Discursive Arena Research Articles

Publics, Scientists and the State: Mapping the Global Human Genome Editing Controversy

AbstractLiterature on scientific controversies has inadequately attended to the impact of globalization and, more specifically, the emergence of China as a leader in scientific research. To bridge this gap in the literature, this article develops a theoretical framework to analyse global scientific controversies surrounding research in China. The framework highlights the existence of four overlapping discursive arenas: China's national public sphere and national expert sphere, the transnational public sphere and the transnational expert sphere. It then examines the struggles over inclusion/exclusion and publicity within these spheres as well as the within- and across-sphere effects of such struggles. Empirically, the article analyses the human genome editing controversy surrounding research conducted by scientists in China between 2015 and 2019. It shows how elite scientists negotiated expert–public relationships within and across the national and transnational expert spheres, how unexpected disruption at the nexus of the four spheres disrupted expert–public relationships as envisioned by elite experts, and how the Chinese state intervened to redraw the boundary between openness and secrecy at both national and transnational levels.

Official bilingualism in a multilingual nation: a study of the 2030 bilingual nation policy in Taiwan

ABSTRACT Since the late 1980s, Taiwan has moved away from Mandarin-only language policy in favour of greater recognition of local Taiwanese languages as part of a greater localisation movement. While continuing to implement language policies aimed at promoting local Taiwanese languages, in December 2018, Taiwan announced intent to implement a bilingual language policy to incorporate English by 2030, titled Bilingual Nation. Applying Ball’s (1993) policy as discourse framework, this paper endeavours to investigate the Bilingual Nation policy planning and rhetoric so as to shed light on Taiwan’s official conceptualisation of national identity. The case study finds that English is the primary focus of Bilingual Nation policy documents and is relegated to the discursive arenas of internationalisation and global economic competition. English is rarely discussed in tandem with any other specific language or language category, with little consideration for the interaction of English and Taiwan’s official national languages. In sum, Bilingual Nation acts as an affirmation of the current status quo in Taiwan’s official conception of national identity: muddled, with the assumption of Mandarin at its centre. Questions remain for Bilingual Nation and its ability to push beyond a symbolic state effort for internationalisation or unproductive labours for international status.

“The Innovation Imperative”: The Struggle Over Agroecology in the International Food Policy Arena

As the gravity of the global social and ecological crises become more apparent, there is a growing recognition of the need for social transformation. In this article, we use a combination of narrative case study and discourse analysis to better understand how transformative concepts, such as agroecology, are shaped as they as they enter mainstream discursive arenas. We probe the different characteristics of the “innovation frame” and how they qualify and give meaning to agroecology. Our case study narrates the recent emergence of agroecology in the UN space and its relationship to the discursive frame of innovation. We then undertake a systematic discourse analysis of comments provided in an online consultation process on the “Agroecology and Other Innovations” report by the 2019 High-Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) in the World Committee on Food Security. We examine how different actors positioned themselves vis-a-vis the innovation frame and we analyse the discursive strategies used to advance particular political agendas. Our analysis reveals three primary sub-frames within the innovation frame (Evidence; Technology; Rights) which were deployed by both proponents and detractors of agroecology. We focus on the notion of social agency, and its different presentations, within the three sub-frames which raises a number of problematics of the innovation frame, not only for agroecology, but for sustainability transformations more widely.

Prosecuting a Prophet: Justice, Psychiatry, and Rebellion in Colonial Kenya

AbstractIn Kenya, the prophecies of the late Elijah Masinde, leader of the anti-colonial religious revival Dini ya Msambwa, remain contested. MacArthur explores the religious innovations, intellectual work, and moral debates for the first time through Masinde’s own words. During his 1948 deportation trial, while the prosecution sought to remake Masinde from prophetic madman into calculating criminal, Masinde used the courtroom to challenge the pathologization of rebellion and remake his own patriotic vision. MacArthur argues that Masinde’s trial reveals colonial justice and psychiatry as discursive arenas for contestations over resistance, social control, and moral authority in colonial and postcolonial Africa.

