Crisis Discourse Research Articles

Sensemaking View on Servant Leadership in Crisis Discourse

This study is based on leadership in crisis time - a panel discussion after 62 leaders’ discussions in various workshops. Analysing the data through the sensemaking typology for organisations - using sensemaking typology (Sandberg & Tsoukas 2020) and coming up with servant leadership theory offers a fresh and welcomed view in servant leadership study - revealed how servant leadership and especially the readiness to shift in sensemaking helped to overcome the crisis. The leaders used the four typologies: immanent, involved-deliberate, detached-deliberate, and representational sensemaking in various ways for a servant purpose. For example, seeing the personnel with new eyes and allowing them to act freshly, lowering barriers, and bringing others’ potentiality to use helped to tolerate crisis. To demonstrate, leaders with detached-deliberate sensemaking found a new direction and valued co-work whereas when acting with the immanent sensemaking they held on to routines and kept the focus on the basic task. In brief, the servant-first attitude was emphasized for the leadership to be willing to set oneself in use as well as create an atmosphere where others can work on their best and emerge from others capabilities for them to serve the common good.

Not for those of us who know war well: crisis, metaphor negotiation and collective memory in an era of war

ABSTRACT The use of war metaphors in COVID–19 crisis communication has prompted great metalinguistic attention and highlighted the role of conflict memory in crisis discourse. Still, discourses of collective memory are to date rarely integrated with the study of metaphor and crisis communication, though frequently observed in crisis metaphor analyses in post–conflict contexts. This study focuses on the relations between the war metaphor and war memory as seen specifically in post–conflict settings. Set across three post–Yugoslav states, it starts from an examination of WAR metaphor use and its relations to war memory discourses in early pandemic political leaders' announcements, and citizen responses to these. Second, it zooms in on the patterns of metaphor negotiation and contestation in citizen discourses in particular. The findings show how the early pandemic discourse drew on heavily militarized metaphoricity, which revived nationalist images of the country's violent breakup in the 1990s but also gave rise to ample contestation in public space, revealing differing positionings in politicians' and citizens' discourses. The analysis allows a discussion of some implications pertaining to the relations of metaphor, collective memory and crisis communication, as well as the increasingly laden affective potentials of war and history in times when ‘war is never far away’.

Метафорическая концептуализация экономических отношений в публицистическом дискурсе финансово-экономической нестабильности (на материалах англоязычных публикаций, отражающих кризис потолка госдолга в США в 2023 г.)

The article examines the metaphorical conceptualization of a crisis economic situation in mass media discourse. The article looks at the metaphorical representation of economic relationships in the period of financial uncertainty caused by the inflation and the debt ceiling crisis in the USA in 2023. The aim of the research is to determine and describe the most relevant metaphorical models depicting the economic phenomena in the given historical period. The scientific novelty lies in describing the ways of metaphorical conceptualization of economic relationships in mass media discourse brought to life by new empirical data of the debt ceiling crisis. The research findings include describing the most relevant metaphorical models that depict the economic phenomena in the articles of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist; determining the nominative field of the target concept ECONOMY; extending the corpus of metaphors from crisis discourse and identifying the primary functions of the metaphors used in the texts under the study.

