxford English Dictionary. This study explores the word's characteristics and use in the media. The data were collected from British internet magazines and newspapers and the NOW corpus (News on the Web) for the time period from May 2012 to January 2023. The study argues that the word Brexit has the following features of a keyword: social significance, high frequency, wide use in various contexts, occurrence in strong media positions, metaphorical creativity, and neological productivity. Brexit appears on magazine covers, newspaper front pages, and in headlines. Reflecting heated debates on the British exit from the EU, the word has acquired new and controversial meanings and become a rich source of word formation, thus giving rise to numerous neologisms collectively referred to as Brexit glossary or Brexicon. This glossary of Brexit terms includes "old" English words and expressions that have acquired new meanings and political terms used in everyday discussions about Brexit. The most significant contribution of the word Brexit to present-day English is the new productive suffix -exit that, transcending the boundaries of political discourse, has come into use in various other domains.

The Genealogy of Obedience in the Biblical Sources of Jewish Culture

In the past two years, against the backdrop of the Covid-19 epidemic, civil disobedience has been on the rise in Israeli society. While civil disobedience preserves the boundaries of discourse and democracy, it also poses a real danger to the existence of society. Attitudes toward civil disobedience reflect the core values of a particular culture. Thus, attitudes toward obedience or disobedience in Israeli society must be examined with respect to the religious roots of Jewish culture. This article examines attitudes towards the issue of obedience in the formative texts of Jewish culture. Revealing the religious past of the culture enables a re-evaluation of values and stances. To understand the sources of the values relevant to obedience in Israeli society today, I will analyze religious texts using the genealogical method. The subject area of genealogy is the past, yet its purpose is to understand and critique contemporary reality. The main finding is that obedience and disobedience do not appear to be in a dialectical relationship in today’s society. Despite the fact that controversy is welcome and prevalent in Judaism, obedience and disobedience do not manifest as contentious or as two sides of a single issue.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Speech and social cues combine at discourse boundaries to promote word learning

Social cues, such as eye gaze and referential gestures, have been shown to promote word learning in children, usually by exposing children to a label-object association with vs. without a social cue. However, social cues are not always so cleanly linked to referents in the world. Instead, label-object associations occur imperfectly across time in a discourse. We conducted an experiment to examine how labels and eye gaze interactively support 4- and 5-year-olds’ word learning during exposures to a series of brief discourse topics. We found that children learned novel words better when social cues and word labels jointly marked the beginning or end of a discourse topic, but not when they were misaligned. The findings indicate that young learners can use social cues to inform their understanding of word meanings across successive utterances, not just within single labeling events. We discuss how social cues may support children’s ability to find where discourse topics begin and end within their ongoing speech input.

Between Democracy and Ochlocracy in the Context of the Centuries-Old Dispute about the Perfect Form of Government: The Legal Heritage of the Antiquity in View of the Challenges of Modernity

The author endeavored to enliven the universal discourse on the perfect system of government applicable to human society, which to many luminaries constitutes a certain paradigm of the science on the state and the law. While adopting a classical, chronological convention of the narrative herein commenced, the author made the time of Antiquity the point of departure, selected the Enlightenment as a form of a modern counterpoint thereto, and then finalized the deliberations carried out here against the reality of contemporary times. The intent of the exploration here was to place the research subject within the interdisciplinary framework, which was undoubtedly supported by the multifaceted nature of the problem at issue and by subsidiary utilization of the advantages of the comparative approach. The intention to present the issue through a broad perspective, transcending the boundaries of academic discourse, was naturally convergent therewith. As a result, the author did not shy from controversy, seeking the purpose of the actions undertaken, thereby in the formation of conclusions on what the applicable law should be. That allowed for the presentation of numerous remarks, assessments, and opinions, among which at least some may be deemed disputatious or plainly speaking, highly debatable. The investigator did not attempt to evade those; on the contrary – sought it in complete premeditation.

Understanding Current Alevism: A Field Research in Ankara, Turkey

Anthropology is a discipline that attempts to understand the human condition epistemologically. Concepts such as ethnicity or identity keep framing these studies. Alevism is one of those which is called ethnoreligious. However, Alevism has assumed different meanings according to regions and countries in the historical process. Discussions about what Alevism is have increased, especially in recent years. Different sources feed these discussions. Against the insistence on defining Alevism within the borders determined by the governments in Turkey and the discourse that ignores social diversity in general, Alevism feels the need to return to its resources, especially the historical and sociological studies of Alevi intellectuals, to seek a solution to this identity crisis. On the other hand, the organized Alevi movement, which has achieved various gains in Europe, expresses more confidently their demands for the rights of Alevis in Turkey, and they are also on the agenda in the country from time to time. The participants are Turks who do not have connections with Alevi organizations, do not have access to written sources of Alevism, and whose socialization spaces are usually their village associations in the city. Although their views sometimes show parallelism with the studies that seek the “essence/history” of Alevism, they also create unique ways of conveying the principles and philosophy of their beliefs and diversify their interpretations of Alevism. These interpretations sometimes have features that stretch the boundaries of traditional discourses.