Broader Social Discourses Research Articles

Beyond Needle and Thread

Beyond Needle and Thread

You Gotta Be There: A Thematic Content Analysis of the Historically Black College and University Sporting Experience

The college sport landscape is a unique arena where institutional and social norms merge with an erratic, but highly-traditioned, sporting space. While the broader scope of college sport is framed through a Predominantly White Institution (PWI) lens, the context of differing institutions is often forgotten or misunderstood. This process is primarily evident with Minority-Serving Institutions. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are educational spaces that leverage their historical foundations and missions in an effort to create safe and equitable spaces for Black students and community members. Traditionally, scholarly inquiries about HBCUs have focused primarily on exploring and understanding institutional missions and culture. The dynamic and complex relationships that exist between HBCUs and their collegiate sporting teams continues to be understudied. This study uses a Black Liberatory Fantasy lens to analyze tweets posted by HBCU students, alumni, and media members from 2013 to 2020. A thematic content analysis of tweets discovered five (5) emergent themes that highlight the unique contributions of the HBCU sporting space: (1) shifting HBCU narratives, (2) the communal culture of HBCU sport, (3) the HBCU sporting sanctuary, (4) enrichment within the HBCU sporting space, and 5) the Black Oppressive Nightmare. Implications of this study highlight institutionally and culturally-specific approaches towards marketing, fan experience, and broader social discourse.

The breathing human infrastructure: Integrating air quality, traffic, and social media indicators

Outdoor air pollution is a complex system that is responsible for the deaths of millions of people annually, yet the integration of interdisciplinary data necessary to assess air quality's multiple metrics is still lacking. This case study integrates atmospheric indicators (concentrations of criteria pollutants including particulate matter and gaseous pollutants), traffic indicators (permanent traffic monitoring station data), and social indicators (community responses in Twitter archives) representing the interplay of the three critical pillars of the United Nations' Triple Bottom Line: environment, economy, and society. During the watershed moment of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns in Florida, urban centers demonstrated the gaps and opportunities for understanding the relationships, through correlations rather than causations, between urban air quality, traffic emissions, and public perceptions. The relationship between the perception and the traffic variables were strongly correlated, however no correlation was observed between the perception and actual air quality indicators, except for NO2. These observations might consequently infer that traffic serves as people's proxy for air quality, regardless of actual air quality, suggesting that social media messaging around asthma may be a way to monitor traffic patterns in areas where no infrastructure currently exists or is prohibited to build. It also indicates that people are less likely to be reliable sensors to accurately measure air quality due to bias in their observations of traffic volume and/or confirmation biases in broader social discourse. Results presented herein are of significance in demonstrating the capacity for interdisciplinary studies to consider the predictive capacities of social media and air pollution, its use as both lever and indicator of public support for air quality legislation and clean-air transitions, and its ability to overcome limitations of surface monitoring stations.

Crisis, transformation, and agency: Why are people going back-to-the-land in Greece?

Transformations are fundamentally about agency: human intention, motivation, and power to influence and to resist. Most studies focus on deliberate system-level transformations, usually guided by a set of influential actors. However, system-level transformations may also occur as the result of the cascading effects of multiple individual transformations in response or in anticipation to various crises. Little is known about how crises foster these individual transformations, and how these may relate to different types of system-level change. This article fills this gap by looking at how crisis fosters two different types of agencies—internal and external—and how these link to individual transformations in the case of Greece’s back-to-the-land movement whereby urbanites sought to reconnect with land-based livelihoods during the economic crisis (2008 onwards). The article draws on the qualitative analysis of 76 interviews of back-to-the-landers to further understand why people are going back-to-the-land (their motivations), how these relate to the concept of agency and individual transformation, and what implications might there be for system-level social-ecological transformations. This article makes three key points. First, crises create different opportunity contexts that may lead to rapid changes in what is valued in the broader social discourse. While social values and discourses are usually considered to be “deep levers” and slow to change, we found that they can rapidly shift in times of crises, challenging notions of the role of fast vs. slow variables in system transformations. Second, agency is needed to respond to crises but is also further catalyzed and enhanced through crisis; activating one’s internal agency leads to personal transformations as well as collective transformations (linked to external agency), which are mutually co-constitutive. And third, systemic-level transformation emerges through multiple pathways including through the aggregation of multiple individual transformations that may lead to emergent system-level changes.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-021-01043-5.

