Discursive Context Research Articles

Affectively Entertaining: Dating/Games During a “Limited Military Exercise”

Here the author presents a collage of inter-relatable quotations. The excerpts include discourses from/regarding reality dating shows, media coverage of Ukraine’s invasion, gamification in dating apps, the role of affect in media remixing and sense-making, military and business strategy, computerized games, and literary authors and social theory. Questions emerge: How do various forms of popular/social media “interpellate” us? How does affect precede and result from participation, watching, and/or collaboration? How might varied discursive contexts present overlapping (and destabilizing) phrasing and points of focus across platforms? The performative text is designed to meet the moment.

Shaping Strategy Formation Processes of Emerging Ventures

This qualitative study explores how industry discourse shapes the strategy formation processes of new ventures. Based on a field study about the technology ventures in the insurance industry from 2017 to 2019, I unpack the insurance technology (InsurTech) discourse as a socially constructed condition and track the strategy formation processes of four ventures that are embedded in the discourse. I identify two primary streams of discourse, relational and arm’s length, and show how these streams shape the ventures’ strategy formation processes into two patterns: derivative and puzzle-piecing. The study thus highlights the role that socially constructed enablers play in shaping venturing processes and calls for attention to understanding ventures’ strategy work as an evolving process embedded in the discursive context.

Media framing and expression of anti-China sentiment in COVID-19-related news discourse: An analysis using deep learning methods

This study focuses on news content related to China and COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic and investigates how media frame, affected the emergence of anti-China sentiments through a case study of Japanese online news discourse. We collected large-scale digital trace data including online news and comments during the COVID-19 pandemic. By employing deep learning-based sentiment classifications, we were able to measure the extent of anti-China sentiments expressed through comments during the pandemic's different phases and on different types of news content. Our results provide empirical evidence that the news media's negative depictions of China and coverage related to political and international relations issues increased as the prevalence of COVID-19 in Japan increased. Importantly, since this coverage can prompt the expression of anti-China sentiment, we argue that the framing used by the media can provide discursive contexts that escalate COVID-19 issues into a broader expression of anti-China sentiment. This study not only identifies the impact of media frames on the expression of anti-China sentiment but also contributes to the development of methods for detecting public opinion and measuring the framing effect with big data and advanced computational tools.

Securitization of Disinformation in NATO’s Lexicon: A Computational Text Analysis

Following the Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections, disinformation and fake news became popular terms to help generate domestic awareness against foreign information operations globally. Today, a large number of politicians, diplomats, and civil society leaders identify disinformation and fake news as primary problems in both domestic and foreign policy contexts. But how do security institutions define disinformation and fake news in foreign and security policies, and how do their securitization strategies change over years? Using computational methods, this article explores 238,452 tweets from official NATO and affiliated accounts, as well as more than 2,000 NATO texts, news statements, and publications since January 2014, presenting an unsupervised structural topic model (stm) analysis to investigate the main thematic and discursive contexts of these texts. The study finds that NATO’s threat discourse and securitization strategies are heavily influenced by the US’ political lexicon, and that the organization’s word choice changes based on their likelihood of mobilizing alliance resources and cohesion. In addition, the study suggests that the recent disinformation agenda is, in fact, a continuity of NATO’s long-standing Russia-focused securitization strategy and their attempt to mobilize the Baltic states and Poland in support of NATO’s mission.

Sculpture and Faith at St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1796–1913: Introduction

Abstract In our introduction, we establish the original conference context of the 15 following position papers, emphasizing that the papers represent a conversation between participants, each of whom had been allocated a single monument from St Paul’s Cathedral in the period between c. 1796 and 1913, to think about the memorial’s visual and material richness and complexity, as well as its immediate and wider cathedral location, and broader discursive contexts. We map out the historiographical contexts of the papers, within the contexts of sculpture studies, studies of church monuments, interdisciplinary studies of the nineteenth century, and histories of Victorian Christianity – and especially Anglicanism – as it intersects with other world religions, and seeks to evangelize both at home and abroad.

