Discursive Production Research Articles

Investigation on Gender and Leadership in STEM in Higher Education: Methodology Design

Institutional actions and policies implemented by universities hold the potential to significantly impact the inclusion of women in leadership roles within STEM fields. This article describes the methodological design approved by the local ethics committee to conduct the research in Brazil, with the primary objective of understanding the degree to which discursive productions on gender affect women’s career experiences and leadership paths within STEM fields in higher education. Discursive productions include structures of power such as university policies, climate, culture, and projects. It is expected that the work will provide valuable insights and support for researchers sharing similar goals and who work to reduce gender inequalities in STEM.

Social representations of disability: Between models and persons. Debates and perspectives on the dynamics of social interactions

This paper aims to describe and problematize the different models and approaches that attempt to understand disability throughout current history. People elaborate on these through their interactions as social subjects. In this sense, social representations about these models can maintain their validity, with greater or lesser legitimacy. Based on a qualitative review, we analyze the characteristics of the leading models and approaches proposed by various authors in the last two decades, linking them with social representations as discursive production and with the social practices of a given context that is simultaneously constructed. We conclude that this critical review leads to a rethink of social representations, professional practices, and discursive crossings from the different models and approaches to disability. Finally, we reflect on how, when presented as hegemonic and totalizing representations, models can deprive the subject with a disability of agency, preventing him/her/them from critically reflecting, rethinking, and re-presenting him/her/them, as well as from making decisions based on his/her subjectivity expressed in everyday life

Estonia's “Return to Europe”: The relationship between neoliberalism, statelessness, and Westward integration in post-independence Estonia

Following Estonia's declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the country engaged in a fast-paced neoliberal transition to secure its alliance with the West. Simultaneously, the newly independent state decided to exclude the 500,000 Soviet migrants living in Estonia from its citizenry, thereby making a third of its population stateless. The aim of this article is to explore how the three political projects of independent Estonia – that is, creating and maintaining the ethnonationalist citizenship regime, the country's neoliberal transition and Estonia's Westward integration through a “Return to Europe” – have converged, mutually reinforced each other, and become irrevocably intertwined. To this end, the article traces the historical, material and discursive production of statelessness in Estonia. The initial exclusion of Soviet migrants from citizenship was justified on the basis of “restoring” Estonia to its pre-USSR demographic composition. While many left, those who stayed have been treated as a disposable population and face a disproportionally high incarceration rate. This article contributes to the literature on the intersections between ethnonationalism and neoliberalism by demonstrating how the continued mistreatment of the stateless in Estonia has been justified through neoliberal rationality, which casts the domain of the political into an economic register through the valorisation of individual responsibility. We further show how the emergence of neoliberalism has been linked with Orientalist narratives that simultaneously framed the country's economic reforms and ethnonationalist citizenship regime. As such, the Estonian post-independence experience demonstrates how neoliberalism is inherently compatible with ethnonationalist policies, especially when mediated through Orientalist logics.

Racializing the Irish: the discursive production of race and nation by the young Ireland movement

ABSTRACT This essay will analyse the ways in which definitions of race in nineteenth-century Ireland were not only, nor simply set by British colonizers, but rather were produced and determined by Irish people themselves. This long history of Irish engagement with concepts of race shaped how the Young Ireland movement understood how the Irish nation was (racially) constituted. Additionally, the multi-racial history of the Irish nation inflected Young Ireland's understanding of how history structured the construction of an Irish nationality. This paper then will show how the Young Irelanders understood race and, more particularly, how they recognized themselves as racialized subjects. Their own adoption of a racialized Irishness was important to their vision for Ireland's revolutionary future. Placing race centrally within the writings of Young Ireland, highlighting its essential role in a historical account of Irish nationality, this essay will thereby cast new light on the difficulties inherent in Young Ireland's nationalist project. In particular, it will underscore the anxieties experienced by Young Ireland about the potential impossibility of the nationalist project with reference to its production and experience of racialized but ambiguous subject positions.

