Discursive Regimes Research Articles

The story of the PPO queen: the development and acceptance of a spoiled identity in child protection social work

AbstractThe efficacy of child protection social work is regularly being questioned in the media as vociferous critics deride the profession for the apparent failings of its practitioners. This paper aims to examine the impact this hostility can have on practice and the relationship practitioners develop with their organization and subsequently the families they work with. By using autoethnography, a personal experience I encountered whilst working as a statutory social worker for an Emergency Duty Team will be explored in detail in order to analyse how discursive regimes can endorse and encourage particular ways of thinking and doing for social workers. I also intend to demonstrate that when workers operate in a risk averse environment, oppressive practices can develop subconsciously. These not only affect professionals’ values and assumptions but also fortify distance between the social worker and the client. If social work is to facilitate positive change in the current climate of uncertainty, then it is hoped that this story may enable both practitioners, and their critics, to recognize that being open to different forms of knowledge could lead to better outcomes for all involved.

Affective Economies in the Governance of Trafficking and Sex Work in Vietnam

Since Vietnam's advances in “capitalist globalisation” in the late 1980s, it is argued to have become a source and destination country of trafficking in men, women and children. Considered a global problem, human trafficking draws together an array of national and international actors, governing logics and practices in its global governance. This article examines how, in the prevention of trafficking in women and children in Vietnam, a global neoliberal governance logic converged with socialism. Specifically, it focuses on one site where this can be seen playing out, namely in the attempt to prevent trafficking in women and children in the Mekong Delta area in the mid-2000s. The article draws particular attention to the affective economies at play in the discursive regimes of Vietnamese femininity deployed to prevent the trafficking of women and girls. It thereby complements a Foucauldian reading of governance with Ahmed's work on the cultural politics of emotions.

Narrative Id/entity in Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas

Abstract Poststructuralist theory interrogates systems of thought and discursive regimes of knowledge in order to locate the underlying historical assumptions that shape and inform human subjectivity. Nowhere is this epistemological excavation more complex than in representations of the postcolonial self. Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas can be read as a representation of the hybrid self, one produced by transcultural processes of colonisation. Yet, if we read the novel through Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology, we find that Joshi’s narrative representation of self is not confined to the postcolonial dialectic of self and other. For Ricoeur, self and other than self reside in a circle of sameness-identity; it is constitutive of selfhood. While critical work on Joshi’s novel has distinguished between the narrator, Romi, and the protagonist as two mutually exclusive entities, the primary focus being the existential experience of Billy, this paper suggests that the narrator himself is intimately implicated in this experience. Indeed, they can be read as two parts of a whole being, a ‘double consciousness’ that inhabits the dialectic self and its other. Ultimately, this reading will attempt to access an understanding of the hierarchy of significations that inform our hermeneutic experience of narrative self-identity.

Goldwater’s left hand: Post-raciality and the roots of the post-racial racist state

Post-racial discourse rests on the allegation of a particular undoing to which we must urgently attend. There is almost nothing empirically credible about this pseudo-historical narrative structure, yet as a (growing) field of knowledge production, the post-racial discursive regime is no less formidable and far-ranging. Perhaps most importantly, it has attempted to reconstitute (and has undeniably already altered) some of the operative truth assumptions of racial discourse writ large: as a teleological marking, post-racialism minimally posits that the long modern era’s reliance on various iterations of racial power/violence—from modalities of human classification to strategies of mass geographic containment and social liquidation—has yielded to other forms of social ordering, which are no longer centrally premised on this particular form of human differentiation and brutal hierarchy.

