Discursive Space Research Articles

Publics in local media reporting on harm reduction: Rightfully worried local witnesses or uneducated obstacles to change

BackgroundIn 2018, the planned opening of a second Needle and Syringe Exchange Program (NSP) unit in Stockholm, Sweden, was stopped with reference to protests from the public. Local Stockholm media cited stakeholders who claimed that the initiative was led by politicians with “zero knowledge about what makes citizens upset” and referred to reported public concern over a preschool located near the planned NSP unit. This case highlights the significant role of the public – and the idea of public opinion – in relation to political and medial aspects of alcohol and other drug (AOD) issues. Our aim is to scrutinize how “the public” is produced in local print media reports on harm reduction measures such as the NSP, to illuminate how these representations operate and what reality/ies they co-produce. MethodsWe analyzed 171 articles reporting on harm reduction in local Stockholm print media from 2012 to 2023. The themes identified in the analysis emerged from a combination of data-driven empirical observations and a theory-driven approach grounded in the influential literature on publics and counterpublics by Michael Warner and Nancy Fraser. ResultsThe overarching articulation in the material is that of a singular and homogeneous public. Public opinion regarding local experiences of individual drug use and harm reduction is depicted as being driven by fear and worry over living alongside “messy others”, thereby producing a public of worried local community witnesses. This production of the public takes on two different meanings depending on the narrative of the articles: 1) as righteous and entitled, 2) as ignorant and irrational. As a result, the public comes to operate as either a consulted public deserving consideration in the implementation of harm reduction policies or as an uneducated political obstacle to change. Consequently, the public is assigned both a counterpublic and a dominant public identity. ConclusionsWhen the representation of the worried public is repeatedly echoed by the media, it becomes hard to ignore in policy-making processes. The implications of such media representations are significant, as they risk disguising the complex nature of publics as a diverse group of individuals while reproducing taken-for-granted ideas about local communities opposing harm reduction measures. In addition, the appropriation of a counterpublic identity narrows the discursive space for action. Taken together, the repetition of a singular worried public and the appropriation of the counterpublic position make it nearly impossible to imagine alternative public responses to harm reduction. As a consequence, this can limit well-needed policy responses to AOD issues.

Mapping epistemic pluralism: A network analysis of discursive practices in communities promoting refused knowledge about healthcare and wellbeing

This article presents an analysis of discourses performed in communities that share and disseminate knowledge refused by institutional science. The study focuses on an online community concerned with alkaline water, food, and lifestyle, aiming at understanding how promoters of refused knowledge in this community enrol other forms of knowledge, including science. Theoretically, this work is framed in Science & Technology Studies, and in the tradition of actor-network theory, situating itself in a recent turn that takes epistemic instability and pluralism into due consideration, thus overcoming opaque views of the opposition between science and non-science. Empirically, this fine-grained analytic purpose is addressed by a mixed-method strategy in which discursive practices are observed through a web-ethnography conducted between January 2020 and December 2021 on the relevant online spaces and then analysed qualitatively and quantitively by means of formal techniques. Relying on the tools of social network analysis, the discursive space of the community under study is formalised as a two-mode network of knowledge claims and heterogeneous actors enrolled in discourse to sustain those claims. Then, community detection is performed to map the different assemblages of claims and actors and the relevant repertoires characterising those assemblages. Finally, multiple correspondence analysis applied to two-mode networks is used to highlight the dimensions of concern and meaning expressed in the knowledge organisation of this community.

Further semantic change of the derogatory sociomorpheme tái in Chinese gender-related Internet neologisms

Internet neologisms provide discursive spaces for grassroots netizens. This study examines a pair of gendered labels gaining popularity in Taiwanese online forums: táinán ‘Tai-man’ and táinǚ ‘Tai-woman’. The quantitative keyword analysis based on a corpus of online data suggests that táinán and táinǚ are pejorative labels. The qualitative discourse analysis of the keywords in context presents gender stereotypes associated with táinán and táinǚ, respectively. Converging evidence for the negative attitudes toward táinán and táinǚ is obtained in a questionnaire survey. The shared morpheme tái inherits localness-related ideologies and interacts with gender ideologies concerning ideal manhood and womanhood, and it has come to index an ideological contrast between favorable foreignness and unfavorable localness. This study contributes to the current literature on Chinese morphological patterns studied in social contexts. Moreover, this study presents evidence that changes in social meanings also follow the dominant trajectories of other semantic changes.