Deliberation and Discussion in Classical Athens*

Deliberative democracy has often been associated with classical Athens, yet how far and where such activity appeared in the classical Athenian political system is open to question. This article explores the character of the deliberation and/or discussion that took place in five Athenian political arenas: courts, assembly, council, local assemblies, and street. It finds that in democratic Athens, discussion and deliberation (in the core Greek sense of “coming to a decision”) were inversely related. The most decisive arenas (assembly, courts) were the least discursive, in the sense of being least marked by the exchange of reasons admired by many contemporary theorists, while the most discursive arenas (street, perhaps local assemblies, perhaps council) were the least decisive. This finding makes sense. Mass democracy relies ultimately on the vote, not on back-and-forth discussion. Yet does not follow that discussion was unimportant to Athenian democracy. Indeed, it seems very likely (though impossible to prove or to disprove) that the decision-making powers of ordinary citizens in the assembly and courts prompted increased discussion of political issues outside those bodies, and that such “everyday talk” affected votes.

MPs on Facebook

Social media platforms are today the main spheres in which politicians make political and personal statements, confront other public figures, and interact with the public. In the current study, the Facebook pages of all Israeli Members of Parliament (MPs) were scraped and analyzed for the entire period of the 19th Israeli parliament service (between 2013 and 2015), in order to find similarities and differences between the posting behavior and acceptance of coalition and opposition members posts. We found that popular posts published by members of coalition and opposition differ in terms of scope of publication, scope of user engagement (posts by coalition members were more engaged with), content, and format (posts by members of opposition more varied in format, more mobilizing, critical, opinionative and negative, less formal but also less personal). The implications for the character of Facebook as a key parliamentary discursive arena are discussed.

Discursive struggles over the Turkish agricultural cooperative field: liberal vs etatist frames during the early republican era, 1930-1933

ABSTRACT Purpose - This study aims to solve a historical puzzle in Turkish cooperative history and illuminate the failure of a discursive medium, the journal of Turk Kooperatifcisi, to realize its ambitious goals of disseminating liberal ideas into the field of agricultural cooperatives. Given the strong state influence on Turkish cooperatives for over a century, this article strives to articulate when and how the anti-etatist cooperative discourse experienced an absolute defeat in the face of state hegemony. Methodology – This historical case study carries out hermeneutical discourse analysis on the archival data collected from the National Library of Turkey. Drawing on the first Turkish cooperative periodical, namely the Turk Kooperatifcisi, the researchers have read 214 articles, amounting to 966 pages. After a systematic interpretation of the collected data, the researchers have further situated archival evidence onto a plot and accordingly constructed a historical narrative, thereby illuminating the underlying reasons for the short life span (1930-1933) of a liberal cooperative periodical in early Republican Turkey. Findings- The findings of this study suggest that towards the end of the 1920s, the sharp turn in the economic policy of Turkey triggered a series of events, leading the agricultural cooperatives to become state apparatuses. Correspondingly, the liberal frame regressed in the face of the etatist frame and became defeated in the discursive arena. Conclusion- The contest between frames both shapes and becomes shaped by the ideological shift in the Turkish state polity. However, this macro-level change yielded in the Turkish agricultural-cooperative field an open forum where opposing discourses challenge for the settlement of expedient cooperatives.

Exclusion and Articulation: Transgender Counter-Public in the Indian Public Sphere

The study attempts to locate transgender counter-public as an alternate public sphere in India. It argues that transgender counter-public is necessitated owing to the exclusionary practices of the Indian public sphere as well as the successive counter-public spheres. The study, further claims that transgender counter-public is constructed by critiquing the marginalisation of transgender people through exclusionary practices, and articulation of concerns linked to transgender people. Public discourse analysis of both discursive arenas—print: newspaper articles, journal articles, autobiographies, biographies, memoir, and others, and non-discursive arenas—activism, pride parade, protests and alike have been adopted as methodology. The study concludes that transgender counter-public achieves the dissemination of their concerns to the wider public that exclusion and discrimination of transgender people are a denial of social justice in the democratic social structure.

Discourses on abortion amid the Zika epidemic: analysis of the coverage by newspapers O Globo and Folha de S.Paulo.

The objective of this study was to analyze the national press coverage of abortion in cases of Zika infection and examine whether it reinforced discourses already associated with the practice or broadened and qualified the discussion of the subject. It is a qualitative study based on the analysis of 43 news stories on Zika/microcephaly/abortion published in the newspapers O Globo and Folha de S.Paulo between November 2015 and December 2016. Based on concepts from Journalism and Discourse Analysis, we identified the sources present in the coverage and analyzed the arguments they used in order to justify their positions, in addition to the strategies, types of knowledge and values they mobilized in the argumentation. We found that both newspapers privileged specialized sources - physicians in Folha de S.Paulo and lawyers and legal scholars in O Globo - and silenced the voices of women directly affected by the epidemic. As for the argumentation, sources that were favorable to the right to have an abortion in cases of Zika infection mainly denounced social injustices, while those who oppose it used a defense-of-life discourse. We observed the predominance of knowledge derived from beliefs and moral values in the discursive arena we analyzed, which was further marked by analogies loaded with negative meaning on both sides of the debate. Comparing our data with those from other studies on abortion in the media, we consider that the media coverage of Zika/microcephaly/abortion played a relevant role in reconfiguring the media discourse on the subject, characterized by a more technical focus, by a plurality of voices and positions and by a greater attention afforded to favorable arguments based on constitutional principles.

