Discursive Positions Research Articles

Self‐organisation in dialogical patterns of a patient with borderline personality disorder and their therapist: A case study from nonlinear dynamics perspective

AbstractObjectiveThe purpose of this study was to identify self‐organised dynamics in sessions with dialogical patterns (i.e. reflective interactions of self‐states associated with psychological change) within long‐term psychotherapy. One of the hallmarks of self‐organisation is the presence of an Inverse Power Law (IPL) in the frequency distribution of relevant events, which reflect better adaptation to internal and environmental changes, produced by psychotherapy.MethodsA case study of successful psychotherapy (44 weekly sessions) with a patient diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and the therapist was conducted. The expressions of the subjectivity (i.e. voices) in the patient and therapist were identified through the Model of Analysis of Discursive Positioning in Psychotherapy (MAPP). State Space Grids (SSG) identified sessions that presented dialogical patterns acting as attractors (8 sessions) and those with non‐dialogical patterns acting as attractors (12 sessions). Finally, Orbital Decomposition (ORBDE) produced statistics of self‐organisation in both groups of sessions and the degree of fit to an IPL.ResultsBoth groups of sessions presented an acceptable fit to the IPL distributions (R2 = .853 and .938), and statistics placed them in different self‐organised regions.ConclusionsAlthough dialogical patterns are an emergent property of therapy, their structure is similar to sessions of other types, in that dynamic processes occur in them that can be empowered in patients to consolidate psychological change. The nonlinear and emergent character of these self‐organised processes and their clinical implications for activating the patients' psychological resources are discussed.

EMI as discursive positioning

Abstract Set against a background of societal pressure and preference for English language education in Hong Kong, this paper explores the policy and practice of English medium instruction (EMI) from the perspective of one group of content subject teachers. Grounded in Bakhtin’s dialogism, the paper reports the results of a qualitative study that used in-depth interviews to explore the perspectives and experiences of these teachers as they implement EMI policy in Hong Kong schools. The results reveal the existence of several discourses of EMI in Hong Kong that position the teachers at community, institutional, and professional levels. The results also suggest that the interplay of EMI discourses can offer content subject teachers positions which they regard as undesirable. Suggestions for ensuring that the voices of these teachers are heard within the context of teacher professional development opportunities in EMI settings are considered and implications for future research are discussed.

Golden Gays: Awards Legitimation from the Globes to GLAAD

This article historicizes how the Golden Globe Awards and the George Foster Peabody Awards selectively commended television programming with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) themes from the 1970s through the mid-1990s. I argue that these awards programs’ different legitimizing practices helped to define LGBTQ+ programming as elite, sequestering it from television’s everyday discursive positioning. I first consider how the outcast status of the Golden Globes, organized by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, compelled greater attention to “queer” television oddities, even while the recognitions upheld a troublingly classed framing of LGBTQ+ shows that dovetailed with the organizer’s late-1980s discrediting following disclosures of bribery and other dealings. The Peabodys, on the other hand, promoted standards for “respectable” programming and therefore refused recognition of gay-themed shows until doing so became politically expedient in the late 1980s. This academic awarding institution later singled out “quality” entries for acclaim, paving the way for more contemporary associations between LGBTQ+ television and premier viewing platforms. Ultimately, I argue that activist media watchdogs such as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation (GLAAD) emulated the Globes’ and Peabodys’ public relations strategies, becoming de facto awards organizations in the 1990s that adopted “quality” criteria for recognizing queer-themed shows.

Discovering Animation Manuals: Their Place and Role in the History of Animation

This article explores the history of animation manuals in the United States from the 1940s to the present. It argues that this history can be divided into three major periods that correspond to changes in technique, profession and industry. From the post-War period until the 1980s, manuals reflected the hegemony of hand-drawn animation, closely bound to studio production and an apprenticeship training system. At the end of the 1970s, the rise of computer animation led to a new type of guidebook, addressing a growing convergence of computational training and new requirements introduced by the animation industry. Finally, since the turn of the century, manuals have sought to combine hand-drawn skills with digital tools, re-negotiating tradition and novelty in a diversified professional environment. Therefore, manuals are situated at a changing nexus of professional identity and training, techniques and technology, aesthetics and modes of production. In this article, the author argues that their integration within the history of animation will prove beneficial to researchers. Nevertheless, manuals are not innocent sources, but reflect discursive positions that shape the very history in which they take part.

