This study examines how Shiite Muslims in Pakistan construct resistance and solidarity in response to collective violence. Using discursive psychology within a constructionist social-psychological frame, it analyses 14 semi-structured interviews and 255 social media posts collected between November 2024 and January 2025. The analysis identifies discursive practices such as category entitlement, footing shifts, corroboration and extreme case formulation through which participants perform moral accountability, communal identity and defiance. Resistance emerges through ordinary discourse that reclaims voice, while solidarity is enacted through shared religious and moral language. The findings demonstrate how language operates as social practice, transforming grief into collective agency. The study advances discursive psychology by showing how discourse functions as a medium for moral repair and social reconstruction in contexts of sectarian violence.

ABSTRACT The rise of ‘dadvertising’, campaigns featuring emotionally engaged, nurturing fathers, highlights how commercial media commodifies masculinity. While studies have accumulated in Anglo-American and Northern European contexts, and a growing body of Turkish scholarship has examined advertising and masculinity, the intersection of paternal emotion work and dadvertising remains underexplored in Turkish scholarship. This paper addresses that gap by examining paternal emotion work in Turkish Father’s Day advertising (2020–2025). Drawing on Hochschild’s distinction between organizational emotional labour and domestic emotion work, Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity and Gill’s postfeminist sensibility, the study identifies four discursive formations. First, selective and bounded emotion work stages paternal care as episodic rather than routine. Second, emotional exceptionalism renders fathers’ caregiving heroic. Third, the commodification of paternal affect converts emotional expressiveness into brand capital. Fourth, postfeminist displacement uses individual-choice narratives to obscure the gendered care gap. Ultimately, Turkish dadvertising produces a modernized image of fatherhood that simultaneously reinscribes care inequality by framing men’s emotional participation as exceptional rather than quotidian. The findings contribute to feminist media studies by demonstrating how postfeminist advertising logic operates within a patriarchal, semi-peripheral context and by clarifying crucial conceptual boundaires between emotion work and emotional labour.

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship has emphasised the lack of clear boundaries between casual and serious leisure, showing a diversity of engagement styles within various sub-cultures. We explored what discourses provide justification for the diverse ways of engaging with martial arts and combat sports (MACS), and how certain versions of leisure engagement become dominant in discursive practices. Using a Foucauldian discourse analysis, we explored the constructions of ‘appropriate’ engagement with MACS in Potku.net, a popular online discussion forum in Finland. We identified two dominant discourses, ‘the balanced life’ discourse where engagement was valued for (instrumental) benefits of well-being and productivity, and ‘the committed life’ where wholehearted engagement was considered valuable for its own sake. The dominance of the balanced life discourse was recognised by forum users across subject positions. However, the balanced life discourse was resisted by the committed life discourse, underpinned by an ethos of existentialist ethics, with the focus on freedom and responsibility in creating one’s own meaningful projects. In conclusion, a Foucauldian approach is useful for understanding diversity in leisure styles, highlighting the complex value orientations behind MACS practice.

ABSTRACT This article examines how the concept of ‘skill’ has been defined and institutionalized in primary mathematics curricula across five national systems the United States, England, Finland, Singapore, and Türkiye and within OECD policy frameworks between 1900 and 2025. The analysis draws on 23 official curriculum texts and supranational policy documents (approximately 197,000 words of policy language across Periods III—V) coded using a four-category analytical matrix applied to identifiable policy statements. Intercoder reliability was established on a 20% subsample (Cohen’s κ = .76–.83). The study reconstructs five periods of paradigmatic change and develops a three-type typology of discourse—architecture alignment. Findings indicate that in many contexts competency language in curriculum documents has expanded ahead of corresponding transformation in content organization and assessment design. Competency framing is frequently layered onto content structures whose epistemic logic remains predominantly procedural. Evidence from Singapore and Finland demonstrates that coherent alignment between skill discourse and epistemic architecture is achievable when professional knowledge infrastructures and assessment systems support the curriculum’s epistemological aims across successive reform cycles. The proposed typology offers a comparative analytical framework for examining how global competency discourses interact with national curriculum structures and accountability regimes.