Comment on Johanna Oksala’s Foucault, Politics, and Violence

Is violence an ineliminable feature of politics?1 In Foucault, Politics, and Violence, Johanna Oksala answers no.2 In order to make her case, she not only questions dominant understandings of relationship between politics and violence offered within traditional and critical theories, but also attempts to cultivate sensitivity to historical and contextual specificity of both concepts. Furthermore, Oksala takes issue with appeal to both negative and positive views of human nature in Western thought. Indeed, she adopts neither sort of view herself and argues instead that theorists interested in problem of violence should turn to Foucault, suspend anthropological universals, and engage in ontology. Doing so promises to open up possibility of contesting idea of any essential connection between violence and politics, to politicize views that deem violence to be inevitable and thereby unnecessarily limit reigning discourses on violence to problem of distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate forms of it.In effect, Oksala claims that view that violence is either an indispensable instrument of politics, or inevitably bound up with it, stems from ontologies and specific rationalities within which theorists are operating. She regards Foucault's genealogical strategy of revealing historicity and specificity of various ontological commitments associated with a given discursive regime or form of rationality as indispensable to effort to show that the connection between violence and political is not internal or essential, but contingent.3Oksala's strategy for eliminating violence from politics centers on questioning current assumptions and beliefs about human violence and politics, suggesting that insofar as these assumptions arise within specific historical power/knowledge relations, they are inevitably Thus her phrase,political ontology, refers to a conception of constituted within power/knowledge regimes. What we take to be real or necessary is politicized insofar as it is constituted within a power-laden context of struggle over truth and objectivity.4 Here, following Foucault, Oksala broadens category of the political. The includes power/knowledge relationships outside confines of state and its corresponding institutions to include those found in micro-level relations between individuals and within and between institutions. She adopts Foucault's understanding of critique as involving resurrection of forgotten constitution of social reality within power-laden contexts as a way of opening up a field of contestation.In what follows I want to raise three questions concerning Oksala's project, questions concerning following: (1) method she takes herself to be employing throughout book, and (2), a more complicated question, namely, whether her assertion that violence is eliminable is warranted by analysis she provides, and (3) whether enlisting Foucault in project of ontology can help her show that it is. I then raise some broader questions about status of empirical research on human nature within a Foucauldian framework.Oksala's MethodIt is not clear to me whether Oksala takes herself to have provided a genealogy of specific ways in which politics and violence have been intertwined, or whether she is simply urging us to recognize its importance for any effort to end or reduce violence. It is clear that she does want to encourage further historical inquiry into how violence comes to be understood as compatible with governmental or rationalities. Moreover, insofar as she endorses an agonistic view of politics that places contestation, not rational deliberation a la Habermas or Rawls, at heart of politics, she deems critical inquiry into ontology an indispensable tool for opening up possibilities for other ways of being and thinking, particularly for disentangling violence from agonistic rationality. …

Violence, non-violence : Sartre, à propos de Fanon

The article examines Sartre’s highly controversial preface to The Wretched of the Earth. Its aim is to identify what, in the various modes of address, are elements in an economy of violence and what, on the contrary, participates in a process of recognition. The examination of the addressees of the address leads to a correlative transformation of the very notion of the author, commonly equated with the merely singular individual. What is at stake here is to grasp what makes Fanon, as it does any political theorist, not merely an author but also a “movement emerging”. The exploration of discursive regimes also leads to a reflection on what, within the habitual practices of interpellation, participates in a gendered division of the conversation and companionship of struggles.

‘Keeping up the Good Fight’: The Said and Unsaid in Flores v. Arizona

The authors' purpose in this article is to interrogate the mediated and political discourses that emerged alongside the Flores v. Arizona case. The authors endeavor to offer another voice, framework and approach that may help sustain a continuous, paramount conversation concerning the educational rights of English language learners and the ways in which the public rationalizes appropriate state provisions for such students. Therein, the manuscript operationalizes the rationalities that appear across pro- Flores data (which consists of public opinion rhetoric positioned in support of the plaintiff and therefore in favor of appropriate state support for English language learners). The analysis of this data lays bare the echoes of the discursive regime surrounding the Flores case, a regime which unmasks neo-liberal rationalities for supporting English language learners. For example, the findings indicate that neo-liberal rationalities such as commodification, competition, risk, security, insurance and entrepreneurialism dominate the discursive landscape and eclipse alternative ways of arguing in support of students' rights to equitable and appropriate education, including social justice, pluralism and democracy.

Beyond the current political economy of competence development

Competence is a concept imported into the adult and continuing education arena from the psychological terminology of human resource development in work organizations. It has been elevated to a societal and political level as part of a new discursive regime. This article points out the significance of the particular circumstances in which the competence discourse has emerged, and argues for its critical investigation within a Marxist framework. A new discourse of learning and competence reflects a new material dependency of capital(ism) on the concrete quality of work and workers, requiring a total program of learning for work. This opens a new arena of political struggle over the direction of learning processes and the participation of workers in work and society. The socio-economic realities and new understanding of the interrelationship between knowledge, skills, learning and practice central to the competence concept, raises a potential issue about the role of work and the living worker in a capitalist economy. This requires a re-development of the notion of economy based in the value and interest of working people, and enabled by the full development of the competences of the workers themselves. A notion of the "political economy of working people" is proposed as a framework for investigating the potentials of competence development for enhanced democracy.

Emotions, performance and entrepreneurship in the context of fringe theatre

Through a study of small scale independent theatre companies, generally known as ‘fringe’, this article explores how passion is drawn on and activated as company founders seek an outlet for their work. Drawing on a social constructionist approach to emotions, we highlight the multiplicity of passion through its positive and negative dimensions as well as how these may intersect. Further, by positioning passion within a set of power relations we point to its performative role in reflecting and reinforcing contextually specific discursive regimes. We contribute to the literature on the social and emotional performance of entrepreneurialism and to understandings of passion that characterize the affective entrepreneurial condition.