Merging mobilities: querying knowledges, actions, and chronotopes in discourses of transcultural relationships from a North/South queer contact zone

ABSTRACT In this article, we query binaries of mobility and immobility in language studies via an empirical focus on language/social practices in a site that bridges the global North and global South. To do so, we work from a Southern praxis perspective to analyze discourses/knowledges informing the performance of accounts from Cambodian men, interviewed about transactional same-sex relationship practices between (ostensibly immobile) local men and (ostensibly mobile) male tourists to Cambodia from the global North. The analysis focuses on a process in which participants’ chronotopic awareness of language shapes a negotiation of power, knowledge, and action with respect to these relationships. Encompassing the discursive positioning of selves and others through the deployment of relevant and affective chronotopes, the talk from these Cambodian men allows us to challenge assumptions about (im)mobility, awareness, agency, sexuality, and power, and demonstrate how these are accessed in multiple ways at this site of North/South contact.

University Students’ Approaches to Making the Most of Their Study Time

ABSTRACT This article explores university students’ approaches to and positions with regard to making the most of their study time. The article discusses how various normative societal expectations around students’ use and management of time feature in their talk about how they organise their everyday lives. The research is based on thematic interviews (n = 28) that focused in detail on students’ day-to-day activities that were generated with students from two sets of generalist study fields in three regional Finnish universities. The results of a discursive analysis of students’ positionings reveal three discursive positions that represent of a variety in students’ approaches to make sense of the temporal organisation of their everyday lives as students. The identified discursive positions draw on broader societal discourses and ideals about fast completion of studies, significance of academic immersion in becoming an expert, and optimising one’s time use to enhance employability.

Stratagem of Chinese political discourse

The article is dedicated to the study of the stratagem of the Chinese media discourse as a special way of structuring a discursive position that contributes to its dominance in communication. Because of the analysis of the corpus of media texts of the Chinese political discourse, it is established that stratagem manifests itself in the coordinates of the political macro-communication, which has an agonal character, and is focused on achieving a dominant position by validating it with the help of a public social addressee based on his/her intertextual cultural competence. The essence of a stratagemically structured discourse consists of re-designing, that is, reframing the original scenario of the development of the situation into a different type of scenario. The stratagem is constructed on the basis of both precedent stratagems and non-precedent stratagems. A specific method of reframing can be put in accordance with the implicit prescriptive content of the literal formula of a phraseological unit as a sign of a certain type of stratagem in the Chinese language. Reframing the initial situations that determine the stratagem of the discourse allows us to implement various communicative strategies, the main of which are manipulative, imperative and developmental.

Public AI imaginaries: How the debate on artificial intelligence was covered in Danish newspapers and magazines 1956–2021

Abstract This article investigates the media's construction of public perceptions of future human–machine relationships related to artificial intelligence (AI) development and reflects on how such perceptions play a role in shaping strategies for the use of AI in Denmark. Through a critical discourse analysis of 253 newspaper and magazine articles published from 1956 to 2021, it shows how conflicting discursive positions are constructed, representing what I refer to as public AI imaginaries. The analysis shows that newspapers and magazines tend not to distinguish between futuristic descriptions of the human–machine relationship of AI and the human-centred principles of intelligence amplification (IA). Furthermore, it demonstrates how principles of IA are reflected in the Danish strategies for AI in practice. While the discursive ambiguity has fuelled public debate, it leaves the term AI relatively vague, thereby creating uncertainty rather than possibilities for a form of human-centered AI in empirical reality.

