Discursive Constraints Research Articles

Engaging with discursive complexities in mental health accessibility: Implications for acquired brain injury.

The psychosocial needs of people with acquired brain injury (ABI) have been neglected based on ableist assumptions of incapability to participate in mental health treatment. Although people without disabilities benefit from evidence-based mental health supports, these treatments remain inaccessible for those with disabilities after ABI. Discursive simplifications used in dominant conceptualisations of health and disability may maintain this inaccessibility. This paper examines the role of discursive constraints in concealing the complexities of ABI recovery, undermining the gradients of mental health exclusion among different ABI subpopulations, and muddying possibilities for enhancing mental health accessibility. An alternate discourse that challenges disabling societies in service of centring the whole person is proposed. Discursive opportunities are thus created by conceptualising the objective and subjective dimensions of disability as intermeshed, providing both the motivation to incentivise mental health inclusion, as well as a method to achieve it. By recognising the unavoidable impact of bodily impairments on social participation, participatory ideals can be actualised by accommodating ABI-related disabilities in mental health treatments. The possibilities for transformative research and practice are illuminated through examples of mental health treatments that have been preliminarily adapted using accommodations, and a research agenda for realising these possibilities is proposed.

Toward a coherent critical theory of learner autonomy in language learning: Exploring its political implications in higher education and limitations in the literature

The literature on autonomous language learning reveals both, scholars’ great enthusiasm for the revolutionary potential of learner autonomy as well as pessimism for its continual depoliticization within higher education. Similar to how ‘learner autonomy’ is still today an unfinished construct that raises considerable confusion among scholars, the critical theory of learner autonomy in the field of language learning remains largely unexplored; and thus, yet to be fully articulated. Building on the relevant literature, this article attempts to provide a coherent and nuanced theoretical framework for the critical practice of learner autonomy in higher education. Results show how the field of language learning is dominated by uncritical and apolitical approaches that render learner autonomy a politically impotent practice. Critical autonomous language learning must be both critically aware—so it can raise students’ awareness of the structural and discursive constraints on their autonomy—and politically active—so it may lead to education reform and social change—, while also aiming at reaching the highest levels of institutional material support and student control possible.

Mobility Repertoires: How Chinese Overseas Students Overcame Pandemic-Induced Immobility

The burgeoning field of immobility studies focuses on how migratory aspirations and capabilities shape a given (im)mobility status but devotes scant attention to how people traverse different (im)mobility categories. Through a case study of Chinese students in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article develops two arguments to shed light on migrants’ experiences and strategies in mobility transitions. First, during the pandemic, while China's restrictive travel policies and unfavorable public discourses made return migration extremely difficult, Chinese overseas students also felt unwelcome in the United States, due to visa restrictions and Sinophobic violence. This dilemma of being unable to return to the homeland and being simultaneously stranded in a hostile host society pushed Chinese student migrants, a previously highly mobile population, into immobility. Second, drawing on in-depth interviews, we discover that Chinese overseas students deployed four sets of tools—online crowdsourcing, virtual intermediary, temporal adaptation, and institutional cushioning—to reclaim mobility. We propose the concept of “mobility repertoires” to capture social actors’ active retooling and deliberate restrategizing of digital, cognitive, and institutional resources to navigate unsettling (im)mobility predicaments and construct new mobility tactics. By cross-fertilizing studies of immobility and migration infrastructure, we provide an action-centered, processual account of (im)mobilities as agential practices and robust courses of action, rather than static statuses or categories. This article also transcends the mobility bias in the literature on international student mobility (ISM) by unraveling the co-production of international student immobility by migration policies and discursive constraints in host and home countries.