The spectre of the tranny: pedagogical (im)possibilities

ABSTRACT Transfemininity marks a site of social upheaval, an encounter that sparks discord. Transfemininity is always otherworldly, posing trans girls and women as figures sought out for capture and eradication. In this manuscript, I elucidate the affective contours of what I describe as the spectre of the tranny, which is a technology of capture and dispossession that seeks to confirm the killability of trans women. Mirroring broader social discourses about transfemininity and trans women, the spectre of the tranny haunts the institution of higher education, shaping pedagogical realities for trans women. In this manuscript, I attend to how the spectre of the tranny attenuates pedagogical (im)possibilities for trans women faculty, particularly those who are pre-tenure and/or in contingent roles. Additionally, I gesture towards how trans(girl) sociality may provide a significant site of momentary resistance from the spectre’s haunting absent-presence.

"I Was Raised in Addiction": Constructions of the Self and the Other in Discourses of Addiction and Recovery.

The aim of this article is to address how conceptualizations of addiction shape the lived experiences of people who use drugs (PWUDs) during the current opioid epidemic. Using a discourse analytic approach, we examine interview transcripts from 27 PWUDs in rural Appalachian Ohio. We investigate the ways in which participants talk about their substance use, what these linguistic choices reveal about their conceptions of self and other PWUDs, and how participants’ discursive caches might be constrained by or defined within broader social discourses. We highlight three subject positions enacted by participants during the interviews: addict as victim of circumstance, addict as good Samaritan, and addict as motivated for change. We argue participants leverage these positions to contrast themselves with a reified addict-other whose identity carries socially ascribed characteristics of being blameworthy, immoral, callous, and complicit. We implicate these processes in the perpetuation of intragroup stigma and discuss implications for intervention.

(Trans)gendering public toilets: Queering toilet humour in South Park’s ‘The Cissy’

Abstract This article reads South Park’s episode ‘The Cissy’, which aired in 2014, to consider broader social discourse about gendered public toilet segregation in America. A resurgent interest in policing the borders of public toilets has led to the development of ‘bathroom bill’ legislation in some states. Given the unique challenges that this causes for elementary schools, South Park’s take on the practice of gendered toileting is deemed a relevant text. This article argues that ‘The Cissy’ queers the animation series’ own framework of toilet humour by using the toilet and its boundaries as a vehicle through which to explicate a position of transgender rights.

Professions in periods of social change: the case of architectural discourse and design

ABSTRACTThis article examines how professions behave in periods of social change. The article considers whether professions take positions vis-à-vis broader social discourse, and explores the relationship between the professions’ positions and those of the government. The article examines these questions through the case of the Israeli architectural profession’s behavior after the 1967 war in both the newly occupied territories, over which Israeli control is under dispute among Israeli Jews, as well as the pre-1967 areas, in which Israeli sovereignty enjoys a consensus among Israeli Jews. The article traces both design and construction activities, as well as the discourse that followed in their wake. The article’s conclusion is that changes in professional discourse are a way to understand the profession’s position regarding a given set of social changes. We argue that the transition from an inward-facing professional discourse to an outward-facing professional discourse that addresses the larger society is both an indication of that profession’s condition as well as the condition of the social group to which it belongs.

Ethnic minority students from South Asia in Hong Kong: language ideologies and discursive identity construction

This article explores how ethnic minority students in Hong Kong secondary schools discursively construct their identities in relation to culture, heritage, and social discourse. It finds that the ethnic minority students negotiate their identities within multiple positioning from parents, school, and the broader social discourse on minority languages and cultures. It also finds that they construct contradictory language ideologies when attempting to legitimate their heritage languages and to illegitimate the status of Chinese in the social context. The findings indicate that the participants tend to establish an essentialized cultural difference between their heritage culture and host culture. It argues that fixed and stereotyped views towards language practices and culture may lead to antagonistic relations between the ethnic minority students and locals, and become obstacles to their socialization and integration into the mainstream community. The implications for establishing a flexible and relational view on cultural differences and language use are explored.

