Discursive Devices Research Articles

‘They think we’re just in God’s waiting room’: A discursive study on identity aloneness in stroke survivors

This paper examines the rhetorical strategies used by stroke survivors to attend to identity aloneness, a phenomenon in which individuals experience a sense of disconnect from others as a consequence of identity change, for which stroke is known as an antecedent. Three stroke survivors, and their spouses, were interviewed about their stroke, social support, and experiences with loneliness and identity change. The data was transcribed using a simplified version of the Jeffersonian method and analysed using a critical discursive psychological approach. This made it possible to examine the way in which the psychological business of identity aloneness was managed in participants’ talk via discursive devices such as metaphors and category entitlement, while also leaving room to consider how broader societal discourses were drawn upon. The analysis revealed two critical ways in which participants attended to the issue of identity aloneness: (1) by crafting and occupying a position of resilience; (2) by managing the impact of the post-stroke social world on their identities. These findings offer insight into how the issue of identity aloneness is made sense of by stroke survivors in the context of a discussion with an interviewer. Finally, findings informed future directions for research, including developing a comprehensive theory of identity aloneness using a grounded theory approach and developing and validating a psychometric measure of identity aloneness to be applied in a rehabilitative setting.

Disclaimers for the Non-Reporting of Sexual Harassment within the Swedish Police

This article analyses reasons for not reporting sexual harassment within the Swedish police. The empirical data consisting of interviews, participant observation, testimonies from the police #MeToo call, and internal police investigations is analysed through tracing ‘disclaimers’, a form of discursive devices aligning actions to restore meaning. The article identifies 20 disclaimers that represent distinct reasons for not reporting sexual harassment perpetrated by colleagues and supervisors. These disclaimers shed light on police cultural norms and what we label as ‘male network acceptance’, that together with organisational factors influence the un/willingness to report experiences of sexual harassment. The findings show that sexual harassment is renegotiated when perpetrated by colleagues, and that both the harassed and bystanders doubt that reporting will lead to positive impacts. There is therefore a need to develop and implement alternative ways of handling sexual harassment that enable a shift from individual guilt, and re-frame sexual harassment as an issue of collegial concern.

Discursive Devices Used in the Advertisements by Private Schools in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: Discursive and Discourse Analysis

Discursive Devices Used in the Advertisements by Private Schools in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: Discursive and Discourse Analysis

Discursive Representation of Social Actors in Selected Speeches of the Former Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe

This study investigates the discursive devices deployed by the late former Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe, to represent social actors in his speeches, in order to unveil how these devices and the ideologies in them are mobilized to maintain political power and garner popular support. The data for the study comprise his: 2002 world summit on sustainable development speech in South Africa, 2005 party manifesto speech in Zimbabwe, 2003 Non-aligned speech in Malaysia, and 2007 UN speech in New York. These were subjected to qualitative analysis with insights from Teun A. van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of Critical Discourse Analysis. The study reveals that Mugabe uses discursive polarization strategies to emphasize positive things/de-emphasize negative things about his in-group (himself, Zanu-PF, the majority black, majority Zimbabwean supporters, and the third-world country allies), but emphasizes negative things/de-emphasizes positive things about the out-group (the minority white Zimbabwean land grabbers, the USA, the UK, Tony Blair, George Bush, etc.). The discursive strategies identified were used to pursue land ownership, anti-imperialist, revolutionary, and Marxist ideologies. The study concludes that these strategies were employed by Mugabe as linguistic, rhetorical and political strategies to maintain power and mobilize the support of majority black Zimbabweans for years.

Generating reality and silencing debate: Synthetic data as discursive device

In addition to tapping data from users’ behavioral surplus, by drawing on generative adversarial networks, data for artificial intelligence is now increasingly being generated through artificial intelligence. With this new method of producing data synthetically, the data economy is not only shifting from “data collection” to “data generation.” Synthetic data is also being employed to address some of the most pressing ethical concerns around artificial intelligence. It thereby comes with the sociotechnical imaginary that social problems can be cut out of artificial intelligence, separating training data from real persons. In response to this technical solutionism, this commentary aims to initiate a critical debate about synthetic data that goes beyond misuse scenarios such as the use of generative adversarial networks to create deep fakes or dark patterns. Instead, on a more general level, we seek to complicate the idea of “solving,” i.e., “closing” and thus “silencing” the ethico-political debates for which synthetic data is supposed to be a solution by showing how synthetic data itself is political. Drawing on the complex connections between recent uses of synthetic data and public debates about artificial intelligence, we therefore propose to consider and analyze synthetic data not only as a technical device but as a discursive one as well. To this end, we shed light on their relationship to three pillars that we see associated with them (a) algorithmic bias, (b) privacy, (c) platform economy.