Lawyers’ metapragmatic expressions in the opening speech of Anglo-American criminal trials

This study explores lawyers’ linguistic traces of metapragmatic awareness as manifested in the opening speech of Anglo-American criminal trials, with a view to investigating the forms, functions, and distribution of explicit metapragmatics. Based on transcript data from five criminal trials, six groups of metapragmatic expressions are identified: verbal act descriptions, epistemic and evidential adjusters, message glosses, speech commentaries, talk about interactional norms, and talk about language use. Quantitative results indicate a unique distribution pattern, attributable to the discursive constraints associated with institutional norms and, to a lesser extent, to the presenter’s immediate communicative needs. The study reveals that while evidence and facts are the primary objects of dispute in the courtroom, pragmatic issues also often become objects of talk and, at times, are subject to being challenged. These metapragmatic utterances serve to enhance the lawyers’ propositional content and boost their credibility in various ways and can conceal the argumentative force of a lawyer’s statements, thereby mediating the interpretation of the facts and the import of evidence.

Is L1 Transfer Operative at the Syntax-Discourse Interface? The Acquisition of Null and Overt Subjects in L2 Turkish

Recent studies on L2 acquisition focus on how interface-related properties are acquired at the end state grammars. Proposed as part of this theme, the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace & Filiaci, 2006; Sorace, 2011) claims that the syntax-discourse interface is particularly challenging to acquire, irrespective of the L1 and L2 of the speakers. On the other hand, the Full Transfer / Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996) predicts that L2 acquisition is L1-constrained and UG is directly accessed. This study tests these assumptions on the acquisition of null and overt subjects in L2 Turkish to understand whether L1 transfer operates in the domain that needs the mapping of syntax on the discursive knowledge. This was tested in a study on advanced Korean and Japanese L2 Turkish speakers (n=27) by employing contextualized grammaticality judgment task (CGJT). In this task, participants were asked to judge whether the contextualized sentences they read were pragmatically odd or not (for each condition n=4). The discursive constraints (topic continuity and topic shift) on the use of null and overt subjects were not violated in the first two conditions. However, the latter two conditions violated the discursive constraints, rendering unacceptable null and overt subject constructions. The results of the CGJT revealed that the L2 participants were insensitive to the discourse of null and overt subject distribution. Since the very same constraints that regulate the null and overt subject distribution hold both in the L1 and L2 of the speakers, this finding suggests that L1 transfer is not operative at the syntax-discourse interface, which is in line with the claim that the properties at this interface cannot be fully acquired as postulated by the Interface Hypothesis.

The Divine Feminine in Mormon Art

The Divine Feminine in Mormon Art

‘Don’t worry. It’s just the baby blues’: representations of new motherhood in contemporary graphic memoirs

ABSTRACT All bodies are governed by principles of temporality, yet regarding their roles as (potential) mothers, female bodies are kept under particularly strict observation. I argue that comics’ power to offer ‘a more inclusive perspective of medicine’ can be made fruitful to interrogate the impact that implicit temporal regimes that govern pregnancy, birth and the postnatal period have on new mothers. Analysing two autobiographical comics, Teresa Wong’s Dear Scarlet and Lucy Knisley’s Kid Gloves, I examine how Knisley’s struggles with pre-eclampsia and Wong’s postnatal depression turn their time as new mothers into a period of ‘crip time’ in which their chrono-normative time experience is altered. Both artists use different aesthetic means to illustrate experiences that differ from the positive image of an easy birth, swift recovery and blissful postnatal period perpetuated by contemporary discourses. I suggest that the medium of comics is particularly suited to illustrate these shifts in their subjective time experience. My paper explores how Knisley’s and Wong’s graphic narratives create alternative representations of the corporeal experience of the postpartum period, providing a social commentary on the discursive constraints of motherhood and an underrepresented time in women’s lives.

Factors influencing the development and implementation of national greenhouse gas inventory methodologies

In contrast to its Assessment Reports, less is known about the social science processes through which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces methodologies for greenhouse gas emissions reporting. This limited attention is problematic, as these greenhouse gas inventories are critical components for identifying, justifying, and adjudicating national-level mitigation commitments. We begin to fill this gap by descriptively assessing, drawing on data triangulation that incorporates ecological and political analysis, the historical process for developing emissions guidelines. Our systematic descriptive efforts highlight processes and structures through which inventories might become disconnected from the latest peer-reviewed environmental science. To illustrate this disconnect, we describe the IPCC guideline process, outlining themes that may contribute to discrepancies, such as diverging logics and timeframes, discursive power, procedural lock-in, resource constraints, organizational interests, and complexity. The themes reflect challenges to greenhouse gas inventories themselves, as well as broader challenges to integrating climate change science and policy. Highlights This article provides an illustrative analysis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s greenhouse gas inventory guideline process There is evidence for substantive discrepancies between empirical literature and these guidelines Particularly for forest soil organic carbon reporting, inventory guidelines are influenced by a multitude of political and scientific actors Explanations for these discrepancies merit further inquiry, and include institutional lock-in, political influence, discursive power, resource constraints, and world views

