Defensive Discourse Research Articles

Da and its mothers of the martyred: meaning and contest in an Iranian war memoir

ABSTRACT Zahra Husayni’s war memoir Da (2008) is widely recognized as one of the most successful productions of Hawzah-yi Hunari’s Holy Defence oral history project. Focusing on this work and by using a combination of paratextual analysis and close reading, the present article explores the dynamics of meaning-making as a contested phenomenon within the propagandist messaging of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The analysis hinges on the fact that despite the official promotion of this memoir as a tribute to the mothers of martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War, the narratives of these mothers are surprisingly marginalized within the text. Approaching the Holy Defence discourse as a Lyotardian grand narrative, this article raises the question whether in light of this discrepancy, a counter-discursive reading of Da is possible. Exploring this question provides insight into the construction and propagation of meaning in the Holy Defence war memoirs industry in Iran.

Imagining the future – rejecting the present: Future thought and defensive discourse strategies in Russian society during wartime

Abstract For many Russians, the Russia–Ukraine war became a starting point for rethinking their identity. And thinking about their personal and national future played a significant role in this process. This article is based on the analysis of the interviews I collected during the first year of the war. It examines how imagining the future activates a variety of defense mechanisms, which can be situated in four unique, yet not mutually exclusive, defensive discourse strategies. The primary focus is the connections among future thinking, agency, defensiveness, and identity. The whole spectrum of different and, in some cases, opposite visions of the future and the fact that the majority of respondents used more than one defensive discourse strategies can be a sign of a significant fragmentation – on individual and collective levels. This fragmentation is almost invisible if we consider the public opinion polling or Putin's approval rating. This paper gives crucial insights into what remains hidden in the statistics and presents a more complex picture of Russian society in a time of war.

Discourses of middle managers' cross-boundary collaboration in health and social care

PurposeIn the implementation of integrated care, the role of managers is important and their mutual collaboration should be addressed more visibly. The purpose of this study was to investigate how cross-boundary collaboration is constructed in the discourse of middle-level managers in health and social care.Design/methodology/approachThe study was based on a discursive approach. Group discussions with three groups of Finnish middle managers (n = 39) were analyzed using discourse analysis.FindingsFive ways of talking about cross-boundary collaboration were identified, labeled “ideal”, “structure”, “defence”, “money” and “support” discourses. In the ideal discourse, cross-boundary collaboration appeared as a “good thing” and is self-evident. Structural discourse defined managers as passive actors in self-sustaining entities. Defensive discourse highlighted the problems of cross-boundary collaboration and the hierarchy within the health and social sectors. Financial discourse constituted the ultimate obstacle to successful cross-boundary collaboration, and both strengthened and explained defensive discourse. Supportive discourse portrayed other managers as partners and as an important resource.Research limitations/implicationsCross-boundary collaboration can be experienced as a resource, helping managers cope with their workload. However, identification of and continuous attention to challenges at macro, meso and micro levels of integrated care is crucial for successful collaboration. Thus, critical discussion of collaboration needs to be given space.Originality/valueThe study design and discursive approach highlights the power of language and give voice to middle managers who are key actors when implementing integrated care.

Heroines in Covid-19 times: visibility of nursing in the pandemic.

To analyze the visibility of Nursing workers through images, which circulated in the media during the Covid-19 pandemic. Cultural analysis that aims to articulate the image and its effects with theories from authors in the field of Cultural Studies. Six figures were selected in which nurses are portrayed as heroines to fight Covid-19 and are promoted from supporting actor to main character, combining the care strategy with the scientific discourse of defense of social isolation. The images portray them as women who face labor suffering from strenuous work and prolonged use of personal protective equipment. The pandemic, has highlighted speeches related to health work, where we see images of nurses as heroines who organize the chaos and bring order to the "frontline", making the idealization of Nursing visible.