“A Much More Valuable Signature”: Gender, Factory Labor, and the Mythology of Builder-Signed Amplifiers from Fender's “Tweed” Era, 1948–60

AbstractAmplifiers from Fender's so-called Tweed era (1948–60) are among the most valuable instruments in all popular music. Inside most Fender Tweed amplifiers is a piece of masking tape bearing the signature of the worker who hand-wired the amplifier's circuit. Today, collectors have elevated several of Fender's previously unknown Latina employees into legendary figures with near cultlike followings. In the absence of biographical information about these women, however, the contemporary discourse about them is often highly romanticized. In this article, I present novel historical information about Fender's Tweed-era employees to counter the misinformation surrounding them and Fender's mid-century Fullerton, California factory system more broadly. Analyzing contemporary discourses surrounding Fender's earliest employees, I also critique the persistence of gendered and racialized stereotypes about Fender's female employees being naturally equipped for labor-intensive assembly work due to their supposedly “nimble fingers.” This article also details the social processes through which Fender's Tweed amplifiers have been made “vintage,” and the company's mid-century mass-production techniques have since been attributed the same artisanal values associated with vintage string instrument making. Ultimately, I show how the builder-signatures contained within Fender's Tweed-era amplifiers have been central to the discursive production of value among collectors.

Examining the discursive production and deployment of diversity and inclusion in a UK-wide outdoor organisation

ABSTRACT This study draws on a Foucauldian lens to examine how diversity and inclusion are produced, understood, experienced, and managed within the context of a UK wide outdoor non-profit organisation that recently began steps to increase the diversity of its workforce. Qualitative semi‐structured interviews were undertaken with 16 adult members of staff (8 male and 8 female), from different levels, roles and leadership positions, and across different locations. Analysis highlighted tensions between historical and cultural legacies of exclusion in the outdoors and diversity and inclusion organisational values and practices. It also highlighted the privileging of certain discursive articulations, rationalities, and diversity management practices over others. These included the need for workforce diversity to better represent the client base, leading to a focus on front-facing staff and instructors, and a project-based approach. Findings suggested there may be a generational shift in talking about diversity and inclusion within the outdoor sector, but alternative voices are not yet powerful enough to provoke meaningful and sustainable change. We propose a critical perspective to challenge unproblematized discourses of progress and call for diversity and inclusion to be embedded within core organisational cultures and working practices to avoid it slipping down the ladder of competing organisational priorities.

Unmade in America: The gendered politics of birth tourism in the United States

This paper interrogates the discursive production of the “birth tourist” and associated opposition to jus soli birthright citizenship in the United States. I trace the intersecting axes of heteropatriarchy and racism that underpin history of opposition to jus soli citizenship, and position contemporary media and political attention to “birth tourism” as an extension of those axes. Through a critical discourse analysis of popular media coverage and public commentators, I position the “birth tourism” category within a broader national discourse of white supremacy, before linking this discursive production to national-level regulatory efforts. Interrogating the “birth tourist” categorization as a discursive tool of white, patriarchal ethnonationalism, I advance the study of political geographies of fertility and argue that contradictions embedded within the “birth tourism” discourse ultimately work to fuel fears of white supremacy's collapse. Keywords: birth tourism, birthright citizenship, white supremacy, intersectionality, feminist geopolitics.

Bisexuality and ambiguity: metaphoric relations and metonymic processes in discursive productions on bisexuality

Resumo A ausência de pesquisas sobre a bissexualidade no século XX somada às preocupações em torno da epidemia da AIDS possibilitou a construção de narrativas especulativas sobre a população bissexual, sendo comumente descrita como uma categoria ambígua. Mediante uma análise antropológica, propõe-se refletir sobre os complexos simbólicos que produzem a bissexualidade como uma categoria ambígua, relacionando-a com a produção discursiva sobre as ficções de contágios, essencialmente metonímicas.