"Albańska Golgota" - exodus Serbów na Korfu w czasie I wojny światowej w dyskursie publicznym międzywojennej Jugosławii

Both the Balkan Wars and World War I, and particularly the great migration of the Serbian army during the retreat to the Corfu island, which imprinted in the collective memory as the Albanian Golgotha, were among the most important reference points in the public discourse of interwar Yugoslavia. Official government circles tried to present them as the cornerstones for the building of a unified state of the Southern Slavs. The authorities supported all the initiatives which were commemorating those events. King Alexander Karađorđevic was one of the most active in this field, he repeatedly personally graced the celebration of all events and battles or honoured their heroes. However, it should be noted that the Albanian Golgotha was such an important point of reference in the public discourse of interwar Yugoslavia not only because it became a kind of an instrument in the hands of politicians, especially the king, but also – and perhaps primarily – because it grew it roots in the broader social discourse, not only in politics but also in the media and culture – literature or the arts. It is also worth mentioning that the memory of these events was not a homogeneous one. For obvious reasons, it were the Serbs, who excelled in the worship of the Serbian soldiers, who sacrificed their blood for building a common Yugoslav state. While the attitude of Croats and Slovenes was not so clear. Therefore the cult of the Serbian army required an appropriate action from the state. One of the actions was a way of presenting these events in the daily press. The main aim of the author is to show how the cult of the sacrifice of the Serbian soldiers and civilians during World War I, and especially the mythologized Albanian Golgotha, was created and became one of the pillars on which authorities tried to build a Yugoslav identity and the prestige of the Karađorđevic dynasty in the interwar period. A special attention is paid to the way of describing those events in the “Politika” daily, the most read and influential journal of interwar Yugoslavi

Internationally Educated Mathematics Teacher Candidates

This paper addresses the issues noted among diverse student teacher population at one Canadian university. In her previous research, the author found three main concerns expressed by the internationally educated teacher candidates, namely the communication concern (e.g., use of grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, accent, etc.), concern for power and authority in the classroom, and the socio-cultural acceptance concern. This study builds on the previous results and addresses the experiences of mathematics IETCs, in an attempt to find how the concerns theory plays out when the IETCs use language to navigate practice teaching in Canadian schools, what kind of discourse of power they see in the cross-cultural encounters, and how they use mathematics discourse to counteract the broader social discourses.

Improving Upon Nature: The Rhetorical Ecology of Chemical Language, Reproductive Endocrinology, and the Medicalization of Infertility

Chemical theories of human fertility and reproduction first became prevalent in both technical and mainstream media outlets beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, and they have remained prevalent to this day. In this essay, I analyze a selection of primary sources from this era that defined human fertility as a chemically induced process, rather than, for instance, a characteristic related to the conservation of nervous energy or to moral physiology. The resulting rhetorical history demonstrates the ways in which this chemical rhetoric was appropriated to re-envision sex, gender, and reproductive health in light of appeals to biochemical variability, artificiality, and technical expertise. Tracing these appeals sheds light on the rhetorical ecology that supported the widespread medicalization of (in)fertility and demonstrates how public vocabularies of science and medicine are constituted as they move across and interact with broader social discourses.

Objects of pleasure: Epistephilia and the sex worker in Rithy Panh’s Le Papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise

Prostitution in contemporary Cambodia is historically linked to the violence of the Khmer Rouge regime and the degradation of Cambodian society. And yet, while other attempts at official reconciliation have been made, prostitution remains largely shrouded in silence. Rithy Panh’s 2007 documentary, Le Papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise, counters this silence by focusing on a group of prostitutes in Phnom Penh, seeking not only to give them voice, but to contribute to the healing of the Cambodian people. However, in making the prostitutes the subject of their own intimate discourse rather than the object of a broader social discourse, Panh’s film fails to satisfy the viewer’s expectations – expectations that are attendant on the documentary genre and bound to epistephilic desires and the pleasures of non-fiction. In humanising its subjects, Panh’s film paradoxically defamiliarises the film’s subject matter, in a Brechtian sense, interrupting the process through which the viewer projects his moralising pity or righteous indignation.

Social behavior in the "Age of Empathy"?-A social scientist's perspective on current trends in the behavioral sciences.