Lacan in the US cyber defence: Between public discourse and transgressive practice

AbstractEdward Snowden exposed the discrepancy between the official US defence discourse of liberal values in cyberspace and secret surveillance and cyber exploitation practices. Situated in the critical literature on security and surveillance, the article proposes that more attention needs to be paid to the constitutive role of transgressive practices for security communities. The article introduces a Lacanian strategy for studying transgression in the US cyber defence community. Through this strategy, a transgressive other – in this case, China in cyberspace – enters the fantasy of the US cyber defence community as the symptom that conceals more fundamental tensions in the US cyber defence. But the community's representation of China in cyberspace represents more than that; China is a fantasmatic object that structures and gives content to a desire for transgressing the official ideals of the US cyber defence. This is why the excessive cyber practices that China is criticised for conducting mirror the secret, disavowed transgressions of the US cyber defence. Transgressions, the article concludes through Lacan, provide the necessary (partial) enjoyment that sustains the US cyber defence community as a solidarity-in-guilt and the official US cyber defence discourse.

Defensive Discourse in Writing about Music

A simple conception of musical experience positions music as an active force, listeners as passive. A defensive resistance to passivity sometimes leads music theory and analysis, and other discourses about music, to divert attention from listening, understood as feminized, while working to establish powerful, active roles for composers, music, and theorists. The essay explores the effects of the active/passive opposition in writing by Eduard Hanslick, Hector Berlioz, John Rahn, Allen Forte, and Edward T. Cone. These analyses summarize fuller treatments by the author in previous essays, here drawn together to show the shared concerns of these writers. The essay concludes by offering ways to complicate or evade simple dualities of active and passive. Schlichtere Vorstellungen von musikalischer Wahrnehmung verstehen Musik als eine aktive Kraft, Zuhoren hingegen als passiv. Ein defensiver Widerstand gegen Passivitat fuhrt musiktheoretische, musikanalytische und andere Formen des Diskurses uber Musik gelegentlich vom Horen weg, welches als ›feminisiert‹ gilt, um im Gegenzug kraftvolle, aktive Profile fur Tatigkeiten in Komposition, Musik und Theorie zu finden. Dieser Aufsatz untersucht die Auswirkungen einer Opposition von ›aktiv‹ und ›passiv‹ in Texten von Eduard Hanslick, Hector Berlioz, John Rahn, Allen Forte und Edward T. Cohn. Diese Textanalysen greifen ausfuhrlichere Darstellungen des Autors aus fruheren Aufsatzen auf, die hier zusammengefuhrt werden, um eine gemeinsame Tendenz der genannten Autoren herauszuarbeiten. Der Beitrag schliest mit einem Ausblick auf komplexere Formen der Wahrnehmung jenseits von simplen Dualismen wie ›aktiv‹ und ›passiv‹.

The coalition of health entrepreneurs and their proposals for the reform of the Brazilian health system: political and programmatic setbacks (2014-2018).

With the aim of systematizing the health private sector proposals related with the reformulation of the Brazilian health system, as well as contributing to the understanding of its meaning, an essay was carried out, based in documents from the Health Coalition Institute (ICOS) published in the period from 2014 to 2018. The document content analysis was carried out guided by some concepts of Bourdieu, Coutinho and Labra. With the change in the correlation of forces resulting from the 2016 parliamentary coup, the private health sector's proposals gained visibility, which initially seemed to correspond to an update of its historical agenda, but which are progressively changing to suit the new political and economic scenario. From then on, conditions of possibility were created for the protagonism of these entrepreneurs in the field of power in relation to sectoral reform and the formulation of health policies, with consequences related to the disruption of the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS). The contradictions between the discourse of defense of SUS by the entrepreneurs, and the privatizing concrete proposals may reveal a search for the symbolic profits associated with the defense of the public interests and of the universal.

