Discursive Repertoires Research Articles

“The asylum system is completely broken”: An analysis of justifications and resistance for the UK Government’s Rwanda policy in parliamentary debates

In April 2022, the UK government announced the signing of a ‘partnership agreement’ with the Government of Rwanda in which some asylum seekers who enter the UK would be transported to Rwanda where their cases would be decided. This ‘Rwanda policy’ has been met with strong resistance from opposition politicians. This paper examines how the UK Government has sought to justify this ‘offshore processing’ policy and the ways in which the policy is resisted by politicians from the Opposition. We present a discursive analysis of the transcript of the Home Office’s statement to the House of Commons on the “Global Migration Challenge” and the subsequent debate among Members of Parliament about the statement. We identified three discursive repertoires that politicians on opposing sides used to both justify and resist the Rwanda policy, specifically repertoires focussing on the safety of Rwanda, the need to deter people smugglers and be in line with ‘what the people want’. Despite political polarisation in the debate on this policy, we argue that the use of similar discursive devices to both justify and resist this policy creates problems for supporters of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in carving out a clear discursive space for their arguments.

#MeToo in Poland: reactions to public accusations of sexual violence

ABSTRACT As in many other countries, the #MeToo movement in Poland brought forth a wave of accusations of various forms of sexual violence. In this article, we analyze public statements of men accused of sexual violence in order to explore their constructions of gendered power relations and expose the internal logic of male privilege. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, we distinguish five discursive repertoires employed in the statements: new facts, the real victim, the decent feminist, good reputation, and explicit stigmatization. We argue that our discursive repertoires are similar to strategies extracted in different cultural contexts, thus indicating common connections across cultures in how male privilege operates. We have also observed characteristics specific to the Polish context, including the high importance of the supposed neutrality of the law in the debate around #MeToo and the predominant use of the good reputation repertoire to enhance credibility of privileged men. Given the specificity of the material analyzed and the exploration of the logic of privilege and misogyny, this article aims to contribute to efforts to counter harmful narratives about sexual violence that are prevalent in many countries.

Strike versus Boycott: discursive repertoires and contention in the 2012 Quebec student strike

ABSTRACT Protesting government tuition increases in 2012, Quebec university and college students participated in collective action that they contentiously characterized as a ‘strike.’ While oppositional actors insisted students were boycotting classes – not striking – student activists claimed legal and cultural justifications for their action. This paper asks: How did Quebec student activists discursively characterize and legitimize their protest tactic as a strike? How did this discourse – and opponents’ counter-discourse – structure the terms of the debate within higher education institutions? Using discourse analysis of student newspapers and organizers’ first-hand accounts of the strike, this paper argues that striking students developed a discursive repertoire constituted by two components: they linked their action to a collective identity with a historical legacy of striking and adopted collective action frames that characterized the action as disruptive and collective. While the debate within higher education institutions centred around legitimacy, it was deeply rooted in contestation over individualism versus collectivism and the ongoing neo-liberalization of higher education. Through the case of the 2012 student strike, I propose employing collective identity and collective action frames together in a dialogic framework of discursive repertoires, thereby providing analytical clarity to this concept for social movement scholarship.

Mythmaking in audit regulation: the Canadian initiative on ‘enhancing audit quality’

Although extant literature has provided accounts of regulatory processes that failed to produce new or improved regulation, we know less about how regulators attempt to devise an ‘illusion of regulatory action’ to prevent their initiatives from being labelled failures and deflect public criticism. This study’s focus is on the regulatory initiative in Canada in response to a global post-crisis regulatory trend seeking to address the problem of low audit quality. Despite decisive regulatory responses elsewhere, the Canadian project leaders not only concluded with weak regulation based on problematic assumptions, but they also actively pursued efforts to argue the opposite, thereby creating an illusion of a meaningful regulatory response. By reference to Barthes’s work on mythmaking, we examine the relevant project documents to make sense of such arguments and claims essentially as instances of regulatory actors’ mythmaking designed to diffuse criticism and garner public support. Our findings enable us to offer insights into and consider the role of regulatory myths as important elements in the discursive repertoires by which regulators maintain their legitimacy and authority. We also discuss certain conjectures which increase the likelihood of regulatory mythmaking.