Recently, several behavioral sciences became increasingly interested in investigating biological and evolutionary foundations of (human) social behavior. In this light, prosocial behavior is seen as a core element of human nature. A central role within this perspective plays the “social brain” that is not only able to communicate with the environment but rather to interact directly with other brains via neuronal mind reading capacities such as empathy. From the perspective of a sociologist, this paper investigates what “social” means in contemporary behavioral and particularly brain sciences. It will be discussed what “social” means in the light of social neuroscience and a glance into the history of social psychology and the brain sciences will show that two thought traditions come together in social neuroscience, combining an individualistic and an evolutionary notion of the “social.” The paper concludes by situating current research on prosocial behavior in broader social discourses about sociality and society, suggesting that to naturalize prosocial aspects in human life is a current trend in today's behavioral sciences and beyond.

Denial and Responsibility

The dominant theories of responsibility in contemporary criminal law scholarship argue or assume that individuals or, more rarely, groups are responsible for criminal acts or omissions which engage their capacities for rational deliberation. Whether based on choice, opportunity or character, these agency-based theories typically attach importance to attitudes or states of mind such as knowledge, intention and recklessness, with dispositions such as carelessness or indifference featuring as secondary bases for the attribution of responsibility. This paper reflects on the implications of Stanley Cohen’s monograph States of Denial for our practices of attributing criminal responsibility. To what extent does, and should, criminal law hold us responsible for taking risks we are unaware of, or for engaging in conduct the harmful or wrongful nature of which we are not conscious, where that lack of consciousness or awareness is due to ‘states of denial?’ Cohen’s arguments, it is suggested, constitute a useful starting point to begin to think about the scope – and limits – of human responsibility, and about the relationship between the variegated understandings of responsibility which circulate in our social world. The paper traces the variety of conceptions of responsibility circulating in not only legal and philosophical but also in broader social discourse, noting the lack of fit between certain pervasive social understandings of, or feelings about, responsibility and legal or moral conceptions. It then goes on to trace the influence of ideas of responsibility in practices of criminal exculpation and inculpation, arguing that this survey suggests that a more explicit dialogue between criminological, philosophical and legal conceptions of responsibility on the one hand and psychological/psychoanalytic and social conceptions of responsibility on the other can sharpen our appreciation of the practical imperatives of – and limits on – practices of formal ‘responsibilisation’. Such a dialogue may also illuminate the ways in which formal mechanisms of responsibility-attribution in fact draw upon certain informal understandings which they have tended not to acknowledge.

Children and media: a cultural studies approach

Ao desafiar a psicologia tradicional e a pesquisa sobre os efeitos da mídia, o texto propõe uma abordagem para estudo das correlações das crianças com a mídia, com foco na televisão, retomando a abordagem dos Estudos Culturais, embora as pesquisas do Centro de Birmingham não tenham se dedicado a essa faixa etária. O trabalho utiliza o modelo de circuito cultural, refuta a visão de significado como algo que a mídia distribui a públicos passivos e afirma que o público é ativo, mas atua sob condições que não são de sua própria escolha. No caso das crianças, suas relações com a mídia são estruturadas e restringidas por discursos e instituições sociais mais amplos, que procuram definir a infância de determinadas formas.

Comic Strips and “the Crisis”: Postcolonial Laughter and Coping With Everyday Life in Zimbabwe

In African Studies, political cartoons and comic strips have frequently been analyzed in relation to concepts of power and resistance and considered as ways in which those subject to power challenge the rulers (Mason, 2002; Mbembe, 2001; Nyamnjoh, 2009). To a certain extent, these studies have reflected the wider debate on the role of humor in the relation between rulers and ruled in the postcolony. In media and cultural studies, scholars have analyzed comics primarily as ideological texts which offer a particular framing of reality. Drawing on the Zimbabwean comic strip Chikwama, which was published in the Zimbabwean privately owned newspaper The Daily News in the early 2000s, this article argues that postcolonial laughter does not always address those in power, but humor may also point fingers at those subject to power in an attempt to make readers cope with the tragic events unfolding around them. Laughter frequently adopts a self-reflexive mode through which those subject to power mock their own powerlessness and lack of agency in the face of a system that they perceive as immutable. Furthermore, the strip Chikwama also highlights how media discourse came to reflect the way in which politics slowly invaded the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans, hereby reinforcing the importance of treating media texts as embedded in broader social discourses. The comic strip Chikwama did not only replicate the particular institutional ideology of The Daily News but also mirrored the way in which ordinary Zimbabweans negotiated the social and economic impact of the crisis on an everyday basis.