‘I sing to you / from my place with my righteous kin’: Judith Wright’s decolonial poetics

ABSTRACT Widely celebrated as one of the most influential twentieth-century Australian poets, Judith Wright occupies a central and uncontested space in the national literary canon. The political drive of her poetry, intertwined with her lifelong commitment to ecological and Indigenous rights activism, transformed the platform afforded her as a ‘poet of the land’ into a discursive space through which to contest the legitimacy of her own positioning – as a settler, as a poet, and perhaps most significantly as an anticolonial ally. Despite this, and despite the growing urgency of conversations about institutional decolonization, Wright’s complex legacy as a decolonial agent remains largely uncontested. This article considers Wright’s poetic capacity to strike at the foundation upon which she stands and to excavate the violent histories beneath it; however, it also illuminates the inherited literary traditions that stunt her disruptive efforts. Drawing her contribution as a writer-activist into broader reflections on decolonization, I demonstrate the lasting significance of Wright’s reparative gestures – acknowledging and attending to active silences – as a timely model for literary canon reformation. Such (re)considerations of Wright’s legacy raise pertinent questions about what constitutes decolonial literary activism and gesture towards the silences as yet unbroken by the broader decolonial project.

TERMINOLOGYOF MANAGEMENT IN THE DISCOURSE SPACE (BASED ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE)

The article is devoted to the study of the English terminological system in the field of management with regard to aspects of the structure and semantics of its components. The typology of cognitive-linguistic and institutional features that distinguish management discourse from other discursive types is explored. A comprehensive analysis of the main ways of forming management terms is carried out, among which morphological derivation, compounding and abbreviation are highlighted. The reasons that determine the dominant role of compounding in management terminology are established. The most frequent morpho-grammatical models in the discursive space of management are identified. Attention is focused on the syntactic status of such terminological units, which allows us to assert that multicomponent terms represent one member of a sentence that does not have synonyms, which fundamentally makes them different from free phrases. Extralinguistic and intralinguistic factors that determine the specifics of the formation of the terminological layer of the lexical system of a language are also explored. Based on the analysis of practical material with its integrative connection to the structural and compositional realities of the modern discursive space of management, the authors of the article propose a comprehensive structural and thematic stratification of terminological units, which allows us to study the conceptual apparatus and trace the main algorithms of the hierarchical interaction of terms of each of the identified structural and thematic segments. Using the continuous sampling method, five structural and thematic groups are identified and stratified, which allows us to conclude that the term management system is a consciously constructed system, divided into flexible and open terminological fields. A statistical analysis is carried out to establish the frequency of use of terminological units of structural and thematic subsystems of the general management terminological system in the discursive space of business. The distinctive feature of abbreviations is investigated, which is represented by a high level of consistency and hierarchy of correlations between abbreviation terms.

Toward a rhetorical understanding of Chinese political internet memes amid a Chinese governance crisis

ABSTRACT The global trend of social media communication renders internet memes increasingly popular as democratic-oriented discursive tools in online ideological contests. However, scholarly attention to the rhetorical aspects of memetic political discourse has predominantly been Western-centric, leaving their counterparts in non-Western socio-political environments, especially during times of social crises, relatively unexplored in the existing literature. To bridge this gap, this article employs a social-semiotic-rooted multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) to investigate how Chinese netizens utilize internet memes for ideological contestation during a societal-level Chinese governance crisis in the 2020s, characterized by a series of iconic ideological upheavals. The research examines 357 memes from the “My Post” community on WeChat, one of China’s prominent social apps, to unveil their symbolic processes and rhetorical functions in Chinese online politics. This empirical study reveals that Chinese political internet memes serve as strategic rhetorical devices that: (1) enable civic ideological expressions within an authoritarian media landscape dominated by standardized ideological narratives; (2) foster a dynamic process allowing negotiation among political authority, media institutions, and netizens to establish a discursive space accommodating contentious topics and acceptable compromises; and (3) signify a paradigm shift in rhetorical function, elevating internet memes from online communicative artifacts to a democratic perspective.