“Cannabis Businesses Are Being Good Contributors to the Community”: The Regulated Cannabis Industry and Cannabis Normalization in the United States

This study examines how regulated cannabis businesses normalize their trade in the United States. Using interviews ( N = 56) and a cross-sectional survey of cannabis professionals ( N = 144), I find that the U.S. cannabis industry employs three strategies: (1) Using deviant practices to engage in legitimate business, (2) Reconciling divergent cultural frames for reducing stigma against the cannabis industry, and (3) Changing discursive repertoires that uniquely stigmatize cannabis and cannabis users. I argue that each strategy constitutes a new analytical category of social skill that contested industries leverage in a gray market context.

Porn, Business and Morality: Examining Discursive Repertoires in Doing Feminist Porn

Porn, Business and Morality: Examining Discursive Repertoires in Doing Feminist Porn

Saints and witnesses: Virtue and vocation in the memorialization of the Western conflict journalist

How are Western journalists who are killed in the course of their work remembered? Using the biographies of journalists killed covering conflict, this article investigates the discursive repertoires through which the memorialization of journalists killed while reporting conflict is accomplished. The authors argue that such journalists are consistently constructed as humanitarian, cosmopolitan witnesses engaged in supererogatory moral projects involving justice and voice for those outside of these journalists’ geopolitical home communities. This particular articulation appears to herald a recent shift in the memorialization of the journalistic dead, although it is continuous with longer discourses in fields such as photojournalism and its idea of the ‘concerned photographer’. We speculate that this shift is consistent with material changes in the field – in particular, the precaritization of conflict reporting driving journalists into the material and social world of professional humanitarianism, whose discourses around the moral worth and cosmopolitan nature of the work have colonized the subfield of conflict reporting.

“Greenlandicness” and Nation Building in Kalaallit Nunaat

Greenland is in the process of full de-colonization and is moving towards independence as the first Inuit nation-state. This trajectory, which is influenced by a widespread sense of nationhood, appears to set Greenland apart from other Inuit communities in the Arctic. This article investigates the nature and role of understandings of “Greenlandicness” in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), as well as their effects on contemporary nation building and visions for a future independent Greenland. It explores past and current debates about collective identity in Greenland by analysing political discourses as expressed in mass and social media, Inatsisartut debates and official documents, and various statements by politicians, parties, and Naalakkersuisut. The discourse analysis is inspired by Wetherell and Potter’s social psychology approach to identity analysis, including their understanding of “interpretative repertoires” (1988). The article concludes that although Indigeneity remains one source of the perception of the inherent right of the Greenlandic people to self-determination, the stronger current in Greenland politics and collective identification is one of classical (European) nationalism. Further, it finds that a number of discursive repertoires exist, which can be thematically labelled: Kalaallit Indigenous nationalism, pan-Inuit Indigenism, post- and de-colonialism, (post-)modernism, traditionalism, and ethnic and civic nationalism.

Turkey and Greece as frenemies: discourse-historical approach to foreign policy repertoires of the leaders

This paper analyzes Turkish-Greek relations during the contentious period of July 2019-2022, when tensions between the two countries have risen due to domestic and conjunctural factors. The study employs a Discourse Historical Approach to reveal the processes of identity construction in Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an and Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ political statements. The analysis suggests that the two leaders have developed discursive repertoires of frenemies, which represent interactive processes of logics and practices of amity and enmity between Turkey and Greece, in which they are competitive and mistrustful, but also convinced that collaboration advances their respective and often conflicting interests.