The acquisition of L2 Spanish intonation

Abstract This study examines the developmental patterns manifested in the intonational grammar of American English-speaking learners of Spanish based on their use of intonational features (e.g., [±delayed peak], [±deaccentuation], or [±compression]) involved in focus marking in three different discursive contexts (i.e., broad focus, informational subject focus and corrective subject focus). The data, collected through a Question & Answer pairs task performed by learners and native speakers, suggests that while development towards the target language is possible, it is constrained by markedness and learnability. The analysis of the results is framed within Mennen’s L2 Intonation Learning theory, which considers the multidimensionality that characterizes intonational grammars and the complexity of the acquisition process as a result of it. Individual factors related to the learners’ experience (i.e., experience abroad and hours of exposure) were examined and extended periods of immersion (i.e., more than 8 months) were found to have a positive effect.

The semiotics of Heiren (黑人): race, everyday language, and discursive complicities in a Chinese migrant community

ABSTRACT Among Chinese migrants in Tanzania, “Heiren (黑人)” (black person/people) is a ubiquitous term with many referents, encapsulating everyone from labourers to state officials, and ranging from an ethno-racial category to an individual pronoun. In English translation, the term bears on a contentious debate regarding racialisation in Africa-China relations. In this paper, based on seventeen months of fieldwork among Chinese migrants in Tanzania, I examine racialisation in everyday discourse, and also the politics of (white) ethnographic reportage on (non-white) racism. I focus on the social lives of the word heiren among Chinese, examining how it is deployed in heterogenous social situations and discursive contexts. I argue that the use of ‘Heiren’ flattens otherwise heterogeneous experiences with and attitudes towards Tanzanians, contributing to the construction of an African other. Specifically, talking about Heiren becomes a way that economically privileged but politically vulnerable Chinese migrants talk about the tense relations they have with Tanzanians. However, I argue the significance of Heiren talk is not that it defines ‘the Chinese’ in isolation as ‘racist’, but rather how it becomes discursively complicit with global anti-blackness.

Model rekonstrukcji aktualnego znaczenia interjęzykowych lakun w oparciu o paradygmat dyskursologiczny

This paper presents a model for the reconstruction of the actual meaning of interlingual lacunas. Lacunas as lexical units, present in one culture and absent in another, that hinder the reception of texts and cause difficulties in translation. The clarification of their meaning is possible by analysing the discursive contexts and the discourse fragments in which they occur. Based on the discourse paradigm, a model for the reconstruction of the actual meaning has been developed that consists of individual stages of analysis. According to the assumptions of the proposed model, the case study reconstructs the actual meaning of the lacuna Drachenfutter in German.

Hilary Mantel’s Re-appropriation of Whig Historiography: A Reading of The Wolf Hall Trilogy in the Context of Brexit

This article analyses Hilary Mantel’s critically-acclaimed Tudor novel series (Wolf Hall, 2009; Bring Up the Bodies, 2012; The Mirror & the Light, 2020) in the context of Brexit. Even though Mantel has dismissed any possible analogy between the Reformation and Brexit, this research builds on the hypothesis that the past and the present interact in historical fiction, a genre that has contributed to both feeding and questioning the myths upon which nations are constructed. More specifically, I focus on the trilogy’s protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, to argue that he is presented as the architect of what Whig historiography has understood as the pillars of Englishness (and, by extension, Britishness), often evoked in the discursive context surrounding Brexit. However, although the narrative’s portrayal of Cromwell undoubtedly fosters the reader’s sympathy with the character, a deeper analysis of Mantel’s characterisation and narrative techniques —and, more specifically, Cromwell’s status as a flawed human being presented through the lens of what turns out to be an unreliable narrator— suggests that Mantel’s portrayal of Cromwell cannot be reduced to a simple vindication of the Whiggish notion of Englishness, subtly questioning instead the myths upon which the latter is built.

