Discursive Conventions Research Articles

Eco-Modernist Environmental Politics and Counter-Activism Around the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Games

This study examines the environmental discourses surrounding the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics in the Korean public sphere. Specifically, it compares the dominant environmental discourse of the government and Olympic organizing committee with the counter-Olympic discourse of Korean civil society. Our study indicates the state has actively mobilized ecological modernization (EM) discourses. Their three discursive conventions of EM—cultural, institutional, and technocratic—and its environmental reforms are revealed as powerful tools in the public communication. The parallel environmental discourse engaged in by Korean civic organizations is shown to be the basis for strategic political engagement in uncovering unknown and silenced knowledge. In short, the environmental reforms led by the government are seen to be illustrative of the prioritizing of economic development over environmental protection with little reflexive or rigorous application of EM principles. In contrast, the parallel discourse is seen to pose a compelling challenge to the dominant. That is, while their activism was limited to a nature-protectionist, dominated by urban elites, it still managed to oppose the top-down Olympic and make it a more democratic process.

The Interpretivist and The Learner

Aim/Purpose: In the time that we study for our dissertation, our learning takes many turns. Sometimes we feel excited, motivated and accomplished, while other times frustrated, tired or unsure. This paper presents a poem to illustrate one student’s PhD journey through reflection on those fluctuations, milestones and learning moments experienced along the way. Background: Central to the journey presented here is learning about the interpretivist paradigm, its approaches, methods and critics. Interpretivism is a qualitative research approach which, in many disciplines, continues to be the positivist’s poor cousin. Methodology: This original paper takes an autoethnographic approach, expressed through poetry. Autoethnography uses self-reflection to connect personal experience to wider social and cultural understandings and has been seldom applied to investigate and uncover the contested and emergent doctoral experience. Contribution: Little opportunities arise during doctoral studies for the student to pause, reflect and communicate new learnings or knowledge without the boundaries of academic discursive conventions. In this way, the poetic medium of expression offers an original contribution to the field. The poem also illuminates the struggles with finding voice, an ontology that resonates, and the place that marks independence from others in becoming a researcher. Findings: Poetry affords ideas and feelings intensity through a distinctive style and rhythm of literature. This original poem offers a creative artefact that can be useful for supervisors and students at any stage of their dissertation, to ignite conversation on the challenges of higher education study. Recommendations for Practitioners: This paper invites others to consider their learning journey and discovery of self, to reflect on and record the milestones, tensions and catalysts of learning. Recommendation for Researchers: It opens doors particularly for those exploring, or wanting to explore, qualitative research through an interpretivist paradigm where knowledge is socially or experientially co-constructed and the researcher is inseparable to the research. Impact on Society: Becoming a researcher as synonymous with being a learner is a crucial discovery that widely connects to being a practitioner in any field. Learning to love the red pen is a metaphor of doctoral studies used to denote acceptance of feedback on written work as well as acceptance more broadly that there is always more to learn. Future Research: What if we encouraged doctoral students and academics to challenge convention and write/produce/create authentic expressions of learning? Encouragement should be afforded to doctoral students and academics to reflect during and beyond their research journeys, in a medium that personally resonates to empower deeper insights and understandings.

Web Localization of Spanish SMEs: The Case of Study in Chemical Sector

Constant changes in the economic environment, where globalization and the development of the knowledge economy act as drivers, are systematically pushing companies towards the challenge of accessing external markets. Web localization constitutes a new field of study and professional intervention. From the translation perspective, localization equates to the website being adjusted to the typological, discursive and genre conventions of the target culture, adapting that website to a different language and culture. This entails much more than simply translating the content of the pages. The content of a webpage is made up of text, images and other multimedia elements, all of which have to be translated and subjected to cultural adaptation. A case study has been carried out to analyze the current presence of localization within Spanish SMEs from the chemical sector. Two types of indicator have been established for evaluating the sample: indicators for evaluating company websites (with a Likert scale from 0-4) and indicators for evaluating web localization (0-2 scale). The results show overall website quality is acceptable (2.5 points out of 4). The higher rating has been obtained by the system quality (with 2.9), followed by information quality (2.7 points) and, lastly, service quality (1.9 points). In the web localization evaluation, the contact information aspects obtain 1.4 points, the visual aspect 1.04, and the navigation aspect was the worse considered (0.37). These types of analysis facilitate the establishment of practical recommendations aimed at SMEs in order to increase their international presence through the localization of their websites.