O espaço neoliberal: uma análise do discurso dos editoriais da revista Veja (1985-1989)

A revista Veja é, atualmente, um dos baluartes que perpetram o discurso de defesa das políticas neoliberais, já que defende o livre mercado, as liberdades econômicas e encolhimentos do Estado. Mas, para entender como esse discurso funciona hoje em nossa democracia, é preciso voltar ao começo da “Nova República” para perceber como a revista criou o que chamamos de “espaço neoliberal”, utilizando suas páginas para semear ideias próprias a essa política e que, de modo geral, iriam nortear as políticas nacionais na década de 1990.

Resiliens hinsides modstand og tilpasning:

Over the recent decades, the concept of resilience has spread from environmental science to a number of disciplines dealing with crisis and disaster management. From psychology, public health, and human resource management to development and security studies, resilience is replacing an earlier focus on resistance and adaptability within these fields. There exist several studies dealing with resilience discourse as a key to a diagnostic of the present. While some hail resilience as a new register of ecological resistance for social movements, other decries resilience as a discourse legitimating the neoliberal state’s abandonment of the poor to catastrophe. This article proposes a framework for reading together these highly diverging interpretations of resilience through a historicising of the concept of resilience, tracing its rise genealogically in relation to the concepts of resistance and adaptability. Through readings of authors such as Thomas Hobbes, Carl von Clausewitz, Herbert Spencer, and C.J. Holling, the article shows how these concepts were imported from scientific materialism into pragmatic and normative discourses of defence of life against shifting threats to individual and social life. The article shows how the shifting importance of the concepts of resistance, adaptability and resilience must be related to changing social-ecological problems and the forms of contestation and governance that respond to them.

Citizenship, religion, gender and the politics of belonging: a case study of white, middle-class christian men in the East Midlands, United Kingdom

Religion, and in particular Christianity, is losing ground in the UK as fewer people identify as Christian and more people report having no religion. Although religion remains influential in politics, education and welfare, the role and legitimacy of religion in the public sphere is highly contested. This context of religious and cultural change provides the background for a case study of white, middle class, Christian men in the East Midlands and how they understand and experience citizenship in everyday life. The article examines how religious faith and citizenship are linked, and whether religion provides resources or barriers to citizenship. The article argues that the interviewed men draw on both status and practice based understandings of citizenship, and on both instrumental and expressive forms of masculinity, depending on context. Notably, some of the men invoke a defensive discourse in reference to alleged threats posed to Christianity by secular forces and by Islam. The findings have larger implications for the politics of belonging in the UK and Western Europe.

Hernán Vidal y el aporte de la crítica literaria latinoamericana al proyecto de construcción y defensa de los derechos humanos

La revisión de la obra crítica y teórica que realizara el investigador y ensayista chileno Hernán Vidal (1937-2015) desde la Universidad de Minnesota sirve de punto de apoyo para explorar un proceso de ida y vuelta. Por un lado, de construcción de una hermenéutica cultural y literaria de los derechos humanos, anclando la primera en los segundos, a fin de realizar una serie de aportes desde la perspectiva de los estudios literarios y culturales latinoamericanos de orientación sociohistórica al propio discurso de promoción y defensa de los derechos humanos en América Latina.

Debates about Conflict of Interest in Medicine: Deconstructing a Divided Discourse.

The pharmaceutical industry plays an increasingly dominant role in healthcare, raising concerns about "conflicts of interest" (COI) on the part of the medical professionals who interact with the industry. However, there is considerable disagreement over the extent to which COI is a problem and how it should be managed. Participants in debates about COI have become entrenched in their views, which is both unproductive and deeply confusing for the majority of medical professionals trying to work in an increasingly commercialized environment. We used a modified meta-narrative review method to analyse debates about COI in the academic and grey literature. We found two Discourse Models: The Critical Discourse Model sees COI in health and biomedicine as a major problem that both can and should be addressed, while the Defensive Discourse Model argues that current efforts to control COIs are at best unnecessary and at worst harmful. Each model is underpinned by profoundly differing views about how society should be organized-in particular whether market forces should be encouraged or curtailed-and how the dangers associated with market forces should be managed. In order to make any headway, academics and policymakers must recognize that these debates are underpinned by profoundly differing worldviews.