The European Muslim Crisis and the Post-October 7 Escalation

Israel’s war on Gaza following 7 October 2023 has given birth to several political and social changes in European nations. According to the United Nations Report of the Special Rapporteur, Israel has used this moment to “distort” international humanitarian law principles “in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.” In the European context, this has led to European Muslims and non-Muslims, including organizations, institutions, as well as individual academics, politicians, and activists mobilizing and voicing their condemnation and demand their governments to do more towards peaceful and equitable solutions. However, this has been met with a strong reaction from European governing bodies. This paper situates this reaction within wider discourses on the European Muslim crisis. It begins with a systematic literature review on the so-called European Muslim crisis, followed by case studies on the United Kingdom and Germany on their respective changes to policies impacting Muslims in the post-October 7 contexa Regarding the literature review, this paper illustrates how this concept has three distinct, yet intersecting meanings: the crisis of European identity; the crisis of foundational ideologies of Europe; and an internal Muslim crisis that often leads to radicalization. Through the British and German case studies, this paper illustrates that October 7 has reinforced and strengthened the shift towards values-based citizenship and integration. This paper argues that through branding pro-Palestine protesters and organizations as extremists in the British context, and adding questions related to antisemitism and Israel in the citizenship tests in the German context, the Israel/Palestine issue has now become yet another yardstick to demarcate the European, civilized “us” vs. the Muslim “other.” In doing so, October 7 has escalated elements already present within the wider discourses of the European Muslim crisis.

Macro-structures framing language policy in Morocco: Which discourse? Whose discourse?

Today, the power of discourse is incontestable. Within the field of language policy and planning (LPP), language policy (LP) has been conceptualized in various ways. One paradigm-shifting conceptualization is viewing LP as discourse. The discursive power of language policies is quite real as it can be contested in official state discourses about language and language-related issues. This paper employs corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to examine the macro-discourses of crisis, quality, equity, equality, and change in Morocco’s language policy. The study scrutinizes these discourses and explores their “manipulative” use in official policy texts. It contends that these macro-discourses are strategically used to rationalize the spread and strengthening of foreign languages to the detriment of national ones. Specifically, the analysis shows that crisis discourse serves as a powerful strategy to legitimize change and create a sense of urgency that often sidelines crucial questions about the nature and beneficiaries of the proposed changes. Furthermore, the discourse of quality ties educational “quality” to the mastery of foreign languages. Likewise, renovation and modernization discourses are found to align systematically with the promotion of these languages. Also, the rhetoric of equity in language-in-education policy appears to justify biased decisions that favour foreign language instruction, risking the perpetuation and exacerbation of existing educational inequities. Consequently, this study implies that more attention should be paid to the intricate dynamics of language policy, especially its discursive power, which could potentially amplify disparities in education systems instead of eliminating them.

Crisis and critique in Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind (2021)

ABSTRACT To date, literary fiction’s interventions into debates about the crisis in literary studies, and contestations over critical methods, have received scant scholarly attention. Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind treats the idea of crisis with irony, utilising overstatement in the novel’s narrative discourse to draw attention to crisis discourse’s inefficacy in delivering meaningful change. The novel represents literary critique, especially as extended to non-literary objects, as a compulsion; and, as failing to result in action. Instead, in The Life of the Mind, crisis and critique are discursive conventions which culminate in the protagonist remaining in a suspended emotional and economic state. This paper draws its theoretical approach from the novel’s intertexts, including Lauren Berlant’s conceptions of crisis ordinariness and impasse, and contextualises The Life of the Mind in relation to its intervention into discussions about critique and reading methodologies. Literary criticism and literary fiction are portrayed as being in a state of impasse in Smallwood’s novel. Despite Berlant’s (and Ann Cvetkovich’s) guarded sense of impasse as a state of potential, in The Life of the Mind impasse is regarded ironically; progress in the protagonist’s situation, in the discipline of literary studies, and in the practice of critique, are questionable.

‘Help Shelter Mend a Broken Family’: Homes, Homelessness, and Crisis in 1960s Britain

