Discursive Closure Research Articles

Power and Play: Investigating "License to Critique" in Teams' AI Ethics Discussions

Past work has sought to design AI ethics interventions--such as checklists or toolkits--to help practitioners design more ethical AI systems. However, other work demonstrates how these interventions may instead serve to limit critique to that addressed within the intervention, while rendering broader concerns illegitimate. In this paper, drawing on work examining how standards enact discursive closure and how power relations affect whether and how people raise critique, we recruit three corporate teams, and one activist team, each with prior context working with one another, to play a game designed to trigger broad discussion around AI ethics. We use this as a point of contrast to trigger reflection on their teams' past discussions, examining factors which may affect their ''license to critique'' in AI ethics discussions. We then report on how particular affordances of this game may influence discussion, and find that the hypothetical context created in the game is unlikely to be a viable mechanism for real world change. We discuss how power dynamics within a group and notions of ''scope'' affect whether people may be willing to raise critique in AI ethics discussions, and discuss our finding that games are unlikely to enable direct changes to products or practice, but may be more likely to allow members to find critically-aligned allies for future collective action.

Where injustices (fail to) meet: newspaper coverage of speciesism, animal rights, and racism

This study examines the ways widely circulated U.S. newspapers have articulated the idea of “speciesism” and its associated idea “animal rights” in relation to “racism” to understand how powerful news media helps to shape the public understanding of the interlocking systems of oppression that cuts across the human and the more-than-human world. The archives (1987 to 2023) of three U.S. newspapers – The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post – were analyzed, using qualitative content analysis. The ideas of articulation, symbolic annihilation, erasure, and discursive closure served as the analytical guides for the analysis. The analysis shows that there is gross underrepresentation of speciesism and even far less representation of the relationship between speciesism and racism and between animal rights and anti-racism. When represented, the articulations showed problematic patterns of erasure of those concepts and relationships. The paper ends with the implications of the findings.

Exploring affective Polarisation of the (Digital) Public Sphere in Slovenia: The Case of Marshal Twito

The last decade saw the issue of polarisation garnering increased scholarly attention. While political polarisation has been almost unequivocally studied as synonymous with ideological polarisation, scholars have recently addressed polarisation along partisan lines manifesting through strong in-group favouritism and out-group unfavouritism, labelled as affective polarisation. This paper investigates patterns of affective polarisation in the Slovenian (digital) public sphere, through analysis of discourse of former Slovenian PM Janez Janša on Twitter. The affective-discursive analysis of Janša’s Twitter resulted in the identification and exploration of four affective-discursive practices: Dangerous Outsider, Pride and Patriotism, Immoral and Incompetent Women and Defection. We find that through interplay of these practices and by employing strategies of discursive closure, Janša successfully fuels polarisation among partisans by solidifying divisions along the in-group-out-group axis. The paper contributes to affective polarisation literature by demonstrating how political actors condition competitive environments around different social identities thereby minimising opportunities for meaningful deliberation and debate beyond the differences.

Using speculative methods to challenge the invisibility and inevitability of data in education

Speculation is a resource for critical analysis of data-driven postdigital education. In particular, speculative methods help researchers challenge the invisibility of data-driven educational practices, and thereby unsettle the apparent inevitability of data futures. Working against these tendencies towards invisibility and inevitability requires critical imagination, and speculative methods help foster this for researchers and participants. This paper introduces speculative methods and explores their enactment in a research project that examined the social and ethical implications of datafication in higher education. Speculative methods are characterised by their non-representational, complexity-informed and inventive character and their temporal, epistemological and performative qualities. They have a complex relationship with time and temporality, attending to ‘not-yetness’; are epistemologically complex, producing problems and engaging with ambiguity; and act to create futures or realities they represent, in part through engaging publics at different scales and in different contexts. Methods inspired variously by speculative fiction and speculative design approaches have been used by digital education researchers to investigate and intervene in data futures and to challenge predictive, closed forms of data-driven future-making. The methodological value of speculation is explored here through discussion of a research project that involved ethnographic and speculative engagement with students at a research intensive university in Scotland. The research attempted to understand participants’ experiences of and perspectives on emerging data-driven technologies and practices, and what this meant for their relationship with the university. In this paper we analyse the design of and data generated through two particular speculative methods: data walking, and thinking otherwise. We focus on participants’ reflections on the methods used and show how speculation was central to efforts to prompt ethical reflection on data-driven practices. In the case of data walking, this involved sensitising participants to datafication processes, thereby making hidden practices visible to participants. A simple prompt to think otherwise, meanwhile, generated data regarding participants’ experiences and problems in the present while at the same time opening up possibilities of thinking otherwise about data futures. We close by relating these findings to wider considerations for speculative methods, focusing on the role of speculative objects as both instrument and output of research and exploring the significance of discursive closures in participatory research.