Hitler, for Example: Registers of National Socialist Exemplarity in Contemporary Germany

AbstractThis article examines whether and how the figure of Adolf Hitler in particular, and National Socialism more generally, operate as moral exemplars in today’s Germany. In conversation with similar studies about Mosely in England, Franco in Spain, and Mussolini in Italy, it seeks to advance our comparative understanding of neofascism in Europe and beyond. In Germany, legal and discursive constraints limit what can be said about the Third Reich period, while even far-right nationalists often condemn Hitler, for either the Holocaust or his military failure. Here I revise the concept of moral exemplarity as elaborated by Caroline Humphry to argue that Hitler and National Socialism do nevertheless work as contemporary exemplars, in at least three fashions: negativity, substitution, and extension. First, they stand as the most extreme markers of negative exemplarity for broad publics that understand them as illustrations of absolute moral depravity. Second, while Hitler himself is widely unpopular, Führer-substitutes such as Rudolf Hess provide alternative figures that German nationalists admire and seek to emulate. Finally, by extension to the realm of the ordinary, National Socialism introduces a cast of exemplars in the figures of loving grandfathers or anonymous fallen soldiers. The moral values for which they stand, I show, appear to be particularly significant for young nationalists. An extended, more open-ended notion of exemplarity, I conclude, can offer important insights about the lingering afterlife of fascist figures in the moral life of European nationalists today.

The Language of Transcendentalism

Danny Luzon, “The Language of Transcendentalism: Mysticism, Gender, and the Body in Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite” (pp. 263–290) This essay studies the idea of a “third” sex adapted by Julia Ward Howe and other American transcendentalists from the language and theology of European mysticism. It explores Howe’s design of a nonbinary gender category through her dialogue with the figure of the hermaphrodite in the mystic tradition. Specifically, I look at Howe’s unfinished “Laurence manuscript” (written throughout the 1840s and first published in 2004 under the title The Hermaphrodite), tracing how it gives shape to unique intersex modes of knowledge and expression. The novel’s intersex protagonist, who repeatedly claims “I am no man, no woman, nothing,” allows Howe to productively utilize a language of negation and multiplicity, making the apophatic quality of mystic speech, as well as her protagonist’s denial of intelligibility, into a means of spiritual transcendence. In doing so, Howe marks gender categories as dwelling beyond social expression, away from phallocentric discursive constraints and their production of fixed dualistic concepts. Her mystic phenomenology elucidates the indeterminacy of gender, revealing it as something that cannot be adequately conceptualized in language. Howe’s prose thus produces complex dynamics between the spirit and the flesh, in order to free both the self and the body from the sociolinguistic restrictions of social intelligibility.

Conquergood’s other: materializing the cultural text of Hmong and Latinx

ABSTRACT Dwight Conquergood’s ethnographic performance studies research, much of which featured Latinx and Hmong cultures, influenced the Communication discipline. Analytically critiquing those Latinx and Hmong representations, we reinterpret them through our lived experiences. Via three separate vignettes of our culturally forefronted academic lives, we depict how Conquergood has reified and expanded the discursive constraints of our academic beings. Centering on three types of text (urtext, text, and context), we argue that our Hmong and Latinx cultures were and continue to be foundational to a humanistic and humane turn in the study of culture as embraced and advanced by Conquergood and ourselves.

