Discourses Of Blame Research Articles

Conceptions of agency and constraint for HIV-positive patients and healthcare workers to support long-term engagement with antiretroviral therapy care in Khayelitsha, South Africa

In the context of the optimism around antiretroviral therapy (ART) as prevention of HIV/AIDS, addressing the barriers to long-term ART adherence is critical. This is particularly important given the tendency to individualise or use a blame discourse when exploring why HIV-infected patients “fail” to adequately adhere to ART, and not sufficiently exploring contextual reasons for poor adherence that may require varying solutions. This study took place at three clinics and one hospital in Khayelitsha, South Africa, to document the contextual factors that challenged ART adherence in this community. Interviews were conducted with 20 HIV-infected patients who had defaulted on their ART and were subsequently admitted to Khayelitsha hospital for clinical complications, and 9 ART service providers including doctors, nurses and HIV counsellors. Interviews assessed the reasons patients defaulted on ART and explored ways this could be prevented. Data from both groups were analysed collectively using thematic analysis. While the interviews revealed a landscape of environmental risks threatening adherence to ART, all patients managed to overcome the identified barriers at some point in their treatment phase, indicating the fluidity of patients’ needs and decision making. Patients reported that distrustful relationships with service providers could inhibit their understanding of ART and/or interrupt their follow-up at clinics. Patients described their rationale and agency underlying non-adherence, such as testing their bodies’ physical limits without ART medication. The study speaks to the need to appreciate contextual social and structural barriers related to ART adherence, and how these are negotiated differently by specific sub-groups, to support an appropriate response. It is imperative to not solely emphasise loss to follow-up but also assess patients’ subjective trajectory of their ART journey, decision making and agency with adhering to ART, their relations with healthcare workers, and how these dynamics are intertwined with broader constraints in health systems.

International Experience in a Non-Western Country, Teacher Habitus, and Level of Inclusion in the Classroom

One of the challenges with increasing diverse student populations in today?s classrooms is figuring out ways to address the needs of all students. This paper explores the role of the teacher and his/her dispositions in creating an inclusive learning environment. This paper, through Pierre Bourdieu?s interconnected theoretical concepts of habitus, capital, and field explores how an international experience in a non-Western country can help foster greater inclusion in a classroom setting. Autobiographical experiences of Bourdieu?s time in Algeria as well as the author?s international experiences in Iran and Barbados are presented as case studies. Overall, this paper seeks to advance the discussion on student disengagement beyond discourses of blame and towards exploring new avenues with potential for blossoming and unveiling of new understandings.

Good Guys Are Still Always in White? Positive Change and Continued Misrepresentation of Race and Crime on Local Television News

A content analysis of a random sample of Los Angeles television news programs was used to assess racial representations of perpetrators, victims, and officers. A series of comparisons were used to assess whether local news depictions differed from outside indicators of social reality. In a significant departure from prior research, they revealed that perpetration was accurately depicted on local TV news. Blacks, in particular, were accurately depicted as perpetrators, victims, and officers. However, although Latinos were accurately depicted as perpetrators, they continued to be underrepresented as victims and officers. Conversely, Whites remained significantly overrepresented as victims and officers. The implications of these findings are discussed in light of incognizant racism, ethnic blame discourse, structural limitations, and the guard dog perspective of news media.

Mothers and autism: the evolution of a discourse of blame.

Although now discredited, the idea that mothers' behavior is responsible for autism lives on in the social pressure that mothers feel to save their autistic children, at a cost to both the self-blaming parents and people with autism.

The Changing Misrepresentation of Race and Crime on Network and Cable News

Prior research found that stereotypical media content shapes the perception of racial groups and social policy. Using the UCLA Communication Studies Digital News Archive, we sampled 146 cable and network news programs aired between 2008 and 2012. Findings revealed that Blacks were actually “invisible” on network news, being underrepresented as both violent perpetrators and victims of crime. However, Whites were accurately represented as criminals. Moreover, Latinos were greatly overrepresented as undocumented immigrants while Muslims were greatly overrepresented as terrorists on network and cable news programs. The implications of these findings are contextualized using the “guard dog” media coverage theory, structural limitations/economic interest of media, ethnic blame discourse, and the community philanthropy perspective.