Abstract In 1966, a new homelessness charity, Shelter, set out to redefine the homeless as impoverished families enduring poor or insecure housing rather than single men living on the street. Through a series of ‘hard-hitting’ reports and adverts, the group highlighted the destructiveness of poor housing on young families and gained a prominent national voice. This article examines Shelter’s campaigns in the 1960s to examine how debates about homes and homelessness can reframe the development of discourses of ‘crisis’ that defined the 1970s and provided a key narrative of Thatcherism. It focuses on how Shelter deployed ideas of childhood, family, and the family home, often echoing theories of leading child psychiatrists of the post-war period, to warn of the profound and acute danger that the housing crisis represented to British society. Shelter’s prominent and successful adverts and campaigns drew on growing anxieties about social and economic crisis, but did not discuss key issues of unemployment, racial discrimination, and deindustrialization. Instead, Shelter’s campaigns focused on the damage poor housing did to family life and the education and life chances of individual children. Discourses of crisis in this period are often associated with ‘inner cities’ and failing reconstruction schemes, but Shelter presented an image of social crisis that was centred in the family and the family home. By analysing how Shelter drew on fears about the coming social crisis, the article suggests that the family home and the life chances of individuals were central to popular understandings and perceptions of crisis before the 1970s.

Humor as Hope?

This article examines the use of humor in contemporary environmental short films, centering on the alleviating power of humor and its capacity to challenge conventional modes of perception. It argues that humor constitutes an important narrative device in the stories of critical hope that scholars claim are necessary in moving beyond the debilitating registers of apocalyptic rhetoric and crisis discourse. By comparing two short films—the Indian satire Finding Beauty in Garbage, and the American mockumentary The Majestic Plastic Bag—the article examines the affordance of irony, parody, and satire to model alternative and hopeful ways of interacting with contemporary toxic landscapes. The article demonstrates that while genres and devices such as satire, irony, and parody all trouble anthropocentric paradigms of human mastery, they do so in different ways and with different implications. Whereas satire offers an effective vehicle for lamenting the proliferation of waste, the critical mood that defines the genre also restricts its capacity for generating meanings and sensibilities outside conventional environmental discourse. By contrast, parody and irony appear more suited to mobilize such changes, as their playful estrangements model innovative and self-reflexive ways of perceiving waste as a source of beauty, a site of agency, and an object of guilt.

Constitucionalismo de exceção, pós-democracia e o julgamento da reforma trabalhista pelo Supremo Tribunal Federal – STF

This paper will analyze the judgment of Direct Actions of Unconstitutionality ADI 5685, ADI 5938 and ADI 5794 by the Supreme Federal Court, with the objective of verifying whether the Judiciary has echoed the discourse of the economic-financial crisis and legitimately ratified the exceptional measures of austerity , with a cut in labor matters. The epistemological scientific orientation of the papper is the Ecology of Knowledge. For which it will combine resources from the French Discourse Analysis, from Bakhtin’s Marxist philosophy of language, to contributions from the Sociology of Law and the Sociology of Absences. Our research hypothesis is that such judicial decisions, permeated by the austerity discourse, are constituted as Exceptional Constitutionalism and produce the absence of labor rights. As well as the ontological degradation of its holders, the functional de-differentiation of Law and its ethical delegitimation. Such judicial decisions and the Constitutionalism of Exception are a symptom of a scenario of exception and post-democracy generated by neoliberalism. Documentary and bibliographic research techniques will be necessary.

Reinforcing Institutional Power: The Discourse of Normalcy in European Union Governance

This paper examines the notion of normalcy within the discourse of the European Union (EU), with a focus on its response to transformative dynamics and challenges, especially post-2008. I analyse how the EU, facing diminishing ideological supremacy, has reinforced its institutional power through the framework of normalcy. By emphasizing constitutionalisation and integration through legal means, bodies such as the European Court of Justice (ECJ) have expanded their roles, promoting "integration through law" to counter alternative political projects invariably labelled as populist, thereby giving rise to anti-populism as a discursive tool. Drawing on crisis discourse and diagnostic practice, this paper explores how normalcy legitimises and perpetuates existing power structures within EU governance, subtly coercing member states and citizens into accepting its norms and values, thus shaping perceptions of normalcy and also inevitability. At the core of this framework lies the rule of law (RoL), which establishes legal boundaries in the first place, but in the same move shapes political contexts.My paper argues that the exclusive focus on legalistic interpretations obscures the underlying structural factors perpetuating power dynamics and economic disparities among member states, constraining adaptive responses. I examine the narrative of "growing up to democracy" and its impact on the European project discourse, particularly in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. I then scrutinise the roles of experts and the “juristocracy” in reinforcing this narrative while simultaneously masking underlying inequalities and power differentials. Furthermore, the paper explores the strategic deployment of language and discourse by EU institutions during crises, highlighting their implications for public understanding, political action, and outcomes. Finally, it investigates the EU's strategic use of crisis discourse and diagnostic practices, focusing particularly on the ascendancy of the judiciary, but also highlighting how this trajectory may also have negative influence of legislative and executive bodies as their role diminishes in the process.

