Discursive Politics Research Articles

The discursive politics of nuclear waste: Rethinking participatory approaches and public perceptions over nuclear waste storage repositories in Switzerland

Used nuclear fuel must be safely disposed. One solution to this complex challenge are deep geological repositories. Participatory approaches accompany the selection of suitable sites for these repositories in many countries and have been studied by risk perception scholars. However, most research has used quantitative cross-sectional data to explain the relationships among the variables of interest (particularly risks) and to inform nuclear policies. In this paper, we introduce a complementary perspective highlighting two fundamental factors: public opinions and their dynamics or stability. We provide results of a longitudinal survey (2 measurements 1year apart) on plans for a nuclear waste repository in Switzerland. The respondents (N=841) submitted their own arguments with which they would discuss the site selection process. In addition, we surveyed the respondents’ general opinions. We found a focus on values and responsibility. Those in favor of the repository used different arguments than those who opposed it or were undecided on it. Women perceived the repository more negatively (general opinion) but did not use different arguments than men. A comparison over time showed that one third of the sample did not change their argumentation. The use of descriptive data to enhance policy-making processes is discussed.

Capturing in words what a symbol symbolizes? Challenges for studying symbolic representation from a discursive approach

ABSTRACTStudying symbolic representation is not only relevant, but also challenging. Hanna Pitkin [1967. The Concept of Representation. CA: University of California Press, 97] already warned us that “[w]e can never exhaust, never quite capture in words, the totality of what a symbol symbolizes: suggests, evokes, implies.” We will discuss the opportunities and challenges we encountered in our study of symbolic representation from a discursive politics approach, where we took political discourse as the agent. A discursive approach has allowed us to study symbolic representation as a dimension of representation per se, and to unpack the relation between agent and principal in symbolic representation by revealing the activity of constructing meanings and ascribing them to the principal. Yet, a number of questions arise: what makes a symbol a symbol and what does this mean for a discursive approach to symbols? What makes symbolic representation different from substantive representation when the agent is of a discursive nature? And what methodological challenges does the broadening of the agent in symbolic representation to discourse include?

An anthropological reading of the policies of international development: export competitiveness as a conjunctural case study

Drawing on ethnography of the World Bank’s private sector development program, this paper explores the ways in which discussions of export competitiveness emerged in the past decade or so and how they interacted with larger discourses on solidarity and development. The immediate context within which this idea emerged was that of the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) which had maintained that the public regulation of the private economy compromises on industrial productivity (and by extension distributive social justice). But it would be naive to think that alternative ideologies have not tried to insert themselves within the Bank’s neoliberal discourse on development. If anything, discursive narratives suggest that the very notion of export competitiveness initially worked to justify the role of the state in regulating and incubating the private sector in developing countries even if these attempts became disembedded from their local contexts in the long run. This paper contextualizes this specific encounter on export competitiveness within the broader discourse of development and economic anthropology to examine the discursive politics of policy and knowledge in the global aid industry.

Modern singing sons of the Pharaohs

In 2009, the U.S. Library of Congress officially launched the Ragheb Moftah Collection, an online exhibit that presented the largest music archive of Coptic liturgical recordings and music transcriptions outside of Egypt. Moftah, an amateur Egyptian collector, had commissioned an English composer, Ernest Newlandsmith, to notate and record the entire Orthodox hymnody. They both believed that, as the last connection to a Pharaonic and pre-Islamic past, the ancient melodies lay unchanged, “buried under a debris of Arabic and other ornamentation.” Drawing on Wendy Cheng’s notion of strategic orientalism (2013) and Timothy Mitchell’s staging modernity (2000), I explore contemporary discursive politics of sound archives in the Coptic community. Specifically, I investigate the role of Coptic music archives in articulations of community legitimacy, indigeneity, and agency as a religious and political minority in a Muslim majority nation. How have today’s cantors and activists rendered western transcriptions as sound objects which to negotiate authenticity as Egypt’s last remaining “modern sons of the pharaohs,” even without being able to read them? As the principal curator of the site, I explore how Western scholarly encounters have not only entangled Coptic music discourses in a western-centered teleology of modernity and progress, but in emulating the West, also infused them with orientalist critiques that equated heterophony and embellishments to “Arab debris” that marked signs of backwardness.

Elite discourses of conservation in Tanzania

ABSTRACTThis paper examines how the discursive politics of conservation, shaped within an elite global tourism political economy, directly influences the tactics of community groups, government officials and foreign tourism companies, and reproduces the meaning of conservation and rights in places like Tanzania. I examine how a recent online campaign to “save the Serengeti” builds on persistent elitist discourses of westerners saving African wildlife while also saving Africans from themselves. This discourse continues to shape struggles over land for tourism and local livelihoods.