Polarisation in Venezuelan presidential tweets

Abstract The Venezuelan Presidential Crisis emerged as a unique polarising political scenario in January 2019, when Juan Guaidó, president of the National Assembly, proclaimed himself interim president of the country, despite the victory obtained by Nicolás Maduro in the May 2018 presidential elections. Considering this context and the role of social media in the spread of polarisation, the present manuscript examines how metaphors and social actor representations act as divisive discursive tools in the tweets of Maduro and Guaidó. To do so, a corpus of tweets posted by these politicians during the first year of the conflict (2019–2020) is analysed, adopting a target-based approach (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2006) to identify the polarising metaphors and a socio-cognitive framework (Darics and Koller 2019; van Leeuwen 2008) to study the social actor representations. The results reveal that these discursive devices help both leaders to construct their social identities, legitimise themselves, delegitimise the other and reproduce their polarising ideological schemas.

Neoliberalism, institutional change and the new culture of the university professoriate: the Spanish case

ABSTRACT Neoliberalism has pervaded almost everywhere in the world, bringing about major changes in institutional frameworks and social relations. Science and university research have not escaped the effects of the neoliberal conception of university knowledge as a commodity and of Higher Education as a factor of economic growth. This research offers a provisional assessment of the effects of the profound institutional change produced in the Spanish university sphere instigated European and national directives. As will be seen, the implementation of the operational criteria of evaluation is shaping a new culture of university teaching staff. This paper ties together a Institutionnal Political Economy explanation of the transformation of Spanish academia with research evidence of the outcomes of a neoliberal regime, honing in or activities resembling or constituting malpractice, and complicity of staff in their governance, alongside the more commonly discussed issues of workplace stress, overwork, and mental health issues. This research analyses the discursive devices and strategies used for the construction of the new neoliberal subjectivity, by means of an exhaustive review of the literature and empirical studies carried out in Spain. Next, the institutional effects of the disproportionate use of metrics are presented. Thirdly, the socialisation processes of Spanish academics and their adaptation to evaluation methods are described. The text ends with a brief conclusion and a series of proposals aimed at configuring another way of generating knowledge in a model designed more for development than for economic growth.

"La imaginación de las musas. Autoría y creatividad literaria femeninas en el siglo XIX mexicano"

"In the following pages, I propose a review of the symbolic displacements of the concept of authorship as a function of the social subject —male or female— who writes in the context of 19th Century Mexico, marked by sexual binarism. As the feminine word gained ground in material supports, mainly journalistic, women built representations of the female writer that were soon questioned by the 19th Century literary culture, mesocratic and patriarchal. To this end, I will stick to a handful of key texts located in the press to expose this phenomenon, by analyzing the discursive marks that served to legitimize the differences between female and male creativity. In particular, I will examine the discursive devices that made it possible for a woman of this period to imagine and define herself as an author, revealing the incidence of gender in the process of articulating a national literary field, eminently shaped by androcentric laws.Keywords: female authority; writer; imagination; gender; literary field"

La fonction de restauration identitaire des échanges interpersonnels hors normes des incarcéré(e)s

We propose a semantic-discursive analysis of the «non-standard» epistolary exchanges that incarcerated people sentenced to heavy sentences can have with people who do not belong to the judicial or police institutions, nor to the media, nor to their community family. We start from the postulate that these exchanges represent discursive devices (DD) likely to participate in a process of restoring the identity of incarcerated people, or even to trigger it. We propose to develop a conceptual model of this process at the intersection of the reconceptualization of criminal acts and three major themes: victimization, guilt and responsibility, defence and self-argumentation.

Exemplifying and Numeration as Ideological Discursive Devices in Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera's Gulf Crisis 2017 Reporting

Exemplifying and Numeration as Ideological Discursive Devices in Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera's Gulf Crisis 2017 Reporting

A Study of a Specialised American Police Discourse Genre: Probable Cause Affidavits

This paper focuses on the analysis of a specialised American police discourse genre and is based on a corpus of 115 probable cause affidavits. A probable cause affidavit is a sworn statement written by American police officers to state that there is probable cause to believe the defendant has committed (or is committing) a criminal offence and that legal action is required. After briefly presenting the methodological framework for this study, the paper intends to show how the police use specific linguistic, discursive and rhetorical strategies to serve a specialised purpose, which is to present the existence of probable cause to the relevant legal authorities. The findings indicate that officers use various discursive devices to inform but also—and perhaps more importantly—to convince their audience by means of a chronological and structured narrative of events that follows a prototypical three-fold internal organisation (exposition, investigation, resolution) signalled by specific linguistic markers. Finally, the paper intends to go beyond the objective description of events in order to highlight the assertive nature of this discourse genre and the additional rhetorical strategies used by PCA writers. It studies the emphasis placed on the expertise of the author, as well as the police classification of the offence and the progressive elaboration of the burden of proof.