Exploring alternative discourses about datafication in a speculative youth participatory action research curriculum

PurposeThis paper aims to address the limitations in designing educational approaches that apply critical approaches to data literacy, given the obscure nature of digital platforms, which leave youth unable to develop discourses that challenge dominant narratives about the role of data in their lives. The purpose of this study is to propose and evaluate a critical data literacy approach that empowers youth to engage with data from a sociocultural perspective using a speculative participatory research approach that affords opportunities to develop alternative discourses.Design/methodology/approachThis is a multiple-case study that involves five alternative schools in Uruguay which implemented the Nayah-Irú curriculum over ten weeks leading to the development of six distinct research projects about the materialization of data in youth lives. The curriculum incorporates an alternate reality game (ARG) to engage youth in critical data literacy, based on the principles of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) epistemology and Speculative Civic Literacies.FindingsThe findings of this study highlight the integration of speculative storytelling and real-life experiences in developing alternative discourses about datafication. The analysis revealed instances of discursive closure among the youth, but through the curriculum's speculative fiction elements, such as the narrative of Nayah-Irú, emotional connections were formed, leading to increased engagement, critical inquiry, and problem framing.Research limitations/implicationsThe study conducted on the Nayah-Irú curriculum shows its effectiveness in engaging youth and educators in critical data literacy by affording opportunities for youth to engage in the analysis of their personal data literacies in an alternative world. Bringing speculative approaches to data literacy can open new avenues for exploring data literacy with youth in ways that center their voices and help them overcome different forms of discursive closure.Originality/valueThis study offers new insights into critical data literacy education blending youth participatory action research epistemologies with a speculative literacies framework to support youth in developing alternative discourses regarding the role of data in their lives.

How Culture Displaced Structural Reform: Problem Definition, Marketization, and Neoliberal Myths in Bank Regulation

We use content analysis to show that the diagnosis of the financial crisis of 2007–2009 shifted significantly from a focus on the need for structural change in the banking industry to an emphasis on culture and reform at the organizational level. We consider four overlapping subsystems in which this shift in problem–solution clusters played out—political, regulatory, legal, and consulting—and show that the “structural reform agenda,” which was initially strong and publicly prominent in the political arena, lost attention. Over time it was displaced by a neoliberal managerialist turn, which watered down or abandoned structural solutions and instead played up a new “culture and conduct reform agenda.” We explain this shift in terms of the marketization of regulation, which—following Mautner (Language and the market society, 1st ed. Routledge, 2010)’s model of interdiscursive alignment—we detect in the shifting language of financial-services reform across the four subsystems in scope. We argue that a neoliberal turn took place with a discursive closure that made the structural reform alternative gradually unsayable and, in the end, unthinkable. At the same time, the discourse turned to embrace the neoliberal agenda, built on the myth of self-regulating actors and markets, manifest in the culture problematic. This managerialist turn was able to mobilise, and be operationalised by, an industry of consultants, whereas structural change came to be seen by regulators as too risky to implement. We claim that these dynamics reveal how a form of “collective strategic ignorance,” based on powerful institutional myths, was systematically oriented to ignore and reject structural sources of crisis. Finally, we suggest that the observed pattern of displacement—whereby initial calls for structural change become later displaced by managerial and procedural solutions—is common to other social issues, such as audit reform and corporate social responsibility.

Lessons from the Framing Contest over UK Shale Development

Abstract The framing of shale gas development has received widespread attention, especially in the UK, United States, and throughout Europe. However, little has been said about what lessons can be learned from the shale development case about the role of language in use in the construction, contestation and closure of environmental problems. This article teases out and clarifies the subtle variations in the way the concept of the “frame” has been interpreted and operationalized; puts forward an analysis of the difficulty of achieving discursive closure in the UK shale development policy debate; and identifies possible implications of the failure of the “bridging fuel” argument for environmental discourse more broadly, asking in particular if this failure represents a challenge to ecological modernization or its continuation.