The “red door” controversy—Middlesbrough's asylum seekers and the discursive politics of racism

AbstractThis article explores some of the ways in which the current refugee “crisis” has played out in the North East of England, with a particular focus on media coverage of asylum in Middlesbrough, the town with the highest proportion of asylum seekers in the country. In January 2016, Middlesbrough made national headlines when it was claimed that the homes of asylum seekers in the town had been made identifiable through the distinctive colour of their houses' front doors, leading to occupants being singled out for violence and abuse. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of national and local newspaper features and online media content, the article examines contrasting constructions of racism, place, and class in the media's coverage of the “red door” controversy. It is argued that even these humanised constructions of asylum seekers draw on discourses that obscure the existence of elite‐driven cultural and institutional racisms that are a defining feature of Britain's asylum process. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The discursive politics of unconventional gas in Scotland: Drifting towards precaution?

With a long history of oil and gas production and potentially significant reserves of unconventional gas, Scotland represents a notable case amid the growing international controversy over unconventional gas development (UGD). This article applies argumentative discourse analysis to the Scottish debate over UGD and identifies several important storylines which have mobilised different discourse coalitions and shaped public opinion as well as policy-making. For now, anti-UGD storylines appear more encompassing and have achieved greater resonance. Of particular interest, however, is the role of the Scottish government as a third discourse coalition. Through a moratorium on all forms of UGD and a cautious ‘evidence-based approach', the government has established a form of discursive dominance and has successfully minimised electoral risks. But its anti-Westminster storyline – created in the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 – has undermined the government's pragmatic strategy by invoking Scottish resistance to the UK’s pursuit of shale gas. While the evidence-based approach persists as the preeminent storyline, its interpretation has ‘drifted’ from (1) a modestly reformed planning policy to (2) an exercise in scientific fact-finding combined with a public consultation and, arguably, (3) to a precautionary approach that might lay the foundation for an extended moratorium.

“Bitch I Said Hi”: The Bye Felipe Campaign and Discursive Activism in Mobile Dating Apps

This article examines the Instagram page for Bye Felipe, a feminist campaign where people submit screenshots of examples of harassment and sexual entitlement from men on online dating sites such as OKCupid and apps such as Tinder. I frame the campaign as an example of feminist discursive activism. The site owners collect contributions and aggregate examples of particular discursive patterns in hook up apps, in order to make collective political claims, a strategy that Tomlinson calls “intensification.” I address the existing literature on cyber-misogyny and online harassment, and also research on previous similar campaigns such as Fedoras of OKCupid to discuss shaming as a political practice. I then draw out the patterns and concepts invoked in interventions and resultant discussions on Bye Felipe, examining the themes of rejection, silence and who has the right to silence, rape culture, and gendered sexual entitlement. I identify the political claims being made through the rhetorical strategies described in the first part of the article. Drawing on the work of McCosker on trolling as provocation, I discuss the role of repetition and rehearsal in the practice of discursive politics. Finally, through a discursive analysis of responses to the posts on Instagram and Facebook over time, I explore the ongoing and difficult boundary work around what constitutes appropriate examples for the site, and the articulation of feminist claims and discourses.

Technocracy or transformation? Mapping women's policy agencies and orienting gender (in)equality in the Canadian provinces

AbstractCanadian gender equality policy has taken a “technocratic turn” that favours bureaucratic expertise to monitor and measure (in)equality rather than participatory and consultative mechanisms. While the processes and impacts of this shift are well documented at the federal level, less is known at the provincial level. This article takes stock of provincial gender equality mechanisms, demonstrating variations in women's policy agencies (WPAs) across the ten provinces. It then links these variations to the discursive politics of gender equality within each province. We demonstrate that the potential for transformative orientations of gender equality emerges in WPAs with broad consultative mechanisms.

The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality: Stretching, Bending and Policymaking Edited by E. Lombardo, P. Meier and M. Verloo (2012) Abingdon: Routledge, 217pp.

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Don’t think of them as roads. Think of them as road transport markets: Congestion pricing as a neoliberal political project

For some time now, many planners have embraced the idea of congestion pricing, an idea that has its origins in the field of transport economics. A positive attitude towards pricing, however, seems to be at odds with values commonly held by planners. To clarify this paradox, we need to thoroughly understand the history and sociology of the idea, and to acquire such understanding, this dialogue discusses the claim that the history of thinking about congestion pricing can best be understood by seeing it as a discursive politics of the market. The current view on congestion and road pricing originated in the 1950s, and there is clearly a link between the dissemination of the idea of congestion pricing and the rise of neoliberal thinking in general, although a different, rather Keynesian, tradition has continued to exist since the early days. The article also presents some criticisms of congestion pricing based on technical, equity as well as normative arguments. Finally, some attention is devoted to the format of the paper, given that it is written as a dialogue.