Nationalism, populism or peopleism? Clarifying the distinction through a two‐dimensional lens

AbstractPrompted by recent scholarly debates on the distinction between populism and nationalism, we elaborate on the Laclaudian understanding of populism as an antagonistic form of us‐building/community‐making that relies on the extension of equivalential chains between demands. From this heuristic perspective, populism can be understood as an empty form to be filled with different contents, such as nationalism. Our radically anti‐essentialist stance combines Laclau's formalist conceptualisation of populism and Brubaker's work on nationalism. We highlight the ontological dimension of populism, as a form of us‐building, and the ontic dimension, as an array of discursive repertoires that fill the form, such as ‘the people’ for peopleism. We explore the ontological–ontic distinction through the case of Narodism in Serbia. Conceptualising populism two‐dimensionally contributes both to debates on the ‘core’ of populism and to cases where articulations of ‘the people’ coincide with expressions of nationhood, civilisationalism and culturalism, rather than being entirely the same.

Sustainability, justice and equity in food systems: Ideas and proposals in dispute in Brazil

The impacts of food systems on climate change are of growing concern as meat consumption and the soy-meat complex expand. This article explores contrasting ideas, proposals and narratives in the Brazilian context with its significant power asymmetries and identifies two broad discursive repertoires voiced by the private sector, civil society and government to differently address issues of food and environmental justice, social equity and climate change. The influence of these repertoires on public policies can induce or hinder just transitions in food systems. Documents from 2008 to 2021 are analyzed, mainly focusing on multi-scale food systems, dimensions of justice and corporate political action. Contrasting perspectives on the drivers of inequalities and sustainability are also presented, along with respective proposals ranging from paradigm shifts in food systems to topical solutions based on private mechanisms.

589. HOW COULD PATIENTS SUPPORT SURGEONS? ANALYSIS OF PATIENT'S SKILLS BEFORE AND AFTER OESOPHAGOGASTRIC SURGERY AND IMPACT ON QUALITY OF LIFE

Abstract The role of hospital case volume and surgeon expertise in improving results after esophagectomy is well known. However, health-professionals expertise and hospital volume are not enough. Prehabilitation trials outlined that patient involvement is mandatory to improve adherence to therapeutic programs. This study aims to identify what are patient’s modalities of dealing with postoperative course, supporting surgical outcomes with a psychological intervention and to evaluate his effect in the medium-term postoperative period. Literature analysis was conducted to identify specific patient’s skills supporting the postoperative course. Sixteen peculiar dimensions were identified, considering four patients skills applied to clinical, daily activities, family and work areas. Patients textual data were collected by a sixteen-questions interview. Methodology for the Analysis of Computerized Text Data was used to identify discursive repertoires used by esophageal cancer patients. These textual data let construct a closed-ended questionnaire used to assess patient’s skills in the early postoperative course. A psychological intervention aimed at enhancing competencies was conducted. Skills were re-assessed and quality of life (QOL) data were collected 9-months after intervention. In this study 28 consecutive gastroesophageal cancer patients were enrolled within a larger group of patients undergone major surgery for gastrointestinal tumours. Low/medium/high levels were detected for each of the four skills. Wilcoxon signed-rank test showed that three of the four skills levels increased after the supportive intervention. Analysis revealed no differences in relation to diagnosis, oncological treatment and demographic variables. Compared to other patients, skills levels showed no differences in gastroesophageal patients. Furthermore, quality of life at 9-months after esophagectomy was comparable to date reported in current literature in the medium-long term period after surgery for digestive tract cancer. In these preliminary data, even with poorer prognosis, gastroesophageal patients deal with major surgery side effects using the same skills levels used by other gastrointestinal cancer patients. Results show that skills evaluation during hospital stay can reveal the lacking modalities of dealing with the postoperative problems due to patients’ wrong beliefs about surgical results and physical recovery. When aimed at improving surgical outcomes and based on surgeon’s indications, even patients can support surgical outcomes.