Teachers’ values in a space of change: The idea of teacher assistants as re-negotiation of teacher professionalism

ABSTRACT Teacher professionalism has long been subject to contestation as embedded with certain ideas, norms and values. Transnational discourses on teacher professionalism have spurred the recontextualisation of the idea of teacher assistants in Swedish educational reform. Policy imperatives around increasing teachers’ professional responsibility and accountability have raised issues regarding what values around teacher professionalism ought to be prioritised. The aim of this article is to explore teachers’ values regarding professional responsibility in the compulsory school context based on the interaction with teacher assistants and in light of policy discourses on teacher professionalism. The concept of “discursive space” is utilised to explore juxtaposed values within the local and across national and transnational levels. This concept is based in a combination of discursive institutionalism and curriculum theory with an actor-centred approach around ideas and discourses in an institutional context. The analysis shows dilemmas around holistic aspects and fragmentation regarding professional responsibility, but also, possibilities when “sharing” responsibilities with teacher assistants. Dilemmas emerge around questions on purpose and temporal struggles. Dilemmas emerge regarding professional responsibility against accountability purposes and result-orientation. Re-negotiation of teacher professionalism is spurred by the idea of teacher assistants, and surrounding discourses, creating dilemmas for teachers in the negotiated discursive space.

Trans (on) YouTube: Localizing transnational narratives on two Polish trans YouTube channels

Abstract This article explores genres and narratives of gender transition on two Polish YouTube channels (forming one collective) to illustrate negotiations between transnational and local understandings, performances, and interpretations of (trans)gender identity. “Trans YouTube” is a valuable performative and discursive space, allowing (especially young) trans creators to maintain, present, and communicate the desired sense of self. The article explores multilingual and multimodal practices on Polish trans YouTube and discusses their role in localizing the transnational LGBTQ+ discourse within the local socio-cultural context. Applying the perspective of translation studies and exploring the role of translation (and non-translation) in localizing the transnational concepts of gender and sexuality makes it possible to trace the process of trans-creating the new language of the Polish trans community, a language that emphasizes trans social media users’ agency and is capable of expressing their individualized and localized gender transition experiences.

Re-placing Race in the Public Space

In this article I engage with the un- and re-making of monuments in the context of the globalization and mediatization of Black Lives Matter and anti-racist activism. I analyze in particular two examples that display transcultural negotiations of antiracism against the background of different colonial histories: The induction of Josephine Baker to the French Pantheon in November 2021, which opens the space of a key monument of French heritage to a black woman for the first time. The defacing of the statue of the Italian journalist and prominent intellectual Indro Montanelli in Milan in June 2020. The analysis emphasizes, on the one hand, the fluidity characterizing the transnational circulation of language, media and spatial practices. On the other, it points to multiple asymmetries deriving from the globalization and the transculturalization of communication. In order to take both aspects into account, I use a border perspective, and expand the category of ‘monument’ to include processes of un- and re-making heritages. In particular, I de-border the concept of language and crisscross the borders between discursive spaces and material spaces of representation. The article contributes to diversify postcolonial theory by showing that labels such as ‘European’ (post)coloniality or ‘global’ anti-racism are far too reductive with respect to the diversity of colonial histories and postcolonial realities. Accordingly, it pleads for putting transculturality at the core of decolonial struggles within and outside academia.

Artistic mutilation of genitalia: an interpretive analysis of representations of genitalia in Indian school science textbooks

ABSTRACT Visual representations (and their censorship) are carriers of messages and are powerful tools to invoke discourses. Visuals are not just supplements to written text; rather, these can be read independently as the primary text and are crucial to scientific communication, particularly in life sciences. This paper aims to investigate various textbook depictions of genitalia and examine how ideologies are manifested through visuals in relation to the human body. Here we try to unpack the visual representations of genitalia in different discursive spaces within Indian science textbooks from 6th to 12th grade. We position our study within the hermeneutic methodological landscape and apply the socio-semiotic analytic framework developed by Serafini [Serafini, Frank. 2010. “Reading Multimodal Texts: Perceptual, Structural and Ideological Perspectives.” Children's Literature in Education 41 (2): 85–104. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-010-9100-5], consisting of three analytic perspectives: perceptual, structural, and ideological, to interpret the visual images of genitalia and the ideological matrix that produced these images. Our analysis of textbooks' portrayal reveals a tendency to censor or obscure genital depictions. The paper discusses the potential effects of these representations on students' health and relationships with their bodies and argues that they must engage in dialogue with discourses challenging normative understandings of the body and remain open to change.