Pandemic discourse and cultural healing

COVID-19 pandemic has brought new social and discursive contexts with the metaphorization and gothification of the virus for many purposes ranging from reporting to politics. This discursive reality is similar to Lawrence Buell’s notion of toxic discourse. The discourse of the pandemic, like toxic discourse, is both useful and harmful in the ‘risk society’ that is exposed to both the infection and economic downslide. While on the one hand this discourse is integral in raising awareness and infection control measures, it also results in the monsterization of virus in press, social media and political rhetoric. This paper attempts to analyze various texts that have emerged in the backdrop of the pandemic to show how the social media humor, advertisement metaphors, masking and sanitizing of language and the serio-comic use of language have evolved as discursive strategies of the contemporary pandemic-hit society. The study also focuses on how literary/poetic use of language becomes a part of cultural healing. Linguistic and literary tropes that have mutated and evolved in the pandemic time are also analyzed.

“All Politics is Local”: A Sociocognitive Investigation of Contexts as Indigenous Peculiarities in Gubernatorial Inaugurals

Devised by Tip O'Neill, "all politics is local" relates the standard that -as a politician- a new governor’s communicative skill is directly connected to the shared understanding of the peculiar situations of a particular locality, by which views regarding the governor’s new regime are presented in an inaugural speech (IS). This angle of contexts in IS pictures the cognitive bridge of language and society; and has received scarce scholarly attention, particularly from the sociocognitive perspective. They are, therefore, explored in this article along with peculiar activities and events (as issues) in the inaugural speeches of three Nigerian Governors- relying on insights from van Dijk’s Context Models and Fauconnier and Turner’s Conceptual Blending. Six discursive contexts –categorised under common (labour, restoration, electoral process), and distinctive (divine support, tradition and value, morality) -situated six issues in the speeches, in terms of how Governors Rauf Aregbesola (RA) and Olagunsoye Oyinlola exploited Osun people’s religious inclination; in terms of the disposition of RA’s regime to the ideals of some previous administrations; and in terms of how Adebisi Akande rationalised participants’ behaviours. The article argues that described events and ongoing discourses in a new governor’s IS are the subjective mental representations that typify participants’ indigenous peculiarities; and constrain communicative meaning derivations.

Women, Peace and Security governance in the Asia–Pacific: a multi-scalar field of discourse and practice

Abstract The UN's Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda is now over 20 years old, yet much of the Asia–Pacific has been slow to engage in formalized WPS work at national and regional scales. This article examines the relatively recent development of official WPS national action plans by Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Timor-Leste, alongside mounting collective efforts towards WPS governance by regional organizations like ASEAN. We demonstrate the existence of an emerging multi-scalar field of WPS discourse and practice in the Asia–Pacific, which is still in its formative stages and carries the potential for both convergence and contestation as actors work to navigate diverse approaches to WPS governance along various ‘tracks’. This article also points to the limitations of a rigidly formalized elite-driven WPS agenda that neglects well-established communities of practice in the Asia–Pacific. Ultimately, more attention needs to be paid to the complex dynamics that shape the ongoing postcolonial encounters between the broader WPS agenda and the localized historical and discursive contexts of regional WPS governance.

Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhóta Oyáte by Christopher Pexa