Composing the Self

ABSTRACTThe focusing of post-structuralism on broader social discourses has led to the sidelining of the ‘author’ within cultural history. This article explores authorship and subjectivity in the composition of Scottish balladry – a genre transmitted over generations and collectively composed. It argues that even within texts as seemingly socially created as ballads the voice of individual singers can be heard, highlighting their concerns and subjectivities. This article focuses on songs collected from Scottish balladists by the early nineteenth-century collector William Motherwell and discusses how gender identity was explored in ballads by singers.

Surveillance/Discipline/Resistance: Carly Fiorina under the Gaze of The Wall Street Journal

This essay examines how news discourses of former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina shaped her professional persona throughout her tenure with the company. At a time when only eight out of the Fortune 500 companies had female CEOs, she was often identified as the most powerful female CEO in the United States. This high-profile position brought with it much media attention and focus on her gender, her performance, and her “visibility.” Through a Foucauldian analysis of The Wall Street Journal, I illustrate how Fiorina's public identity was shaped and disciplined through the popular press and explore the opportunities for resisting certain subject positions. This analysis reveals the complex relationships between organizations and broader social discourses that involve gendered workplaces, glass ceilings, and even the role of the visual in organizational life.

Can we move beyond ‘Indigenous good, non-Indigenous bad’ in thinking about people and the environment?

Abstract Bucknell and Mannion (2007) commented that student responses in the 2006 VCE Outdoor and Environmental Studies (OES) exam could be boiled down to a pat answer of "Indigenous good, non-Indigenous bad" (p. 8). They suggest that the subject of OES is too rich for such a simple answer. This paper uses the expression of 'Indigenous good/non-Indigenous bad' as a springboard to explore some of the ways notions of the environment, race and ethnicity intersect and how this might lead to an exam question being answered in such a uniform and simplistic way by some students. The aim of this paper is to highlight some of the productive tensions of environment, race and ethnicity as a strategy for richer and more complex debates around peoples' interactions with the environment. Introduction The suggestion that the answer to a question about the historical relationships between people and the environment can be reduced to Indigenous good/ non-Indigenous bad raises some questions about what is occurring around the Victorian Outdoor and Environmental Studies (OES) curriculum to enable such a pat answer. There is a need for caution when using students' exam responses to make inferences about curriculum and the way it is taught. However, in this paper I use the OES curriculum as a context to examine some of the broader social processes at work that may be informing what Bucknell & Mannion (2007) perceive to be such a uniformly reductionist response of Indigenous good/non-Indigenous bad. Curriculum does not stand alone; rather it is "shaped by and reflects the content and organisation of society, including the distribution and relationships of power" (Reid, 2004, p. 59). As such, curriculum documents are a rich site to explore the content and organisation of society. I would suggest that the OES curriculum is not unique in producing a 'pat' response of Indigenous good/non-Indigenous bad, but rather, this response reflects broader social discourses. The intent of this paper is to explore the content and organisation of society through the OES curriculum, rather than a critique of this curriculum area as such. This paper starts with a brief description of the OES curriculum to provide a context through which to examine the ways in which race, ethnicity and environment intersect. This is further located in the outdoor and environmental education literature. Then I turn to a discussion on some of the ways in which race and environment are written about. I return to the curriculum documents and look how the terms Indigenous and Australians are portrayed in this curriculum area via the text book that supports it. The paper finishes with a discussion foregrounding whiteness as a strategy to engage with questions of race, ethnicity and environment. Before proceeding, it is important to point out that this paper is written from the perspective of a white educator who is grappling with how to meaningfully engage with questions concerned with relationships with the natural environment. These questions have come into focus more sharply since moving from New Zealand to Australia in 2005 as I try to make sense of new landscapes and new curricula. The 'we' I refer to in the paper's title and in the text is to non-Indigenous people given that, as I argue in the paper, stories around race usually serve the needs of non-Indigenous people. Outdoor and Environmental Studies The Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) refers to the final two years of secondary schooling in Victoria. The rationale for Outdoor Environmental Studies (OES) is as follows: Outdoor and Environmental Studies is a study of the ways humans interact with and relate to natural environments. Natural environments are understood to include environments that have minimum influence from humans, but they may also include environments that have been subject to human intervention. Ultimately, the study is directed towards enabling students to make critically informed comment on questions of environmental sustainability and to understand the importance of environmental health, particularly in local contexts. …