Governing gene-edited crops: risks, regulations, and responsibilities as perceived by agricultural genomics experts in Canada

ABSTRACT This paper explores the role and responsibilities of agricultural genomics experts in governing gene editing (GE) for food and agriculture, engaging with the frameworks of technological determinism and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). We interview agricultural genomics experts in Canada to study expert views on risks, benefits, and regulatory challenges of GE crops and the extent to which agricultural genomics experts exercise the RRI principles of anticipation, reflexivity, deliberative inclusion, and responsiveness. Agricultural genomics experts wield power in food systems both in shaping the applications of technology and as advisers influencing policy and governance. Their resistance to RRI principles, especially deliberative inclusion and responsiveness, and exercises of discursive closure are challenges for responsible governance of GE crops. The study offers empirical and theoretical contributions, working across Science and Technology Studies and food systems research.

Framing the normative role of the right to a healthy environment: thinking with internormativity, embodiment and emergence

This article critically examines the modalities through which the right to a healthy environment shapes environmental law and the environmental law-making function of the State. I argue that construing the right to a healthy environment through the prism of internormativity, embodiment and emergence can facilitate a conceptual leap that allows the right to be more attentive to people’s lived experiences of environmental injustice and harm. The conceptual leap I advocate for is in response to the fact that a constitutionalized right to a healthy environment potentially reproduces specific normative, ontological and discursive closures that have typically been associated with the prevailing positivistic view of the law. These closures work to disengage the right from the physical and factual dimensions of people’s experience of environmental injustices and harm. The main normative closures manifest as liberal positive law’s exclusion and devaluation of the normative potential of ordinary formal law and of productive forms of knowledge drawn from diverse philosophical-cultural traditions. Institutionalized human rights propagate liberal law’s erasure of embodiment, justifying the attendant piecemeal attention given to the full scope of human suffering. The treatment of constitutional human rights as an ultimate, stable framework for validating and legitimizing ordinary law forecloses the discursive practices that give meaning to human rights law beyond formal law-making processes and institutions. In light of these closures, construing the right through the three-pronged conceptual lens suggested here could, I contend, help focalize actual human experiences of environmental injustices and harm by harnessing the normative potential of formal and informal sources of values and norms, by centralizing embodiment as the actual ontological circumstance of the human beneficiary of the right and by giving voice to discursive strategies that imbue meaning to the right to a healthy environment beyond its formal rendition.

Graffiti and Discursive Legitimacy: The Politics of Spatiality and Agency in Teachers’ Attitudes Towards Student Graffiti in Zimbabwean High Schools

The article explores how issues of spatiality and agency are implicated in the construction of teachers’ attitudes on the occurrence of graffiti within the Zimbabwe school system. Graffiti is an important third space in the education system that is, however, negatively conceptualised by both the teaching staff and school authorities, alike. Teachers are a crucial cog in the total education process who have the mandate to determine the range of spaces on which ‘legitimate’ discoursing and learning can take place. Teachers’ attitudes on the presence of graffiti on the school premises are mainly shaped by their perception of (1) the toilet as a discursive space and (2) the nature of the graffiti writers who are mainly perceived as (i) hailing from the ghetto (ii) intellectually and mentally challenged. Data was collected from interviews held with high school teachers in Gweru district. Analysis of the data is couched in Deetz’ theorisation of discursive closure. Analysis of the graffiti texts reveals that, in spite of its many positive contributions to educational institutions, teachers mainly attribute the presence of graffiti in the school to ‘slow learners’, students who come from the ghetto and single/absent parent backgrounds. This is further compounded by its main association with the toilet, which is a space that no ‘sane’ student is supposed to interact on.

