What can feminist relational discourse analysis offer the field of drug policy?

Since 2015 and its adoption by the United Nations (UN), the sustainable development goals (SDGs) program and its 17 SDGs have been a source of inspiration for numerous sectors, in order to reach the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. In sectors as diverse as industry, human rights, ecology, or education, several institutions, organizations, and stakeholders have used the opportunity offered by the SDGs to make sustainable choices or apply specific policies. Yet it is also true that the sheer application of the SDGs have triggered grounded criticism, insofar as it offered readymade templates to reproduce inequalities or foster wrong decisions. In this sense, the 2030 agenda has raised some concern regarding a new form of colonialism it seems to rely on, its permanent links to an economy of growth and non-decent work, or the pervasive impacts on education and social inequalities. Such critical points have motivated scholars to work on a reinterpreted application of the SDGs, underline the positive evolution of the SDGs in comparison to the millenium development goals, and call for an adaptation of the SDGs regarding climate change and planetary limits. As a linguist, my approach regarding the 17 SDGs is rooted in systemic discourse analysis-an applied discourse study that simultaneously draws on critical discourse analysis, corpus studies and lexicometric analysis, which I will define later in the present chapter. My goal is to analyze every official text published in order to present and encourage the application of each of the 17 SDGs, thus building a corpus by extracting texts from official sources published on the Internet website of the UN, dedicated to the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. In this sense, a link is made between discourse structures, social structures, and social representations.

Emergent possibilities: A sociotechnical approach to generative AI in discourse analysis

This study Research This study analyzes the social criticism discourse presented by female comedians in the Adu Cuanda x TAYTB Women Warriors program on OCBC YouTube, placing digital media as a space for women's advocacy and empowerment. Based on Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity and Rodney H. Jones et al.'s analysis of digital discourse, this study highlights aspects of text, context, interaction, and power relations and ideology. The results show that the comedians raise issues of gender, culture, family, economics, politics, morals, and religion, including stereotypes, objectification, subordination, double burdens, socio-economic inequality, and religious and mental health stigma. These findings confirm that stand-up comedy functions as a medium for social criticism and empowerment, while YouTube serves as an inclusive digital space for the struggle for gender equality.

Older adults' experiences of primary care are shaped not only by service capacity but by the language and routines through which access and care are organised. Using a qualitative Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) approach informed by the bioethics of vulnerability, we analysed interviews and focus groups with 12 community-dwelling older adults living alone in southern Spain. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) linked micro-level talk to meso-level scripts and macro-rationales. Participants portrayed appointment systems and digital channels as gatekeeping devices that shifted agency to family 'brokers', with telephone and app-based booking often producing situational-or, after repeated failures, pathogenic-vulnerability. In consultations, haste, technical jargon and the 'doctor-patient-computer' triad curtailed understanding; age-based commonplaces (e.g., 'what do you expect at your age') legitimised truncated responses; discontinuity with physicians contrasted with nurse-led clarity and vigilance. Emotional sequelae included strategic silence and reduced help-seeking. We argue that vulnerability here is produced rather than intrinsic and can be mitigated via human-assisted booking parity, plain-language and teach-back as safety practices, continuity-by-design, and explicit de-ageing of triage and policy scripts. Communicative justice emerges as a core condition for equitable care in later life.

Representing animals in ecological crises: A corpus-based ecological discourse analysis of 环球时报 (Global Times)

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is widely presented as an objective psychiatric diagnosis describing emotional and relational distress. However, feminist, decolonial, neurodiversity and lived experience-led scholarship demonstrates that BPD emerged within colonial, cisheteronormative, misogynist and neuronormative epistemologies that moralise distress and regulate identity, self-expression and access to care. This paper critically examines BPD as a diagnostic construct and governance technology that produces iatrogenic harm through epistemic injustice, structural exclusion and moralised interpretations of need. It explores how the diagnosis discredits lived experience knowledge, justifies care withdrawal and obscures sensory, cultural and structural determinants of distress and considers the implications for mental health nursing practice. A critical discourse analysis was conducted across psychiatric literature, policy documents, historical diagnostic texts and lived experience scholarship, treating psychiatric language and categorisation as technologies of power shaping credibility and clinical response. The analysis shows that BPD operates less as a clinical description than as a regulatory framework maintained through gendered, colonial and cisheteronormative norms. Dominant narratives of dependence, attachment theory and emotional expression obscure trauma, sensory differences and structural violence, while legitimising coercive and exclusionary practices. Mental health nurses are positioned at the frontline of enacting these logics, often experiencing moral distress. The BPD diagnosis lacks epistemic, cultural and ethical legitimacy. Its continued use undermines therapeutic safety and trust. A harm reduction transition away from the BPD construct is required, prioritising relational safety, sensory-informed and culturally responsive care, epistemic humility and lived experience leadership.