Bissexualidade e ambiguidade: relações metafóricas e processos metonímicos em produções discursivas sobre a bissexualidade

Abstract The absence of research on bisexuality in the twentieth century and concerns regarding the AIDS epidemic enabled the construction of speculative narratives on the bisexual population, which is commonly described as an ambiguous category. Analyzing bisexuality through an anthropological lens, this article examines the symbolic complexes that produce bisexuality as an ambiguous category, relating it to the discursive production of fictions of contagion, which are essentially metonymic.

BORDER AND ILLEGAL MIGRATION IN LUIS ALBERTO URREA’S THE DEVIL'S HIGHWAY: A TRUE STORY

In the last two decades, literature concerning Latin American undocumented migration to the United States has emerged as a significant resource for comprehending the evolving landscape of state authority. The article considers techno-militaristic and the discursive production of the migrant figure in Luis Alberto Urrea’s Devil’s Highway. The author considers how Urrea’s text constructs a notion of migrant subjectivity and how the text participates in the reproduction of the material and discursive conditions by which the undocumented migration is rendered to readers. Undocumented migration is the focus of cross-border migration story described by Luis Urrea. It emphasizes the pervasive impact of global capitalism on migration processes. The undocumented migrants are perceived by the dominant power as a sub-human category. Urrea’s Devil’s Highway describing contemporary undocumented migration allows for a more nuanced comprehension of migrant subjectivity, extending beyond economic injustice. Urrea interweaves the migrant’s journey with the intricate tales of the border. Nevertheless, the physical encounter of crossing the border constantly interrupts their journey. The desert's autonomous power inscribes the men's experiences instead of the men defining the land. Urrea directs the readers' attention to the tangible reality of the human bodies and the vast desert landscapes, crafting a multi-dimensional narrative that immerses the readers in the story. Urrea vividly portrays the brutal impact of the desert on the bodies of the walkers, urging the readers to empathize with their physical ordeal. The article argues that the subjectivity of undocumented migrants needs to be reconsidered in the context of such discourses as negative globalization, human rights, and economic dispossession.

Discursive (re)production of social cleavages in the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary elections

ABSTRACT This article studies the problem of discursive (re)production of social cleavages in the politics of divided societies. Through the discourse analysis of communication of a wide variety of political parties, politicians, and actors during the 2019 parliamentary election in Ukraine, we supplement and clarify the theory of cleavages in its application to Ukraine and similar societies with deep division and armed conflict. The results show that cleavages are (re)produced in different ways in the discourses during the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary elections. The sharp cleavages are articulated in a simplified form, while the fundamental cleavages are masked by discursive means, which, overall, blocks the overcoming of fundamental cleavages. Our results indicate that it is necessary to supplement the theory of cleavages with discursive components of separation and distinguishing between instrumental and fundamental cleavages.

Enacting the Ombud’s Roles: A Study Based on Text Mining

Abstract What roles do ombuds institutions create through their activities? How does the creation of ombuds’ roles relate to the person of office-holders? Based on a case study of the Austrian Ombudsman Board, the present article analyses the discursive production of ombuds’ roles via a corpus of annual reports. Using the text-mining programme Alceste, the paper examines how topics are prioritised in activity descriptions, how the institutional mission is presented and put into practice, and how the complainants are described. Alceste identified a total of nine “lexical worlds” that point both to the diversity of the roles that are exercised by the ombudspersons and to the existence of three ideal types of approaches to the ombuds office. Results also highlight the fact that these different, partially interrelated roles are characteristic of certain individual organisational units and people, which indicates a personalisation of the office. At the same time, some of these roles are shared by several ombudspersons.