Internalising discourses of parenting blame: Voices from the Field

This paper investigates the intertwining of a discourse of parental blame with the legacy of institutionalised neglect and the current roll-back of state support and services in two of Ireland's most socially marginalised and economically disadvantaged communities. In the course of fieldwork conducted to explore narratives of community safety, the authors were struck by the continual, unprompted emergence of a divisive and enduring belief that community problems could be primarily traced to 'bad parents' and 'bad parenting'. This article argues/identifies that the internalisation of a powerfully evocative discourse of blame works to absolve the state of all responsibility for the conditions in which marginalised communities are forced to live; it legitimises current and future cutbacks by portraying such communities as irresponsible and as the creators of their own problems; it distorts and distracts discussion away from necessary and critical questioning of state accountability by promoting a reductive, individualised understanding of what are complex, collective responsibilities. The internalisation of discourses of culpability operates to the benefit of the state, where 'bad' parents are understood to be 'undeserving' citizens. Finally, we argue that the ability of the state to cut back social funding and to roll back on previous commitments depends, in a large part, on the willingness of the wider community to believe that responsibility for long term social and economic marginalisation and associated problems rests, not with the state, but with 'bad' and 'undeserving' citizens (Adair 2005; Edelman 1998; Lens 2002; Welsh and Parsons 2006). Promoting that willingness is achieved through continual media and public sphere portrayals of the poor, and particularly of working class parents, as dangerously and overly fertile (Tyler 2008; Wilson and Huntington 2005), as non-contributors to prosperity and as over contributors to decline (Skeggs 2005; Morris 1994; Renvall and Vehkalahti 2002; Hayward and Yar 2006: Law 2006; Levitas 2003).

Crying wolf? Biosecurity and metacommunication in the context of the 2009 swine flu pandemic

This article explores how the 2009 pandemic of swine flu (H1N1) intersected with issues of biosecurity in the context of an increasing entanglement between the spread of disease and the spread of information. Drawing on research into metacommunication, the article studies the rise of communication about ways in which swine flu was communicated, both globally and locally, during the pandemic. It examines and compares two corpora of texts, namely UK newspaper articles and blogs, written between 28 March and 11 June 2009, that is, the period from the start of the outbreak till the WHO announcement of the pandemic. Findings show that the interaction between traditional and digital media as well as the interaction between warnings about swine flu and previous warnings about other epidemics contributed to a heightened discourse of blame and counter-blame but also, more surprisingly, self-blame and reflections about the role the media in pandemic communication. The consequences of this increase in metacommunication for research into crisis communication are explored.

Another Misadventure of Economists in the Tropics? Social Diversity, Cohesion, and Economic Development

Several prominent economists have recently argued that ethnic and other forms of social diversity lead to economic failure. Apparently, serious social frictions caused by diverse preferences do not create conditions for the development of endogenous institutions that enhance good economic policies. Others, however, have shown that diversity reduces transaction costs within and between groups absent good public institutions, because of within-group social capital and ingroup policing in repeated dealings across groups. High diversity also reduces mass mobilization and forces consensus: ethnic diversity acts as a barrier against the concentration of absolute power. Using several measures of ethnic diversity, this study demonstrates that diversity and cultural difference reduce serious social frictions measured as the repression of political dissent. This study also finds that higher social diversity directly predicts higher levels of economic freedom, a proxy often used to gauge the market-friendliness of a country, the endogenous conditions often associated with economic success. The same results are true when a measure of the control of corruption is used. The results show that diversity enhances, not retards, the prospects for development and reduces social frictions. It may very well be that discourses of conflict, particularly the discourses of blame and recrimination based on ethnic ties where economic failure is apparent, is mistaken as the cause rather than the byproduct of crises, mistakenly attributed to historical conditions that have generated artificial borders. Empirically, diversity seems to foster, not displace, the preconditions for development.