Publics, Scientists, and the State: Mapping the Human Genome Editing Controversy

Literature on scientific controversies has inadequately attended to the impact of globalization and, more specifically, the emergence of China as a leader in scientific research. To bridge this gap in the literature, this article develops a theoretical framework to analyze global scientific controversies surrounding research in China. The framework highlights the existence of four overlapping discursive arenas — China’s national public sphere and national expert sphere, the transnational public sphere and the transnational expert sphere. It then examines the struggles over inclusion/exclusion and publicity within these spheres as well as the within- and across- sphere effects of such struggles. Empirically, the article analyses the human genome-editing controversy surrounding research by scientists in China between 2015-2019. It shows how elite scientists negotiated expert–public relationships within and across the national and transnational expert spheres, how unexpected disruption at the nexus of the four spheres disarrayed expert-public relationships envisioned by elite experts, and how the Chinese state intervened to reshape the boundary between openness and secrecy at both national and transnational levels.

Practicing Belonging?

Abstract This article suggests a way for scholars of Japanese religion to contribute to the international discussion on “nones” or the “non-religious,” who have been characterized as “believing without belonging,” “belonging without believing,” “believing in belonging,” etc. by integrating three different discursive arenas: one on multiple secularities as a context-conscious reexamination of functional differentiation; one on Japanese modernization centered on the idea of ie (household)-mura (village community); and one on a recent Japanese obsession with tsunagari (relationships, connection) and shōnin (recognition). The article argues that Japanese non-religiousness in the 2010s is an updated, self-conscious version of “religion as human relationships,” which can be paraphrased as “practicing belonging.” Moreover, while the current “religion as human relationships” practiced among young people tends to be confined to the intimate sphere, its traditional version regulated the public sphere as well. It was this public sphere of “religion as human relationships” that came to appear secular, as opposed to World Religions as matters of personal choice, in the process of modernization, which included the adoption of the Western concepts of “religion” and “secular.” The article also suggests that a “relationships turn” has been taking place not only in nonreligious rituals and festivals but also in spiritual culture and institutionalized religion.

Shaping Public Opinion and Community Mobilisation: The Role of Urdu Language Media in India

Considering the role played by Rashtria Sahara, an Urdu daily newspaper that took recourse to the democratic practice of questioning and challenging the hegemonic formation of the maligned image of Islam and the faith community vis-à-vis terrorism in the discursive arena, that is, the public sphere, this article tries to understand the role of the Urdu language media in shaping the public opinion and mobilising people from within the community. To this end, first, the article seeks to comprehend the present configuration of the Indian public sphere keeping in view its colonial origin. Moreover, the ‘othering’ of Muslims in postcolonial India that has colonial roots, too, has been understood through the idea of ‘interior frontiers’. Second, the role and practices of the Indian state towards Muslims have been taken into account. And, the final section analyses strategies that were put to use by the newspaper to contest the hegemonic formation, which paved the way for social movement to emerge.

HUMANISME KARYA-KARYA SASTRA PRAMOEDYA ANANTA TOER: SEBUAH PERGULATAN DISKURSIF

Until now Pramoedya Ananta Toer is still recognized as a great Indonesian writer. For this reason, many people doubt that Hanung Bramantyo as popular movie director can perfectly and deeply adapt Pramoedya’s literary works into movies. Some scholars agree that one of the fundamental values in Pramoedya’s works is humanism. However, since Pramoedya visited China and was involved in Lekra, their opinions were split into two categories of humanism: universal humanism on the one hand and the socialist humanism on the other. This research attempted to scrutinize whether Pramoedya is on one of the humanism categories or beyond both categories. Theoretical framework of this research is Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory combined with Bhabha’s concept Location of Culture, while the method is the appropriate discourse analysis method. This research found that Pramoedya’s humanism is beyond universal and socialist humanism. In his articulations of humanism as uncovered from his literary works, there are different positions taken by Pramoedya according to different discursive arenas in wich the humanism articulated. In other words, Pramoedya’s postcolonial humanism is located in the liminal area that is always in contestation and negotiation.