Enlargement and the Historical Origins of the European Community's Democratic Identity, 1961–1978

AbstractThis article examines how and when democracy entered the discursive politics of the European Community to become one of the fundamental tenets of European political identity – and in the process influenced how decision-makers approached the question of enlargement. Building on multiple archival sources, the article traces how all three Community institutions (Commission, Council and European Parliament) legitimised the expansion and continuation of the process of European integration through the discursive construction of democracy. It focuses on the debates elicited by the attempts of southern European countries to accede to the EEC in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Colonial State and Resource Frontiers

The article, through an investigation of a plethora of colonial reports, correspondences and petitions, attempts to build a history of frontier spaces invested in resource appropriation. Discovered in the forests of the northeastern tracts of British India in the early nineteenth century, rubber entailed the culmination of a resource frontier whose effects simultaneously produced the disruptive as well as the dialogical in a multiplicity of extractive as well as non-extractive activities. As the material intricacies of appropriating rubber located beyond the assumed political boundary of the colonial state littered the frontier geography with strange institutions and legal apparatus, there circulated at the same time certain ideas and perceptions that wove the region and its people within an ideological geography that increasingly rationalised the operative intentionality of the resource frontier. The effects noted, sometimes through the violent outbursts of military combat and sometimes through the discursive politics of petition writing, bring forth the complexities that the project of rubber appropriation unfolded for the region.

Posthumous personhood and the affordances of digital media

This article identifies and outlines some of the more prominent ways that digital media can extend one’s personhood following death. We consider three examples: when the digital persona of the deceased continues to interact with the living through a human surrogate; the emergence of autonomous and semi-autonomous software enabling the dead to use social media to intervene in current events; and finally the operation of algorithmic presence services like Eterni.me, where artificial intelligence creates a re-enlivened form of the deceased. Situating these examples in relation to sociological, anthropological and cultural literature foundational to ideas of distributed personhood and posthumous symbolic immortality, we suggest that digital codes and computational texts stand as key sites for contemporary forms of ‘distributed personhood’, including posthumous personhood. We then extend this body of literature by examining how the discursive politics of social media contributes to a social and commercial context, which supports ongoing interactions with the dead online. Through this process, we suggest that the persona of the dead, which remains after bodily death, can continue to maintain meaningful posthumous relationships with the living, presenting a new perspective on how we interact with the dead through digital media.

Economic experts: a discursive political economy of economics

The aim of this article is to show that economic experts are not the product of one single social field, with one identity and one role. They are rather the product of a trans-epistemic discursive field. By a combination of discourse analytical tools from post-structuralism and a theory of symbolic power derived from Bourdieu's work, the contribution explores how economists occupy a powerful, hegemonic position in the global political economy. While classical approaches in Political Economy reduce power mainly to money and violence, this paper takes the recent debates on the cultural turn in Political Economy as a starting point to develop the idea of a Discursive Political Economy of Economics. In the first step it is shown how discourse and power interact. In the second step the paper explores the discursive power logic of economic expert discourses at the interface between academia, politics, media and the economy with illustrations from empirical research. The claim of this paper is that the power of economic expert discourses in the media, politics and the political economy is based on an elitism dispositif which emerged in the academic world of economics in the USA as an ‘excellence myth’.