The revision of the 2025 TNI Law raises concerns about expanding military authority into civilian domains and weakening civilian supremacy. The Akbar Faizal Uncensored podcast serves as a discursive arena for public criticism of these developments. This study employs Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis covering text, social cognition, and social context using document study and note-taking techniques. The discourse centers on the theme “The TNI Law for Generals,” supported by diction, argumentation, and rhetorical strategies. Informants’ social cognition reflects a pro-democracy perspective, while the social context underscores the role of digital media in facilitating state critique. Findings reveal risks of strengthening OMSP, reviving ABRI’s dual function, and restricting civilian space. The analysis highlights the need for a democratic reassessment of the 2025 TNI Law. Academically, the study enriches CDA scholarship in the digital era; practically, it informs policy advocacy and democracy literacy.

During the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937-1945), China faced severe public health crises amid military and political upheaval, making hygiene and epidemic prevention critical to safeguarding public health and national survival. While the Communist Party of China (CPC) newspapers' role in wartime political culture is recognized, systematic research on how their hygiene discourse shaped national identity is scarce. This study adopted qualitative discourse analysis of 586 hygiene-related reports from New China Daily (1937-1941) and Liberation Daily (1941-1945), sourced from databases such as the National Newspaper Index, to explore their identity-construction mechanisms. It found that the newspapers adopted three interrelated strategies: popularizing scientific hygiene knowledge to reshape public perceptions, politicizing health campaigns to turn private practices into patriotic obligations, and embedding hygiene into daily life via education and institutions to consolidate collective consciousness. These narratives not only mobilized public support for the war but also localized Foucault's biopolitics and Douglas's purity and danger theory, redefining hygiene as a patriotic duty and collective resistance, illustrating how public health discourse shapes collective identity and drives public health practice in crises and broadening Western theories' applicability in the Chinese context.

Source-based writing is an important yet under-researched aspect of English-medium instruction (EMI) and English as a foreign language (EFL). Students often struggle to write reports that demonstrate lexico-grammatical variety, cohesion, and coherent paraphrasing. This study investigated how student reports manifest the relationships among lexical control, structural clarity, and genre awareness, both intentionally and unintentionally. The data consist of 35 student reports on a published article, along with surveys and reflections. A genre-informed analysis was conducted, and quantitative findings were triangulated with qualitative data from student insights and textual excerpts. Findings indicate partially developed genre awareness and lexical and sentence clarity, but persistent difficulty with paraphrasing, transitions, and argument independence. Students were confident repurposing ideas from the source text but found it challenging to integrate them cohesively into their own arguments. Lexical precision and cohesive progression were influential factors. The study demonstrates that genre awareness enhances structural competence, skill, and coherence without replacing them. It also highlights students’ areas of difficulty and confidence. Recommendations for genre-informed pedagogical practices that focus on lexical sophistication, argument progression, and source-based integration are offered to help students move from reproduction to argumentation

ABSTRACT This study employed Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to investigate Othering and Framing as linguistic strategies deployed in President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s 31 July 2023 State of the Nation Address. Situated in the domain of political rhetoric, the research addressed how dominant political actors discursively legitimise high-stakes policies and socially disruptive programmes by constructing an ideological scapegoat. The sociocognitive models of van Dijk and the three-dimensional approach of Fairclough are the frameworks used to examine how the regime utilised language to constitute a strict binary opposition: the virtuous, suffering Self (Government/Citizenry) versus the avaricious, anti-state Other (Smugglers/Cabals). The focus was placed on strategic lexicalisation (naming/labelling) and pronominalisation. It hypothesised that President Tinubu strategically framed the subsidy removal not as a painful structural adjustment, but as a moral and necessary crusade against a powerful, illicit elite. The findings demonstrated that this discursive tactic served to effectively divert public scrutiny from systemic economic flaws and simultaneously consolidate executive power by forging a unified nationalist alignment with the populace. This study concluded that the communicative success of this policy is inextricably tied to the potent linguistic construction of a visible enemy, reinforcing the profound ideological function of political discourse in postcolonial state.

