Discursive Contradictions Research Articles

From general rejection to individual normalization: Ambivalences in discourses on intimate partner violence by young Spaniards.

Violence against women continues to be a serious social and public health problem all over the world, despite its high level of social condemnation. The aim of this study is to include the concept of ambivalence in order to analyze the perceptions that young people have of intimate partner violence (IPV). We conducted a qualitative study based on 20 semi-structured interviews with young Spaniards (men and women) who were segmented according to involvement or not in activism against IPV. A critical discourse analysis was performed based on situational, attitudinal and temporal ambivalences. The results show the presence of ambivalent discourses that express a high level of condemnation towards IPV and, at the same time, justify certain violent practices when considering the situational framework. This leads to discursive contradictions when considering jealousy in a couple's relationship, the responsibilities of violence that women suffer and the social origin of IPV. These ambivalences are influenced by the social context, as those involved in activism against IPV express a more coherent discourse that does not justify or accept any kind of violence. Nonetheless, non-activists represent ambivalences in their attitudes towards IPV studied in this research. The results suggest the need to reflect on the strategies used with young people to eradicate IPV by considering the ambivalent nature of attitudes.

Речевой конфликт в художественном дискурсе (на примере романа Цзя Пинва «Циньские напевы»)

The present study addresses the interdisciplinary issue of conflict and its linguistic specificity as a component of the emotive dimension in artistic discourse, with a focus on the novel “Qin Qiang” by Jia Pingwa (2005). The aim is to analyse the aspects of speech and language conflict, as well as its destructive forms, within the lexico-semantic, syntactic, and functional-stylistic units of the language. A conflictual communicative act is viewed as the result of specific failures in speech interaction and the violation of conventions and rules governing discursive behaviour. Linguistic contradictions and conflicts are analysed within the framework of emotiology, at the level of emotivity and the emotive field in the pragmatic space of artistic discourse, as a multimodal phenomenon shaped by systemic relations of emotionalism. Discursive contradictions function as key elements of the structural tension in the text, serving as linguistic and semantic dominants or attractors. These contradictions materialize as stylistic units at various levels and can be employed as a tool to create the desired effect in artistic narrative. Linguistically, conflict arises from violations of pragmatic-semantic and stylistic-syntactic conventional norms. Drawing on empirical material, the study demonstrates that the use of conflictogenic discourse in prose is a distinctive feature of Jia Pingwa’s idiosyncrasy, integrating various communicative strategies. The findings provide a foundation for further research into speech collisions in Chinese fiction.

Introducció

In their reconsiderations of hospitality through the thought and artistic practice of women of color, the contributions in this special issue rely heavily on historical memory, testimony, storytelling, affective politics, and decolonial phenomenology and epistemology. Given the mismatch between a humanistic, almost old-fashioned discourse of hospitality and the secular use of the word in the service business, the essays demonstrate a renewed interest in hospitality as a figuration of ethics and a critique of its practical and discursive contradictions: between a legally confirmed identity and the encounter with the unknown, between the unlimited responsibility toward a guest and gendered and racialized economic relations, between justice and fairness and essentialist views of the other (McNulty, 2007: viii).

Transition to sustainability: Assessing the challenges of the Brazilian environmental agenda and policy

The Bolsonaro government has fueled a false and pernicious discursive contradiction between economic growth and environmental preservation. Environmentalists may have felt relieved by Lula's election; however, his government must now deal with a complex environmental agenda and the escalation of the discursive contradiction between those who perceive the environment as an exploitable resource and those who view it as a preservation-worthy asset. We present two interrelated alternatives to overcome the political, economic, and social challenges to consensus building. First, technology can contribute to promoting innovative methods for the sustainable exploitation of the Amazon. Second, the reconstruction of the institutional apparatus must incorporate other functions. In addition, to reinforce coordination, democratic participation, and democratic legitimacy, as well as suitably reduce the frequent prevalence of speech over practice, the government and society must address governance challenges. Consensus-building could bolster coalitions, improve governability, and play a pivotal role in advancing the sustainability agenda.

