Discursive Conflicts Research Articles

Dialectical Sentences and Social Contradictions in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables

This paper highlights formal and thematic expressions of discursive conflicts in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. It focuses on Hawthorne’s use of the “dialectical sentence,” a type of sentence attributed to German dialectical thinkers, principally Theodor Adorno. Voicing two contradictory views in the same breath, the dialectical sentence provides formal expression of irresolvable discursive conflicts. Hawthorne’s dialectical sentence serves as a suitable medium for expressing the conflict of interests between the Pyncheon and Maule families. The discursive conflicts are expressed through a set of binary terms, including Pyncheon/Maule, novel/romance, present/past, reason/rumor and science/ superstition. The first term in each binary usually serves for the Pyncheons and the second, the Maules. Thus, expressed in dialectical sentences, the narrative voice oscillates between an irony which reflects the values of the former family and an enthusiasm which reflects those of the latter. Coming down firmly on neither side of the conflict, and through avoiding reconciliation, the novel takes on a dialectical structure which keeps the resolution of the discursive conflicts, as a utopian element, for a time outside the novel’s timeframe.

After the Night, Before the Gate: Kafkaesque Imaginations and Dystopian Speculations in the Mediterranean

ABSTRACT This article attempts a critical conversation between Kafka’s Der Prozess (posthumously published in 1925, translated into English as The Trial in 1937) and two novels from the Mediterranean Basin. The Turkish author Bilge Karasu’s Gece (1985, translated into English as Night by Güneli Gün in 1994) responds to the national conflicts intensified by the military coup in Türkiye (Turkey) in the 1980s with its dark portrayal of political conspiracies and unhinged violence. Almost thirty years later, Aziz conveys a similar sense of social chaos and political disillusionment: her novel Al-Ṭābūr (2013, translated into English as The Queue by Elisabeth Jaquette in 2016) addresses the aftermath of the 2011 Egypt uprising. In addition to the social critique that shapes the dystopian allegories of the novels, Kayışcı Akkoyun examines the discursive conflicts and gaps through which Kafka, Karasu, and Aziz expose the constructed nature of oppressive structures and the arbitrariness of authority. She argues that the disjointed dystopian narratives of Kafka, Karasu, and Aziz not only portray the horrors witnessed at a particular place and time but also share a common utopian vision that extends to the future through the authors’ imaginative struggle against totalizing forces of uneven modernization.

Examining academic freedom within WB and UNESCO discourses on higher education: A Foucauldian discourse analysis

Academic freedom constitutes an integral part of traditional university values that ensure the proper functioning of universities in pursuing truth and inculcating civic values. In a globalized world where Higher Education (HE) policy is the result of the interaction of local, national, and international levels, the positions of international organizations on questions of academic freedoms deem significant. Within global discourses on HE, literature contrasts the World Bank’s human capitalist to UNESCO’s humanistic approach. Through Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of both organizations’ documents, the paper presented a genealogical analysis of academic freedom that challenged the existence of static, opposite, and binary positions. Transformations, ruptures, juxtapositions as well as gaps, limits, and exclusions were detected within and across International Organizations’ discourses. Juxtaposition of economic and humanistic rationales as well as academic freedom protection and neoliberal policy interventions have muted discursive conflicts and inherent contradictions. The failure of UNESCO to address contemporary threats to academic freedom emerged from the appearance of neoliberal transnational governmentality as an inevitable social regularity that delimits what can be said and cannot be said about academic freedom. Through coercive funding schemes and technologies of differentiation, surveillance, and monitoring, the WB created the space for such transnational governmentality, and placed faculty members under its gaze resulting in undermining academic freedoms and de-professionalization of academics.

‘Green future’ versus ‘Planetary boundaries’? Evolving online discourse coalitions in European bioeconomy conflicts

The European Commission is pursuing a circular bioeconomy to tackle pressing sustainability challenges, such as climate change and fossil dependency. Previous bioeconomy policy studies demonstrated the existence of competing bioeconomy discourses in the European Union. However, it remains nebulous how such discursive conflicts emerge and change, particularly in online settings. In this paper, we provide a more in-depth analysis of how argumentative changes of actors alter the network of online dynamic discourse coalitions. We base our findings on interviews and a qualitative discourse network analysis of 9983 tweets about European Union bioeconomy policies from the period 2008–2021. Our results indicate that initially, expert debates centred around storylines on bioeconomy advantages. After the 2012 Bioeconomy Strategy, the debate diversified with the entry of new actors and storylines. Two discourse coalitions, ‘Green future’ and ‘Planetary boundaries’, emerged around conflicting storyline clusters. In the aftermath of the 2018 Bioeconomy Strategy update, the debate simplified into core argumentations of few, highly conflicting storylines, leading to a polarization of the two discourse coalitions. Storyline hijacking further added to polarization and conflict. Understanding the evolution of online dynamic discourse coalitions provides new opportunities for practitioners to open up discourses towards storylines from other parts of the discourse network. This can help to prevent locking-in the limited range of solutions in congruence with the dominant ‘Green future’ discourse.