ABSTRACT This article critically examines how the concepts of resilience and cohesion are mobilised in the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) of Sweden and Italy, drafted in response to the Covid-19 crisis. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, we explore how these terms – prominent in EU recovery discourse – function not simply as policy objectives but as ideologically flexible signifiers that accommodate divergent national contexts while sustaining a shared European framework. In its NRRP, Italy embeds cohesion within a moral narrative of national rehabilitation, linking it to the historical North–South divide and framing resilience as dependent upon structural reform and solidarity. Sweden, by contrast, employs both terms in a technocratic manner, presenting them as instruments of governance optimisation. Yet at the ideological level, both converge in depoliticising recovery, framing inequality as a technical obstacle rather than a socio-political issue, and legitimising reform agendas aligned with EU priorities. We conclude that the power of resilience and cohesion lies in their ambiguity: they reconcile neoliberal imperatives with social rhetoric, projecting consensus while masking structural tensions in national and EU governance.

Abstract Questions remain about what professional vision means within mathematics education and the best ways to study it. Epistemic network analysis is a theoretically aligned quantitative ethnography method for discourse modeling that operationalizes cognitive connections, statistically validates patterns, and allows for nuanced discourse analysis, thus offering a socially organized framework for examining PMTs’ growth into teaching. This study explores whether the novel application of epistemic network analysis is a productive method to analyze naturalistic data generated from preservice mathematics teachers’ (PMTs’) weekly field observation reflections for their development of professional vision over time, and if so, what insights are afforded by this strategy. Findings revealed qualitative and quantitative empirical evidence that the PMTs made substantially different connection patterns in their reflections between key instructional aspects over time. The analysis also produced network graph visualizations that highlighted salient changes in PMTs’ discourse data, both at the group and individual levels. Using epistemic netwrok analysis in this study was generative, producing empirical insights about the learning of the individual PMT alongside the learning of the group, validation of qualitative claims, and theoretical saturation to make qualitative studies more reliable and realistic modeling of discourse connections.

A critical discourse analysis of the problem-oriented medical record.

ABSTRACT In 2015, the Chinese government launched the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA) initiative to integrate nine mainland cities with the two Special Administrative Regions. The term ‘GBA’, however, only entered everyday discourse after the reality television show Call Me by Fire featured five Hong Kong contestants who dubbed themselves the ‘GBA brothers’. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of social-media posts, comments, and platform circulation following the programme’s broadcast, this article traces how ‘GBA’ was popularised, reinterpreted, and reworked in everyday audience discourse. I argue that the ‘GBA brothers’ exemplify a platformised mode of soft propaganda, in which state-influenced broadcasters deploy entertainment to advance political agendas while relying on media enterprises, government-affiliated ‘mouthpiece’ accounts, and ordinary users to amplify an entertaining yet ideologically charged discourse. While this strategy boosted the visibility of the term, it also backfired due to the endogenous dynamics of popular culture: television audiences interpreted the GBA brothers as representing and valorising a resilient Hong Kong identity rather than a newly minted ‘GBA identity’. By foregrounding audience reception, this article demonstrates the structural limits of entertaining soft propaganda and shows how popular culture simultaneously enables and unsettles state-led projects of regional identity formation.

ABSTRACT This paper presents findings from a critical discourse analysis of 10 English Language Education (ELE) policy documents published in China after 1978. Using the Text as a Critical Object (TACO) framework, the study examines how neoliberal principles are gradually embedded in ELE policies and how they contribute to the construction of students as neoliberal subjects. The analysis of the policy documents identifies two major themes. The first theme, the instrumentalisation of English, highlights the contradiction between treating English as a tool for competitiveness in the neoliberal market and the need to construct socialist collective ideas. The second theme addresses the transition from ideological education to ‘humanity’ in ELE, showing how policies strategically use the collective ideas to integrate personal development through learning English with national neoliberal goals. Based on these findings, this paper argues that ELE policies in China discursively construct students as neoliberal subjects who are expected to balance market-oriented skills with nationalist ideals. This reveals how ELE policies legitimise market-oriented objectives with nationalism, providing implications for understanding how neoliberalism governs individuals through educational policies. This study contributes to the broader debates on how neoliberalism shapes and manages individual behaviour with market-oriented values in the field of education globally.