Fashion as ‘Force for Change’? How Ideologization Reshapes the Work of Intermediaries in the Legitimation of Culture

What happens when politics enters strongly aesthetic cultural fields? This article proposes a novel conceptual framework, which we propose to call ideologization, to understand how political-ideological considerations influence cultural legitimation. We build on theories of legitimation and cultural intermediaries to examine the strategic case of fashion as a cultural production field at the intersection of aesthetics and economics. Combining an analysis of frames in fashion magazines since the 1980s with critical discourse analysis of British Vogue in turning-point year 2020, we theorize ideologization as consisting of three elements: aesthetic agenda-setting; the reimagination of relations between producers, consumers and intermediaries; and the generation of discursive contradictions. This process of ideologization, which we see across cultural fields since the late 2010s, has strong implications for intermediaries who act as framers and brokers of legitimate culture. We conclude by proposing future research to further develop the ideologization framework and detail the long-term impact of political-ideological logics on cultural fields.

“Wait a Minute”: Reflections on [the] Pause

“Wait a Minute”: Reflections on [the] Pause Bernd Herzogenrath (bio) In this short essay, I would like to situate Jane Bennett’s take on the virtue of enacting a deliberate ‘pause’ in an assemblage of and encounter with other ideas and concepts, and use it as a cue for addressing the question of how this may relate to recent literary debates about critique and its possible alternatives. In 2004, Bruno Latour published a now-canonical essay on the state of criticism, in which he poses the rhetorical question of whether criticism has “run out of steam” (“Why Has Critique” 225). Latour paints a bleak picture of a practice of criticism couched in military terms (with “war,” “generals,” “projectiles,” “smart bombs,” “young recruits, young cadets”). This situation forces participants to take sides: between those who know and those who are fooled, between appearance and reality, between surface and depth, with the critic seeing himself or herself occupying the default position on the ‘right side’ of the trenches.1 If critique, as Latour suggests, is all about ‘letting off steam,’ then this will come to a natural, entropic end—steam machines don’t run forever, not without external energy. Or, to couch it in Jane Bennett’s terms—no efflux without influx, and, more important: not without the and in-between. “The ‘and’ of influx-and-efflux is immensely important: it marks the hover-time of transformation” (x). In the (often) either/or of critique, the and is conspicuously missing—and it is in the pause, I argue, where the and has a chance to enter. [End Page 1031] Bennett’s book is, on the face of it, (also) a book about Whitman, and in Whitman, the and sometimes seems to be an end in itself: both ‘literally’ and ‘conceptually’ (in his many enumerations), “and” is the building block of Whitman’s lists, the ‘ground-word’ of his paratactic discourse and politics. Here, the ‘I’ connects and is connected to everything in the universe: to the spread of one’s own body, and to the drift of conversation, and to the conduit of water and electricity, and to other people, and to the contents of a book, and to dung beetles, and to the stars and nebulae. The Whitmanian ‘I contain multitudes’ might thus be more than just a metaphorical figure of speech, referring to discursive contradictions—see Ed Yong’s book of the same name, on the life of microbes. The “and” is also the building block of what Gilles Deleuze has called an “assemblage” (in French: agencement), a rhizomatic and fragmentary multiplicity that never adds up to ‘One.’ It is by no means clear how the term “agencement” can be translated most accurately into English. Deleuze and Guattari coined this term in the late 1970s as an alternative to their often misunderstood concept of the machine. While linguistically oriented translations rendered it as “concatenation of enunciations,” it gradually became clear that it was actually about the complex linkages between sign and matter, technology and body, human and animal, etc. In his Dialogues with Claire Parnet, Deleuze gives us a shorthand of this idea: “Substitute the AND for IS” (Deleuze and Parnet 57)—a short motto which you could print on a T-shirt. In French, “est” (3rd person singular of “être,” “to be”) and “et” (in English “and”) are homophones. But this pun encapsulates what is at stake: to undermine or even substitute a transcendental logic of being with a processual logic of becoming: and … and … and … Relations have to be produced, forged—identity, of the subject and of a collectivity, is thus always only a fragmentary effect of the perpetual flux of the given. For Deleuze, the assemblage (as a result of the and … and …) is the basic ‘unit’ of the social, the “minimum real” (Deleuze and Parnet 51). Collective assemblages of enunciation are connected to a “machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions; an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 88). It is the complex interplay of these two segments, the dynamic conjunctions of discourse and physics, that makes up the social field, that in fact ‘produces’ semi-stable subjects...

Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture, edited by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier

Reviewed by: Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture ed. by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier Alicia Carroll (bio) Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture, edited by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier; pp. xiii + 264. London and New York: Routledge, 2019, $160.00, $44.05 ebook. Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier's collection, Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture, aims to reverse the problem of human exceptionalism that underplays the subjectivity and agency of animals. In many cases, the collection succeeds admirably. It is at its best when exploring the ontological intimacies between animals and children, noting the power of shared qualities—smallness, muteness, or perceived passivity—to erode the animal/human binary; the book also excels at emphasizing culture, widely defined, over canonical literature in animal studies. Readers will find this topic a welcome new focus in the field with a corresponding expansion of the canon of animal studies. From the beginning, authors in the collection note the paradoxes of the animal-child relationship in foundational Victorian children's texts. Ayres writes that the tenor of nursery rhymes changed in the 1830s as animals began to instruct children in kindness as well as the carnivore's discourse in which "birds and mice were on purpose for eating" (23). Keridiana Chez's chapter, "Wanted Dead or Alive: Rabbits in Victorian Children's Literature," notes likewise that rabbits are the "sweetest pets as well as the sweetest flesh" in Victorian children's literature. She substantiates the claim that Victorian children's literature legitimizes "the most glaring discursive contradictions in our treatment of nonhuman Others" (31). In "Unruly Females on the Farm: Domestic Animal Mothers and the Dismantling of the Species Hierarchy in Nineteenth-Century Literature for Children," Stacy Hoult-Saros shows that children and farm animals are equated in being unruly and in need of adult authority. Such texts disturb hierarchical thought, prefiguring the posthuman. In "A Brotherhood of Wolves: Loyalty in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Folktales," Lindsay Katzir and Brandon Katzir argue that the wolf in Victorian Anglo-Jewish tales, often represented as a pack animal defending its communal life, responds to British stereotypes of Jewish people as lone wolves. Emphasizing cohesion, the wolf in these tales resists the threat of assimilation. This essay introduced welcome new texts to this Victorianist, along with questions of how alternative cultural animal symbolism might prompt ethical thought about advocacy for wolves and their habitat now. Animal advocacy is at the forefront of Alisa Clapp-Itnyre's contribution. Her "Advocating for the Least of These: Empowering Children and Animals in The Band of Mercy Advocate" expands our knowledge of Victorian periodical literature and children's advocacy for animals in a fascinating study of how the journal of the Band of Mercy, The Advocate (1879–83), renegotiated associations between animals and human children through their shared bodily vulnerability, muteness, and passivity. Despite the risks of this alliance, children sang, pledged, recited, and petitioned for animals. Through their public work, both animal and human bodies came to matter. Less obscure works by Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, and the Brontës, as well as Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), also appear here. Constance Fulmer demonstrates that Eliot's novels satirize Victorian culture that treats children like animals and animals like children. Her survey will be valuable to those interested in animals in Eliot. Maier, in "Neither Brutes nor Beasts: Animals, Children, and Young Persons and/in the Brontës," shows that children abuse animals as they themselves have been abused. Maier also notices slippages between the ontological categories of animal and human [End Page 318] when adults (violently) refuse kindness to children as well as to animals. She also makes the important point that the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1824) was formed some sixty years before the formation of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1884). Citing Donna Haraway, Maier notes that the relationships between both associations offer "not irrational denials of human weakness," but instead "clear-sighted recognition of the connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture" (qtd. in Maier 199). Her work, like Hoult-Saros's...

Internal Instabilities: Nationalism in the Context of Nagaland with reference to Select Novels

This paper is an attempt to explore the internal instabilities within the idea of nationalism through a reading of Birendra Bhattacharyya’s Yaruingam and Easterine Kire’s Bitter Wormwood. It would look into Nationalism in the context of Nagaland which offers an alternative idiom in so far as any discussion on the idea of nation is concerned. Any discourse on nationalism in India would have to take into account the discursive contradictions of ideas inherent in it. Taking into consideration the views of Gandhi, Tagore and Ambedkar, the paper strives to begin with the premise that the idea of nationalism in the Indian context is inherent in its internal instabilities and inherent contradictions. As such, years after independence, India continues to deal with its effects as there have been autonomy movements as diverse groups within Northeast India find itself absent in the narrative of the nation. Nagaland, the focus of this paper, for instance, wanted secessionism. The Naga case through a reading of the texts taken for the study offers insights into this vexed Naga crises.