On the Impossibility of Discursive-material closures: A Case of Banned TV channels in Ukraine

Drawing on the ideas of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and Carpentier (2017), this paper shows how, on the one hand, discursive-material assemblages within the digital environment of interconnected information networks prevent the possibility of final discursive closures, while, on the other hand, they may weaken discourses, preventing them from serving as a mobilizing force for social change. To illustrate this, the paper discusses the case of Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, who banned oppositional television channels in a bid to shut down oppositional discourse by both discursive (the reduction of oppositional arguments) and material means (the physical closure of the studios). Discourse-material analysis presented in the paper draws on the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and Nico Carpentier’s Discursive-Material Knot.

“We try to be nuanced everywhere all the time”: Sweden’s feminist foreign policy and discursive closure in public diplomacy

“We try to be nuanced everywhere all the time”: Sweden’s feminist foreign policy and discursive closure in public diplomacy

Specialists over generalists?: Examining discursive closures and openings in expert collaborations

ABSTRACT Prior research on expert collaborations has focused on how specialists – experts with deep domain knowledge – work across disciplinary boundaries with other specialists, with much less attention paid to how generalists – experts with broader and connective knowledge – work alongside specialists. To address this gap, we examined collaborative work requiring expertise of generalists (regional planners) and specialists (civil engineers). Our interview data revealed that privileged values of specialist expertise (i.e., exclusivity, neutrality, and feasibility) could close interpretive possibilities of their collaboration and that generalists engaged in communicative expertise positioning to make their expertise work with that of specialists. We developed a grounded model of generalist-specialist collaboration theorizing how they used discursive closures and openings to accentuate gains from their different expertise.

The Need for Speed – Technological Acceleration and Inevitabilism in Recent Danish Digitalization Policy Papers

Abstract The article explores whether sociotechnical imaginaries of digitalization as inevitable accelerating development can be traced in Denmark’s official policy papers concerning digitalization 2015–2020. It identifies imperatives of speed, acceleration and agility equal to what has been described as a corporate data imaginary as well as tropes of an imaginary of the fourth industrial revolution and inevitable exponential technological development and disruption. The empirical analysis discovers a shift in the studied period mid-2018, before which inevitabilism is prominent and after which the focus on non-economic values increases and the aim of influencing the development, instead of adapting to it, emerges. The article then addresses how imperatives of acceleration and narratives of inevitabilism may be considered problematic from a democratic point of view employing Hartmut Rosa’s critical diagnosis of the acceleration society and the notion of discursive closure. Finally, it discusses the empirical findings in light of technological determinism and constructivism inherent in the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries and introduces a sociotechnical selectionist theory allowing both for human agency in technological development while also providing a mechanism for explaining the emergence of law-like technological trends, as Moore’s Law, at macro level.

The limits of the imaginary: Challenges to intervening in future speculations of memory, data, and algorithms

Over 3 years, researchers, artists, and activists collaborated on eight public engagement experiments in five countries. All focused on building critical consciousness about digital futures. The interventions worked: Once participants broke through the seamlessness of interface surfaces, they immediately thought more critically about how digital platforms actually operate. Yet even as participants reached into these black boxes, they did not imagine alternatives. This article offers a critical theory reading of the theme of inevitability, using the concept of discursive closure, whereby we can see how particular values and (infra)structures are naturalized, neutralized, and legitimated, closing off discussion of alternatives that might counter current hegemonic power. This article highlights the importance of considering iterative formats for speculative interventions, whereby facilitators can focus not only on imagining new or different digital futures, but find creative ways to identify and help overcome the current resignation to the inevitable.

Childfree and “bingoed”: A relational dialectics theory analysis of meaning creation in online narratives about voluntary childlessness

ABSTRACTWe utilize RDT 2.0 to analyze 424 narrative accounts by voluntarily childless (“childfree”) Reddit users of bingo-response interactions to explore how discourse constrains and enables meaning creation. Contrapuntal analysis revealed competing Discourses of Reproductive Normativity (DRN) and Reproductive Autonomy (DRA). We identified both dialogically expansive and contractive discursive practices. The carnivalesque, a communication genre characterized by the sample, enabled discursive closure to occur via single-voiced monologue. Calcification is offered as a discourse marker through which authoritative monologism is accomplished. Discursive interplay occurred via countering, negating, and one discursive hybridization, pet parenthood. We offer the bingo-response interaction as a heuristic framework for advancing future RDT inquiry and critically oriented research about challenging social topics. We describe additional implications and future directions.