Discursive conflicts, actors, and Twitter polarization: the dismissal of Minister of Education Abraham Weintraub from the Bolsonaro administration

Este artigo apresenta um estudo das dimensões que envolvem os embates discursivos entre grupos de apoiadores políticos no debate público em plataformas digitais. Por meio do estudo de caso do embate no Twitter em torno da demissão de Weintraub do Ministério da Educação do governo Bolsonaro, apresenta uma análise que destaca três dimensões do embate discursivo: (a) a cronologia do comportamento das redes de interação discursivas sobre o tema; (b) as temáticas que foram mobilizadas; e (c) o perfil daqueles usuários que mais tuitaram durante as discussões. Os resultados apontam que os embates discursivos são dominados 1) pela replicação de mensagens originais (retweets), 2) pelo entrecruzamento de temas que envolvem os personagens e o contexto do conflito e 3) pela grande atividade de perfis não institucionais na difusão das mensagens associadas a seus posicionamentos ideológicos.

The Ordering of Green Values

Abstract The article presents a comparative study of shale gas media debates in Germany and Poland. Drawing from the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD), it addresses discursive conflicts over the use of hydraulic fracturing and its environmental impacts in both countries. The authors relate their analysis to the theoretical debate that emerged in the 1990s in French sociology concerning the question of “green justifications” that form a specific way of how social actors intervene, dispute, and build compromises in public discussions to protect non-human entities. Referring to these discussions, this article identifies several ecological justification clusters and the associated social actors that are ‘compromised’ or enclosed in existing orders of worth.

Tristan’s Origins

AbstractThe initial section of the thirteenth-century Tristan en prose has been the subject of multiple critical investigations, mostly devoted to identifying its teleological purpose or figurative function in relation to the rest of the romance. This article proposes to reframe the question by reading the narrative of incest that dominates the “prehistory” of the prose Tristan against two key concepts that inform Michel Foucault’s 1971 essay “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire.” First, Foucault’s focus on the succession of discursive formations allows for a reinterpretation of the “guerre des récits” that traverses the Tristan: within this critical framework, Foucault’s work on judicial forms permits the identification of the points of emergence of new power/knowledge relationships within the prehistory, with the advent of ecclesiastical authority embodied by Saint Augustine and affirmed in the context of the saint’s public ordeal. Second, Foucault’s reading of the body as the surface of inscription of such discursive conflicts sheds light on the ways in which the saint’s discourse rewrites the bodies of the two protagonists, Apollo and Chelinde, and frames them within the lines of lineage. However, once Augustine’s narrative of “origin” is reinscribed in its discursive context, it clearly appears as purposefully chimeric. Because Tristan’s Arimathean lineage is founded on the revelation of Apollo and Chelinde’s incest, the very idea of unbroken continuity and ordered descent within genealogy is revealed as an illusion: it is a genealogical stemma that only exists in virtue of an archetypal error—the “bad grammar” of incest.

Subjectivity as the site of struggle: students' perspectives toward sino-foreign cooperation universities in the era of discursive conflicts.

While students’ perspectives are crucial for international/transnational institutions’ development, their preferences towards certain values should not be taken for granted, as the possibility of lived experience is confined by individuals’ subjectivity, which derives from power and knowledge but does not depend on them (Deleuze; Foucault, 1988). Drawing on empirical data collected from Chinese sino-foreign cooperation universities, this study illustrates how the constructed neoliberal and authoritarian subjectivity influences students’ perception towards the enrolled universities, and their struggle in self-examination about what counts as truth, especially privileged by the discursive conflicts. It further argues while such critique to the politically imposed discourses represents the first step for “the care of the self” as Foucault proposes, the students have inevitably confronted the danger of the sense of lost.