Reviewed by: Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhóta Oyáte by Christopher Pexa David J. Carlson (bio) Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhóta Oyáte by Christopher Pexa University of Minnesota Press, 2019 IN TRANSLATED NATION, Christopher Pexa makes a substantial contribution to the growing body of scholarship focused on the work of Indigenous intellectuals active during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period when tribal communities were under extraordinary pressure from the settler-colonial state and consequently framed by many as the nadir of tribal nationhood in the United States. While certainly acknowledging the potency of U.S. colonial discourse and institutions at this time, Pexa's tribal-centric study instead emphasizes Dakhóta resistance, highlighting forms of that resistance generally overlooked by previous scholars. Pexa's specific focus is on the ethos of thióšpaye (extended family), the "core relational [philosophy]" that shapes Dakhóta life (xi). He explores the ways that figures ranging from Charles Eastman to Ella Deloria encoded and bore subtle witness to that ethos within works that might first seem (especially to non-Indigenous readers) to be essentially assimilationist. And while other scholars have emphasized the existence of various rhetorics of resistance in Indigenous writing from this period (including in the work of some of the authors treated here), Pexa's deeply informed readings and his explorations of a rich and coherent tradition of Dakhóta survivance set Translated Nation apart as an exceptionally valuable study in the field. Pexa dialogically structures his exploration of what he variously refers to as "cultural camouflage" or "rusing accommodation," weaving together literary analysis, autobiographical reflection, and conversational interludes with his own Dakhóta relations (1, 4). Perhaps it would be better to say that he organizes Translated Nation relationally, highlighting how Indigenous peoplehood, in a Dakhóta context, challenges artificial, colonial boundaries between ways of knowing, discursive contexts, periods, and physical space. Pexa finds evidence of the persistent assertion of thióšpaye ethics in such diverse locations as the carceral writings of Dakhóta citizens held at Fort Snelling after the 1862 U.S.-Dakhóta War, Charles Eastman's retellings of traditional stories in Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904), the horse [End Page 160] dance portion of Black Elk's great vision (as recorded in the original transcripts), Ella Deloria's ethnographic novel Waterlily (written in the 1940s), and contemporary family reflections on the deep links between place, narrative, and identity. In each of these examples, Pexa develops his central claim: while Dakhóta expression may at first seem co-opted and fully legible from a colonial perspective, it is in fact dual voiced, "translat[ing] and re-working settler state mandates" into Indigenous understandings of kinship and relation (148). Translated Nation thus becomes a chronicle of what Pexa calls "unheroic decolonialisms," a term intended not to diminish the significance of these subtle forms of resistance but rather to highlight the importance of appreciating nonindividualistic forms of revolt not typically privileged in the settler-colonial worldview (147). In his account, the endurance of the Dakhóta people becomes a function less of periodic instances of exceptional activism (valuable as those may be) but rather of steady and persistent "caretaking" (235). In summarizing Pexa's core argument as I have here, it is not my intention to imply that Translated Nation overlooks the more equivocal aspects of some of the performances of personal and collective identity by its principal objects of study. Pexa's readings are never one-sided, and his critical discussions are always well grounded in current Indigenous studies scholarship. There are many examples of this care throughout the book. Pexa thoughtfully marks places where the conventionality of Ella Deloria's gender politics potentially conflicts with other aspects of her encoding of thióšpaye ethics. Elsewhere, he engages with some of the problematic elements of Black Elk's iconicity and popular reception. Perhaps considering the tremendous scope (and tonal variation) of Eastman's writings, one might have hoped that Pexa would consider a broader range of texts in that particular chapter (though it seems clear why, in the context of his argument, he made his specific selections). Pushing such a quibble...