There is a strong emphasis globally that health policy and practice can be improved by leveraging best available evidence in decision-making processes. The dynamic political context of policy means, however, that decision-making processes are highly complex. A growing field of inquiry examines how the evidence-informed approach impacts on and interacts with real-world policy development. Despite the growing recognition of the complexity of health policy development little is known about policy narratives underpinning evidence-informed decision-making. Analysis of policy narratives over time can reveal how recognition of policy problems and their corresponding solutions emerge and shift through a contestation of different ideas and interests and how they legitimise different political courses of action. The aim of this study is to explore policy narratives underpinning evidence-informed decision-making within Swedish healthcare, tracing their formulation and development from 1992 to 2024. The study is based on a textual analysis of Swedish government documents published 1992-2024. Drawing on theories of policy narratives, a thematic content analysis of 132 Swedish government-issued documents during this period was conducted. Four episodes with a dominant narrative in each emerged from the analysis. They differ in ideas connected to policy problems and solutions in healthcare and evidence-informed decision-making. Besides ideas on the substance of the policy solutions, the ideas include different assumptions about problems they are solving, how healthcare actors are connected to problems and solutions, values that motivate the solutions, and assumptions about mechanisms that will promote sound decision-making and resource use in healthcare. These four policy narratives include one of efficiency, provision of information, and deliberation; one of equality, data, and standardisation; one of integration, synthesis of perspectives, and collaboration; and one of responsiveness and the local context of decisions. The study offers insights into the governance of evidence-informed decision-making in healthcare. The findings contribute to a broader understanding of implications of the evidence-informed approach on healthcare policy, and how healthcare policy is shaped by competing ideas, values and assumptions. They also contribute to the theoretical debate on policy narratives, and discursive practice in general in healthcare governance.

This paper explores how the maritime border dispute between Albania and Greece is framed through nationalist narratives and media discourse, revealing the persistence of banal nationalism in contemporary Southeast Europe. While formally a legal and diplomatic issue, the dispute has become a symbolic battleground for the articulation of sovereignty, national dignity, and historical justice. Drawing on theories of banal nationalism, symbolic borders, and cultural nationalism , the paper argues that the dispute is embedded in everyday discursive practices that sustain national imaginaries and perpetuate the symbolic boundaries of the nation-state. Through a comparative analysis of media and political discourse in both countries, the paper demonstrates how the maritime border functions not only as a site of geopolitical negotiation, but as a space where the nation is routinely imagined, performed, and defended.

Workplace-based assessments (WPBAs) are widely promoted as formative tools to promote learning in postgraduate medical education. However, their meaning and effectiveness are deeply influenced by sociocultural and institutional contexts, particularly hierarchy and power relations. Understanding how these dynamics shape WPBA discourses remains underexplored. This study examines how residents' discourse about WPBAs reflects and reproduces hierarchical relations in Pakistan. This qualitative study employed Fairclough's three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework to examine WPBA discourses as reflected through residents' language-in-use. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with senior medical residents from diverse specialties and institutions across Pakistan. Analysis focussed on textual features (micro level), discursive practices (meso level) and broader sociocultural structures (macro level). Three themes were identified: (1) WPBAs for Surveillance and Control, where assessments were linked to reputational risk and gatekeeping rather than learning; (2) Hierarchy and Fear of Judgement, highlighted how norms of deference, silence and emotional restraint shaped assessment interactions; and (3) Strategic Compliance to Survive WPBAs, where residents employed adaptive behaviours and self-regulation to minimise risk of reputational damage, loss of clinical opportunities or strained faculty relationships. These findings illustrate how WPBAs are not neutral tools but culturally situated practices that reflect and reinforce institutional power dynamics. Our findings indicate that culturally sensitive adaptation of WPBAs requires more than faculty training or checklist refinement; it should consider the communicative norms and power dynamics of everyday clinical education. When assessments are shaped by fear, reputational risk or hierarchical control, WPBAs can undermine their intended developmental purpose. This cautions against uncritical adoption of WPBA frameworks across contexts and emphasises culturally responsive approaches that foster psychological safety, dialogue and genuine learner development. Otherwise, in hierarchical contexts, WPBAs risk functioning as mechanisms of control rather than as tools for feedback and growth.