Soviet Puppet Cinema of the 1930s: from Avant-Garde to Mainstream

Evaluation of Russian animated cartoons of the 1930s wasnt positive for a long time; historians of cinema, directors, artists marked this period as the era of hard times, as formalism and imitation Disney's esthetics. However the films considered in the article have played a significant role in development of world cinema. Particularly they have influenced upon moulding of the Czech, Polish and Ukrainian stop motion animation of the post-war years. Unfortunately, some works released in the Union of puppet animation at Mosfilm studios under the leadership of A.L. Ptushko have been lost, and nowadays it is impossible to establish precisely their actual released number. In the article the experimental animation films of the second half of the 1930s which have remained on film and also in the form of editorial scripts (RGALI, Mosfilm, Gosfilmofond) are being analyzed. It should be noted/ that five films of the group shot with P. Mershin's method are restored (method of time-lapse reconstruction) by N. Mayorov and V. Kotovsky (on the remained color negatives) in the 2010s. So it is possible now to estimate innovation and originality of these films, and to define a role of school of the Soviet animation in development of the world stop motion. Special attention is drawn to the socio-cultural context accentuating peculiarities of reading the films, which formed their imagery and on specific reflection of a defence discourse in the Soviet animation of 1935-41s.

A game of give and take: The introduction of multi-layer (water) safety in the Netherlands and Flanders

At the beginning of the 21st century, the Netherlands and Flanders introduced a risk-based approach to flood risk management (FRM), labelled as multi-layer (water) safety. In contrast to a flood defence approach, risk-based management stresses the need to manage both the consequences and probability of a flood. The concept has developed differently in the two countries, as we conclude from a discursive-institutionalist research perspective. The Netherlands is characterised by a high institutionalization of the traditional flood defence discourse and a more closed policy arrangement, whereas in Flanders, the flood defence discourse is less institutionalized and the arrangement is more open. In both countries we see an opening of the arrangement preceding the establishment of multi-layer (water) safety, but at the same time, actors stress different aspects of the concept in order to increase its compatibility with the existing policy arrangement. In the Netherlands, the focus is on probability management, in Flanders on consequence management. In the Netherlands, multi-layer (water) safety as a concept could be established because it stabilises the system in the short-term by reinforcing the importance of flood defence, whereas in Flanders, policymakers were receptive to the concept because it supports a shift of responsibility towards actors outside traditional water management.

Северные страны в трансатлантическом пространстве: проверка на прочность

In the Euro-Atlantic relations system (USA, NATO, EU), small Nordic countries are forced, in a conformist way, to adapt themselves to unsteady parameters of global and regional conditions. Irrespective of the Ukrainian crisis duration, they will drift together with their EU partners to a greater autonomy from the USA, not interrupting tight links with their transatlantic supervisor. It seems that the geopolitical pressure on Russia, the creation of threat to its North-West by the growing military potential is not seen very clearly. A deep transformation of relations between the USA, Europe and Russia indirectly affected the Nordic Europe. The mobilization of elites and inhabitants on the basis of defensive discourse is taking place in the Northern subregion. NATO and EU are trying to react accordingly, but still do not justify the expectations of Nordic Europeans. The new strategy accomplishing to deter Moscow’s “revisionist behavior”, but at the same time, to secure Russia's involvement in international affairs for a long-term perspective is, from viewpoint of the Nordic community, one of the priority tasks of transatlantic partners for a more balanced, stable, complex world order. The transatlantic policy of Nordic countries is changeable in a very short range of variants. In this subregion, one may see the interaction/competition between two segments of the Euro-Atlantic security: NATO (art. 5 of the Washington Treaty) and EU (Lisbon Treaty – an additional option) as an independent “power center”. The activation, especially the institutionalization of the subregional Northern defense cooperation (the report made by T. Stoltenberg on February 9, 2009; NORDEFCO; the initiative of the Ministers of Defense on April 9, 2015) may become a new strategic macro factor under conditions of the complicated interaction/ competition between two segments (NATO and EU) for the Euro-Atlantic security in the future Europe.