Working knowledge, uncertainty and ontological politics: An ethnography of UK long covid clinics.

Long covid (persistent COVID-19) is a new disease with contested aetiology and variable prognosis. We report a 2-year ethnography of UK long covid clinics. Using a preformative lens, we show that multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) built working knowledge based on shared practices, mutual trust, distributed cognition (e.g. emails, record entries), relational knowledge of what was at stake for the patient, and harnessing uncertainty to open new discursive spaces. Most long covid MDTs performed the working knowledge of 'rehabilitation', a linked set of practices oriented to ensuring that the patient understood and strove to 'correct' maladaptive physiological responses (e.g. through breathing exercises) and pursued recovery goals, supported by physiotherapists, psychologists and generalist clinicians. Some MDTs with a higher proportion of doctors (e.g. cardiologists, neurologists, immunologists) enacted the working knowledge of 'microscopic damage', seeking to elucidate and rectify long covid's underlying molecular and cellular pathology. They justified non-standard investigations and medication in selected patients by co-constructing an evidentiary narrative based on biological mechanisms. Working knowledge was ontologically concordant within MDTs but sometimes discordant between MDTs. Overt ontological conflict occurred mostly when patients attending 'rehabilitation' clinics invoked the working knowledge of microscopic damage that had been generated and circulated in online support communities.

The role of public art has changed in recent times: a study

Public art which falls under the institutional category of visual arts primarily focuses on audience engagement and public representation. Additionally, there are other types of art in public settings that are designed for audience participation. The term Public Art means to those works of art commissioned and sponsored, monuments, memorials, and civic statues and sculpture installed in physical public domain by the Government and agencies and organization, which are especially significant within the Art World. The term is sometimes also applied to include and art which is exhibited in a public space these public art are basically symbolic, imaginary and illustrative representation on the Historical, political and cultural and civic values of the state. While speaking of public sculptures we often speak in terms of its artistic identity i.e. we always look at it and recognize merely as a piece of art only. We cannot undermine its importance in day to day social, cultural and political life. The presence of these pieces of art in any society holds a cultural recognition of that particular society. These are like the index or contents of a book that are sufficient enough to explain the entire subject matter. These public sculptures have become a part and partial of our day to day life. Since the colonial times to the modern era, in India, public art has undergone numerous changes. The institutions of public art and the public realm, media, genres, and forms of public art have all changed over time. Since the last two decades, site-specificity, public engagement, and process-based activities have been the main focuses of art in public spaces. Two types of public space can be distinguished. The first is the actual public space as a location, site, piece or thing. The second is the discursive public space, which is an abstract/conceptual area created briefly as a result of private individuals coming together to talk about or share important and light-hearted subjects. According to Habermas, this discursive space is the public sphere, which includes gatherings and encounters of people in public places like coffee shops, streets, community centers, and parks.

The Cultural Life of Democracy: Notes on Popular Sovereignty, Culture and Arts in Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya

This paper explores the emergence of a demotic style of politics alongside demotic forms of cultural and esthetic expression during Sri Lanka’s 2022 political struggle dubbed the aragalaya (struggle). It argues that the aragalaya opened up a discursive space to reimagine democratic politics in Sri Lanka and the role of aesthetics and culture in such popular-democratic political mobilization. However, the paper also argues that such popular political mobilization and its attendant cultural expression needs to be considered cautiously because its potential is politically and culturally ambiguous. By tracing a critical genealogy of the notion of the “people” in Sri Lankan political history and extending this genealogy to how the “people” was reimagined as an agential collective during the aragalaya and by looking at aesthetic and cultural practices that were foregrounded during the aragalaya—particularly the music of Ajith Kumarasiri—the paper argues that the demotic understanding of the people and the demotic cultural forms that gained prominence within the aragalaya offer a counterpoint to the deeply corrupt and exclusionary mainstream political culture of the country. A central concept used to frame this argument is the analytical and methodological heuristic of the “cultural life of democracy.”