ABSTRACT The education system benefits from the interaction between students and educators, which is widely associated with effective human-centred learning. In the specific case of engineering education, practical activities in collaborative work environments greatly support the acquisition of the technical and social skills necessary for engineers’ professional practice, where oral communication serves as a driving force that connects all these abilities. This study analyzes the communication practices outlined in the syllabi of undergraduate engineering programmes to improve the efficiency of the educational system. A comprehensive analysis, based on a case study, examines the discursive strategies applied to educational policies through first-year subjects and their relationship with the curriculum, with a focus on didactics and evaluation. The analysis indicates that the discursive practices recommended in the examined higher education system include both written and oral discourse, even though writing and reading have traditionally been the primary approaches to teaching and learning. Academic orality has been deprioritized in the higher education system, as evidenced by its absence in assessment. In first-year courses, such as Algebra, Calculus, and Physics, written discourse is strongly emphasised as essential for teaching complex mathematical concepts, whereas programming courses, such as Programming Workshop, emphasise a dual use of written and oral discourse in learning strategies and evaluation. The findings indicate consistent discursive patterns in syllabi of first-year engineering courses, suggesting implications for teaching and assessment design. However, as a syllabus-based study, no inferences can be made about student engagement or performance.

Javier Milei’s victory in the 2023 presidential election challenged the established consensus that had prevailed since the democratic transition in several ways, for example by officialising what until then had been a counter-memory of the last military dictatorship. This paper takes as a star ting point a set of meanings of terms reclaimed by the libertarian discursive formation to refer to the 1970s, such as “war”, “terrorism”, “there were not 30,000” and “curro (theft) of human rights”, and aims to rebuild the layers of meaning that overlap in this configuration of memory by considering its historical lineage. On the one hand, following Foucauldian notions of origin and emergence, it analyses the course of historical and political events which contributed a plexus of meanings from the years before the coup up to the present. On the other hand, it examines the growing tensions and disagreements that contributed to the pervasiveness, dissemination or obliteration of such meanings in the public debate.

ABSTRACT The transition to adulthood presents complex challenges for care-experienced youth, including accelerated emancipation, limited family and social support, and persistent stigmatisation. Recent socio-educational approaches emphasise strengths, autonomy, and the role of professionals in shaping life trajectories. This qualitative study explores how professionals perceive and re-elaborate their discursive practices within a participatory, reflective process in an innovation project on care-experienced youth emancipation. The sample included 142 professionals from 36 organisations. Findings indicate that professionals describe a shift in their discursive practices adopting communication strategies that are more empathetic, horizontal, and trust-building. Participants also reflect on how their expectations influence opportunities for youth and the importance of challenging stigmatising narratives. Professionals’ shared spaces for reflection were highlighted as valuable for supporting professional learning and fostering more reflective and situated socio-educational practice. The study provides insights into the discursive strategies that professionals can use and into how participatory, reflective processes can facilitate professionals’ discursive development.

ABSTRACT Despite consistent debunking, climate conflict narratives remain dominant in Euro-American great power discourse and practice. This article reveals the role of these narratives in justifying capitalist climate strategies and technologies, and their application to the military. We argue that the branding of armed forces as ‘green’ and central to the ‘fight’ against climate change is an expression of ‘disaster capitalism’: now armed and greened to advance geopolitical and industry objectives amid climate breakdown. The article demonstrates the supply-web impact and hydrocarbon entanglement of ‘renewable energy’, and how such false solutions and extractive technologies are integrated into NATO and EU militaries to ‘decarbonise’ their operations. We identify five discursive and material practices by which armed green disaster capitalism—the continuation of war by ‘green’ means—is solidifying in ways that only worsen socioecological catastrophes. The article concludes with a discussion of community-based and inter/national policy approaches that would begin a process of real conflict prevention and climate change mitigation.

ABSTRACT AI science evaluation tools aim to assess research credibility. As with traditional metrics such as impact factors, their edicts can be decontextualised and repurposed in problematic ways. To address this, I propose Critically-Engaged Pragmatism as a scientific norm enjoining scientific communities to scrutinise the purposes and purpose-specific reliability of AI science evaluation tools. To foster Critically Engaged Pragmatism, creators of AI science evaluation tools should transparently and fully report design, training, and benchmarking details to facilitate assessments of purpose-specific reliability, liability to different types of error, and bias. What count as best practices for the transparent reporting of AI science evaluation tools should be updated as new forms of error, bias, and gamesmanship are discovered. Under this framework, AI science evaluation tools are not objective arbiters of scientific credibility. Rather, they are the object of critical discursive practices that ultimately ground the credibility of scientific communities.