Learning through collaboration between vocational teacher training institutions and workplaces: Barriers and contradictions

In vocational education and training, the acquisition of relevant skills by learners is vital for their employability. It has been argued that institution–workplace collaboration facilitates this acquisition of relevant skills through availing authentic real-life learning situations. This study used the cultural–historical activity theory to identify and characterise challenges to learning through collaboration between a masters of vocational pedagogy (MVP) programme, vocational teacher training institutions and workplaces in Uganda. Data were obtained using in-depth individual interviews with purposively sampled actors in collaborative activities. The findings revealed that challenges manifesting as discursive contradictions occurred in different phases of implementing collaborative activities. In the planning and implementation phase, contradictions were linked to short time frames for collaborative activities, unsynchronised activity plans and contradictory working cultures. In the supervision of learning, contradictions arose from a lack of a common understanding of the objectives and work methods of the collaborative activities. A lack of feedback to actors, an absence of a collaboration focal person, and a lack of government policy limited participation in collaborative activities. These challenges were observed to lessen the focus on the MVP students’ learning, which ultimately affected the quality of work produced and interfered with the implementation of collaborative activities.

From ‘echo chambers’ to ‘chaos chambers’: discursive coherence and contradiction in the #MeToo Twitter feed

ABSTRACT Using the example of the Twitter feed #MeToo, this paper argues that CDS, in its task to understand more about how social media can offer ways for voices to challenge ideologies from below, needs to explore the ideas of ‘nodes’ (KhosraviNik, M. (2017b). Right wing populism in the west: Social media discourse and echo chambers. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Majid_Khosravinik/publications) and ‘echo chambers’ in greater detail. Though #MeToo did provide an ideological challenge, I show how it is also discursively chaotic and partly driven by influencers who may have a range of other motivations to align with the moral capital in the feed. At another level, #MeToo is highly nodal in terms of affect and moral conviction. These features can be understood in regard to nodal power of affective connectivity (Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics and structure of storytelling: Sentiment, events and mediality. Information, Communication and Society, 19(3), 307–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1109697) and also in terms of major shifts in accepted norms of debating politics and society driven by social media. I consider what this means for CDS in relation to identifying discourses and discovering ideology in the social media landscape.

Discursive Representations of the (Capitalist) Results of the “Chinese Economic Miracle”

It is unlikely that any other state attracts more attention of the world community than China; there are endless debates about its geopolitical status, social-economic potential, demographic challenges, environmental threats, political structure, etc. However, scientific and popular-science discourses focus rather on finding an answer to the question of what type of social system China has in terms of the classical dilemma of “capitalism vs socialism”, and there are no universal nominations for either the historical past or present. The article aims at identifying the key discursive representations of the “Chinese economic miracle” by reconstructing them from three books recently translated into Russian: Zhang Yu’s China’s Economic Reform: Experience and Implications, Yifu Lin’s Demystifying the Chinese Economy, and How China Became Capitalist, written by Ronald Coase and Ning Wang. The article summarizes the main arguments of the three books. Although their interpretations of the “Chinese economic miracle” differ, including the degree of the politicized enthusiasm and optimism, they agree that developing countries should follow the Chinese path of reforms and ignore a number of this path’s serious problems. The article concludes that the books represent three discourses: an ideological-politicized scenario of developing a special type of socialism “from above”, a description of the capitalist economy developed from both “above” and “below”, and a statement of the completed transition to capitalism not under the party leadership control but mainly “from below” and, despite prohibitions and anti-capitalist rhetoric, “from above”. Such discursive contradictions are especially interesting for the Russian reader who remembers disputes about the type of “Russian capitalism” in the 1990s–2000s, and for the sociologist of the “classical type”, i.e., one studying historical changes to understand current social transformations.