The nutritional turn towards crisis: a critical perspective

ABSTRACT With concerns about food systems growing due to environmental change and the abrupt disruption of trade relations following the dual crises of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, it has become increasingly common for global development agendas to include discussions, programmes, initiatives, and policy proscriptions about the risks of malnutrition. Yet, there remains limited insight into how securitising nutrition in particular influences the politics of food insecurity more broadly. Therefore, we aim to develop a critical perspective of ‘nutritional crisis’. In doing so, we draw from critical security studies to advance an interpretation of the nutritional turn that takes into account three key dynamics: (1) the performativity of nutritional crisis discourses (2) the political-economic context in which they are embedded (3) alternative notions of nutrition, security, and crisis among resistance movements. We apply this perspective to a case in point concerning food insecurity in Guatemala – a country that remains the intense focus of nutritional policies at the global level and simultaneously a site of struggle and resistance for local and transnational food justice.

Semantically Enriched Cross-Lingual Sentence Embeddings for Crisis-related Social Media Texts

Tasks such as semantic search and clustering on crisis-related social media texts enhance our comprehension of crisis discourse, aiding decision-making and targeted interventions. Pre-trained language models have advanced performance in crisis informatics, but their contextual embeddings lack semantic meaningfulness. Although the CrisisTransformers family includes a sentence encoder to address the semanticity issue, it remains monolingual, processing only English texts. Furthermore, employing separate models for different languages leads to embeddings in distinct vector spaces, introducing challenges when comparing semantic similarities between multi-lingual texts. Therefore, we propose multi-lingual sentence encoders (CT-XLMR-SE and CT-mBERT-SE) that embed crisis-related social media texts for over 50 languages, such that texts with similar meanings are in close proximity within the same vector space, irrespective of language diversity. Results in sentence encoding and sentence matching tasks are promising, suggesting these models could serve as robust baselines when embedding multi-lingual crisis-related social media texts. The models are publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/crisistransformers.

Dynamics of English gratitude expression: a corpus-assisted analysis of UK government COVID-19 briefings

Abstract With a focus on politicians’ and medical experts’ gratitude expressions in UK government COVID-19 briefings, this research describes how perspective and intensity were modulated in expressing gratitude to realise different pragmatic intentions. This corpus-assisted analysis finds that retrospective or prospective gratitude expression was adopted by the two British elite groups to build solidarity (encouraging) and/or make requests (directing) for protecting public health. Gratitude of varying intensities was expressed (e.g. by highlighting metaphorical dimensions such as WIDTH and DEPTH) to correspond to the importance of a benefit (judged by how much the given benefit matches the receiver’s needs and preferences) and/or to implicitly display the evaluation of the benefactor’s responsibility and efforts. We tentatively formulate a dynamic model of gratitude expression in public discourse and shed light on the metaphorical conceptualisation of English gratitude expression and the power of gratitude expression in boosting social cohesion and directing social actions in a discourse of crisis.