VISUALIZATION OF CULTURE: EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS

The authors of the article focus on changes related to education. Education is considered as a communicative construct arising from the process of symbolic interaction between individuals who establish meanings when coordinating their statements. The communicative generation of situations and orders of knowledge is interpreted as educational semiosis. Analyzed is the discourse of modern humanities which are competing with each other in determining the current socio-cultural situation. Highlighted is the research tendency, asserting the point of changing the cultural morphogenesis by means of its visualization processes. Based on this, the hypothesis of a gap between culture and education is put forward. According to this hypothesis, cultural relations are increasingly mediated by figurative participation, while educational practices appeal to verbal and textual forms of the situational mediation. Within the relations between actors in education, this is reflected in the dominance of legitimate (metanarrative) samples, the transmission model of educational knowledge, the communicative preference for orderliness, the desire for unambiguity, the clarity and completeness of logocentric forms of thinking, and so on. The change of the mediation form in the organization of educational interaction and the transition from the verbocentric order to the ocular-centric one, is suggested as a step in the development of modern education. It must affect the way educational relations (educational communication) function, the way words (speech) and images (vision) are inter-related, the principles of students’ orientation in their attitudes to the sign-symbolic world, their partners in interaction, and to themselves. In the first case, the point is to organize educational communication based on the principles of paradoxicality, paralogicality, and disproportionality of statements and images of the situation. Here the most important educational objective is to make the participants of the educational interaction consider their differences in their interpretations of the world, their styles of utterance, and their discursive positioning. In the second case, the educational objective is the liberalization of vision, which emerges in the course of perceptual work emancipated from the primary procedures of interpretation and comprehension of the visible and relying on the action of the image as the context of the statement. The third case is about worldview constants, radical changes in the position of the educational subject, acquiring the experience of self-detachment in learning. In the final analysis, this provides an opportunity for differentiation and diversification of the worlds of human presence.

Exploring the discursive positioning of members of a literacy professional learning community

ABSTRACT Increasingly, professional learning (PL) approaches in the U.S. and globally are reflecting highly adaptive and socially constructed views of learning. However, much remains to be learned about how professional learning groups discursively develop and sustain collaborative communities. Drawing on positioning theory in this year-long qualitative study, we sought to understand how the dialogue used in a literacy teacher learning community shaped how participants engaged in PL. Results revealed that the nature of dialogue within and across social tasks during collaborative PL meetings evolved such that the teachers in the PL community assumed and enacted more agency for their professional learning across the year. Moreover, the evolving storyline of the group across the year was informed by the way discursive practices were enacted in terms of conversant’s rights and duties, the social force of their conversational turns, and the evolving identities of individuals and the group. This work matters because the more we understand the characteristics of effective PL approaches, the better we can co-construct effective PL communities with teachers that promote their learning and the learning of their students.

Tinker, tailor or transform: Gender equality amidst social-ecological change

Global visions of environmental change consider gender equality to be a foundation of sustainable social-ecological systems. Similarly, social-ecological systems frameworks position gender equality as both a precursor to, and a product of, system sustainability. Yet, the degree to which gender equality is being advanced through social-ecological systems change is uncertain. We use the case of small-scale fisheries in the Pacific Islands region to explore the proposition that different social-ecological narratives: (1) ecological, (2) social-ecological, and (3) social, shape the gender equality priorities, intentions and impacts of implementing organizations. We conducted interviews with regional and national fisheries experts (n = 71) and analyzed gender commitments made within policies (n = 29) that influence small-scale fisheries. To explore these data, we developed a ‘Tinker-Tailor-Transform’ gender assessment typology. We find that implementing organizations aligned with the social-ecological and social narratives considered social (i.e., human-centric) goals to be equally or more important than ecological (i.e., eco-centric) goals. Yet in action, gender equality was pursued instrumentally to achieve ecological goals and/or shallow project performance targets. These results highlight that although commitments to gender equality were common, when operationalized commitments become diluted and reoriented. Across all three narratives, organizations mostly ‘Tinkered’ with gender equality in impact, for example, including more women in spaces that otherwise tended to be dominated by men. Impacts predominately focused on the individual (i.e., changing women) rather than driving communal-to-societal level change. We discuss three interrelated opportunities for organizations in applying the ‘Tinker-Tailor-Transform’ assessment typology, including its utility to assist organizations to orient toward intrinsic goals; challenge or reconfigure system attributes that perpetuate gender inequalities; and consciously interrogate discursive positions and beliefs to unsettle habituated policies, initiatives and theories of change.