La bioética en el contexto de las narrativas mediáticas. ¿Es posible la “relocalización” del sentido de las discursivas?

Se propone una discusión sobre las condiciones de posibilidad que justificarían la construcción de un conocimiento desde la bioética con relación a las narrativas mediáticas. Concretamente, plantar un escenario desde donde se pueda interrogar sobre la posibilidad de relocalizar epistémicamente las discursivas y provocar así una migración en el sentido de las mismas. Al mismo tiempo, se plantea la posibilidad de proponer que se redefinan los presupuestos teóricos atribuidos a la bioética desde posturas teóricas que constituyen lugares de enunciación “otros”. En otras palabras, escenarios desde donde sea posible cuestionar el discurso sobre la bioética, el cual, como se indicará más adelante, está enfocado en asuntos hospitalarios y biomédicos, de modo que pueda involucrarse con discursos emergentes, con discursos que contrastan las hegemonías epistémico-ideológicas, los regímenes discursivos, y el carácter de politicidad que subyace en la relación persona-espacio público. Desde esta perspectiva, plantear como posible una redefinición del discurso en bioética a partir de propuestas y/o planteamientos teóricos enmarcados en las nuevas narrativas, particularmente en las narrativas mediáticas.

Through Foucault to a political geography of mediation in the information age

Abstract. Drawing on Michel Foucault's understanding of power and governmentality, this paper advances an initial reflection aimed at developing a "political geography of mediation'', concerned with the question of what "makes'' and what "happens within'' the imbrications of power and space. This discussion is structured into three main parts. Firstly, the paper considers two levels on which Foucault addresses the question of how (through what means) power is exercised and constituted, relating to the techniques of power on the one hand and to the discursive regimes underpinning and shaping these techniques on the other. Secondly, two ideal typical spatial logics of power are discussed, relating to what Foucault calls apparatuses of discipline and apparatuses of security. This will show how thinking about mediation in a Foucauldian sense allows for a conceptualisation of the imbrications of space and power. Thirdly, the paper advances one specific proposition of how to further pursue from a contemporary geographical perspective Foucault's "technical'' approach to the functioning of power. In so doing, the paper develops a programmatic reflection on power, space and regulation in the information age.

The carnivalization of the world as criticism: laughter, political action and subjectivity in social life and speech

Taking the notion of carnival as developed by Mijail Bakhtin as starting point, in this text I evaluate the possibility of vindicating a carnivalization of the world as a practice of social resistance and transformation in the face of the hegemony of an established dialogicity or a dominant, institutionalized discourse. I analyze the resource of parody and the exercise of subversion of the official –solemn– text, as well as the collective insertion of laughter, as means of inaugurating an alternate, or “second”, existence through which any identitary congruence linked to the reiteration of a discursive regime associated with power relations is contradicted. Thus, I conceive of carnivalization as a milieu generator of specific forms of language and communication that, availing itself of grotesque corporality and masking as well, contravene established patterns of functional, ordered conduct, thereby opening a path that leads to other practices of freedom and the production of subjectivity.

The carnivalization of the world as criticism: laughter, political action and subjectivity in social life and speech

Taking the notion of carnival as developed by Mijail Bakhtin as starting point, in this text I evaluate the possibility of vindicating a carnivalization of the world as a practice of social resistance and transformation in the face of the hegemony of an established dialogicity or a dominant, institutionalized discourse. I analyze the resource of parody and the exercise of subversion of the official –solemn– text, as well as the collective insertion of laughter, as means of inaugurating an alternate, or “second”, existence through which any identitary congruence linked to the reiteration of a discursive regime associated with power relations is contradicted. Thus, I conceive of carnivalization as a milieu generator of specific forms of language and communication that, availing itself of grotesque corporality and masking as well, contravene established patterns of functional, ordered conduct, thereby opening a path that leads to other practices of freedom and the production of subjectivity.

The Distribution of Facts and Fictions.

In our paper we discuss the political aesthetics of Jacques Rancière, specially his writings on the documentaries of the French director Chris Marker. In a first section we give an introduction to Rancière’s political philosophy, which explains political acts in terms of seizing the word by those who have no share in our societies. Such a seizing of words reconfigures the discursive regimes that decide who can say what and under what conditions publicly. In a second section we will show how Rancière’s aesthetical writings discuss works of art in a similar way as agents of a transfiguration of orders of visibility or sight. This becomes clear, as our third section will argue, in Rancière’s film aesthetics, especially in his essays on Chris Marker. Markers movies (for instance Le Tombeau d'Alexandre) focus on and at the same time complicate the boundaries between documentary and fiction; they allow us to understand a reality which is supposedly without alternatives as a result of human practice which always can be changed.