MISREPRESENTING MARX: A LESSON IN HISTORICAL METHOD

ABSTRACTIn this book Jonathan Sperber deploys his extensive knowledge of nineteenth‐century European social and political history, and his diligent research into sources that have become readily available only recently, to produce a substantial biography of Karl Marx. We find, however, that Sperber is mistaken in his treatment of Marx's ideas and of the intellectual contexts within which Marx worked. In fact, we suggest that he is systematically mistaken in this regard. We locate a root source of the error in his reductive approach to theoretical ideas.In section I we focus on the claim, taken for granted in the book, that Marx's ideas are instantiations of “materialism.” By detailed reference to the record of Marx's writings, we show that there is no justification for describing Marx as a “materialist” in the usually accepted senses of that term. In section II we review how Soviet and other interpreters of Marx, taking their lead from the later Engels, insisted that “materialism” was fundamental to Marxism. We suggest that Sperber's presentation of Marx's thinking as “materialist and atheist” aligns far better with such interpretations than it does with what Marx actually wrote. In sections III and IV we criticize Sperber's “contextualist” approach to dealing with ideas in history. His approach may seem reminiscent of Quentin Skinner’ s, but where Skinner deploys the discursive conventions prevailing in a past time to illuminate theoretical ideas, Sperber reduces theoretical ideas to context. We name Sperber's approach “theoretical nominalism,” a term that we use to denote the view that theoretical ideas are nothing but interventions into particular situations. We end by suggesting that greater attentiveness to philosophy and theory would have enriched Sperber's efforts in this book.

Aesthetic Categories and the Social Life of Genre in Victorian Criticism

This paper explores the contingent and affective dimensions of genre in Victorian criticism on the ballad. Aesthetic judgments comprise an important part of the historical meta-discourse surrounding literary genres, yet these categories occupy only a marginal position in our present theories of genre. The terms of aesthetic judgment tend to fall out when we tally historical genres’ discursive conventions and map their formal and thematic contours. In contrast, Victorian literary criticism’s dependence on the language of feeling, not only in describing individual works but also in shaping generic taxonomies, provides an opportunity to consider the ways in which the seemingly irreducible particularities of aesthetic experience meet the generalizing force of genre.

Palladius of Helenopolis: One Author, Two Ways to Write

The present article analyzes the narrative strategies and discursive conventions that Palladius of Hellenopolis employed in his works, the Dialogue and the Lausiac History, and proposes the reasons why one author could produce two such disparate works. I use the concepts and approaches offered by reader-response criticism in order to differentiate between an implied audience of the historical narrative as the narrative itself mediates it, and the historical audience, i.e., real people of flesh and blood who read the book in the past. The ways in which Palladius chose to present certain topics (the attitude to wisdom and foolishness, eschatological expectations, the appearance of righteous men, male and female ascetics living together, and the attitude to pride) are important indicators of how he envisioned the audiences of the Dialogue and the Lausiac History, and that, to a larger extent, accounts for the impression of the remarkable difference between the two works. An attempt is made to correlate these implied audiences with the diverse groups in Palladius's immediate milieu and to hypothesize about the real first-hand readers of his works, who were ready and willing to internalize his assumptions and expectations.

Speech affordances: A structural take on how much we can do with our words

AbstractIndividuals can do a broad variety of things with their words and enjoy different degrees of this capacity. What moderates this capacity? And in cases in which this capacity is unjustly disrupted, what is a good explanation for it? These are the questions I address here. I propose that speech capacity, understood as the capacity to do things with your words, is a structural property importantly dependent on individuals' position in a social structure. My account facilitates a non‐individualistic explanation of cases in which speech capacity is undermined due to speaker's perceived social identity, e.g. episodes of silencing. Instead of appealing to interlocutors' implicit bias against speaker's identity, a structural approach refers to the positions interlocutors occupy in the social structure and the discursive conventions operating upon those positions. I articulate my proposal drawing on the notion of affordances. Each position within a social structure is associated with its own range of speech affordances. Thus, speech capacity is a function of the probability distribution of speech affordances across positions in the structure.