Negotiating euthanasia: Civil society contesting ‘the completed life’

Autonomy and independence have become crucial elements of end-of-life decision making. Opinions on the latter are, however, strongly contested in public discourses. This contribution analyses arguments in favour of and against a Dutch civil society initiative which promotes the extension of the legislation on euthanasia. The authors investigate Dutch newspapers associated with three groups: religious, liberal and humanist perspectives, and do so by utilising quantitative and qualitative elements from a discourse-analytical perspective, raising the following questions: Which stances can be identified? How do different parties position themselves with regard to a ‘completed life’ and a ‘good death’? To what extent do these positions create demarcations between ‘us’ and ‘them’? The authors show that the debate developed along the lines of three key topoi: the topos of autonomy, the topos of human worth and the topos of embeddedness. The authors thereby identify how the different discursive positions define different visions of dying as ‘legitimate’ and as a proper end to a completed life.

An Artist and a Writer: YA Literature by Anna Höglund

This article highlights the interpictorality in two YA books by the Swedish writer and illustrator Anna Höglund, Om detta talar man endast med kaniner [This Is Something You Only Talk About with Rabbits] (2013) and Att vara jag [To Be Me] (2015). The analysis of the visual intertextuality between pieces of artwork by Peter Tillberg, Frida Kahlo, Lena Cronqvist, Richard Bergh and René Magritte and five pictures from Höglund’s books thematises school, body and identity. The discursive positioning in the artworks and in Höglund’s pictures directs the readers in their decoding of Höglund’s text, offers possibilities in their interpretations and challenges the adolescent readers to make connections across different formats, such as text and image, and between different images.

Right-wing populist media events in Schengen Europe

Abstract Leaders of European right-wing populism (RWP) have developed speeches about the state border control required to protect the “people” electing them. Nevertheless, are these RWP narratives necessarily circulated during populist media events that take place in the symbolic locations of European integration? It is argued that border control discourse in these EU places can be mitigated by RWP actors, but also emphasized by the media depending on the separated predispositions of politicians and reporters to address the border issue in a given context. Bourdieusian “field theory” is used in this article to grasp the potential differentiated discursive positioning. Based on a comparative analysis of RWP media events organized in the town of Schengen in Luxembourg, the investigation allows us to shed new light on the specificities of populism in the media.

The micro-politics of classroom talk: tracking students’ shifting positions on race, place and privilege

ABSTRACT For the socially conscious teacher working in diverse classrooms, conversation can surface and productively engage the politics of difference. Poststructuralist discourse analysis and/or positioning theory have provided insights into the students’ subject positions and discourses in such conversations. However, studies are often limited by the use of brief extracts from lesson transcripts, making it difficult to detect how students are positioning one another and how subject positions shift over time. This article seeks to make a contribution by using extended extracts of moment-by-moment classroom talk to track the subject positions that students take up and map the discourses they draw on over time in an extended conversation. This qualitative case study examines classroom talk in a racially desegregated classroom in an elite school in South Africa. The issues that emerge provide insights into the ways in which students navigate discursive positions on race, place and privilege. Findings suggest that when the interactional order of the classroom is such that students’ diverse knowledges and experiences are invited in, students collectively gain access to a multiplicity of discourses which can be used as resources to rethink their own subject positions and begin to imagine alternative positions from which to view their worlds.