A América do Sul como Comunidade de Segurança: Região Autônoma e Construção de Identidade

We seek to understand how the discourse of security and regional defense is employed by the former Brazilian Minister of Defense, Celso Amorim, is his official speeches, and the main documents published by the Ministry. It is our objective to establish the connections, similarities and diferences regarding the narratives about what seeks to constructo itself as a regional identity and the threats to this entity phisically and simbolically speaking. In this sense, we first theorically conceptualize the most importante terms and discussions to be presented afterwards - especially what regards to the ontological and epistemological positioning of the theories. We briefly discuss about the security communitiees and the role of the regionalization in the construction of identities and threats, and, with all that set, seek to understand how Brazil constructs itself as an actor to what the state understand that is inside and outside.

MBAs: cinco discursos em busca de uma nova narrativa

A indústria do management evoluiu significativamente no Brasil, desde os anos 1990, disseminando ideias e modelos de gestão. O fenômeno despertou o interesse de pesquisadores, que desenvolveram estudos sobre seus "pilares": as empresas de consultoria, a mídia de negócios, os gurus de gestão e as escolas de negócios - este último, objeto de estudo neste trabalho. Nas últimas décadas, multiplicaram-se no Brasil os programas de pós-graduação em formação gerencial: os chamados MBAs. Nos Estados Unidos e na Europa, tais programas têm sido alvo de escrutínio e de estudos científicos de natureza reflexiva e crítica. No Brasil, entretanto, poucos estudos foram realizados a respeito. Este artigo almeja preencher essa lacuna. Para isso, identificamos e apresentamos os discursos mais salientes produzidos sobre tais cursos: o discurso da crítica instrumental, o discurso da defesa instrumental, o discurso crítico de emancipação e o discurso da redenção da mídia de negócios. Além disso, também apresentamos o discurso dos alunos. Para isso, realizamos uma pesquisa com alunos de três programas brasileiros e captamos suas percepções. Concluímos que MBA pode ser visto como um campo institucional aberto, no qual diferentes agentes empregam distintas estratégias discursivas, de acordo com suas perspectivas ontológicas e seus interesses. Observamos que há pouca interação ou disputa direta entre os discursos. Entretanto, podemos identificar elementos para uma renovação da "narrativa do MBA". A nova narrativa tem como personagem um indivíduo socialmente consciente e responsável, dotado de uma ambição de mudança pessoal e profissional e que aspira a uma posição sênior de liderança ou, alternativamente, o empreendedorismo. Esse indivíduo passa por experiências que unem teoria e prática, que compreendem contextos culturais diversos e o desenvolvimento de uma visão crítica sobre as organizações e a atividade gerencial.

Promiscuous phenomenology and defensive discourse analysis

Promiscuous phenomenology and defensive discourse analysis

Thinking-Aloud About Stereotypical Mainstream and Opiate-Dependent Lifestyle Images

Participants (6 male, 4 female) on a methadone maintenance program completed a Think-Aloud procedure while viewing two stereotypical picture sets depicting opiate-dependent and mainstream lifestyles. Discourse analysis indicated that participants used two different discourses: a stereotype-affirming defensive discourse, which involved affirming the negative and positive stereotypes regarding opiate-dependent and mainstream lifestyles, and a stereotype-refuting defensive discourse, which involved refuting negative opiate-dependent stereotypes while constructing mainstream lifestyles and members negatively. We argue that both discourses fit within a grander discourse concerning normalization with participants’ speech functioning to defend them from being negatively stereotyped by making them “normal” members of society.

Future-Proofing Privacy: Time for An Ethical Introspection?

-