Viewing Priam: Wedding Diction in Priam’s Speech-Acts in the 'Teichoscopia'

Commentators have long noted the peculiarity in the questions posed by Priam regarding the identity of the Achaean leaders in the tenth year of the Trojan War. The section known as “teichoskopia” in Iliad 3.161-244 has an idiosyncratic relationship with the narrative time of the Iliad. The entire book 3 of the Iliad has been read from many angles, emphasizing Helen’s position in epic poetry and poetics and self-referentiality of epic (e.g. Clader 1976, Bergren 1980, Pucci 1993, Worman 2001, Elmer 2005, Martin 2007). The exchange between Helen and Priam is problematic in multiple ways. Moreover, the affinities of this passage with passages from the Odyssey have presented further challenges in its interpretation. Much of the diction is typical in guest scenes (Higbie 1995, Mackie 1996, Tsagalis 2008). Other scholars have regarded the “teichoskopia” as an earlier part of Trojan war narratives (Parry 1966, Kakridis 1971, Edwards 1980, Postlethwaite 1985). Other readings put forth the cognate perspective of wooing and counter-wooing scenes in the indo-european tradition (Jamison 1994). While most studies on Iliad 3 have focused on Helen, this paper analyzes Priam’s speech act from the perspective of traditional poetics and reflections of other speech genres in the Iliad. As I argue, the topoi of traditional discourse around weddings permeate the epic fabric. Priam’s discourse exhibits elements of the tradition of praise, eikasia and makarismos that are aptly placed in the iliadic context. It is a communis opinio that performances at wedding are centered around praise for the couple. The core of the song is praise, possibly modeled on an ainos poetry that seeks to extol the beauty of the bride and the strength of the groom. The wedding theme appears not infrequently in Homeric narrative (e.g. Il. 18.490-496; Od. 4. 1-19; Od. 6 passim; Od. 15.125-127; Od. 23.129-140) but typology and forms of wedding poetry enrich the epic fabric in more subtle ways. While similar strategies have been explored in the Odyssey (Hague 1983) wedding diction in the Iliad remains largely unexplored. A detailed reading of Priam’s questions to Helen shows how he orchestrates the praise of all the Achaean leaders with regards to the size of their appearance, something that can be read against wedding song poetics (as in Sappho. fr. 111). Moreover, Priam’s address to Agamemnon’s name includes a makarismos, also typical in wedding related diction (cf. Hes. Fr. 211 M.-W). The references to Odysseus include an eikasia that likens Odysseus to a ram. While Helen initially responds to Priam using a language that exhibits the strategy of the expert lamenter in a discourse of blame and guilt, she later corresponds her answers to the speech acts of Priam and offers information on more Achaean leaders on the field of Troy (Ajax and Idomeneus). The same preoccupations with size and eikasia are present in Helen’s answers that complement Priam’s speech. This paper focuses on Priam’s speech and aims to shed more light to our understanding of interdiscursivity in epic poetry by highlighting the narrative associations that Priam’s language conveys. Priam’s language renegotiates Helen’s position in the stories around Trojan War and places it in the context of the poetic tradition around Helen’s suitors.SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHYBergren, Ann 1980. Helen's Web: Time and Tableau in the Iliad . Helios 7(1): 19-34Clader, L.L. 1976. Helen: The Evolution from Divine to Heroic in Greek Epic Diction. Leiden.Edwards, M.W. 1980. “Structure of Homeric Catalogues.” TAPA 110: 81-105.Elmer, D. 2005. “Helen Epigrammatopoios” Classical Antiquity 24.1: 1-39.Higbie, C. 1995. Heroes’ Names: Homeric Identities. New York and London.Jamison, S.W. 1994. “Draupadi on the Walls of Troy: Iliad 3 from an Indic Perspective.” Classical Antiquity 13: 5-16. Kakridis, I. 1971. Homer Revisited. Lund. Mackie, H. 1996. Talking Trojan: Speech and Community in the Iliad. London.Martin, Richard. 2007. “Keens from the Absent Chorus: Troy to Ulster.” In Lament: Studies in Ancient Mediterranean. A. Suter (ed.) Oxford: 118-138.Postlethwaite N. 1985. “The duel of Paris and Menelaos and the Teichoskopia in Iliad 3.” Anthichthon 19: 1-6.Pucci, P. 2003. “Prosopopee d’ Helene.” Le mythe d’ Helene, ed. M. Broze et al., 89-119. Brussels.Roisman, H. 2006. “Helen in the Iliad; Causa Belli and Victim of War: From Silent Weaver to Public Speaker” American Journal of Philology 127.1: 1-36Tsagalis, C. 2008. The Oral Palimpsest: Exploring Intertextuality in the Homeric Epics. Washington DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.Tsagarakis O. 1982. “The teichoskopia cannot belong in the beginning of the Trojan war.” QUCC 41 : 61-72.Worman 2001. “This Voice which is Not One: Helen’s Verbal Guises in Homeric Epic.” In Making Silence Speak: Women’s Voices in Greek Literature and Society, ed. A. Lardinois and L. McClure, 19-37. Princeton.