Bill 7633 on the restriction of the use of Russian text sources in Ukrainian research and education: analysing language policy in times of war

AbstractFor centuries, Ukraine has been a site of conflicts over language rights. During 70 years of Soviet leadership, Ukraine experienced’relentless Russification’ (Reznik in Language of conflict: discourses of the Ukrainian crisis (pp. 169–191). Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2020 p. 170). After breaking from Soviet rule, the Ukrainian language became an increasingly powerful symbol and means of national identity. Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the language issues have gained yet more public and political attention. Addressing the urgency, the Ukrainian parliament adopted, in the first reading, Bill 7633, aiming to restrict the use of any Russian sources in Ukrainian school and academia, a bill that was met with criticism and experienced intensified debates. This article analyses a range of text sources (both governmental and non-governmental) debating Bill 7633, using Discourse Analysis, and reveals how ‘liberal values’ and ‘lived liberalism’ (Fedirko et al. in Social Anthropol/Anthropol soc 29(2):373–386, 2021) are practiced or violated through problematising or justifying the Bill. Thus, the article contributes to the (recently emerged, i.e. since the start of Russian annexation of the Crimea in 2014) body of research on political and public discourses of the Ukrainian conflict (Epstein in Studies in East Eur Thought 74(4), 475–481; Jones, 2020; Lanvers and Lunyova in Eur J Lang Policy 15(1), 25–68; Slobozhan et al. in Soc Netw Anal Min 12(1), 1–12, 2022). Results show a comprehensive range of arguments both for and against Bill 7633 in both governmental and non-governmental texts which is interpreted as a form of liberalism in fragments (Fedirko in Social Anthropol/Anthropol Soc, 29(2), 471–489, 2021). The conclusion debates the unreserved applicability of western conceptualisation of liberal language policy in the context of war and prolonged linguistic contestations.

Book review: Andreas Musolff, Ruth Breeze, Kayo Kondo and Sara Vilar-Lluch (eds), Pandemic and Crisis Discourse: Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy

Book review: Andreas Musolff, Ruth Breeze, Kayo Kondo and Sara Vilar-Lluch (eds), <i>Pandemic and Crisis Discourse: Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy</i>

The politics of crisis, care, and vulnerability in “this is going to hurt (2022)”

ABSTRACT This article explores themes of crisis, care, and vulnerability in the 2022 BBC series This is Going to Hurt. Arguing that the series is significant within the genre of medical-themed television because of its complex representation of a “broken” NHS, the article analyses the ongoing, gendered, and racialised dimensions of the public healthcare crisis it depicts. Despite the series concluding that the NHS holds the potential to provide universal care in the future, such a promise rests on eliding the unequal and precarious institutional realities the series has revealed. This suggests a feminist analysis is essential for diagnosing the gendered and racialised forms of labour and recognition within the healthcare system and resisting the differentiated forms of precarity a discourse of crisis can exploit and obscure.

‘Farming God’s Way’: Evangelical Cosmologies of Land and ‘Crisis’ in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Social conditions in post-apartheid South Africa have been widely seen as marked by persistent and often racialised inequalities. The country has also been viewed through the prism of crisis, in economic, social, ecological and political spheres. Such language of crisis is increasingly reflected today among religious actors that reconstitute religious publics in the post-apartheid dispensation. Focusing on the growing public presence of Pentecostal-Charismatic and Evangelical Christianity, this article analyses how cultivating food ‘God’s way’ interplays with discourses of crisis in South Africa. The study employs ethnographic observation and interviews of practitioners and instructors of the Farming God’s Way network, a parachurch organisation operating in promoting regenerative agricultural principles as authentic Christian practice. Biblically authorised land practices address Christians’ emotional attachments and personal histories of agricultural production, land use and ownership. The study argues for understanding such farming as encompassing a space of both mediation and contestation between hopes of restoring an ideal past based on a biblically based agrarian and ecological order and frustrations with attempts at transforming a morally degraded present. Addressing Farming God’s Way as an emotional project entangled in discourses of (non)belonging and questions of change reveals tensions around representations of race, class and gender in Charismatic Christians’ approach to biodiversity. Here, adherence to regenerative farming principles reveals practices through which Christian farmers attempt to remake themselves as moral citizens through ecological care. Rearticulations of the responsible steward, however, pinpoint the persistence of racialised tropes at the core of the religious public project of redeeming the present.