НОВЫЕ КРИЗИСЫ, СОЦИАЛЬНЫЕ РАЗМЕЖЕВАНИЯ, ДИСКУРСИВНЫЕ КОНФЛИКТЫ И ПРОБЛЕМА ОБЩЕСТВЕННОГО ЕДИНСТВА В XXI ВЕКЕ

The author focuses on the idea that the new discourse of conflict characterizes the modern political space. Two main features characterized current crises in political relations inside and outside the countries. Firstly, social divisions that destroy the integration of national communities. Secondly, discursive conflicts, characterized by the opposite narratives and mutual bitterness of cosmopolitans and communitarians. These new patterns are the serious threat to social unity and democracy. Modern researchers see a danger in the new phenomena of the moralization of politics, the politicization of science and social polarization. Were marked as challenges in an era of uncertainty and anxiety. They are divided by the relations to the crucial issues such as: the limits of the open society (preservation or devaluation of borders); national sovereignty and the rights of minorities; climate changes (environment protection, restrictions for the industries), etc. Young urban citizens with higher education demonstrates cosmopolitan values. They do not identify themselves as social losers and use a globalization as an opportunity for development. They are those who identify themselves as Europeans and citizens of the world. The less educated social group of elders, living in rural areas, is firmly connected with their local and national communities and perceives the increasing of freedom as a threat to themselves. Even though citizens with communitarian positions constitute a heterogeneous group with a diverse socio-economic profile, all of its representatives share one common feature: the subjective perception of the danger of living in precarious conditions or lose their social status. The vertical conflict is between the cosmopolitan elites (with their privileged positions) and the communitarians. Stigmatization of elites as «anti-national», «immoral», and self-serving has become a typical device in the struggle of right-wing populist parties and voter support movements. These new patterns are marked as a threat to social cohesion and democracy. Researchers see a danger in the new phenomena of the moralization of politics, the politicization of science and social polarization. They are the main riscs in an era of uncertainty, uncertainty and anxiety.

Framework to accumulate validity evidence for intended and actual consequences of Korean language proficiency testing

Korea is rapidly becoming a multicultural society. As the notion of purity in ethnic bloodline has long been a requisite for ‘Koreanness’, however, the cultural nationalist identity seems to be maintained on proficiency levels tested by the most powerful, government-instituted Korean language test, TOPIK (Test of Proficiency in Korean). Research on immigrants’ language practices, ideologies and (language) testing requirements has been bleak in Korean contexts, and this article proposes one such framework by combining critical discursive approaches and contemporary argument-based approaches to validation to evaluate a newly developed test, TOPIK-speaking, and related policy issues. Drawing on Shohamy’s critical language testing (CLT), Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (CDA), and Bachman and Palmer’s assessment use argument (AUA), it illustrates the unique features of a validation framework and uses TOPIK-speaking as an example to collect and evaluate empirical evidence for its intended and actual consequences. The practice of testing consequences should be discursively analysed as a multilayered phenomenon, reinforced by discursive conflicts, such as represented in the media.

Discursive conflicts in news media and the suspension of a government-led test of English in Korea

Drawing on critical discourse analysis methodologies, this study examines the discursive conflicts and strategies employed by newspaper media surrounding the National English Ability Test (NEAT) in Korea. NEAT was reported to cause severe competition among young learners of English and lacked public support. Discursive conflicts over whether NEAT would be legitimized flourished in the media. In this study, the discursive practices adopted by both proponents and opponents of NEAT in two leading Korean newspapers of different political orientations—Chosun Ilbo and Hankyoreh—were analyzed from 2006 to 2016. Over this decade, there were three periods of transformation: creation, expansion, and extinction. During the creation period, the discursive conflict focused on the TOEFL crisis in Korea, expansion on the implementation of NEAT, and extinction on its abolition. From creation to abolition, there were competing rationales for developing, suspending, or abolishing NEAT. This study investigated the underlying orientations (neoliberal and evaluative state) of the two newspapers and found that they examined the pros and cons of using the test. Moreover, the government’s implementation of high-stakes testing and its attempt to reward those who complied and to curb the private education sector stresses market-friendly state interaction, which accordingly perpetuates neoliberal conditions.

Children's active outdoor play: 'good' mothering and the organisation of children's free time.

This qualitative study draws on the Foucault-inspired notion of biopedagogies to examine and problematise the salient factors of contemporary motherhood impacting children's active outdoor play (AOP). The study positions mothering as a practice, through which children's health and bodies are constructed and disciplined. A discourse analysis of 21 interviews with Canadian mothers identified three discursive constructions of the 'good mother': mothers as time managers, risk managers and screen-time managers. Each was characterised by discursive conflicts that compromised the provision of AOP by mothers. This study provides data necessary for successfully including AOP as a leisure practice within family-centred health promotion.