ABSTRACT This Special Issue offers diverse critical perspectives and analyses, bringing together a range of historical case studies of school sport, physical education and health across the twentieth century in diverse national contexts. Two significant projects, mass schooling and public health, were heavily invested in by governments around the world during this period, and both projects were central in defining and managing the bodies of children and adolescents. This collection comprises twelve papers and four scholarly interviews that engage historical questions about the role of schooling in shaping constructions of childhood(s), understandings of ‘growing up’, movement pedagogies, bodily norms, meanings around health and healthy citizenship. The diverse contexts and case studies examined, highlight that some twenty-first century discourses about ‘schooling bodies’ in and through physical education, health and sport, have much longer histories which tend to be overlooked. Individually and collectively the papers disrupt linear, progressive and teleological logics and question the presentism of our fields, highlighting that schooling the bodies of children is bound to long and complex histories that intersect with changing social norms around gender, race, class and other categories and classifications through which individuals and communities were organised. These often-overlooked histories are important in rethinking the present and in expanding the methods of sociologists, educationists and other critical scholars examining sport, health and physical education.

With welfare states considered contested sites for the construction of unequal social relations, this article explores official welfare imaginaries – discursive practices and narratives which construct the nature of the “good society” and the role of government policies in achieving this – as strategies of depoliticisation, aimed at reproducing authoritarian governance. Through an analysis of Singapore National Day rally speeches by then Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, the article focuses on appeals to maintaining Singapore’s established cultural, societal, and economic relations. Three inter-connected depoliticising logics to National Day speeches are highlighted: technocracy (an appeal to government through rational expertise); survivalism (an appeal to stable leadership in the face of global challenges); and anti-welfarism (an appeal to the necessity of eligibility-based and productivity-geared welfare). Central to maintaining oligarchic modes of authoritarian political governance, welfare imaginaries disseminated through officialised political narratives pre-emptively diffuse alternative discourses and practices which could trouble established hierarchies. The mobilisation of these imaginaries insulates the political economy from deeper critique or the possibility of popular mobilisation against an economy skewed towards enriching an oligarchic state-capitalist elite. Welfare imaginaries help to legitimate accumulation based in disciplined labour and one-party rule albeit within a welfare state facilitating asset-building for some.

To explore how persons with cancer construct and socially position themselves in online blogs. Clarifying the discursive practice of self-construction can deepen healthcare professionals' understanding of how persons with cancer perceive themselves and their place in society. Mixed qualitative and quantitative design using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. Online blogs active between 2015 and 2023 were evaluated. Google search with keywords: 'Blog about cancer' was conducted. Corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, following Fairclough's framework, was used to analyse data from four persons with cancer living in Norway. The analysis identified three discursive practices in which bloggers constructed themselves: a discourse of a person's existence, a discourse of norms, and a discourse of a paternalistic system. The bloggers constructed themselves as being trapped in their own bodies, changed and vulnerable individuals who should conform to the expected behaviours, and not being seen and heard by the healthcare system. The bloggers with cancer struggled between holistic and dualistic ideology, wishing to separate their bodies from themselves and constructed themselves as changed persons. Moreover, they struggled with societal expectations and adapted themselves to a paternalistic healthcare system, despite their desire to be seen and heard as individuals. This study investigated the experiences of patients living with cancer, offering valuable knowledge for nurses, other healthcare professionals, and the government. The study uncovered that persons with cancer constructed themselves as changed persons and felt vulnerable socially and within a paternalistic healthcare system. These results may provide a stimulus for further discussions on the patient roles in cancer treatment and how to meet their needs for care and treatment. This study adhered to the Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research (SRQR) guidelines. No patient or public contribution.

ABSTRACT Grounded in Critical Whiteness Studies, this article examines how white staff in higher education narrate race, racism, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and in doing so reproduce broader racial logics. Using qualitative thematic analysis of 1,806 open-ended responses to the National Assessment of Collegiate Campus Climates staff survey (collected between Fall 2021 and Spring 2023), we analyze how whiteness operates not only through institutional policy but also through the everyday stories staff tell about themselves, their institutions, and the value of DEI. We identified three themes: (a) whiteness maintained through discursive evasion, (b) discomfort with equity demands as a form of whiteness protection, and (c) conditional support masking structural resistance. These findings reveal how discursive and affective practices sustain whiteness within higher education, often under the guise of neutrality or even support for equity. We conclude by discussing the implications for research, practice, and policy to prompt interventions that aim to dismantle whiteness as an institutional logic in higher education and, in turn, better meet the needs of racially minoritized communities on college and university campuses.