THE COMMUNICATIVE STRATEGIES OF MANIPULATING AND LANGUAGE AGGRESSION IN NEDA NEZHDANA’S PLAYS

Abstract
 Background. The study of communicative strategies involves their classification. We acknowledge that today there is no universally accepted typology of strategies, which is motivated by the dynamics and flexibility of strategies, as well as by their dependence on the discursive context and the communicative actions of the speakers. The most recognizable is the classification of strategies according to the method of interaction into non-conflict and confrontational ones. The confrontational dramatic dialogue represents the communication between the characters, which are negatively attuned to each other, which causes negative communicative reactions in the conversation. In such dialogues, communicative strategies demonstrate the mood of the speaker against the listener and are focused on the active pursuit of the own purposes without taking into account the interests of the partner.
 Purpose. This scientific article aims to analyze the conflict strategies of manipulation and communicative aggression of the characters of modern Ukrainian plays, and also the determination of the specific tactics, which are used in the strategies of manipulation and communicative aggression based on the dramatic Neda Nezhdana’s compositions. 
 Methods. The following linguistic methods are used in this scientific article: descriptive method, which helped to identify linguistic features of conflict communication in dramatic texts; contextual-interpretation method, which helped to identify communicative strategies as well as imaginative deviations of the communicative code in the character interaction; the method of quantitative calculations – to test the productivity of these or those strategies of communicative actors’ parts.
 Results. The organizational structure of confrontational communication is characterized by unbalanced communicative intents of the communicants, the presence of negative communicants’ tone of the speech, verbalization of negative intents concerning the subject of the communication or personal features of the communicative partner, the absence of an effective result of the communication. The strategy of manipulation is realized in the tactics of shame, threatening, rejection, irritation, pressure, demands, which are aimed at capturing the communicative space to impose their interests on the partners. The manipulative strategy often combines tactics of obedience and persuasion. The strategy of communicative aggression involves the use of tactics of imagery, irony, criticism, abuse, provocation to realize a negative assessment of the addressee and to lower the level of his or her self-esteem. Among the nuclear tactics, we can identify shame, disgrace, threat, and abuse. The implementation of strategies of manipulation and verbal aggression violates the principle of consideration, which is the basis of the code of communicative behavior. More often confrontational tactics violate the maxim of sympathy, embracing, consideration, modesty, which leads to the destruction of positive and negative appearance of the communicant. The strategy of verbal aggression threatens the positive image; the strategy of manipulation negatively influences the negative image.
 Discussion. In the analyzed Neda Nezhdanova’s articles the strategies of manipulation and communicative aggression, expressed by various tactics, are aimed at violating the code of communicative behavior, which, in its turn, causes confrontations and hinders the successful communication. The prospect of further investigations is seen in the comparative analysis of the confrontational strategies used by men and women in dramatic dialogues of the modern Ukrainian plays.

“Her scarf is a garbage bag wrapped around her head”: Muslim youth experiences of Islamophobia in Sydney primary schools

This qualitative study investigates the ways in which Muslim minority youth experience Islamophobia in south-west Sydney primary schools. Islamophobia has occupied the Australian discursive context since the September 11 attacks and the ensuing War on Terror in 2001, and was amplified in the recent decade following the rise of Daesh and events of home-grown terrorism. In schools, minority Muslim students in Australia have been considered a problem for some time. Since the early phases of migration in the 1970s, Muslims have been constructed as a pedagogical challenge. More recently, this has adopted political overtones, and concerns regarding educational attainment have moved towards issues of national security and socio-political integration. To understand the ways in which the wider discursive context filters to schools, the study is underpinned by critical theory, combined with a critical ethnographic case study methodology. Drawing on the voices of Muslim students aged 10–12 across three schools, the critical discourse analysis found that Islamophobia was experienced by Muslim students in primary schools drawing on visible and physical cultural markers of being Muslim including the Arabic language, the hijab and Islamic practices. This paper contends that Islamophobia should be formally recognised as a form of cultural racism in schools.

Love and lifestyle: how ‘relational healthism’ structures couples’ talk of engagement with lifestyle advice associated with a new diagnosis of coronary heart disease.

Objectives Healthy lifestyle change improves outcomes in coronary heart disease (CHD), but is rarely sustained. To better understand barriers to lifestyle change, we examined couples’ talk of engaging with lifestyle advice after one partner receives a diagnosis of CHD. Design A longitudinal qualitative design, in which a poststructuralist discourse analysis was performed on 35 interviews, conducted with 22 heterosexual British people in a long term relationship. The interviews occurred over three months after one partner was referred to a cardiac rehabilitation programme designed to support lifestyle change. Results Couples understood their health as a shared practice underpinned by an ideological framework of healthism, creating a form of ‘relational healthism’. Practicing relational healthism was not straightforward because the practices of surveillance, control, and discipline related to healthism often contravened relationship norms of support, acceptance and respect for the other’s autonomy. Couples struggled to resolve this tension, dynamically adopting, resisting, and occasionally transforming discourses of health and love in ways that worked for and against engagement in lifestyle change. Conclusion In foregrounding the discursive and relational contexts of behavioural change engagement, we show the considerable complexity for couples, including costs related to engagement with lifestyle advice.