Football fandom, social justice and solidarity: the linguistic landscape of fans’ protests on the Kanjuruhan tragedy in Indonesia

ABSTRACT The tragedy at the Kanjuruhan football Stadium is the second worst in the world history of soccer. The excessive force and use of tear gas by the military officers led to hundreds of deaths and injuries, yet there have been inadequate responses from the authorities to investigate the case. The linguistic landscape in the forms of protest banners and posters responding to the Kanjuruhan tragedy provides a distinct arena - both in the stadium itself and wider discursive space - demonstrating that public space remains an area of contestation between civil society and the state. By drawing on the insights of linguistic landscapes (LL) and critical discourse analysis, we argue that an LL approach serves as an alternative mechanism to accommodate the subjugated voices and those seeking justice. Our findings reveal three alternative discourses, i.e. #usuttuntas, gas air mata vs. air mata ibu (tear gas vs. mothers’ tears), and humanity above football. The analysis draws attention to the importance of using LL research that can be harnessed to seek insights into broader issues, not just regarding multilingualism, but also issues relating to social change and social justice.

The Motherland and the Fight with Fascism: War Cult and War Film under Brezhnev (1965–82)

AbstractThis article, based on extensive archival documentation, newspapers, and periodicals, examines the impact upon the Soviet film industry of shifts in top‐level policy relating to representation of the war. It contends that Leonid Brezhnev’s May 8, 1965, speech on the eve of Victory Day propounded an inclusive vision of the war (later sections of the speech comprise an exhaustive inventory of different representatives of military and civilian society who had been responsible for victory). Yet, in lending encouragement to participants of all kinds to consider their experience valid, the speech opened up a discursive space in which validity might be contested. Further, the emphasis in the film industry upon innovation and the need to avoid predictability ran directly against the requirement that commemoration of the war should fit highly ritualized and easily recognizable patterns. The article traces the results of these overall contradictions in the arguments about overall policy on the war film between representatives of the High Command, film managers at Goskino, cinema’s central bureaucracy, and filmmakers themselves, and the controversies around individual films, including Iurii Ozerov’s Liberation (1968–72), Andrei Smirnov’s The Belorussian Station (1970), Aleksei German’s Operation “New Year” (1971, released as Checkpoint, 1985), and Larisa Shepit'ko’s Ascent (1977).

Populism and cultural heritage policies: public statues in Europe

ABSTRACT Cultural heritage is a central domain for key populist themes of threats to national identity and protection of ‘the majority’ against cosmopolitan, ‘wokist’ elites. The article explores how differing government discursive strategies towards populism influence heritage policies. It takes the case of contested public statues. In France, the government has adopted a discursive strategy of ‘patriotic Republicanism’ that reduced the discursive space for contestation and policy has remained largely unchanged. But in Britain and Hungary, governments have increasingly adopted populist discourses, leading to countervailing discursive coalitions, contestation and change in agendas and decisions in both populist and non-populist directions. The proposition developed is that national governments pursuing populist discursive strategies triggers anti-populist discursive coalitions, with contestation and changes in agendas, institutions and individual decisions. Conversely, governments developing their own nationalistic discourses reduces the scope for populist ones but also leads to freezing of existing policies.

Teacher assistants’ values in a discursive space: emerging change and re-negotiation of teacher professionalism in Sweden

ABSTRACT In the Nordic context, transnational discourses influence recontextualisation of ideas and discourses, and thus, how local actors negotiate around values imbued with ideas and discourses. In Sweden, the idea of teacher assistants has been prompted – through policy discourses on teacher professionalism – under imperatives of reducing teachers’ workload and increasing professional responsibility and accountability. The aim of this article is to explore teacher assistants’ values regarding roles and responsibilities in relation to teachers and education in light of policy discourses on teacher professionalism. Drawing on discursive institutionalism and curriculum theory, the concept of ‘discursive space’ is utilized to explore values in an institutional context. Based on twelve interviews with teacher assistants in compulsory schools, the analysis shows how a reductionist notion of teaching gives rise to dilemmas around being teachers’ ‘alter ego’ when values around teaching as ‘core’ are prioritized. Dilemmas around local pluralization emerge when teacher assistants are viewed as a ‘solution’ to a plethora of issues. Challenges emerge in the context of ambiguity around teacher assistants’ orientation towards teaching or processes ‘surrounding’ teaching. The analysis illustrates conditioned values highlighting dilemmas and challenges, but also possibilities for discursive action. Altogether, a re-negotiation of teacher professionalism emerges in the discursive space.