The linguistic analysis of Turkish novels’ Blurbs: A genre based study

The purpose of this paper was to make a linguistic analysis of the specifically chosen Turkish novels’ blurbs. This study focused on the blurbs of 10 novels in different genres involving Psychology, Sufism, Tragedy, Biography, History, Literary, Thriller & Adventure, Self-Improvement, Romance and Horror. In terms of communicative purpose and linguistic analysis of rhetorical and lexico-grammatical choices, the methodologies of Selinker (1972,), Lackstrom (1973), Trimble (1974), Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993) and consequently their connection with the advertising discourse were applied to the corpus consisting of 10 Turkish novels’ blurbs. In the first stage, for delimiting the scope of the study, domain-specific corpus was determined. Next, the study was devoted to exploring the rhetorical structure of blurbs from a genre analysis perspective (Swales, 1990; Bathia, 1993) to identify their communicative purpose. Furthermore, linguistics analysis in regard to lexico-grammatical features and the relation between the form of linguistic resources and the functional aspects they textualize in discourse were focused. The results showed that book blurbs formed a specific genre characterized by a certain communicative purpose. In the lights of the findings, it was found that the use of specific linguistic and discursive conventions demonstrated some basic characteristics of advertising discourse.

KENYA: TWENDAPI?: RE-READING ABDILATIF ABDALLA'S PAMPHLET FIFTY YEARS AFTER INDEPENDENCE

ABSTRACTThe pamphletKenya: Twendapi?(Kenya: Where are we heading?) is a text often referred to but rarely read or analysed. Abdilatif Abdalla wrote it as a twenty-two-year-old political activist of the KPU opposition as a critique of the dictatorial tendencies of Jomo Kenyatta and his KANU government in 1968, and consequently suffered three years of isolation in prison. Many (at least on the East African political and literary scene) know aboutKenya: Twendapi?but few seem to have read it – indeed, it seems almost unavailable to read. This contribution toAfrica's Local Intellectuals series provides a summary reconstruction of its main points and arguments, and a contextual discussion of the text. This is combined with the first published English translation (overseen by Abdalla himself) and a reprint of the original Swahili text, an important but almost inaccessible document. The article proceeds with a perspective first on the political context in Kenya at the time – an early turning point in postcolonial politics – and second on the work and life of its author, Abdilatif Abdalla who had been trained as a Swahili poet by elder family members who were poets. As most students of Swahili literature know, Abdalla's collection of poetrySauti ya Dhiki(1973) originated in the prison cell but they know little about the pamphletKenya: Twendapi?, nor the circumstances of its authorship. Part of my wider point for discussion is that Abdalla, as an engaged poet and political activist, can be usefully understood as a local intellectual who transcended the local from early on – topically and through global references and comparisons, but also through his experience in prison and exile. Concerns about Kenyan politics and Swahili literature have remained central to his life. This reflects Abdalla's continued and overarching connectedness to the Swahili-speaking region. Abdalla wrote in Swahili and was deeply familar with local Swahili genres and discursive conventions, language and verbal specifications (of critique, of emotions, of reflections) that use the whole range and depth of Kimvita, the Mombasan dialect of Kiswahili, as a reservoir of expression.

Entertainment and Instruction: Women’s Roles in the English Epistolary Tradition

Letter-writing manuals were a highly popular print genre in early modern England. Their study yields much valuable information about their cultural milieu. In particular, they illuminate discursive, commercial, and social conventions, as well as their gradual transformation over time. Eighteenth-century manuals show increasing interest in supplying detailed descriptions of commercial and social life. This essay examines common motifs in epistolary writing as well as the nature of these manuals’ advice to women.

The Extended Space of Public Opinion in the Context of Multi-Platform Journalism: From Speakers to Discursive Actors

This paper has as its starting point the traditional condition of public opinion, especially its existence in the society of mass communication when assuming the role of legitimizing discourses of political protagonists – the government and media. This text aims to show it as an object built around the set of discursive conventions, and show the modifications it goes through in the context of current journalism; a multitude of voices being heard in the circulation of information spaces. The qualitative analysis focuses on opinions on the Israel / Palestine conflict taken from reader comments and Internet search applications based on tags between the period of June and September 2014. Among these changes are the needs to restructure its concept, to understand the challenge it represents to news organizations and to review the formal elaborations that sustain journalistic discourse.