Exploration of a fragmented discourse. Privacy and data security in Süddeutsche Zeitung: 2007–2017

<p>The goal of this exploratory case study is to identify different facets of news reporting on surveillance, privacy and data security, and more specifically, how risks in this context are portrayed. The theoretical foundation consists of two elements: 1) the concept of mediatized risk culture, and 2) the discursive arena model of risk communication, which provides the normative background for assessing news reporting. A text-mining approach (topic modeling) is applied to analyze relevant coverage of the German quality newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The study yields a total of seven topics which belong to three categories: violation of privacy norms, power and law enforcement, and datafication. The results show that despite the de-mystification of digital technology after the Snowden leaks, coverage has recently become more affirmative and less focused on risk. We conclude that this may indicate a normalization of mass surveillance and data harvesting even in Germany, a society which traditionally values privacy. In order to add more context to our findings, however, further qualitative analyses were needed. The paper serves as a starting point for further research on media reporting of surveillance, privacy and data security.</p>

The observer actant in the contemporary legal discourse: a semiotic meditation

ABSTRACTThe sensorial access to the law that a society grants to its members is underpinned by a logic of exhibition and disclosure that, in turn, results from a more abstract cultural propensity to either transparency or opacity. Through investigating the systems of signs by which the functioning of the law is either concealed to external audiences or manifested to them in a more or less spectacular way, one can gain a firmer grasp on the juridical aesthetics of a society. This semiotic approach entails two advantages: on the one hand, the possibility to compare and contrast different regimes of disclosure and secrecy in the synchronic dimension, connecting the discourse of the law with other – apparently distant – types of discourse, adopting the same aesthetics of transparency or opaqueness in other domains of social life and discursive production; on the other hand, the opportunity for a more insightful intelligence of the diachronic development of such aesthetics, so that it may be interpreted as the long-term byproduct of historical watersheds in the history of culture. The article, in particular, proposes to link the socio-pathology of anorexia with several other practices and texts of present-day culture that adopt the same rhetoric of transparency in other discursive arena, including that of law. In all these sign productions, indeed, the trend that predominates is one that, adhering to an ideology of immediacy and transparency, pretends to eliminate all filters, all hindrances, but also all material signifiers that would mar the purity of the content. Although this utopia cannot correspond to any actual semiotic state – for any content needs a material expression to be conveyed – it nevertheless exerts a powerful influence on the present time, until it manifests itself in extreme forms of ‘transparentist’ radicalism.

Worlds, words, and spaces of resistance: Democracy and social media in consumer co-ops

This article explores how members of one of the largest Canadian consumer co-ops, reacting to what they saw as an assault on its democratic principles, use social media to try resisting the attempt from the board of directors to change its governance rules. Building on the Economies of Worth and Critical discourse analysis joint framework that considers power relations in the justification context, we unveil two essential moments. Initially, our analysis points to hegemonic justification struggles marked by the board and resisting consumer-members drawing on and reordering multiple worlds to debate the risk of democratic degeneration in consumer co-ops. Second, the critical insights suggest that the hegemonic control over the official deliberative arena pushed dissenting actors toward social media, an alternative space where they could deconstruct the co-ops-controlled discursive arena and create new conditions of possibility. Our article contributes to the literature on democratic degeneration in alternative organizations. More specifically, in the case of large consumer co-ops in which consumer-members have limited embodied presence, our results highlight how social media can offer a new space for debates, dissensus, and critical deconstruction. Our research also extends the post-structural criticism of the domination tendency of rational debate frameworks by showing that strategic displacement to new alternative spaces is essential to create new possibilities beyond those in central discursive arenas.

The making of an Islamist public sphere in Bangladesh

The article examines the process of making an Islamist public sphere in Bangladesh and identifies the actors involved. It argues that Islamist social Islamization movements in the form of various da’wa (preaching) activities, madrassah activisms, and Islamist political parties’ Islamization projects collectively contribute to the making of an Islamist public sphere. It shows how da’wa movements’ everyday living experiences, madrassah’s absolute authority over public Islam, and Islamist political parties’ social welfare, and associated activities construct an Islamist imagination. A parallel counter Islamist discursive arena with secular discourse is in construction and circulation that formulates oppositional interpretations based on Islamist identities, interests, and needs. The article argues that instead of explicitly challenging the secular hegemonic discourse, Islamist social movements engage in a contested relationship with it, and gradually claim their separate position. It further maintains that although these Islamist movements differ ideologically, and vary the ways they perform and propagate Islam, they invariably contribute to the rise of an Islamist public sphere in Bangladesh.