The power of relationships: Implications for safer and unsafe practices among injection drug users

Aims: To explore the influence of social relationships, at the interpersonal and community level, on safer and unsafe drug use practices among injection drug users (IDUs) in Nova Scotia, Canada.Method: Thirty-eight current injection drug users were recruited through two needle exchange programs. Fifteen women and 23 men participated in semi-structured interviews about their daily lives, relationships and safer/unsafe drug use and sexual practices.Findings: Most participants were well aware of the risks associated with injecting drugs and reported purposely engaging in numerous strategies to minimize those risks for themselves and others. However, several IDUs revealed that the dynamics of their relationships with other IDUs and with non-IDUs could and did lead to unsafe practices including needle sharing. Stigmatizing encounters with non-users and social exclusion from mainstream resources and structures appear to underlie and reproduce these unsafe practices.Conclusions: Within the current Canadian political context, there is a move to shift drug policies away from harm reduction toward a more enforcement-based approach. This shift will likely only exacerbate the current discourse of blame and stigma directed at injection drug users. In addition, it may serve to increase the interdependency among IDUs, and social and economic exclusion from non-IDUs.

Deforestation: constructing problems and solutions on Sierra Leone's Freetown Peninsula

This article examines the issue of deforestation on Sierra Leone's Freetown Peninsula, specifically analysing the gap that exists between the rhetoric surrounding the problem of deforestation and the subsequent policies and projects that are implemented to address it. It is argued in this paper that this gap can be better understood by examining how different actors involved in policy and projects interact over the issue of deforestation. Such an examination reveals how these actors produce discourses of blame towards poorer, politically weaker groups, which ultimately results in deforestation 'solutions' that intervene into their lives. These prescriptions of blame and subsequent solutions for deforestation are negotiated through a combination of local realities, which includes the occurrence of deforestation, and global influences such as development discourses and interventions. The analysis here reflects a political ecology framework that also draws from post-structuralist insights and reveals how underlying discourses, actions and actors across a broad political, social and economic spectrum ultimately play a role in influencing the causes, perceptions and solutions relating to deforestation.Keywords: Deforestation, Political Ecology, Freetown, Discourses, Development, Sierra Leone, Africa

'Not rocket science' or 'No silver bullet'? Media and Government Discourses about MRSA and Cleanliness

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), commonly called a superbug, has recently been a major political issue in the UK, playing a significant role in debates over health policy in the general election held in 2005. While science recognizes the lack of evidence with regards to the effectiveness of existing measures implemented to control and prevent MRSA, the UK media coverage is dominated by articles that appeal to common sense and practical experience calling for more government interventions to combat the bug. In this paper we explore how uncertainty surrounding the origin and spread of MRSA is portrayed in debates within the media and policy-circles to particular political ends. Using established techniques of discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, we examine the assumptions, judgements, and contentions that structure two discourses of MRSA: according to one discourse MRSA is ‘not rocket science’ and there are ‘simple’ ways of coping with the risk of infection, whereas according to another discourse MRSA is a more complex matter and there is ‘no silver bullet’. The analysis of different storylines through which specific ideas of ‘blame’, ‘responsibility’, and ‘urgency’ are attributed helps to explain how different ‘constructions’ of causes for the rise in MRSA emerged and led to discourses of blame and defence centred on cleanliness.