ABSTRACT Contemporary scholarship on Russian war-induced migration often identifies migrants as middle class, marked by higher education, civic engagement, and modern liberal values – seen as signs of political agency and democratic potential. This article challenges that view through discourse analysis of interviews with Russian migrants, embedding a relational class subjectivity framework within a lens informed by Foucault’s biopolitics and Ong’s concept of flexible citizenship. The findings suggest that under Russia’s authoritarian neoliberal order, class distinctions are articulated through moralized and depoliticized differentiation. The middle class is symbolically reproduced via moral and cultural distancing from a perceived civilizational ‘Other’. Viewed through processes of internal orientalization aligned with global liberal norms, this dynamic constructs migrants as an imagined community detached from national belonging. These dynamics, shaped by the Soviet legacy and neoliberal biopolitical integration into global regimes, reflect broader post-socialist identity patterns and illuminate limits on middle-class political agency and democratic subjectivity.

The world faces overlapping crises of global scale and consequence. Given limited attention and capacity, which crises garner attention and framing as important? Which are neglected in ways reflective of broader, systemic concerns that challenge established institutional arrangements? Here, we place gender inequality, a key topic raised by Japanese governmental and non-governmental organizations, in conversation with national level open-response survey data from over 30,000 Japanese participants, collected in March 2020. Using a combination of automated text analysis, manual keyword curation, and discourse analysis, we reveal how expressions of abiding social concern are articulated throughout Japan. We found that the most frequent issue raised was shōshi kōreika (low birth rate, aging population), while phrases related to ‘gender inequality’ were sparse. A subsequent discourse analysis of the open-ended survey responses revealed distress and broader anxiety around gender disparities folded into the phrase shōshi kōreika. We conclude, then, that shōshi kōreika operates as a macro-level ‘idiom of distress,’ a shorthand capturing a dissatisfaction with gender inequality. The significance of this is twofold: (1) it offers insight into how collective concerns are expressed or obscured within dominant narratives of crisis; and (2) it suggests the absence of a national level of concern for gender inequality that is nevertheless complexly embedded in many aspects of daily life.

ABSTRACT This study examines how Greek secondary school students construct the role of special education teachers (SETs) within the context of inclusive education. Fifteen students from mainstream secondary schools participated (seven assessed as having special educational needs [SEN] and receiving support, and eight peers without SEN support). Data were generated through in-depth semi-structured interviews, complemented by a two-year researcher journal. Analysis drew on reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006) alongside Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough 2013) to explore students’ meaning-making and the institutional conditions shaping these accounts. Findings indicate that students constructed SETs as sources of care and emotional support, as agents of regulation and normalisation, as largely invisible actors within the school, and as figures on whom some students became dependent. These constructions illuminate tensions within inclusive schooling, where support may simultaneously enable participation and reproduce forms of control.

The manifestations of climate change take a multitude of forms in different regional contexts. For a large part of the world, it goes beyond the extreme weather events and affects their lives to the core, leading to social, economic, and cultural conflicts. The present research studies the representation of effects of climate change in the context of the Indian subcontinent, as discussed on a podcast named ‘Climate Brides’. Starting its inquiry from the issue of ‘marriages of survival’ done to cope with climate change, the podcast explores the intersectional nature of climate change. This study uses Thematic Analysis combined with Discourse Analysis to examine the portrayal of climate change and its relationship with other issues like gender, ethnicity, slow violence, and human dignity. The discourse here, however, transcends the conflict-centric portrayal of the climate crisis and also discusses possible ways to handle it. By doing this, the podcast aligns itself well with the solutions journalism framework. The article not only makes a contribution to the scarcely studied media portrayal of climate change in the Global South but also advocates for an intersectional framing of the climate crisis, necessary to foster climate justice.