Placing the Ecological Crisis in a Broader Context: The Orphic and the Promethean

The historical prevalence of Promethean characteristics such as dominion and domination has resulted in a dispensation where exclusive pragmatism and habitual perception have steered human actions in directions that have resulted in an unprecedented ecological crisis. Christianity, reductionist science, pragmatic technology, and capitalism have homogenised discursive arenas, limiting the extent to which one can exercise negative freedom, and making ecological degradation unavoidable as a consequence of Promethean progress. Mechanisms exist that prevent changes toward ecologically-sensitive attitudes from rooting and spreading as remedies to Promethean attitudes. Alternative, Orphic attitudes, theories, and movements do exist, and they offer something of a response to Promethean attitudes underpinning the ecological crisis. Permaculture offers a down to earth, context-bound approach to establishing Orphic systems, while philosophy in two specific formats are tools to further broaden the context of the ecological crisis. These philosophical formats are, first, Badiou and Žižek’s outline of the role of philosophy “in the present,” and second, Pierre Hadot’s work on philosophy as a way of life. From the first, it is clear that philosophy cannot confine itself to humanity as it has been historically constituted, which implies that it cannot confine itself to the realm of the Promethean, which has dominated Western history. From the second, philosophy as a way of life entails a breakaway from Promethean, utilitarian, and habitual perception, and aligns itself with an Orphic form of consciousness.

SLAPPing accountability out of the public sphere

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the disruption to civic accountability by strategic corporate action in the form of SLAPP suits.Design/methodology/approachThis paper provides empirical evidence of the discursive processes underpinning participatory and emancipatory accountability regimes through the lens of deliberative democracy and the Habermasian ideal of the public sphere.FindingsWithin this paper, it is argued that the strategic use of SLAPPs by corporations presents a danger to both mechanistic and virtuous forms of accountability regardless of what deliberative democratic theory is adopted. Habermas’ theory of communicative action and notion of the “public sphere” is utilised to demonstrate how SLAPPs can result in the colonisation of public discursive arenas to prevent others providing alternative (in form) and counter (in view) accounts of corporate behaviour and thus act to limit opportunities for corporate accountability.Social implicationsThis paper throws light on a practice being utilised by corporations to limit public participation in democratic and participatory accountability processes. Strategic use of SLAPPs limit the “ability” for citizens to provide an alternative “account” of corporate behaviour.Originality/valueThis paper is original in that it analyses the impact on accountability of strategic corporate practice of issuing SLAPP suits to “chill” public political discussion and limit protest about issues of social and civic importance. The paper extends the critical accounting literature into improving dialogic and participatory accountability regimes.

BUREAUCRATIC ISLAM COMPARED: CLASSIFICATORY POWER AND STATE-IFIED RELIGIOUS MEANING-MAKING IN BRUNEI AND SINGAPORE

AbstractThis article presents a comparative anthropological approach to studying the bureaucratization of Islam in contemporary Southeast Asia. In line with this approach, the article understands thebureaucratizationof Islam not simply as a formalization, expansion, and diversification of Islamic institutions and legal frameworks; rather, bureaucratization is investigated as a social phenomenon that transcends its organizational boundaries and informs dynamics of socio-legal change alongside transformations of the meaning(s) of Islam in state and society. The article centers the state's “classificatory power” and its societal coproduction and contestation, and it takes both functional and hermeneutic modes of analysis into consideration. While the bureaucratization of Islam is always embedded in and shaped by power-political constellations, it simultaneously produces social and doctrinal meanings that are unique to its locally specific discursive arenas. Therefore, more conventional functional perspectives on bureaucratic Islam can be beneficially enriched by a more hermeneutically oriented anthropological analysis, as the article illustrates, based on ethnographic data gathered in Brunei and Singapore.The article first introduces the anthropology of bureaucracy and elaborates on the absence of such studies on state-Islam relations in Southeast Asia, as well as the potential of bringing these streams of scholarship into a fruitful dialogue. Second, it presents the Bruneian case study, focusing on postcolonial Islamization policies, the bureaucratization of a national ideology, legal reforms, and their workings on the microlevel. Third, it moves on to a regional comparison, by illustrating how Islamic knowledge and meaning-production inherent to the bureaucratization of Islam unfolds quite differently in Singapore, despite partly overlapping functional patterns. While anchored in Brunei and Singapore, the article offers a conceptual framework and analytic vocabulary for a wider study across and potentially beyond the region.