Frontier justice: international law and ‘lawless’ spaces in the “War on Terror”

How does the discourse of international law facilitate extraterritorial state violence? This paper synthesizes insights from International Relations, comparative politics, and legal studies in order to explore how the sovereign foundations of international law may render “frontier territories” exceptionally vulnerable to external military intervention. I argue that international law’s focus on sovereignty constitutes frontier territories as “ambiguous,” which leads to discursive conflicts over how to define these spaces, what is considered “legal” and “illegal” action within them, and who gets to define their status. All of this creates a conducive environment for powerful international governments to denigrate frontier territories as “lawless,” by rhetorically constructing them as exceptional legal spaces that do not deserve the same protections as areas ordered by sovereign ideals. To illuminate this empirically, I conduct a discourse analysis of 16 distinct legal documents from the Obama White House, including internal memorandums and public speeches on the legal standing of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

Towards equal sharing of care? Judicial implementation of EU equal employment and work–life balance policies in Spain

ABSTRACTDiscursive factors have not figured prominently in implementation research. This article fills this gap by addressing the material and discursive conflicts articulated around equality at workplace between women and men in multilevel judicial contexts. It studies obstacles to and opportunities for the judicial implementation of EU equal employment policies in Spain by analyzing two cases of parental rights to childcare litigated before Spanish and supranational courts, namely the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights. The claimants are working parents who litigate for the recognition of their right to provide childcare. In judicial implementation multiple meanings about women, gender and intersectionality can be articulated and counteracted at different levels. Frame analysis of selected judicial documents and content analysis of legal proceedings and interviews show that simultaneous favorable institutions, framing, and actors are needed for implementing EU equal employment policies in a way that allows overcoming the gendered division of care and paid work. Distinguishing among ‘women’, ‘gender’ and ‘intersectionality’ approaches, we assess the extent to which the result of judicial implementation is the transformation of gender roles towards equal sharing of care.

Discurso e políticas de ensino de línguas estrangeiras: uma análise do Programa Rio Criança Global

Este artigo se dedica a discussão das tensões e dos conflitos discursivos que emergiram nas instâncias política e educacional por ocasião da implementação do Programa Rio Criança Global, destinado a ampliar o ensino da Língua Inglesa no âmbito da educação municipal do Rio de Janeiro, reduzindo aí, consecutivamente, o espaço do idioma Espanhol, prescrito como obrigatório pela Lei 2.939/1999. Para tanto, pautamo-nos no referencial teórico dos estudos discursivos foucaultianos e analisamos enunciados advindos do Decreto Municipal no 31.187/2009.

Clashing interpretations of REDD+ \u201cresults\u201d in the Amazon Fund

Results-based funding (RBF) is a governance concept that is rapidly becoming the mainstream paradigm for international collaborations in the environmental sector. While portrayed as a compromise solution between market-based mechanisms and unconditional donations, the implementation of RBF is revealing new conflicts and contradictions of its own. This paper explores the application of RBF for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) by describing the discursive conflicts between recipient (i.e., Brazil) and donor (i.e., Norway and Germany) countries of the Amazon Fund about what constitutes “results” or “performance.” Although all parties agree that the financial transfers to RBF should be based on past emission reductions in relation to a historical baseline, they hold clashing interpretations about temporal (i.e., past or future) and epistemological (i.e., how to measure) aspects of the results these payments are intended for. Firstly, while Brazil emphasizes that it deserves a reward of USD 21 billion for results achieved between 2006 and 2016, donor countries have indicated an interest in paying only for most recent results as a way to incentivize further reductions. Secondly, while all parties believe that Amazon Fund should support policies to reduce deforestation, donor countries have revealed concerns that the performance of the Amazon Fund projects in generating further reductions has not been measured in a rigorous manner. This suggests that donor countries may consider making changes to current RBF mechanisms or getting involved in new forms of finance.

Multiple conservation criteria, discursive conflicts and stakeholder preferences in the era of ecological modernization