Open for change but closed for transformation: A communicative analysis of managerial corporate social responsibility discourse on the issue of labor

Why do some researchers observe that managerial corporate social responsibility discourse contributes to increased awareness of and commitment to solving global environmental and social issues, while others reveal that the same discourse works to obfuscate and sidetrack positive social transformation? This article tries to bring together these procedural and structural perspectives on corporate social responsibility discourse by introducing a communicative approach, which embeds the critical study of corporate social responsibility discourse in a complex and emerging discursive field. The discursive strategies of managerial corporate social responsibility are therefore as shifting as the discourses it competes with are varied. This article, grounded in Deetz’s theoretical framework of systematically distorted communication and discursive closure, explores the US garment industry’s corporate social responsibility communication on labor-related issues in the global supply chain. I position garment industry corporate social responsibility discourse within broad labor policy debates at the operational, institutional, and structural levels. I find that corporate-initiated corporate social responsibility communication operates through several internally coherent frames: establishing ethical standards, providing essential services, and innovating labor management systems. Each frame responds to alternative discourses about supply chain labor with discursive closure and non-closure strategies, that is, corporations choose to acknowledge, engage, or agree with some alternative discourses, while ignoring, suppressing, or eliding over others. I argue that the pattern of choosing discursive strategies for different types of alternative discourses is important in understanding systematically distorted communication in the context of a complex, fragmented discursive field.

Managing wildfire disasters in the Rocky Mountains

Research methodology The paper employs ethnographic interviews, a quantitative and qualitative data analysis of publicly accessible data and literature review. Case overview/synopsis With drought conditions expected to worsen in at-risk areas thus amplifying wildfire likelihood, this case explores the organizational and natural dynamics involved with wildfire management. The case engages students to explore the interactions between wildfire, wildland firefighters and agency organizations drawing from the natural resource dependence theory within a sustainability context. When completing the discussion questions, students are challenged to explore how organizations can use discursive closures to eliminate conflict and control meaning surrounding potentially controversial and politicized topics such as wildfire management. Complexity academic level This interdisciplinary case would be appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students in business and STEM classes. Optimal classes include organizational behavior, organizational communication and sustainability. Other appropriate classes include strategic management, applied business decisions, public relations, public policy, crisis management and for corporate training purposes.

Communication Problems When Participants Disagree (or Avoid Disagreeing) in Dialogues in Swedish Natural Resource Management—Challenges to Agonism in Practice

In this article, we analyze how participants perform disagreement in meetings organized with the explicit purpose of managing through dialogue conflicts concerning natural resources in Sweden. How is a conversation initiated about something that participants disagree about? How do they clarify to each other that, about what, and why they disagree? How do they show that they understand it is like that and what do they do when this is clear to them? Answers to these questions are important because, if dialogue is to contribute to the constructive development of conflict situations, dialogue should be regarded as a forum where disagreement is expressed and developed, rather than as a forum and tool for consensus. We conducted a sequential analysis of how disagreement is performed and accomplished in normative dialogues in which participants talk about how to reduce the negative impact of wildlife populations — such as predators and grazing birds — on human activities such as domestic reindeer husbandry and cropfarming. The analysis shows that disagreement is articulated in ways that do not seem to make ontological, epistemological and axiological differences among positions clear for participants. We identified six procedures through which disagreements are(not) accomplished in these conversations. This shows that routines and procedures in normative dialogue are characterized by consensus-preferences not helpful foragonistic dialogue. In order to avoid situations where dialogue leads to discursive closures, standards and procedures that facilitate articulation of disagreement need to be developed.

Discursive closure: political parties and the (ir)relevance of ideology in Azerbaijan

ABSTRACTWhy does ideology often fail to take hold in post-Soviet party politics where parties tend to be personalistic, patronage-based and clientelistic rather than programmatic? Moving beyond conventional theories of social cleavage and patrimonial legacies, this paper offers an alternative explanation focusing on the structure of a country’s discursive space. Analysis of Azerbaijani political party manifestos shows that all political players – the ruling and pro-government parties and the opposition groups alike – actively prevent the emergence of ideological competition and debate. All parties are wedded to the same underlying ideology of nationalism and a shallow or nominal commitment to democracy. This situation perpetuates the status quo and breeds political apathy among younger people.