Modest Fashion

Finally it seems the academic study of hijab has come of age. The contributorsto this collection neither treat it as an object of curiosity or derision, nor wonderat Muslimahs’ “false consciousness”; rather, they treat this “piece of cloth” andthe accompanying dress code as a “normal” object of academic enquiry. Forexample, they expand the investigation to include attire for modest Jewish andChristian women, as well as for secular women who dress in similar ways albeitfor different reasons. The title captures this broad focus by using modest, ratherthan limiting the focus to the hijab. While some Jewish and Christian womenalso dress modestly, discursive politics only label the hijab as oppressive.It is refreshing to read academic studies that treat the hijab with the samerespect that they do modest Jewish or Christian dress codes. This is not to saythat the book necessarily endorses or advocates modest dress, which it mostcertainly does not, but only that its contributors (e.g., a journalist and a paneldiscussion with bloggers, designers, and entrepreneurs) study in a sociologicalway the different meanings behind religious dress while maintaining respectfor those they study. Even Elizabeth Wilson’s “Can We Discuss This?,” whichfinds secular women’s recourse to modest dress depressing (“the human body,clothed or unclothed, is a cause for celebration” [p. 171]) and asks secular feministsto “fight their corner” (p. 171), respectfully summarizes the rationale behindmodest dress in order to argue against that very rationale.The contributors also link the study of modest dress with the concept of“fashion,” which is a matter of women who want to dress modestly but haveto look long and hard for nice, fashionable clothing that meets their standards.But as Lewis (“Introduction”) and others, like arts journalist Liz Hoggard(“Modesty Regulators: Punishing and Rewarding Women’s Appearances inMainstream Media”) note, the mainstream fashion industry does not treatmodest dress as “fashion.” Therefore, some Jewish, Christian, and Muslimwomen entrepreneurs have opened stores as well as designed and sold theirown creations to those who want to dress modestly and yet be stylish and fashionable.By investigating the link between fashion and modest dress moreclosely, the book provides a very refreshing analysis of modest dress. Afterall, we receive the obfuscations of “oppressed” or “false consciousness”through the mainstream fashion lens.Lewis argues that the Internet has allowed this niche market to blossom ...

Preaching and English Parliaments in the 1620s

This article evaluates the impact of a small cache of sermons, dating from the second half of the 1620s, which served as the prelude to the famous sermons preached to the Long Parliament. Few in number, concentrated in time, and disparate in location, these works have attracted little sustained attention from scholars of the parliamentary sermon. However, they represent a crucial turn in the discursive politics of that particular set of influential pulpits: before the 1640s, not one, but three, high‐profile – and very distinct – sermon venues served as sites for the dissemination of opinions directly and intimately associated with the work of a sitting parliament. Considered together, these form one singular and noteworthy platform of political debate, allowing us to posit religious origins to civil war.

The Biopolitic of North Korea: Political Crisis, the Body, and Visual Power

This essay aims to critically examine body politics, which characterize North Korea as the hyper-feminine—as well as hyper-masculine—nation-state, and to contribute to a historical critique of our current inter-Korean situation, wherein South Korea’s cultural superiority to North Korea is unquestionably presumed and legitimized. I discuss what I call the biopolitical Otherization of North Korea, which I define as the discursive formation of the incessant purification of degenerate, inferior North Korean populations along the lines of the problematic formation of national belonging. This discursive politics of Otherizing is located within the allegorical composition of eyewitness reports of North Koreans written by South Korean reporters during the historic first official post-war inter-Korea talks—emerging from the “July 4 North-South Joint Communique” —held in Pyongyang from 29 August to 2 September 1972, which hinder the subject’s ability to deliberate anxieties about national identification.

The Land Question in the Food Sovereignty Project

This essay explores the changing landscape of food sovereignty politics in the shadow of the so-called ‘land grab’. While the food sovereignty movement emerged within a global agrarian crisis conjuncture triggered by northern dumping of foodstuffs, institutionalized in WTO trade rules, the twenty-first-century food, energy and financial crises intensify this crisis for the world's rural poor (inflating prices of staple foods and agri-inputs) deepening the process of dispossession. The circulation of food is compounded by global financial flows into enclosing land for industrial agriculture and/or speculation, challenging small producer rights across the world. Under these conditions, the terms of struggle for the food sovereignty movement are shifting towards a human rights politics on the ground as well as in global forums like the FAO's Committee on World Food Security. This includes in particular the need to develop a discursive politics to reframe what is at stake, namely the protection and support of a production model based on social co-operation, multi-functionality and ecologically restorative principles.

Changing climate discourse and politics in India. Climate change as challenge and opportunity for diplomacy and development

This article contributes to the study of changing climate discourse and policy in emerging powers through a case study of climate discourse in India since 2007. Based on interviews with key actors in Indian climate politics and textual analysis, three general climate discourses – the Third World, Win–Win and Radical Green discourses – are identified. The discourses are characterised by different constructions of India’s identity, interests, climate change exposure and climate policy orientation. At the most general level, the article finds that there has been a general discursive shift from the Third World discourse to the Win–Win discourse, and that the latter discourse is in broad agreement with the dominant international climate change discourse of ecological modernisation and thus supports an alignment between Indian and international climate politics. We also find, however, that India’s domestic climate politics is marked by co-existence and tensions between the three climate discourses, producing a complex and at times contentious discursive politics over climate change, identity and development. The case study presented in this article moreover demonstrates how national interests are socially constructed and how changes in policy reflect changes in the dominant discourse.