Stylistic hybridity in palatial architecture during the reign of King Rama V: a postcolonial reinterpretation on modern Siam

ABSTRACT Informed by postcolonial theories, this research presented critical investigations on Chakri Maha Prasat Throne Hall, the ordination hall at Niwet Thammaprawat Temple, and Munthatu Rattanaroj Villa. Aside from examining the three hybrid Siamese-European buildings beyond stylistic analyses and antiquarian mode of historiography, the upcoming discussions unveiled that the case studies – which were commissioned at the height of Western colonial expansions in Southeast Asia – testified for the Siamese’s: (1) reinterpretations, reappropriations, and recreations of European cultural artifacts; (2) active and authoritative roles in generating, combining, and projecting their versions of contested meanings upon the immediate world and beyond; (3) assertions of a newly acquired self-image by conspicuous consumptions of Western material culture; and (4) long established tradition of mediating power through built forms. In addition, by utilizing the politics of representations as a mode of problematization, these eclectic palatial structures were perceived as representational tools to create a civilized identity and discursive devices for power mediation, as opposed to unskilled or kitschy copies of Western precedents. In conclusion, the inquiries essentially argued that although Siam was among few places in Asia that did not succumb to a direct colonial rule by any Western power, the kingdom was a de facto crypto-colony.

China’s Image in German Media in Major Epidemic Prevention and Control Based on Mathematical Statistics

Abstract National image is an important symbol of national cultural soft power. Adhering to ideas and methods of mathematical statistics, this paper focuses on the construction of China’s image in German media from the perspective of epidemic prevention and control. Taking Deutschlandfunk as the retrieval object, texts are analyzed by AntConc corpus analysis toolkit to construct China’s image and German media attitude tendency under the background. The study found that, the German media exoticised and politicised the event through a series of discursive devices, constructing a biased image of China, although giving positive comments on China’s anti-epidemic measures and foreign aid.

Political Discourse in China: How Does China Frame Hong Kong Protests to Its Domestic Audience?

The Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, starting from June 9, 2019, have presented a challenge to the Chinese regime. How has Chinese official media responded to this crisis on the internet? How has the regime framed the anti-regime protests to its mainland audience? In this paper, I describe the strategies used by the Chinese propaganda apparatus to enhance regime resilience. Using text analysis and data collected from Chinese official media, I show that China uses three main discursive devices in reporting on the Hong Kong protests to its domestic audience. First, the regime draws a clear line between in-group and out-group members. Second, the regime tries to promote internal solidarity by emphasizing unifying values such as nationalism and patriotism among in-group members to prevent influence from out-group members. Finally, the regime presents an external enemy to its domestic audience. In addition, using data collected from The New York Times, I also show a comparison between the Western framing and the Chinese framing of the movement.

IDENTITY REPRESENTATION IN THE SPEECH OF THE LAW

This work proposes a discursive-deconstructivist analysis of the Maria da Penha Law in relation to the representation of indigenous women, in order to trace the effects of discrimination that materialize in the law’s archive. We start from the hypothesis that the law marginalizes indigenous women, through a discursive device that promotes a process of nationalization of the identity/subjectivity of a subject considered peripheral. The work is anchored in the transdisciplinarity between: discursive perspective; Derridean deconstruction (2001, 2007); Foucauldian archegenealogy (2002, 2008, 2015); Anzaldúa’s (2005) and Mignolo’s (2003) theoretical-culturalist point of view. Results show that the text of the law mobilizes the effects of discrimination against indigenous women, as a discursive practice that insists on remaining in the fabric of social formation.

Older adults' refusal speech act in cognitive assessment: A multimodal pragmatic perspective.

This paper explores how older adults with different cognitive abilities perform the refusal speech act in the cognitive assessment in the setting of memory clinics. The refusal speech act and its corresponding illocutionary force produced by nine Chinese older adults in the Montreal Cognitive Assessment-Basic was annotated and analyzed from a multimodal perspective. Overall, regardless of the older adults' cognitive ability, the most common discursive device to refuse is the demonstration of their inability to carry out or continue the cognitive task. Individuals with lower cognitive ability were found to perform the refusal illocutionary force (hereafter RIF) with higher frequency and degree. Additionally, under the pragmatic compensation mechanism, which is influenced by cognitive ability, multiple expression devices (including prosodic features and non-verbal acts) interact dynamically and synergistically to help older adults carry out the refusal behavior and to unfold older adults' intentional state and emotion as well. The findings indicate that both the degree and the frequency of performing the refusal speech act in the cognitive assessment are related to the cognitive ability of older adults.