Implementation of conservation plans as the final stage of a long process of institutionalization of modern strategic environmental management theory meets with difficulties in real world conditions. When actual application of scientific principles is confronted with public appreciation and engagement on the ground, the perception per se of—and reaction to—the scientific discourse and technical arguments regarding conservation value(s) of designated areas, it often turns into a critique by local communities of the preponderant role of experts and the dominance of a western scientific worldview in the ecological modernization era. In this paper, we develop the formalism—and use variations—of a multiplicative model of conservation value, involving concepts that are central to the IPBES decomposition of values into interacting meanings: principles and preferences. Technically, overall valuation after a suite of conservation criteria of an exemplary designated site, i.e. the Natura 2000 Kalloni Gulf, Greece, is decomposed into the product of two factors, technical score and appreciation, as perceived by a series of local influential stakeholder groups. We use a multi-criteria valuation profile adopted and promoted by scientific experts as reference to which respective valuations of stakeholder groups are contrasted. The study refers to a case where a two decade-long fierce social conflict drove to stagnation the implementation process. Divergence(s) in scoring and appreciation of conservation criteria between scientific experts versus local stakeholder groups are measured using our models variables and classic decomposition analysis techniques. Our model(s) treat the following problems: (1) the relative effects of singular conservation criteria when only one conservation criterion in one site is considered; (2) the relative effects of multiple conservation criteria when applied in one site. A narrative story is attempted regarding discursive conflicts between social groups in the studied case: (1) a pattern of mistrust of the public against scientific discourse on conservation planning: scientists are perceived just as ‘another stakeholder group’ promoting their own pro-conservation agenda; (2) a NIMBY-like reaction based on individuals’ property-defence discourse; and, (3) the by-effects of poor governance in downscaling decision-making from centralized to regional/local level.

Indonesia and the “conflictual consensus”: a discursive perspective on Indonesian democracy

ABSTRACTIn this essay we propose an alternative approach to assessing the state of democracy in Indonesia. We focus not on institutional indicators (as is usually the case) but on manifestations of political discourses in the public sphere. In applying post-Marxist political theory through the work of Slavoj Žižek and Chantal Mouffe, we argue that democracy’s main defining feature is that it allows antagonistic discourses about alternative policies to coexist, yet still manages to coalesce around a minimal consensus on how these discursive conflicts are to be dealt with in a fair way. Applying this approach to democracy analysis to Indonesia, we suggest that the major obstacles to democratic practice do not emerge from institutional problems, but from an overbearing political discourse that imposes broad consensus and harmony on most political issues. Political discourse in Indonesia is generally structured around “Islam” and “the people.” These themes provide a basis for a political consensus that conceals economic and social contradictions and reveals considerable depoliticization in Indonesian democratic practice.

The regime’s worst nightmare: the mobilization of citizen democracy. A study of Podemos’ (aesthetic) populism and the production of affect in political discourse

ABSTRACTIn spite of not even being officially registered three months before the European Parliament Elections of 2014, the Spanish upstart party Podemos captured almost 8 percent of the vote, while barely nine months after its formation, in October 2014, social surveys were citing the party as the leading force in national politics. The overall purpose of this paper is to explore how Podemos’ aesthetic and its discursive strategies are being used to mobilize affect and create collective identities in the battle for political hegemony in Spain. I argue in dialogue with Laclau [2005. On populist reason. London: Verso], Errejón and Mouffe [2016. Podemos: in the name of the people. London: Lawrence & Wishart] that: (a) the articulation of a new political grammar and discursive conflicts in which the popular majority can identify themselves as subjects in opposition to an adversary ‘Other’ plays a central role in constructing ‘the people’ as a new form of political culture, especially in times of crisis whereby; (b) the notion of populism transgresses categories such as ‘oversimplification’ and/or ‘demagogy’ and can also be regarded in terms of exhibiting sensitivity to popular demands and participatory democracy. My findings show that welfare politics are not necessarily best communicated through traditional left-wing symbols, due to the left’s popular link with communism and political defeat; these having been repeatedly recounted by the media/culture industry throughout history. Indeed, many may share the idea of protecting a nation’s common social services without wanting to position themselves within a Marxist (leftist) framework. I point to the representative crisis as an affective crisis where there is a potential affective space to be filled. From here, I stress that resistance movements seem to need to learn the current media logic of conflict and recognition in order to mediate affect and produce identification.

The imperishable controversy over aquaculture

Fish farming has been a recurring topic of debate, not the least in the news media. The media is an important source of information about the aquaculture industry and its products to the public. However, the media is also an important debate arena, enabling representatives of the public, stakeholders, authorities, and the industry to engage in discussions as well as to influence policy and regulations. This paper focuses on the continuous debates in news media, the topics and storylines discussed, the various actors participating, and their arguments. Through a study of the content, positions, and producers of debate contributions in nine Norwegian newspapers, this paper sheds light on the public debate on aquaculture and the present controversies. Drawing on discourse theory, it is argued that the concept of discursive conflicts offers important insights into the controversies surrounding aquaculture. Discourse coalitions unite seemingly dissimilar and independent actors, and shared story lines provide political momentum, reduce complexity and reify the debate. However, such coalitions also contribute to maintaining the debate in a deadlock.