The hazy rise of coal in Kenya: The actors, interests, and discursive contradictions shaping Kenya’s electricity future

The recent discovery of coal reserves in Kenya, the political incentive to address problems in the electricity sector, and the growing involvement of China in Kenya has stimulated interest in establishing a domestic coal industry and coal power, which supporters claim would bring major development benefits. On the other hand, any such development will have health and environmental impacts, issues that have been repeatedly raised by the local community; as well as implications for Kenya’s emissions and related climate targets, a concern for the international community working on climate change. Using the proposed Lamu coal power plant in Kenya, this research draws on political settlement theory and discourse network analysis to reveal the influence of structural features of the context, the location of power, the distribution of benefits and how actors employ discursive strategies to protect their interests. The analysis suggests that although there is broad civil society opposition to the plant, there is significant backing from the Presidency, big business interests and the necessary regulatory bodies. The arguments made by supporters, such as cheap, baseload electricity appear to contradict the recommendations for coal, of electricity planning processes in Kenya, which indicate the plant could lead to surplus electricity supply, thereby increasing the price of electricity. The controversies surrounding the ongoing National Environmental Tribunal have also illustrated some of the political motives at play. More broadly, the plant appears to be part of an infrastructure development vision championed by President Kenyatta and supported by a growing relationship with China, suggesting the future of coal may be determined by interests other than robust, least cost electricity planning.

Children's Food: Material and Discursive Contradictions

Children's Food: Material and Discursive Contradictions

Costly Fix: Power, Politics, and Nature in the Tar Sands by Ian Urquhart

Reviewed by: Costly Fix: Power, Politics, and Nature in the Tar Sands by Ian Urquhart Kyle Conway Costly Fix: Power, Politics, and Nature in the Tar Sands. By Ian Urquhart. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. ix + 351 pp. Map, tables, references, index. $39.95 paper. Two things flow in Ian Urquhart's Costly Fix—oil and money—and if there is a lesson to be learned, it's that capital is even more liquid than the sticky bitumen found in Alberta's tar sands. The book traces the history of the tar sands, from the late 19th century when Canada's settler government first surveyed oil-rich northern Alberta, to the present day when international oil companies have taken full advantage of the land (and favorable tax arrangements). It situates Alberta in the global oil trade and shows how international markets shape local and regional governments in Canada's northern Great Plains. The Albertan and Canadian governments, Urquhart argues, have acted in the name of development, wealth, and North American energy independence, but they have sold access to their resources at a bargain price. The key idea in Costly Fix is that of market fundamentalism, or the paradoxical belief that the solution to problems caused by unfettered markets is the removal of still more fetters. The challenge governments face is that oil companies can always take their business—and the jobs they create—elsewhere. The threat of capital flight pits governments of resource-rich areas against each other. As a result, regional economies are anything but regional, as in the case of Alberta, where successive provincial and federal governments have sought to accommodate international oil companies, all the while reacting to changes in the United States as it has sought to decrease its dependence on oil from the Middle East. Over the years, Alberta's government, Urquhart writes, has renegotiated its leasing terms with oil companies, always in the companies' favor, even when Albertans have demanded that their government protect their environmental and financial interests better. Even groups opposed to development have been hampered in their efforts. For instance, the specific terms limiting who can address Alberta's regulator, the Energy Resources and Conservation Board (ERCB), have prevented most environmental groups from testifying. Groups must demonstrate that they would be "directly and adversely affected" by a company's actions, a test the ERCB interprets in the narrowest possible way. First Nations have faced similar structural restrictions. In their case, they have also taken a pragmatic approach to allowing oil exploration on their land: money from oil companies helps them solve problems related to immediate material needs, but at the cost of long-term environmental damage. Overall, Costly Fix is a thorough and well-argued polemic. Although it would benefit by engaging with similar books (such as Jon Gordon's Unsustainable Oil or Dominique Perron's L'Alberta autophage, both of [End Page 172] which describe similar structural and discursive contradictions), it provides a detailed account of Alberta's tar sands and demonstrates the degree to which money and oil move through Alberta, linking it inextricably to the larger network of global capital. Kyle Conway Department of Communication University of Ottawa Copyright © 2019 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The Feminine Copy: Travel and Textual Reproduction in Jane de la Vaudère's Les Demi-sexes