Action on the social determinants of health: Views from inside the policy process

It is now well documented that many of the key drivers of health reside in our everyday living conditions. In the last two decades, public health has urged political action on these critical social determinants of health (SDH). As noted by the World Health Organisation, encouraging action in this area is challenging. Recent research has argued that public health researchers need to gain a deeper understanding of the complex and changing rationalities of policymaking. This, it seems, is the crucial next step for social determinants of health research.In this paper, we turn our attention to the practitioners of ‘the art of government’, in order to gain insight into how to secure upstream change for the SDH. Through interviews with policy actors (including politicians, senior government advisors, senior public servants and experienced policy lobbyists) the research sought to understand the nature of government and policymaking, as it pertains to action on the SDH. Through exploring the policy process, we examine how SDH discourses, evidence and strategies align with existing policy processes in the Australian context.Participants indicated that approaches to securing change that are based on linear conceptualisations of the policy process (as often found in public health) may be seen as ‘out of touch’ with the messy reality of policymaking. Rather, a more dialogic approach that embraces philosophical and moral reasoning (alongside evidence) may be more effective. Based on our findings, we recommend that SDH advocates develop a deeper awareness of the political and policy structures and the discursive conventions they seek to influence within specific settings.

Beweren of bewijzen

Abstract Claiming or Proving. Models in Dutch Literary Criticism around 1917 The first two decades of the twentieth century saw a rapid expansion of literary criticism in the Dutch literary field. Models played an important role in contemporary debates about the nature and function of criticism. In search for new modes of critical writing after the Movement of 1880, critics (consciously or not) made use of discursive conventions, textual genres and exemplary predecessors in order to determine their own critical practice. This article develops a model for studying the specific features and functions of models in literary criticism by analyzing a questionnaire in the Dutch weekly magazine De Groene Amsterdammer in 1917.

“…but there were no broken legs”

The appearance of sports reporting was among the major developments of nineteenth-century journalism. While sports were only very exceptionally covered in the newspapers during the first half of the century, by the end of the Victorian era a diverse array of sports stories provided staple content for the pages of both broadsheet and popular papers. Dealing with the phenomenon of football match reports inThe Times, this article documents the early specimens of the novel genre from the 1860s and the 1870s, tracing some of the linguistic forms and structural features that characterise the early search for the discursive conventions of the new genre. By focusing on a popular topic in a serious newspaper, the analysis illustrates that the emergence of the popular topic of football in a serious daily newspaper was not only very gradual and tentative, but was also marked with substantial uncertainty about the macrostructural and microstructural composition of the reports.

The role of proximity in online popularizations: The case of TED talks

This article investigates some main characteristics of TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks, a new popularizing genre. In particular, it examines the process that recontextualizes scientific speeches into TED talks presented by their own authors, using several discursive conventions to negotiate their role as experts and to establish a closer relationship with their audience. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the 2012 TED talks, the article will draw upon Hyland’s concept of ‘proximity’, and the five elements that he takes into account when illustrating proximity in popularizing texts: organization, argument structure, credibility, stance and reader engagement. It will be observed that the linguistic techniques used to enhance comprehensibility, the use of evaluative and emotive adjectives, and the direct involvement of the audience through the use of inclusive pronouns help the speaker breach the expert/audience barrier, establishing an ‘alignment’. Rather than focusing on proximity of membership, these talks emphasize proximity of commitment, by concentrating not on the speakers’ identity and reputation, but rather on how they are personally involved in the topic of the speech. These techniques reveal TED’s idea that science should be ideas to be discussed rather than information to be passively received.

Constructing Innocence: Representations of Sexual Violence in Upper Canada’s War of 1812

This essay explores the way in which rape was represented in Upper Canada circa 1812. It draws upon a broadly defined Upper Canadian print culture that drew upon and reacted against wider trends, especially those prevalent in the United States. Whereas American newspapers spoke openly of sexual violence against American women during the War of 1812, Upper Canadian sources tended to suppress any such discussion, for reasons that reflect profound cultural and political differences. Americans stoked a rowdy, popular patriotism that Canadians distrusted and sought to avert. The analysis of national differences is contextualized within broader changes in the ways that rape was constructed in the press and the courts over the first half of the nineteenth century, in ways that worked to muffle women’s public voice. But the War of 1812’s most famous heroine, Laura Secord, was not silenced. Writing almost half a century later, Secord challenged discursive conventions of gender when she had her say and made herself a hero. The final section examines how Secord and her early commentators interwove literary signals of danger and respectability in their published accounts.