Советская эпоха в поликодовой прецедентной медиарефлексии, или От каждого по способностям, каждому по потребностям

The article studies linguasemiotic features and functional meanings of precedent phenomena (PP) of the Soviet past through the prism of polycode representation in modern discursive space. The study is aimed at analyzing Soviet precedents of graphic design, sociocultural life, everyday life and gluttony in mass media communication. During pinpoint sampling of polycode units (Internet memes) from the Russian-language Internet segment, 500 texts that met the criterion of featuring a verbal or visual PP representative with the semantic component “Soviet, relating to the historical period of the USSR” were identified. The analysis of PP that implement media reflection of the cultural and historical heritage of the Soviet epoch was carried out based on semiotic, structural and semantic, intertextual, stylistic and discourse analyses. The features of updating the associative connection between the artistic and aesthetic design of polycode text and socio-cultural signs of the Soviet period have been established. The polycode nature of precedent references to the cinematic and musical heritage of the Soviet period is confirmed by the presence of both verbalized elements (names, titles) and non-verbal (audio fragments, captions and visual images); the discursive PP actualization is presented in reminiscent and allusive formats. Text examples demonstrate the dominance of a visual precedent image, appealing to gluttony perceptions and mediated by the context of the past or the era of the Soviet Union. Two models of encoding PP related to Soviet everyday life have been established: the retrospective one (reliance on visual representatives of archaism and verbal temporality representatives) and the axiological one (the verbal part of the message postulating the high quality of products produced in the USSR; visual elements act as a referential basis appealing to culturally specific precedent base).

Identifying stance in legislative discourse: a corpus-driven study of data protection laws

Mirroring public ideologies and value systems in legislative discourse, stance not only functions as a powerful instrument for legislators to balance legal values and stakeholders’ interests but also acts as a valuable reference for individuals to understand legislative texts. This study conducts a corpus-driven analysis of stance expressions in legislative discourse. Using three self-compiled corpora that incorporate data protection laws from the United States, the European Union, and China, we apply Hyland’s stance model to contrastively analyse evidence of hedging, boosting, self-mention, and attitude markers across these jurisdictions and eventually propose a specialised research model of stance in law. This study unveils the nature of modesty and sufficient discursive space of data protection laws, as well as legislative values and public ideologies conveyed by different jurisdictions within the broader socio-legal cultural context. Besides uncovering the legal constructiveness of data protection laws, the results also suggest that the overall representation of stance in data protection legislation aligns with its performance in legislative discourse, which showcases a legislative tendency to achieve an overtly neutral appearance through covert stance expressions.

If you’re reading this, it’s meant for you: The reflexive ambivalence of algorithmic conspirituality

Growing awareness of the ubiquity of algorithms online has established a new discursive space for making sense of their role in individuals’ lives and society writ large. Within this space, social media users have come to think of algorithms as uniquely powerful forces shaping everyday experiences. This article explores how people make sense of algorithms, as seen through (dis)belief in algorithmic conspirituality, where users ascribe divine significance to algorithmic curation on TikTok. We ask: how do users understand algorithmic conspirituality, and under what circumstances do they believe (or not) in the mystical power of algorithms? Drawing on focus groups and interviews with TikTok users ( n = 25), we observed what we call reflexive ambivalence. This refers to a reflexive process in which participants examined their cognitive and affective responses to algorithmic conspirituality videos to untangle seemingly contradictory logical and mystical mentalities. With this insight, we complicate past work by demonstrating the co-occurrence and interdependency of rational, technical vs. affective, socially situated ways of knowing algorithms. We additionally highlight conditions under which belief in algorithmic conspirituality gained plausibility for our participants and how they rationalized the phenomenon as grounded in the worldly realm.