50 Years of Criticizing Religion: A Historical Overview of Norwegian Religious Education

The critique of religion is hotly debated in contemporary media, legal and educational discourses. This review takes almost 50 years (1976–2022) of Norwegian research on the critique of religion in religious education as a point of departure to highlight how the discourse on the critique of religion is negotiated and represented. The review showcases the intimate connection between historical contexts and discursive repertoires through historical and critical discourse analysis. The analysis showcases that the discourse on the critique of religion is dynamic and diverse—starting mainly to appear through theological discourses referencing internal and hermeneutical critique before developing into more diverse discourses emanating from multiple actors and genres centered around critical thinking, source-evaluation, intercultural competence, and negative criticism of religion.

Liminally Positioned in the South: Reinterpreting Brazilian and Chinese Relations with Africa

ABSTRACT This article brings to fore long-standing intricacies and dilemmas in Brazil’s and China’s international positioning. It reveals the complex discursive repertoires shaping the Brazilian and Chinese sense of Self in the world, in the Global South, and, more particularly, in relation to Africa. It engages with the concept of “liminality” to highlight how constructing South–South relationships and invoking Southern identities have been ambiguous, indeterminate—thus liminal—endeavors in these countries’ international affairs. By dissecting their diplomatic and corporate narratives towards Africa, our analysis demonstrates, notwithstanding tensions and contradictions, how Brazilian and Chinese actors have creatively acted upon this liminality to pursue foreign policy goals and economic projects. In doing so, the article stresses the floating, ambiguous nature of powerful constructs such as “South” (and “West”), and binary oppositions between them. It concludes by discussing how a liminality perspective allows us to understand the unfixed and multifaceted nature of roles and identities in international relations.

Menopausal rage, erotic power and gaga feminist possibilities

This study focusses on discourses on menopause through a critical reading of a selection of nine self-help books on the topic in the context of Dutch-speaking Belgium and the Netherlands. The aim is to explore whether self-help books constrain or facilitate the development of emancipatory discourses on menopause. We combine feminist critiques that identify the experience of menopause as a site of potential for revolt with insights from queer and critical new-materialist theorisation to probe the books’ emancipatory capacity. Our analysis identifies three prominent discursive repertoires: a medical, psycho-therapeutic and spiritual repertoire. Anger and erotic power emerge as important themes, albeit differently framed dependent on the discursive repertoires that the books employ. We conclude that none of the books succeed in disrupting prevailing oppressive discourses that devalue ageing women. There are two important constraints, notably (1) the books’ individualistic and depoliticised stance and (2) their reductionist view on the biological body. As a way out, we propose a gaga feminist reading of menopause that looks at anger and erotic power as sites of ‘biopossibilities’ that may open space for overthrowing oppressive models of gender, sexuality and desire.

A Textual Analysis for Understanding the Relations and the Identity Construction in Adolescent Oncology Patients: Retrospective Personal Views in Order to Educate Health Professionals.

Patient input is critical for all aspects of value-based healthcare design. This contribution describes the following: the specifics of communications with doctors regarding the disease in adolescents and young adults with cancer; the patients’ thoughts, emotions and changes in self-perception; “other meanings” taking shape along the treatment pathway; and reacting modes to the disease and treatments. Thirty-five Italian AYA patients in follow-up (age 18–24) were involved in a plenary interview on the cited aspects of their oncological experience. The answers were analyzed by MADIT (Analysis Methodology of Computerized Textual Data) with the software SPAD. MADIT allowed us to perform text analysis, describe the graphical outcomes and discuss the results. Respondents took a first-person perspective and their personal narrative recall had objective and unequivocal connotations. Experience was narrated mainly by maintenance repertoires that fix the reality of disease, its treatments and personal identity. The account focused on the tumor and on an agreed approach to it. The time “after” was described as a distressing space that defines them. Making sense of the events was considered a significant help. Professionals need to focus on the discursive repertoires of communication with which the inner and outer reality are built. Lastly, these patients required a two-way dialogue throughout the entire caring process.