Discourses of blame: deconstructing (hetero)sexuality, peer sexual violence and residential children’s homes

ABSTRACTLittle research exists on sexuality and residential care, even less that position gender inequality as a central analytical component. This paper, based on a wider research project that focused on children’s and young people’s experiences of peer violence within residential care, seeks to help redress this disparity. The main aim of this paper is to explore how (hetero)sexuality, discourses of blame and male peer sexual violence are constructed and interrelated in residential child care. Young people’s and staff’s conceptualizations, evaluations and experiences are compared and contrasted to illuminate the range of discourses surrounding sexuality and sexual violence operating within residential settings. Findings relating to female culpability for male violence, normative male violence, female duplicity and challenges to traditional gender roles will be presented, and contextualized, in relation to previous studies. In addition, some broader implications of the research findings for residential practice are explored.

Globalizing 'Postsocialism:' Mobile Mothers and Neoliberalism on the Margins of Europe

In recent years, women's transnational labor migration from Moldova has grown exponentially and their absence from families has provoked considerable anxiety over transformations in the social order. Few scholars of postsocialist states have explored transnational labor. Those who have focus on how new economic practices such as trading are anxiety-ridden because they index transformations from socialism to "postsocialism." These scholars have not detailed nor theorized the gendered nature of migrant labor, representations of it, and states responses to it. Using ethnographic research and interviews with Gagauz Moldovan migrant women who travel to work as domestics in Turkey and their village compatriots in Moldova, this paper illustrates a discourse of blame that employs the trope of "mothers as key to the social order," one complicated by notions of socialism, sexuality, ethnicity, work, wealth, and rurality. This trope plays a key role in blaming female migrant laborers for social disorder and in migrants' own justifications for going abroad. I argue that the migrants' gendered justifications constitute a new moral economy that aligns with global and Moldovan state neoliberal rationales. Drawing on a broad feminist and anthropological literature, this article problematizes claims about "postsocialist" transnational labor experiences by specifying them in terms of other overlapping subjectivities, particularly gender. In so doing, it shifts the anthropological gaze from a narrow focus on "postsocialism" in this region to identify problems and processes of globalization that hold wider significance and questions our categorizations of states into "postsocialist," "postwelfare," "third world," "global south," and/or "postcolonial."

‘The illness is part of the person’: discourses of blame, individual responsibility and individuation at a centre for spiritual healing in the North of England

While the growth in usage and practice of varying forms of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) continues apace, social science has increasingly turned to CAM's often individualistic approach to health and illness. CAM has been perceived as both partly a cause of and a response to the well-documented ideology in modern healthcare of 'individual responsibility for health'. This occasionally manifests in a 'victim-blaming' ideology amongst both orthodox and CAM practitioners alike. These issues emerged as key themes in an ethnographic study of a Centre for spiritual healing in the North of England. By drawing upon a range of qualitative data gained through the researcher's participation at this healing centre, I argue that the healers' focus on individual responsibility for health is not so much a part of the current socio-political health ideology of 'victim-blaming', rather, it is illustrative of an important contemporary social phenomenon: the movement towards the subjectification and personalisation of public life.

Psychiatric Discourses of Woman Abuse

This article presents a qualitative investigation of how South African psychiatric services, in the course of their management and treatment of female psychiatric patients, deal with the issue of woman abuse. Discourse analysis was used to analyse the case documents of ten female psychiatric patients who were admitted to a psychiatric hospital in a poorer section of the Western Cape Province, South Africa, all of whom had a history of sexual and/or physical abuse. In this article, the analysis focuses on three broad areas: abuse and the ‘syntaxes' of psychopathology; discourses of blame and responsibility; and the failure of (psychiatric) language. The approach of the investigation was one that critically examined psychiatry, at the same time as specifically investigating psychiatry's response to the issue of woman abuse. Given the South African context of widespread violence against women, together with the transformation of mental health structures, this study formed part of a larger research endeavour geared towards developing appropriate services for the treatment and care of women who have been physically or sexually abused.