“It’s easy to just be normal”: Performative masculinities in Die stropers

In post-apartheid South Africa, the representation of queer identities in Afrikaans-language films have become increasingly prominent. However, many such films focus on past contexts or serve as comedic depictions, failing to confront the complex issues faced by individuals in contemporary Afrikaner communities. Etienne Kallos’s 2018 coming-of-age film Die stropers (The Harvesters) candidly depicts the challenges faced by adoptive brothers Janno and Pieter, who must negotiate desire and gender in a conservative, Afrikaans farming community. Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity and recent reformulations of Raewyn Connell’s notion of hegemonic masculinity, we examine the discursive (re)production of hegemonic Afrikaner masculinity within the boys’ adoptive family and community. We investigate how the protagonists strategically deploy performative masculinities to achieve belonging and acceptance as heirs, even if the ideals they emulate oppress and restrict them. We propose that the protagonists’ strategic deployment of performative masculinities represents their claiming of agency in contexts where gender and desire are aggressively policed. Furthermore, their navigation of hegemony in this white, Afrikaner community through resistance and consent might point to a claiming of space for queer identities and the continued transmutation of hegemonic masculinity.

Producing ME/CFS in Dutch Newspapers. A Social-Discursive Analysis About Non/credibility

ABSTRACT Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME)/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is a highly contested illness. This paper analyzes the discursive production of knowledge about, and recognition of ME/CFS. By mobilizing insights from social epistemology and epistemic injustice studies, this paper reveals how actors, through their social-discursive practices, attribute to establishing, sustaining, and disregarding their own and others’ epistemological position. In focusing on the case of the Dutch newspaper reporting about ME/CFS, this paper shows that the debate about this condition predominantly revolves around the ways in which people who make truth claims are represented. In being portrayed as gendered, affectatious, formerly very able, fanatical, or benevolent, people with ME/CFS are constructed as non-/credible. In the debate about what causes ME/CFS, by contrast, the production of non-/credible knowledge focuses more on the content of epistemic positions. Actors in this debate argue that they know the (clear) causes for the illness, something which functions as a discursive strategy to establish and enhance their credibility. This paper contends, however, that since this discursive demarcation of causes is consistently infused with uncertainty – with multi-interpretability, with diffuse explanations, and absence of current knowledge – the credibility of these actors’ epistemic position is undercut rather than established.

What Are They Gonna Think About Me? An Innovative Text Analysis on Social Anxiety and Taijin Kyofusho Through MADIT Methodology

AbstractMeaning and translation are never-ending issues that constantly challenge researchers who work in cross-cultural settings, especially when the focus is on how people use language to express and interact in relation to their distress experiences. Many efforts have been undertaken in order to try to understand and manage the content variance that can emerge from context and linguistic differences. The present study aims at offering its contribution on this topic by presenting MADIT methodology, an innovative textual analysis that focuses on the processual use of language. Using the theoretical references of Dialogic Science, language is analysed as an interactive process, leading the researchers to observe the modalities through which language is used (the how) instead of the different contents brought by speakers (the what). After discussing the theoretical differences between content and processual analysis, we present MADIT methodology through a comparative explorative study on the discursive production about taijin kyofusho and social anxiety in Japanese and Italian contexts. The results pointed out how, going beyond the content differences and focusing on the processual interactive reality generated through language, it is possible to observe cross-cultural similarities in the use of language to shape distress experiences.

More bottoms than tops? Mediated sexual roles and masculinity assemblage in Chinese gay communities

This paper examines the discursive production of “there are more 0s (bottoms) than 1s (tops)” in a mediated environment, and its implications on gay communities. It explores why many Chinese gay men perceive it as a “sexual truth.” Based on ethnographic research from 2017 to 2021, I argue that this popular discourse is produced by the higher threshold to qualify as a 1 than a 0. The unequal threshold prevents many men from self-identifying, and, more importantly, being recognized as a 1. In addition, the wide circulation of this discourse has intensified effeminophobia, and led to unequal sexual opportunities for gay men based on their embodied masculinities.