'The main contribution of this study is'...: An analysis of statements of contribution in English published research articles and L2 manuscripts

Given the widespread use of English for the international dissemination of scholars’ research results, numerous intercultural analyses have been undertaken in the field of English for Academic Purposes in diverse genres. Rhetorical and discursive conventions across languages and cultures have been studied to help non-native English scholars to be successful in the difficult endeavour of being granted publication in international English-medium publications. The increasing competition to get one’s research published in international journals in English has resulted in the authors’ need to clearly spell out what their contribution to their discipline is, a rhetorical convention which seems to be currently crucial especially in some fields. It is the aim of this paper to trace statements of contribution in the Introduction and Conclusion sections of research articles published in two international journals in finance and to compare the results with those obtained from an analysis of three manuscripts written in English by a team of Spanish scholars sent to the same journals but which received major revision or rejection reports. Reference to these statements made by reviewers in their reports will also be analysed to explore to what extent (non) compliance with this rhetorical convention may influence their final decision (not) to recommend publication

Performative Force, Convention, and Discursive Injustice

AbstractI explore how gender can shape the pragmatics of speech. In some circumstances, when a woman deploys standard discursive conventions in order to produce a speech act with a specific performative force, her utterance can turn out, in virtue of its uptake, to have a quite different force—a less empowering force—than it would have if performed by a man. When members of a disadvantaged group face a systematic inability to produce a specific kind of speech act that they are entitled to perform—and in particular when their attempts result in their actually producing a different kind of speech act that further compromises their social position and agency—then they are victims of what I call discursive injustice. I examine three examples of discursive injustice. I contrast my account with Langton and Hornsby's account of illocutionary silencing. I argue that lack of complete control over the performative force of our speech acts is universal, and not a special marker of social disadvantage. However, women and other relatively disempowered speakers are sometimes subject to a distinctive distortion of the path from speaking to uptake, which undercuts their social agency in ways that track and enhance existing social disadvantages.

Inter/Nationalism from the Holy Land to the New World: Encountering Palestine in American Indian Studies

NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 Inter/Nationalism from the Holy Land to the New World 125 STEVEN SALAITA Inter/Nationalism from the Holy Land to the New World: Encountering Palestine in American Indian Studies THIS ESSAY EXPLORES the conditions rendering Palestine, as both symbolic and living space and site of conflict, of interest to the field of American Indian studies (a broad field with degrees of overlap with Indigenous studies, Pacific Island studies, ethnic studies, and so forth). Numerous factors have contributed to this phenomenon, all of which illuminate valuable contexts of decolonial scholarship and advocacy. Understanding the conditions leading to what I term inter/nationalism (described below) among Natives and Palestinians offers crucial insight into the scholarly and material possibilities of American Indian studies and a variety of amenable fields. In particular, Native–­ Palestinian inter/nationalism forces us to assess the viability of, and the ethical questions inherent to, the scholarly imperatives of national liberation and its aftermath. I mainly focus on American Indian studies rather than on the more general Indigenous studies not as an overt political decision, but because this article is largely limited to North American nations. When I examine other areas of the world, I try to offer appropriate nomenclature, though all taxonomical terms used to describe Indigenous peoples are somehow contested (including the term “Indigenous”). Indeed, one of my goals is to undermine the mechanical analyses of naming, which produce conversations fundamentally entrapped in the dictates of colonization, thereby impeding the invocation of more pressing questions. This goal is not intended to demean the importance of various modes of identification; rather, I suggest that naming usually consigns us to the realm of symbolism at the expense of the intricate matters of liberatory dialogue and practice that render naming so complex and difficult in the first place—a situation arising from the peculiar juridical and discursive conventions of colonial practice. With the term “inter/nationalism” I emphasize action and dialogue across borders, both natural and geopolitical—not the nationalism of the nationstate , but of the nation itself, as composed of heterogeneous communities functioning as self-identified collectives attached to particular landbases (something I explore more fully below). Inter/nationalism is a way to ­compare Steven Salaita NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 126 nationalisms, to put them into conversation, but also to examine how the invention and evolution of national identities necessarily rely on international dialectics. An interesting conversation that has developed recently in American Indian studies is the role of Palestine in the field, which forms the nucleus of this project. I am not merely interested in elucidating the processes by which Palestine has become a topic of interest in American Indian studies, although I will do that, but also in exploring the implications of incorporating Palestine into the field and the comparative possibilities that exist when it happens. I have discussed this topic before. My book The Holy Land in Transit was published in 2006, but I compiled most of the research for it in the early 2000s. In the book, I look at some of the ways colonial discourses in North America and Palestine arise from the same moral and philosophical narratives of settlement, examining how modern Palestinian and Native literatures incorporate and react to those discourses. Back then, there was good source material, some of which I had to mine from old documents, but the comparison of Palestine and Native America was pretty undeveloped. Ward Churchill had done some comparative analysis, as had Norman Finkelstein, neither especially strong.1 Robert Warrior had long before published his classic essay “Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians”2 and the American Indian Movement had released numerous statements in support of Palestinian nationhood .3 Thus I was not bereft of materials, but over the past few years, comparison of Natives and Palestinians has reached a level of sophistication and complexity I never could have imagined in 2006. Before I sort out what is happening in these comparisons, let me take a look at some of the reasons comparison of Natives and Palestinians has increased in recent years. I believe there are three primary factors, each with its own set of contradictions and subtexts: 1. The proliferation of blogs...