Knucklebone Faces and Throws: Play, Rules, and Rhetorical Discourse in Julius Pollux

Abstract The reconstruction of the culture of play and games in antiquity involves many problems of an exegetical nature, which are especially difficult to analyse because of the limited amount of encyclopaedic evidence that might provide adequate overviews and descriptions. Julius Pollux’s lexicon is an essential text in this regard. In the second half of the second century AD he wrote a synthesis of ancient knowledge, in which each notice was presented within very specific rhetorical and discursive constraints. This article focuses specifically on a passage (Poll. 9.100) in which two different names are given to the same face of the knucklebone. This passage presents an interpretative problem that has led some scholars to hypothesize a specific game rule. This paper shows how the answer to such an exegetical aporia can be solved by looking at the rhetorical specificities of the lexicographic genre and in particular at the discursive organization of the onomastic knowledge by Pollux.

Cambodian schoolgirls’ negotiation of discursive constraints within and beyond the school context

ABSTRACT For adolescent schoolgirls in Cambodia, remaining in school entails negotiating social expectations of the dutiful, domestic-bound daughter and personal desires for educational attainment, independence, and empowerment. Dominant discourses of girlhood in Cambodia construct girls as weak, ignorant, and quiet, and confine girls’ possibilities to future wife, mother, and homemaker; whilst enabling discourses promote girls’ rights to education and participation in society. Drawing on empirical research using visual and textual data collection methods, we explore how 43 secondary schoolgirls from two state-run coeducational schools negotiated the discursive constraints of Cambodian girlhood. We argue that when schoolgirls challenge discourses of female submissiveness, they redefine Cambodian girlhood in ways that extend schoolgirls’ possibilities for action. We examine the complexities of schoolgirls’ subjectivities in relation to dominant discourses of ‘masculine’ strength and domestic-bound females, and deficit discourses attributed to uneducated (out-of-school) girls.

Social dignity for marginalized people in public healthcare: an interpretive review and building blocks for a non-ideal theory

Jacobson (Social Science & Medicine 64:292–302, 2007) finds two distinct meanings of “dignity” in the literature on dignity and health: (1) intrinsic human dignity and (2) social dignity constituted through interactions with caregivers. Especially the latter has been central in empirical health research and warrants further exploration. This article focuses on the social dignity of people marginalized by mental illness, substance abuse and comparable conditions in extramural settings. 35 studies published between 2007 and 2017 have addressed this issue, most of them identifying norms for social dignity: civilized interactions, non-stigmatizing treatment, treatment as unique individuals, being taken seriously, maintaining a positive identity, experiencing independence, relating to others, and participating in daily life. We argue that these norms belong to ideal theory, whereas we agree with Robeyns (Social Theory and Practice 34:341–362, 2008) and others that improving practice is better served by non-ideal theory. Towards this end, we derive from the literature four building blocks for a non-ideal theory of dignity: (1) avoid violations of dignity rather than seeking to promote it; (2) dignity is not a goal to be reached; it requires ongoing effort; (3) promoting dignity is a balancing act; contradictory norms can make it impossible to realize; and (4) dignity can be undermined by organizational and discursive constraints.

Discursive Constraints of Teasing: Constructing Professionality via Teasing in Chinese Entertainment Interviews

AbstractTeasing can be approached as a linguistic resource for examining the interpersonal issues of im/ politeness and face, or as a discursive strategy for displaying relationships or constructing social identities. However, studies have underestimated the discursive constraints of teasing in specific contexts. Meanwhile, a majority of teasing studies were based on Western cultures and did not pay sufficient attention to the variety of teasing across cultures. By collecting data from two Chinese entertainment interviews, where the interviewer employs teasing frequently for performing institutional roles, this study examined how teasing functions to assist the interviewer to complete communicative goals, and explored the discursive constraints of teasing in media context. Data analysis exemplified how teasing helped the interviewer to manage an interview event, obtain the guest’s disclosure and seek audience involvement, helping to construct the interviewer’s professionality. Implications for understanding the discursive features of teasing in the Chinese media context were addressed.