Can't read my broker face?—Tracing a motif and metaphor of expert knowledge through audiovisual images of the financial crisis

AbstractBased on the question of the representability of economy and economics in audiovisual media, developments on the financial markets have often been discussed as a depiction problem. The abstractness and complexity of economic interrelations seem to defy classical modes of storytelling and dramatization. Nevertheless, public opinion about economic changes and dependencies crucially relies on audiovisual media. But how can the public communicate in images, sounds, and words about forces that are out of sight and out of reach, and can supposedly only be adequately grasped by experts? In a case study on audiovisual images of the global financial crisis (2007–), this paper tracks and analyzes a recurring motif: the staging of expert knowledge as close‐ups of expressive faces vis‐à‐vis computer screens in television news, documentaries, as well as feature films. It draws on the use of digital tools for corpus exploration (reverse image search) and the visualization of video annotations. By relating and comparing different staging strategies by which these “broker faces” become embodiments of turbulent market dynamics, the paper proposes to not regard them as repeated instantiations of the same metaphor, but as a developing web of cinematic metaphors. Different perspectives (news of market developments or historical accounts of crisis developments) and affective stances toward the global financial crisis are expressed in these variations of the face‐screen constellation. The paper thus presents a selection of different appearances of “broker faces” as a medium for an audiovisual discourse of the global financial crisis. A concluding analysis of a scene from Margin Call focuses on its specific intertwining of expert and screen as an ambivalent movement figuration of staging insight. Between the feeling of discovery (of a potential future threat) and the sense of being haunted (by a menacing force), the film stages the emergence of a “broker face” in an atmospheric tension between suspense and melancholy. We argue that the film thereby reframes the motif and poses questions of agency, temporality, and expert knowledge.

LEADERSHIP AND ETHICS IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN PUBLIC SECTOR: ETHICAL AND LEADERSHIP CHALLENGES

This paper analysis the leadership and ethical challenges facing South African public sector including municipalities. Generally, the South African public sector is grappling with service delivery challenges. On top of the public service crisis discourse there is a huge complain about the ethical challenges facing leadership in all the three spheres of government. The South African government sector has turned into a haven for bad management. This has resulted to unmet service delivery to residents of South Africa. This paper is conceptual in approach, and it contends that despite numerous factors affecting service delivery, one major cause that has been overlooked is the failure of the public sector officials to uphold moral principles when performing public duties in their offices. The paper conclude that the current South African sector requires ethically grounded leaders in order to achieve a stable service delivery system compatible with the South African citizenry and their satisfaction.

Interrogating the Discourse of Racism and Identity Crisis in Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man

The present study focuses on the concepts of the Discourse of Racism and the Identity crisis in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Last White Man. The term ‘discourse’ is propounded by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his various books. Discourse is an ideology which produces knowledge and meaning about an object. The knowledge is not the truth about the object. It is the constructed knowledge which is propagated by the dominant power. In the study, the novel The Last White Man, will be explored through the discourse of Racism which is a constructed and discursive knowledge that the dark people should be hated and treated as inferior ones. It is beneficial to a certain section of the people (whites) and others (blacks) who go through an identity crisis because of this discursive ideology. In the novel, the characters Anders and Oona go through an identity crisis because of the discourse of racism that blacks are inferior to whites, which is not the reality. It is just the colour which changes, their intelligibility remains the same. Over time the whole neighbourhood is changed. All the people in the beginning feel the identity crisis, but in the end, they accept this change as the notion of racism is all constructed by the dominant white people. It is an ideology (a discourse) which is beneficial to a few. The main idea threaded in the novel is that race should not be given a universal meaning nor be made into a recurrent topic in contemporary writing as biological essentialism is untenable.