Discursive positions about homeschooling in Brazil in Twitter posts

O estudo analisa posicionamentos discursivos acerca da educação domiciliar no Brasil em postagens do Twitter, no intuito de investigar quais relações de saber-poder são mobilizadas na constituição desses discursos. Para tanto, toma como aporte teórico as investigações de Foucault (2010) acerca do discurso, enunciado e formação discursiva. Sobre a metodologia, trata-se de um estudo descritivo-interpretativo de natureza qualitativa. As relações de saber-poder estão em conformidade com os modos como se enuncia sobre a educação domiciliar, a saber: revolta em relação ao homeschooling, constatação dos impactos na profissão docente e defesa dessa modalidade educacional.

Identities of Resignation: Threats to Indigenous Languages from Neoliberal Linguistic and Educational Practices

ABSTRACT We suggest that while Indigenous languages are threatened by capitalist and neoliberal encroachments, responses from applied linguists in the academy can be misguided. To make our argument, we must first define neoliberalism, and examine how the broader neoliberal discourses of choice, competition and the free market have percolated and distilled into local Indigenous language contexts, impacting languages, cultures and identities. We ask ourselves what identities are currently available, adopted and valorized by and for Indigenous language speakers, and how positions like Indigenous language speaker, academic/linguist, activist and teacher are altering in response to available neoliberal subject positions? We suggest that neoliberal discursive regimes position Indigenous peoples who do not speak their heritage languages as “victims needing recognition and redress.” The result is that they have become trapped in colonizer ideologies viewing Indigenous peoples as unfit to govern themselves. Colonized now by neoliberalism, Indigenous language speakers forced to live within neoliberal regimes must adopt identities of resignation, meaning engaged in a permanent struggle to accommodate themselves to the world. Instead, we posit that their positions are better framed and respected as identities of refusal, everyday actions of refusing enclosure.

Dialogical positions in a Whatsapp group regarding the use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of Covid-19

The objective of this article is to analyze the established discourses in conversations among members of WhatsApp group “Academia Saudável” (Healthy Academy), having as central issue the controversy of the use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine medicines in the treatment of Covid-19. For the analysis, the concepts of concrete utterance, responsible act, alien and authorial discourse, field of communication and discourse genres of Bakhtin's Dialogical Theory of Language and the Circle were summoned. The results demonstrate that each individual of the group has a prominent role in guaranteeing the conversation theme through his/her discursive positionings favorable or not to the use of these drugs in the fight against the new coronavirus.

Power and knowledge negotiations in a collectivity of practice: From peripheralization to epistemological suspicion

Knowledge co-creation at the boundaries of communities of practice (CoPs) can lead to heightened tensions and power struggles. This study examines how power struggles among CoPs can begin to structure knowledge creation processes. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a new medical research project, the study shows how power and knowledge negotiations became manifested through conflicting discursive positioning and coercive power affecting knowledge co-creation efforts. One CoP adopted an authoritative leader role, prioritized their own problem definition and knowledge creation process, and engaged in the peripheralization of other CoPs. The power and discursive moves prevented the development of shared problems and interconnected practices contributing to epistemological suspicion among the participating CoPs. The study offers new insights to research on power dynamics in situated learning and knowing by problematizing the relationship between localized practices and emerging interconnected practices, by shedding light on how discursive positioning and coercive power operate together, and by developing peripheralization and epistemological suspicion as potential explanations for how and why knowledge workers struggle to act on opportunities for knowledge co-creation.

Pandemic platform governance: Mapping the global ecosystem of COVID-19 response apps

This article provides an exploratory systematic mapping of the global ecosystem of COVID-19 pandemic response apps. After considering policy updates by Google Play’s and Apple’s App Store, we analyse all the available response apps in July 2020;their different response types;the apps’ developers and geographical distribution;the ecosystem’s ‘generativity’ and developers’ responsiveness during the unfolding pandemic;the apps’ discursive positioning;and material conditions of their development. Google and Apple are gatekeepers of these app ecosystems and exercise control on different layers, shaping the pandemic app response as well as the relationships between governments, citizens, and other actors. We suggest that this global ecosystem of pandemic responses reflects an exceptional mode of what we call ‘pandemic platform governance’, where platforms have negotiated their commercial interests and the public interest in exceptional circumstances. © 2021, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. All rights reserved.