ABSTRACT Despite increasing promotion of HPV vaccination in China, little attention has been paid to how vaccination is discursively constructed on social media. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis and feminist poststructuralism, this study examines discussions of HPV vaccination on Weibo and Zhihu. The analysis identifies three recurring discursive formations: policy-oriented narratives that position girls as primary subjects of prevention, market-oriented discussions that frame vaccination through the language of “health investment,” and critical expressions concerned with male absence and vaccine consumerism. Across these discussions, legitimation strategies shape understandings of responsibility, risk, and gendered health governance. The study argues that digital health communication in China functions as a contested discursive space where public health responsibility is negotiated through the intersection of policy discourse, market logic, and platform culture.

The article examines the digital political communication of a new generation of right-wing populist leaders in the European Union. The aim of the study is to identify the mechanisms through which systematic digital communication transforms into a stable digital reputation and becomes a significant resource for political mobilisation. The working hypothesis suggests that regular and personalised communication by right-wing populist leaders on digital platforms contributes to strengthening their public image, shaping a resilient digital reputation, and increasing their appeal among younger audiences. The study draws on contemporary approaches to populism as a style of political mobilisation, as well as on concepts of digital political communication, political personalisation, and the mediatisation of the public sphere. Digital reputation is conceptualised as the outcome of discursive, visual, and communicative practices formed in the online environment under the influence of the algorithmic logic of platforms. The methodological framework is based on a qualitative approach, including case studies, comparative analysis, and elements of digital discourse analysis. The empirical basis consists of three cases of young right-wing populist leaders: Jordan Bardella (France), Tom Van Grieken (Belgium), and Rita Matias (Portugal). The analysis focuses on the choice of digital platforms, communication styles and formats, dominant narratives, modes of leader representation, and mobilisation effects. The findings demonstrate that social media function as the central channel of political communication for right-wing populists, enabling a high degree of personalisation, emotionalisation, and direct interaction with audiences. Despite differences in national contexts, digital strategies exhibit similar discursive elements, most notably the reproduction of the populist dichotomy between “the people” and “the elite”. The identified differences point to the variability of models of digital reputation formation, ranging from personalised leadership to symbolic reputational positioning. The article concludes that digital reputation constitutes an important factor in political mobilisation and in the transformation of party leadership under conditions of digitalisation.

ABSTRACT Universities are operating in a challenging and somewhat paradoxical situation in the domain of early childhood literacy education. Against a background of the very limited visibility of university research in the formulation of new policies and practices, there is a great deal of public discourse to which university researchers have contributed. Utilising corpus linguistics methods, the study explores two datasets collected in 2017–2022 from UK newspapers and Twitter, highlighting how university expertise is operationalised in these two types of public discourses on primary literacy. Findings show that while universities are referenced as key sources of expertise in both domains, their representation differs. Newspaper media frequently name specific universities as sources of research and authority, with some universities being cited relatively frequently. Selection and representation emerge from perceived alignments to the newspapers’ own news values and audiences. In Twitter social media interactions, universities play a broader role, with more involvement from overseas HEIs, and a broader range of content and style. There is a separation between academia and practitioners, suggesting limited influence and reach of academic Twitter. Highly effective academic institutional accounts communicate through varied strategies, sometimes heavily reliant on specific academic influencers. Our findings imply that there are opportunities for individuals, in universities or as alumni, and universities as a whole, to devise effective communication strategies in the domain of primary literacy education research, paying attention to both professional news and social media. This is likely to apply to other areas of university expertise.

ABSTRACT Employing critical discourse analysis of netnographic data, this study investigates the discursive enactment of neoliberal multiculturalism within online interactions preceding migration to ethnically diverse destination countries. Textual data, including posts and threads, were collected from three online platforms dedicated to discussions of regular, planned migration pathways (e.g. education, skilled employment, family reunion, investment) among Iranians. The analysis illuminates three interrelated discursive practices through which neoliberal multiculturalism is rendered effective prior to migration: (1) emigrating towards the spectacle of an ‘ordinary life’ (2) qualifying as a ‘desirable’ immigrant and (3) optimistic fatalism. The commitment to achieving an ordinary life through becoming a desirable immigrant is contingent upon accepting and naturalising the ethnoracial hierarchies in neoliberal multicultural contexts – a phenomenon conceptualised in this study as optimistic fatalism.