The Feminine Copy:Travel and Textual Reproduction in Jane de la Vaudère's Les Demi-sexes Sharon Larson (bio) In a somewhat paradoxical gesture, Jane de La Vaudère's Les Demi-sexes (1897), a novel about clandestine ovariectomies in finde-siècle Paris, opens with a sonnet commemorating the "Vénus de Syracuse," a Sicilian sculpture of the goddess of fertility. A tribute to her "flancs puissants" and her "blanches mamelles" (line 14), this reproductive model of femininity seems a far cry from the sterilized Parisian "demi-sexes" that occupy the novel's pages. Famously described by Maupassant in his travel memoir "La Sicile" (1886), the "Vénus de Syracuse," a copy of an original ancient Greek statue, incarnates Les Demi-sexes's conflicting and contradictory discourses about femininity, procreative responsibilities and the sexual emancipation afforded by sterilization. Yet La Vaudère's epigraph-poem also provides a framework for the novel's underlying tensions concerning the authenticity of both womanhood and authorship, or if we may, of sexual and textual reproduction. As a thorough comparison of La Vaudère's novel and Maupassant's travel memoirs suggests, the author of Les Demi-sexes liberally "copied"—with slight modifications—her confrère's descriptions of Sicily's architecture, culture and landscape.1 In duplicating Maupassant's passages that conflate the Sicilian terrain with untamed, fertile femininity, La Vaudère simultaneously problematizes male-authored constructions of womanhood in the literary and medical realms alike. For in the context of the controversial ovariectomy, the author's plagiarism allows her to undercut, through copy, the stability of such normative constructions of femininity. [End Page 225] As Michael Finn has demonstrated, the ovariotomie, first practiced in France in 1882 to combat hysterical symptoms, developed into a highly polemic method of birth control that pitted feminist and pronatalist groups against one another.2 At the time of its development, France was still recovering from the devastating Franco-Prussian War and the threat of depopulation continued to occupy medical and literary texts. By 1895, two years before the publication of Les Demi-sexes, deaths reportedly outnumbered births in the Hexagon (852,000 to 834,000, according to historian Karen Offen). As this contentious medical procedure tapped into scientific anxieties about the country's declining birth rate and female sexual autonomy, female sterilization was also a literary plot device in the late nineteenth century used to corroborate the correlation between depopulation and female procreative duties. In the so-called "novel of problematized reproduction" (Finn 27), women who opt for sterilization are depicted as oversexed, defeminized beings who irresponsibly swap the joys of motherhood for the pleasures of the flesh. These works often feature Paris as the vice-ridden epicenter for sterilization of such debauched "Venuses." In addition to La Vaudère's Les Demi-sexes, other examples in the genre include Camille Pert's Les Florifères (1898), Armand Dubarry's Les Femmes eunuques (1899) and Émile Zola's Fécondité (1899). With its interest in female reproductive responsibilities and the sexual contamination of the capital city, Les Demi-sexes occupies a prominent place in this corpus. Nevertheless, La Vaudère's novel is at times characterized by a moral ambivalence that sets it apart from the other works of the genre, whose unequivocal condemnation of non-procreative heroines leaves little possibility for feminist readings. In her œuvre of nearly thirty novels and short story collections, La Vaudère (1857–1908, née Jeanne Scrive) continually explored marginalized sexualities and unconventional gender expression in her Decadent works, themes that are reflected in such titles as Les Androgynes (1903) and Sapho, dompteuse (1908), among others.3 While Les Demi-sexes is representative of La Vaudère's recurrent depiction of non-normative sexuality, its initial resistance to essentialist discourses on female procreative duty—a seemingly feminist position—is ultimately [End Page 226] complicated by an eventual restoration of moral and gender codes in the otherwise depraved Parisian society. This moral shift occurs not in Paris but in a Sicilian setting. In order to fully understand the discursive contradictions in the novel, we must consider them in the context of Maupassant's travel memoir "La Sicile," whose...

Individuality, Hierarchy, and Dilemma: the Making of Confucian Cultural Citizenship in a Contemporary Chinese Classical School

Is Confucianism compatible with citizenship? If yes, how? Cultural transformation in recent citizenship studies provides a theoretical junction to bring the two concepts together. In terms of cultural citizenship, this paper explores the making of Confucian cultural citizens by analyzing students’ discourses in a Chinese Confucian classical school. It reveals (1) the process of moral self-transformation, whereby the individualities are embedded into ethical relations by the extensive readings of classical literature; (2) practically discursive contradictions between individualism and authoritarianism that is based on the notion of a cultural hierarchy; and (3) the institutional predicament in striving for the recognition of cultural citizenship by the state and society. Finally, it concludes that the dilemmas in discourses and status are part of the contradictions in the overall Chinese party-state’s management of individualization.