Other ‘lenses’: a training programme for social workers and others working with asylum seekers and migrants in Italy

ABSTRACT The article describes the approach adopted in VeSTA, a training project in Piedmont (north-west Italy), funded by the EU's Fund for Asylum, Migration and Integration (FAMI 2014–2020). The aim of the project was to provide training for social workers and others professionals working with refugees and other migrants, and strengthen the network linking up these various actors. Our theoretical approach stresses the importance of asylum seekers’ social networks, and the legal, institutional and discursive constraints structuring their lives, in order to provide a framework for understanding choices and attitudes of residents of reception centres, as well as those of other migrants. Drawing on research on migration and on media production, we encouraged participants in the training sessions to analyse migrants as ‘social actors’, rather than interpreting their behaviour and needs in terms of ‘their culture’. A particularly innovative part of the project was the involvement of 16 migrants as ‘experts in the relationship with the social services’, who participated with lecturers in certain sessions, in a participatory action approach.

VOCÊS VÃO SAIR A BEM OU A MAL: AN EXAMINATION OF (IM)POLITE FORMS OF ADDRESS ONLINE IN EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE

ABSTRACT
 This article examines forms of address in European Portuguese online and their potential to convey, or facilitate, verbal aggression. Departing from an incident at Bairro da Jamaica in the outskirts of Lisbon, in January 2019, where police were filmed attacking residents, two corpora are constituted based on comments left on YouTube and online Portuguese broadsheets. The analysis of the data shows that forms of address are important devices to facilitate verbal aggression and impoliteness; that online platforms cannot be seen homogeneously but rather as specific contexts imposing specific discursive constraints; and that issues of identity and cognition are fundamental aspects to be developed in future research attempts into forms of address.
 Keywords: Forms of address. European Portuguese. (Im)politeness. Verbal aggression.

19. yüzyıl batılı kadın seyahatnamelerinin analizinde kesişimselliği metodolojik bir araç olarak kavramsallaştirmak

My paper aims to reflect on a methodology that could help to further deepen the critical analysis of travelogues written by western women visiting and writing about Ottoman Turkey during the 19th century highlighting their dual position as “colonized by gender but colonizer by race” (Ghose, 1998). This research draws deeply from Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism (1978) and tries to work towards filling up a gap left by the late Said in his study: the issue of gender. My paper intends to show that gender is a salient variable that assumes importance in the interaction with discursive constraints, related to imperialism, femininity, authority, aesthetics, publishing etc. and at the same time needs to be weighted in respect to the deep heterogeneity that characterized women travelers, different by nationality, faith, class, marital status, education, political and social ideology. By showing the broad and composite spectrum of perspectives envisaged by women writers, their position as both oppressors and at the intersection of multiple oppressions, this paper argues for a more complex methodology of analysis of both gender and colonialism, where women travel writings can be located at the intersection of shifting and multiple overlapping circles. This complexity needs more sophisticated instruments of analysis that can be envisaged in the methodological tool of intersectionality, intended as the examination of the intersection of multiple forms of discrimination.

A Grammar of Religious “Truth”: Pragmatic Considerations on the Nature of Religious Truth

Abstract This article explores various ways in which the concept of truth is actually used across discursive boundaries separating common sense, science, mathematics, and religion. Although my overall approach is pragmatic, I argue that we also need to take some semantic restrictions into consideration. The main objective of the article is the issue of translating concepts of truth in various linguistic and cultural contexts without losing sight of the particular network of connotations. I come to the conclusion that with regard to a religious discourse, a translatable concept of truth typically enters the grammatical place of the subject rather than the predicate. From this position the discursive constraints of authority, authenticity and expressivity are held in check by an internal predetermination of the implied possibility of falsehood. Most of all, however, the article focuses on non-propositional aspects of a religious expression of truth, in which case the very distinction between true and false becomes patently irrelevant.

Children’s reconstruction of psychological knowledge: An ethnographic study of life skills education programmes in India

Despite calls for examining children’s lives relationally, dominant accounts view childhood as biologically, culturally or economically determined. Based on ethnographic observations of children’s life skills education programmes in Bangalore, this article shows how poor and marginalised children reposition themselves as ‘better educated’ and successful compared to peers, while a global network of professionals position them as ‘at-risk’, seeking to intervene in their lives. This article draws attention to how children can be seen as ‘strategically opportunising actors’, who creatively seek to make meaning of their lives despite structural and discursive constraints placed upon them.