Will the Revolution Be Tweeted? Mapping Complex Data Patterns from Sites of Protest

Can Twitter really bring a dictator to his knees? Does Youtube stream information that is more influential than traditional news providers, such as New York Times? In the mainstream media debate between Clay Shirky and Malcolm Gladwell about whether or not “the revolution will be tweeted” both pundits make confidently totalizing arguments. In contrast, this panel looks at the radical rhetorics of activism alongside digital practices of the everyday by mapping specific data patterns and discursive conventions across time and space in networked media technologies. Speaking from theoretical perspectives of the international Feminist Technology Network, these papers use textual explication, concept mapping, and media visualization to expose the rich polyvocalism of heterogeneous Internet discourses, full of affect and agency, even if the imagined community to which these utterances appeal is not necessarily realized in embodied interactions of protest at the town hall, city square, or national capital. The flux of configurations of collective and personal expression that constitutes online political speech in North Africa, the Middle East, and India is also often difficult to reduce to linear and predictive trends, and even earlier models of “smart mobs” (Rheingold) and “tactical media” (Lovink) do not always neatly map on to user behaviors in situations of political crisis. It may be difficult to make direct correlations between the rise of revolutionary movements made manifest through large-scale street actions and the adoption of new distributed communication practices around information technologies, but researchers can examine how speech acts of protest can be conceptualized, facilitated, staged, ignored, negated, or thwarted in a culture of accelerated mediation and acknowledge the potential fragmentation of publics, the seeming disappearance of the civic, and, possibly, the dissolution of the nation state in the shift of globalization. The three speakers examine how digital status update services, such as Twitter, not only disseminate links, images, and video that spur political protest but also allow for new forms of political discourse around key terms that function as metadata. Speaker one describes the use of proper names in Twitter hashtags that reference key actors, concepts, and slogans in recent protests against sexual violence in India. Although American NGOs involved in the global women’s empowerment movement may want to see legal, medical, and social privacy practices that mirror those in political institutions in the West, the problem of rape may actually be more forcefully addressed if the victim is given a proper name that can function as a keyword for shared online discourse. Even if it is only a pseudonym, such as Damini or Amanat, as in the recent Delhi gang rape case, naming the victim serves a key informational purpose. Speaker two examines how recent theories of copresence and of networked publics help understand the integration of “human narratives” and “data narratives” that unfold turning times of accelerated political change. This speaker examines how it was not merely the dissemination of graphic images of a self-immolated protester that spurred the overthrow an oppressive Tunisian regime, but the way that the violence against the body of Mohamed Bouazizi was understood through a hashtag with his name. Using the framework of object studies, this speaker will examine how the “body at risk” can be mapped across networked publics.