Sex Dilemmas, Amazons and Cyborgs: Feminist Cultural Studies and Sport

In this article, I discuss sport and physical activities as a field of empirical investigation for feminist cultural studies with a potential to contribute to theorizing the body, gender and difference. Sport has, historically, served to legitimize and rein-force the gender dichotomy by making men “masculine” through developing physical strength and endurance, while women generally have been excluded or di-rected towards activities fostering a “feminine suppleness”. The recent case of runner Caster Semenya, who was subjected to extensive gender tests, demon-strates how athletic superiority and “masculine” attributes in women still today stir public emotions and evoke cultural anxieties of gender blurring. But the rigid gender boundaries have also made sport a field of transgressions. From the “Soviet amazon” of the Cold War, transgressions in sport have publicly demonstrated, but also pushed, the boundaries of cultural understandings of gender. Gender verification tests have exposed a continuum of bodies that cannot easily be arranged into two stable, separate gender categories. In spite of the so called “corporeal turn”, sport is still rather neglected within cultural studies and feminist research. This appears to be linked to a degradation, and fear, of the body and of the risk that women – once again – be reduced to biology and physical capacity. But studies of sport might further develop under-standings of the processes through which embodied knowledge and subjectivity is produced, in a way that overcomes the split between corporeality and discursive regimes or representations. Furthermore, with the fitness upsurge since the 1980s, the athletic female body has emerged as a cultural ideal and a rare validation of “female masculinity” (Halberstam) in popular culture. This is an area well-suited for “third wave” feminist cultural studies that are at ease with complexities and contradictions: the practices and commercialized images of the sportswoman are potentially both oppressive and empowering.

Normativity and change: introduction to the Special issue on Agency and power in multilingual discourse

The present article deals with what we feel to be an unexplored path in present day sociolinguistics and a viable way toward making sociolinguistics more cognitive and cognitive linguistics more social. Naturally, sociolinguistics has a strong interest in issues of variation and change, variation being typically conditioned by social factors, such as age, gender, ethnicity as well as the discursive regimes of language use present in a community of practice. However, just like much of linguistics can be accused of not paying enough attention to the social (or communicative) side of language (cf. Croft 2009), sociolinguistics may be criticized for its relative lack of attention to cognition. We advocate that a true sociolinguistics should bridge this gap, and construct a theory about how social life influences cognitive knowledge. Against this background, we propose to combine a narrow linguistic notion of norm (Section 2) with a discourse-based one (Section 3) and we do so by portraying normativity as a process that operates on a range of elements that form a continuum of complexity. Our point here is that linguistic usage and discourse patterns are subject to the same normative pressures and regulations. First, both are sensitive to the purely cognitive effects of usage: entrenchment of what occurs commonly, leading to internal norms. Second, both are subject to external norms, as groups develop ‘ideologies’ about the way in which something should be done, in other words 'what is normal and what is not'. For some, this will support their own internal norm, but for others there may be a big discrepancy. And, finally, in both cases, is it ultimately up to the speaker (or ‘agent’) to follow the norms or not. We will illustrate this with two examples, one in the domain of traditional linguistics; the other taken from discourse-based linguistic ethnography.

Does culture need explaining?

This keynote paper focuses on the relationship between the idea of culture and the different ways it is talked about in the contemporary world. The media, the Academy, the creative professions and public policy all provide different discursive regimes in which key terms describe and evaluate artworks and cultural experiences. Words are shared but their context of use is not. We think (as critics, academics, artists and policy-makers) we are talking about the same thing, equal participants in ‘the rhetorical economy’. But in reality we occupy radically different subject positions. Referencing Matthew Arnold’s Culture andAnarchy, the paper teases out the implications of functional cultural provision for one area in particular: the ‘fit’ between the categories of government policy and the idiosyncratic processes of creative practice. Can the state define culture save as a general figure? Can it measure artistic value in any but an aggregate way? What are the implications for the language of cultural reporting, and the relationship between the artist and the state, with the ‘cultural industries’ now representing 3.6% of Australia’s GDP?

Doing Safer Masculinities: Addressing at-Risk Gendered Behaviours on Mine Sites

Doing Safer Masculinities: Addressing at-Risk Gendered Behaviours on Mine Sites

Transference and counter-transference in Life in debt

Transference and counter-transference in <i>Life in debt</i>

Sexual Politics, Organizational Practices: Interrogating Queer Theory, Work and Organization

Sexual Politics, Organizational Practices: Interrogating Queer Theory, Work and Organization