Memory politics of the far right in Europe

ABSTRACT In recent years, we have seen a significant increase of memory politics among far-right political actors. In public spheres across Europe, discursive repertoires and historical tropes that mythologize the past have been (re)articulated by far-right actors who construe themselves as the true heirs and bearers of national historical traditions and values. This special issue, comprising six research articles on French, Polish, Italian, Spanish, Serbian and German cases, adds to new scholarship on memory politics among the far right in Europe: empirically, by presenting a wide range of geographically and culturally distinct case studies, and conceptually, by shedding new light on the role of memory politics and the use of historical legacies as factors and context variables in various far-right mobilizations today. In particular, this new research shows how supply and demand-side dimensions of far-right memory politics are mediated through discursive performance by parties, leaders, protest movements and social media. Methodologically, these studies demonstrate how mixed-methods approaches can yield remarkable and sometimes counterintuitive findings. They point to aggressive new far-right instrumentalizations and weaponizations of the past which ultimately seek to rehabilitate nostalgic ethno-nationalism as part of a politically articulated authoritarian revolt against liberal democracies and cosmopolitan social change in Europe.

The cost of doing politics: A critical discursive analysis of Australian liberal politicians’ responses to accusations by female politicians of bullying and intimidation

Recent conversations prompted by the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have put issues of workplace sexism, sexual harassment and sexual assault into the global spotlight. This paper examines how members of the Australian Liberal Party made sense of, and responded to, accusations by female Liberal MPs of bullying and intimidation in their party. Transcripts of media interviews identified by searching the ParlInfo database (between August and September 2018) were analysed using a critical discursive psychology approach. Two discursive repertoires were routinely mobilised in Liberal politicians’ accounts: (1) a gender-neutral repertoire whereby reported incidents of bullying were argued to apply equally to men and women, and (2) a ‘politics is tough’ repertoire that served to downplay and legitimise bullying and intimidation as normative and unproblematic. We argues that such repertoires functioned to silence talk about the relevance of gender and the persistence of inequality. The bullying and intimidation experienced by women may continue to be the cost of their political engagement unless systemic change occurs that acknowledges the ongoing relevance of gender in politics.

'She Wanted to Listen to her General Practitioner's Advice…': Exploring and Explaining Antibiotic Prescribing as a Regulatory Encounter.

This article examines the pressing global problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), applying motivational posture theory to demonstrate how AMR and the prescribing that drives it can be considered a regulatory challenge. Following an outline of AMR and the threat of the 'superbugs' to which it gives rise, the article assesses the regulatory nature of the 'prescribing encounter' in the primary care setting. It applies both a responsive regulatory lens and motivational posture theory to analyse over 100 narrative accounts of encounters between a general practitioner and a patient. In so doing, the article examines the discursive repertoires and cultural resources available to primary care patients to explain the prescribing encounter and the dynamics within it. It concludes that patients conceive of prescribers as regulatory authorities and prescribing itself as a regulatory encounter. On this basis, the article argues that applying responsive regulatory theory and practice in response to the AMR challenge is likely to find reasonable patient acceptance, offering a new approach to this currently intractable challenge. This article then offers an analysis of what factors indicate patient drift towards defiance of regulatory aims, and what engagement and support encourage a return to cooperation.

ACTIVATE! Change Drivers: blame-attribution and active citizenship on a South Africa youth blog

Abstract Processes of blame-attribution can be conceptualised as socially-situated and discursively-mediated events that feature attempts to assign meaning to harmful (or at least potentially harmful) occurrences. Part of the process involves the search for culprits and subsequent argumentation as to the blameworthiness of those singled out for blame. This study conducts a discourse analysis of blame-attribution in 33 online opinion pieces, posted on the website of the civil society organisation: ACTIVATE! Change Drivers. It concentrates on arguments that address the nexus between youth activism, active citizenship, the legacy of Apartheid and blame for the numerous problems afflicting the South African youth. The most recurring arguments hinged on constructions of the South African government as responsible to supporting the capacity of the contemporary youth to participate effectively in democracy, particularly since the youth continue to endure the repercussions of Apartheid. My analysis details the discursive repertoires through which this proposition is made, and considers its implications for research into contemporary online youth cultures and democratic argumentation.