News to me: far-right news sharing on social media

ABSTRACT News sharing on social media is ubiquitous and extends across demographics, platforms, and political ideologies. Online far-right communities are no exception, with a barrage of embedded news stories populating the social media feeds of far-right users. This has potentially profound implications for liberal democracy, especially given the propensity for far-right communities to spread disinformation via ‘fake news’. Yet, we do not know enough about how news content is embedded into far-right discourses, nor the extent to which the practice may contribute to the digital transmission of far-right ideologies. Accordingly, this paper investigates how far-right communities share news media to promulgate illiberalism on social media platforms. The paper aims to uncover the dominant discursive devices deployed to integrate news media reports into far-right discourses. To achieve this aim, this paper applies critical discourse analysis alongside conceptualisations of legitimacy and far-right ideology to an original dataset of social media posts in an Australian context. It finds that news sharing in far-right online circles may legitimise and reify far-right ideology through the juxtaposition of mainstream news media indicating the validity of far-right grievances. The paper also introduces a prototype model of news sharing legitimisation.

‘An expensive commodity’? The impact of hope on US foreign policy during the ‘unipolar moment’

‘Imperial overstretch’ and the role played by related ideational issues derived from particular liberal tenets and the United States’ belief in its ‘manifest destiny’ to lead the world have been regularly cited as explanations for why the United States’ ambitious project to transform the world in the post–Cold War era failed. In this article, I argue that these analyses have overlooked a crucial causal factor that also impelled the United States to undertake its ultimately doomed project: hope. I demonstrate that analyses of hope’s influence have found that while hope can exert a positive influence, it can also – if irrational – induce self-destructive behaviour. During the period of unipolarity, the United States repeatedly advanced teleological visions of a bright future for humanity routinely infused with the language of hope. I demonstrate that hope was, however, more than just a discursive device; it was itself a catalyst for the United States’ actions. I argue that a confluence of factors at the end of the Cold War aligned to impel the rapid emergence of a particular variant of hope – defined as ‘wilful hope’ – which inspired the United States to act as it did. I demonstrate how this disposition was evident in the rhetoric employed by both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush but also – more importantly – in the strategies they each implemented. Ultimately, this disposition played a crucial – though not exclusive – role in undermining international support for US leadership and precipitating the end of ‘the unipolar moment’.

FRIENDSHIP IS IN THE DETAILS: CO-CONSTRUCTION OF RELATIONSHIPS AMONG PERSONS WITH DEMENTIA IN LONG-TERM CARE

Abstract Friendships have been linked to psychological and emotional wellbeing and better physical functioning in older adults. Conversely, negative consequences (e.g., depression) are associated with losing friendships and shrinking social networks. While cognitive decline might be a limiting factor for persons with dementia (PWD) to establish friendships, this has not been proven in the literature. This paper reports on 20 interactions between PWD collected during the Friendship Study (de Medeiros et al. 2011), an ethnographic study of friendship in long-term care (LTC). Participants are male and female residents in an LTC community. Diagnoses range from mild to severe Alzheimer’s disease. Conversational interactions were transcribed and coded for linguistic and discursive devices signaling friendly interactions. Findings reveal that friendships are co-constructed by PWD using 4 primary linguistic discursive devices, including topic (meals, religion, medication, furniture, directions, baking), co-constructed narrative, repetition, and alignment. Implications for future research on friendship among PWD are discussed.

Discussing Media Manipulation in José Ricardo Morales’s Play Cómo el poder de las noticias nos da noticias del poder

ABSTRACT This article critically analyzes the media practices that intertwine private and public interests and the distortion of reality carried out by journalists in José Ricardo Morales’s play Cómo el poder de las noticias nos da noticias del poder (1969). This play is used as a case study to analyze the playwright’s ideas about using media as a manipulation tool to control and distract the audience in modern capitalist societies. The play’s analysis addresses interviews and the commodification/objectification of women as discursive devices of distraction producing false information in the media industry. This study establishes that Morales’s play reveals the cultural space of distraction used by the media, which contributes to creating a parallel narrative of possible futures, both defying national literary canons and anticipating several issues related to media intervention by corporate media and politicians in the 1960s.