Federal Care Policy Possibilities in the 117th Congress: Toward Expansive Kinship and Collectivized Carework

In this article, I position federal policy as a shaper of familial life capable of capacitating new forms of relationality. I review three key child and family provisions in the Build Back Better social policy package proposed by the Biden administration: the expanded child tax credit, universal pre-K, and the expansion of federal childcare subsidies. I trace the sociopolitical context surrounding Biden’s endorsement of these child and family care provisions, highlighting how socialist and abolitionist organizing and the COVID-19 pandemic functioned as twin possibility-making forces, thrusting social democratic federal policy onto the agenda of arguably the most moderate Democratic candidate in the 2020 presidential primary. I argue that these social policies have the ontological capacity to shape an image of care and belonging that challenges the nuclear family form and neoliberal discursive productions of care, advancing more just, collective, and relational notions of responsibility and carework.

Angolan children’s experiences in residential centers: displacement, liminality, and belonging

Abstract This article examines how language, liminality, and social marginalization converge in the institutional lives of two displaced children in Angola. A displaced child is very likely to be placed into institutionalized care, which in Angola exists in the form of centros de acolhimento, residential centers that house minors affected by orphanhood, poverty, displacement, or abandonment. Drawing on one year of ethnographic research in two residential centers, the article argues that despite being sites of care and protection, some children come to desire living on the street as a byproduct of persistent marginalization and forms of liminality in the institutions. Utilizing audiovisual recordings of everyday interactions among children and the center’s staff as data, the focus of the article is a set of communicative practices that routinely positioned certain children as liminal subjects who possessed the negative attributes with which liminality is most often associated: danger, pollution, and being an ambiguous nonentity. As a result, those children occupied marginalized positions within the centers and their attempts at claiming their belonging were repeatedly undermined. The lived experience, talk, and perspectives of two children, a boy and a girl, are closely analyzed to illuminate the micro-processes involved in the discursive production of their liminality and social marginality. More broadly, the article elucidates the everyday forms of liminality that take place in the mundane, rather than in ritualized rites of passage, and questions the traditional notion of liminality as a temporary state.

Aprofundamento Neoliberal e Discurso Jornalístico no Brasil

The objective is to analyze some speeches, made by members of the dominant bloc (intellectuals, bureaucrats, etc.) about the Brazilian crisis and the solutions to resolve it, between the years 2015 and 2019, published in newspapers (O Globo, Folha de São Paulo, El País and Gazeta do Povo), as well as systematized in some books. We will first resort to a theoretical discussion, based on a Marxist theory of contemporary society (Viana, 2018, 2019, Orio, 2019, Almeida, 2020, Braga, 2020), with the aim of building a general understanding of the relationship between capitalist accumulation , Social blocks and discursive production in neoliberal capitalism. Next, we will carry out a dialectical analysis of the speeches (Viana, 2009b, Bajtín, 2010) published in newspapers, relating them to the construction of a consensus around neoliberal forms.

Conservation regimes of exclusion: NGOs and the role of discourse in legitimising dispossession from protected areas in India

In this article, we examine the discourses of NGOs participating in and sustaining India's conservation “regime of exclusion”. We suggest that these NGOs utilise discursive technologies to produce forests and forest-dwellers in ways that legitimise racialised and caste-based exclusion from conservation spaces. We focus on two examples. First, we analyse a petition filed by conservation NGOs against India's Forest Rights Act (FRA), which recognises the customary forest rights of historically marginalised Adivasi and Other Traditional Forest-Dwelling communities. This petition was intended to delegitimise the FRA, and it prompted a court decision that could potentially displace approximately 1.19 million forest-dwelling families. Second, we analyse how conservation-induced dispossession in India is increasingly framed as “voluntary resettlement”, which we suggest normalises and depoliticises dispossession and legitimises arguments against the FRA. Through these examples, we find that discursive technologies produce forests and forest-dwellers in ways that rely on and reproduce existing social hierarchies shaping access to land, resources, and power. We unpack the characteristics and motivations of this conservation regime; particularly the discursive productions through which conservation organisations position their “expert” forest claims above the claims of forest-dwelling communities, authorising the creation of “inviolate” conservation spaces through exclusion. Understanding discourse as the articulation of knowledge and power through which material realities come into being, we problematize the dominant understandings of conservation that underlie dispossession and the discursive technologies that legitimise it.