Doing Drag in Blackface

Abstract This article acknowledges racism and sexism as ethical problems in Grimmelshausen’s novel Courasche. Its charismatic protagonist is not only old and a woman (and therefore arguably a witch), but adds racialised exclusion to her portfolio when she narrates her autobiography in blackface. Here the author interrogates Grimmelshausen’s narratorial masks using Medina’s conception of the infelicitous subject, who has a paradoxical double function: infelicitous subjects simultaneously demonstrate how things should not be done and sow seeds of doubt about the practices and beliefs of the normative economy. Recognising the problem racism and sexism represent in Courasche raises the question whether Grimmelshausen’s engagement with knowledge is conventional or innovative; whether Courasche merely reproduces, or also destabilises, epistemic injustice. Courasche as a protagonist is an exemplar of transgression. But is her transgressive infelicity epistemically constitutive – does it contribute to the creation of new discursive contexts?

Political ecologies of food through film:‘agropoetic’ cinematic style in Ermanno Olmi’s Terra Madre

ABSTRACT Drawing from overlapping interests in visual culture and food studies, this essay documents political ecologies of food through film focusing on eco-food documentary Terra Madre. The role of film as powerful tool to document and intervene in the ongoing ecological crisis of the food system has been widely recognized. The link between cinema, poetic expression, and ecology is particularly evident in Terra Madre, where the human-environment interactions are evoked through the use of what I call an ‘agropoetic’ cinematic style, an affective space for excavating cultures and traditions that value the soil where farmers share their own narratives of agroecological empowerment. Through a close textual reading of the documentary, the essay interrogates the relationships among food, nature, and society to expose the dynamics that reproduce practices of agroextractivism and injustice within the food system. This approach acknowledges the political embeddedness of environmental issues viewed as rooted in systems of power and political control over marginal and colonized groups. The film’s narrative is analyzed within larger visual, discursive, and ecological contexts in order to begin sketching new visual political ecologies of food in Italy.

Heroes, victims, and villains in news media narratives about COVID-19. Analysing moralising discourse in Swedish newspaper reporting during the spring of 2020

This paper explores news media discourse about COVID-19 during the spring of 2020 in Sweden, aiming to provide an understanding of how moralising discourse is employed in narratives about public health risks and responses. We investigate print news media content about the corona virus and COVID-19 during the early stages of the outbreak, guided analytically by framework focusing on the relationship between moral panics and moral regulation. We direct attention, first, to how both moral majorities and villains, i.e., ‘folk devils’, and heroes are constructed in the news. Secondly, we look at how visions for interventions are produced discursively in relation to such constructions. Our findings suggest that moralising discourse largely target risk behaviours and health care claims of middle-class groups. We also find that news media discourse about the pandemic in Sweden is marked by attacks on government interventions that are distinctly different from observations in other contexts. In conclusion, we discuss these observations in relation the political and discursive context, and the potential impact of moralising discourse on the legitimacy of public health interventions and the welfare state. Finally, we also discuss how our findings can inform theoretical discussions about political populism, moralising discourse and public health.

“Immersed in World of Warcraft”: A Discursive Study of Identity Management Talk About Excessive Online Gaming

Online excessive gaming has been associated with negative player identity constructions depicting an abnormal life-style. Up-to-date, there is limited insight into player identity management talk about excessive online gaming. To address this gap, drawing from discursive and rhetorical psychology, we investigated naturally occurring talk of 134 players of World of Warcraft (WoW) -a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG)- from three publicly available websites and of five players from one focus group. The analysis illuminated participants’ dilemmatic and contradictory ways of constructing the player identity, while displaying immersion in the game. Participants invoke identity constructions like ‘nolifer’, ‘hardcore’ or ‘clean’ player, which they disavow or assign to themselves and to each other depending on the conversational context, while attending to concerns about (ab)normalcy. The study’s findings highlight a dynamic process of player identity construction in talk, occasioned by and exemplifying the contingencies of the discursive context.