Discursive contradictions in regional tourism marketing strategies: The case of Fryslân, The Netherlands

Discourses in tourism destination marketing play an important role in constructing and consuming tourism destinations. However, various discursive contradictions can emerge, potentially limiting or facilitating tourism development. This paper has two objectives. First, it aims to identify discursive contradictions embedded in the positioning statements of regional tourism marketing strategy documents. Second, it intends to highlight how such contradictions simultaneously prioritize and destabilize certain destination identities. Employing the case of the Dutch province of Fryslân, discourse analysis of tourism marketing documents was conducted. Findings revealed contradictions emerging along five themes: place branding, identity claims, target groups, roles and collaboration. Regional Frisian tourism marketing appears to prioritize external orientations and homogenizing identities, with limited consideration of geographically proximate markets and a selective perception of internal stakeholders' roles in tourism. Possible implications of such destination positioning are discussed and suggestions are made to balance various positioning orientations in regional place branding.

Context and curriculum in two global cities: A study of discourses of citizenship in Hong Kong and Singapore

This qualitative, comparative case study examined global civic education (GCE) in the Asian global cities of Hong Kong and Singapore. Guided by theories that position curriculum at the intersection of discourse, context, and personal meaning-making, we sought to describe the ways in which intentions for GCE reflect broader societal discourses of citizenship and how curricula allow students to tackle tensions surrounding national and global citizenship. We found that Singapore and Hong Kong have adopted depoliticized forms of citizenship as a means of inoculation against global ills. These types of citizenship are more nationalistic than global in nature; moral rather than political; and focused mainly on utilitarian goals to produce adaptable workers able to support national economic projects in the global economy. Although critical, transnational, and other emergent civic perspectives are apparent in both cities, the data yielded little evidence of curricular opportunities for students to become exposed to alternative discourses and reconcile discursive contradictions. The findings inform current literature by illuminating the nexus of local and global discursive practices, implicating the ability of curricula to accommodate both novel and established civic identities, and forwarding suggestions to bridge disconnections between theoretical and local curricular definitions of global citizenship.

Occupational branding for diversity: managing discursive contradictions

ABSTRACTIn line with recent efforts to increase the representation of women in the field of computing and information technology (I.T.), the National Center for Women and Information Technology has spearheaded an occupational branding campaign that seeks to encourage more women to enter this field. We use this campaign as a case study to investigate how representations of work in an occupational branding campaign (“official branding discourse”) compare with the ways in which practitioners represent this work (“unofficial branding discourse”). Through our analysis, we show that whereas the official branding discourse represents computing and I.T. as a field where women are valued, unofficial branding discourse represents this field as hostile to women. We then propose three avenues through which these contradictions can be managed: (1) acknowledging the challenges expressed by practitioners, while simultaneously discussing how to foster a more inclusive occupational culture, (2) changing the primary goal of the campaign from increasing the number of women in computing and I.T. to making the culture of computing and I.T. less hostile, and (3) committing fewer resources into organized branding campaigns and more resources into direct organizational interventions that seek to make work environments inclusive.

English in Malaysia: Identity and the Market Place

The paper examines Malaysian and Singaporean state policies and examples of literary works that directly or indirectly address the position of English to analyse some of the discursive contradictions and tensions undergirding the use of English in their societies. Contention over the role of English, rejected as a colonial threat to national identity – constructed as essentialist Malay monolingualism – has historically and continuously riven state, public and literary policies and discourse in Malaysia. Ee Tiang Hong's early work articulates the dilemma of the Malaysian Anglophone poet whose voice is critiqued as mimicry of “foreign” tongues. Muhammad Haji Salleh emerged as an elite Malay intellectual with his unnuanced disavowal of English use in Malaysia as a dark psychological depredation of the national soul. This total English language rejection, however, is called into question and undermined by his later bilingual practice of dual Malay and English publications of his work and his praise for the two language rivers that compose him as a single poet-subject. English is now viewed as an instrumental language necessary for competing in the global economy. In Singapore, where this instrumentalist language policy remains uncontested, the state has positioned Singlish, the local variation of English that serves as a major expressive marker of Singaporean identity, as a threat to global economic ambitions.