Discourses of blame: accounting for aggression and violence on an acute mental health inpatient unit

The English National Service Framework for Mental Health stipulates that the highest quality of health care should be provided for mental health service users in the most efficient and effective manner. Incidents of aggression and violence militate against achieving that goal, yet such incidents are frequently reported in inpatient settings. Traditionally, research in this area has focused on the extent of the phenomenon, the individual characteristics of those involved and precursors to the incident. For the most part the literature reflects a dualistic, perpetrator/victim conceptualisation of incidents. This study aimed to address the lack of research undertaken from a more systemic perspective by examining how all those involved understood and attributed meaning to violent or aggressive situations and how these attributions justified individual perceptions, reactions and actions. Working from the position that all behaviour, including violent behaviour, has meaning to those involved and can be understood, 16 semi-structured interviews were carried out in one mental health unit. Because only one client was both willing and able to give a full account of an incident, we focus here on two incidents in which that client was involved. Discourse analytic techniques were used to examine her account of the two incidents and those of the staff members involved. Participants discussed key themes from the interviews in terms of several dilemmas: whether the violent or aggressive behaviour was ‘mad’ or ‘bad’; predictable or unpredictable; and had resulted from ‘personality’ or ‘ mental illness’. The client and staff discourses were strikingly similar and in each case the central concern was with the attribution of blame. The findings have implications for the professional discourse of mental health care, including the discourse of the current policy agenda, a discourse itself constructed with the primary function of exoneration from and attribution of blame.

Risk, error and blame in organizations: a communication approach

Examines the ways in which reporters from differing fields of work in a high‐risk environment (the Aviation Safety Reporting System in the USA) strive through narrative to present and maintain a coherent sense of self through face‐work involving blame acceptance or avoidance. Proposes not to locate specific and final locations for blame, but to instead recognize risk as an underlying factor in a discourse about error and blame in an increasingly global society. In the case examined discourses of blame varied in different worlds of work. Concludes that the approach taken of mapping blame options within different work worlds within a larger context can provide a foundation for ongoing risk assessment through the tracking of shifting blame options over time or the ways in which options are interwoven between work worlds. Maintains that this study may aid in the development of new approaches to risk.

Body Image

In this exploratory study, boys and men (aged eight, thirteen, and sixteen years, and young adults) gave accounts of body shape ideals, body esteem, exercise, and diet in a series of focus groups. Men and boys in all groups presented discourses where being lean and muscular was linked to being healthy and fit. Being fat was related to weakness of will and lack of control by all age groups, and discourses of blame were used to describe those who were overweight. Sixteen-year-olds described peer pressure to be slender and muscular, and two young men had experienced teasing about their body size. Adult men and teenagers explicitly linked having a well-toned, muscular body with feelings of confidence and power in social situations. Data are discussed in relation to recent suggestions that Western cultural attitudes to the male body are in a state of change and that men are becoming more concerned with body image.

“JUST TESTING”

In 1993, debates over mandatory HIV testing reemerged in New York when politicians and journalists launched a compaign to “unblind” results of a survey of HIV prevalence in newborns. This article reports on the findings from a content analysis of 108 “Baby AIDS” news stories published in New York newspapers in 1993 and 1994. In constructing a discourse of blame for the infection of “innocent” babies, “Baby AIDS” news stories demonstrate that racist, heterosexist, and sexist assumptions about HIV transmission, motherhood, and public HIV surveillance are fundamentally intertwined. The article concludes that arguments by AIDS analysts that homophobia and racism are distinct and independent dimensions of policy and popular understandings of HIV are not only misguided but also dangerous.