Discursive Struggle Research Articles

Road safety beyond the automobility norm? Can Swedish road safety policy escape the automobility norm and facilitate cycling instead – lessons from the Netherlands

ABSTRACT Road safety policy rules us in both visible and invisible ways and prioritising one mode often means downgrading another. It has been argued in previous research that road safety policy prioritises car traffic and in that way sustains the automobility norm. This paper focuses on the automobility norm that permeates Swedish road safety policy and how this hampers planning for cycling. It aims to contribute to ongoing debates about the need for a radical change in road safety policy towards the inclusion of broader societal and policy goals. The theoretical foundation for this paper is found in the mobilities approach, which acknowledges that (im)mobility and safety are subject to discursive power struggles and differentiated depending on, for instance, modes, groups, age, origin, and gender. The paper aims at obtaining a broader understanding of how mobility and safety are understood in Swedish road safety policy and secondly at identifying windows of opportunity for a change towards a road safety policy that facilitates and encourages cycling. These aims are achieved by a focus on the conceptualisations of problems – instead of on solutions – and a cross-cultural comparison with Dutch road safety policy. In the concluding discussion, it is argued that road safety policy should embrace more goals besides safety, that the discourse around cycling has to be disrupted and that feelings of unsafety and fear need to be problematised.

Resisting and reifying meaning in everyday life: Using relational dialectics theory to understand the meaning of heterosexual dating

Heterosexual women have intersecting identities that are privileged (i.e., sexuality) and marginalized (i.e., gender), suggesting a complicated site to examine power in the process of dating where meaning has become taken-for-granted over time. In this study, we utilized relational dialectics theory’s (RDT’s) corresponding method, contrapuntal analysis, to examine a group that holds fluctuating societal power in the context of heterosexuality and dating. Findings from the responses of women ( n = 104) revealed two discourses that competed to illuminate the meaning of heterosexual dating from the perspective of women: the dominant Discourse that Dating is Romantic and Necessary (DDRN) and the marginal Discourse that Dating is Restrictive and Unrealistic (DDRU). These discourses interplayed through contractive practices (i.e., disqualification and naturalization), diachronic separation, synchronic interplay (i.e., entertaining, countering, and negating), and dialogic transformation (i.e., discursive hybridization and aesthetic moment), illuminating a discursive struggle that both reified and resisted the DDRN.

Theater of Public Punishment in Pakistan: A Discourse Analysis of Demand for Public Hanging

This paper investigates the discourse of public hanging of rapists on the social media space, that is, Twitter in Pakistan. It also examines how this discourse is interdiscursively related to the power relations particularly implicated in the discourses on religion and gender and the possible effects of this discursive struggle on society. By employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for analysis, this research uses Laclau and Mouffe’s Discourse Theory as theoretical framework. We conclude that the discourse approving death by hanging for the rapists is a device to propagate the power and the fear of the State. It has a “repetition induced effect” and implies sovereign’s exception; and women are silenced in their demands for justice against the patriarchal social structures which are responsible for crime against women’s body. It also reifies the patriarchal structures and controls societies through vengeance rather than reformative justice.

Mothers and Whores

ABSTRACT This article examines two public controversies that arose in quick succession in 2018 around the routines of two female comics: Michelle Wolf’s monologue at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and Samantha Bee’s segment on the policy of separating children from their immigrant parents at the border, which contained a crude insult about Ivanka Trump. Both incidents attracted attention and commentary far beyond the reaches of the performers’ usual audiences. In the wider conversation that myriad voices participated in, a much broader discursive struggle took place over ideals and norms. I argue that it was fundamentally a battle over conceptions of femininity and motherhood and, ultimately, over how to be a respectable woman in the public sphere. Not incidentally, defense of the jokes’ victims revolved around their status as “wives and mothers,” while disavowals of the joke tellers focused on the vulgarity of their use of profanity and sexual innuendo. Overall, these incidents ultimately drive home the way female performers have become hot spots in the “culture wars,” themselves sites of battle over ideals of gender, power, and public space.

“I feel many contradictory emotions”: Finnish mothers' discursive struggles with motherhood

AbstractObjectiveThe aim of the study was to facilitate the understanding and interpretation of multiple aspects of working with mothers by examining Finnish mothers' mothering discourses and the interplay among these discourses.BackgroundAccording to relational dialectics theory, discourses are systems of meaning that are coproduced in interaction. Although discursive research on motherhood has identified various discourses, research on the interplay among competing motherhood discourses is in its infancy.MethodQualitative questionnaire data from 479 Finnish mothers of infants were analyzed using contrapuntal analysis. Mothers' responses to three open‐ended questions were analyzed inductively. Emerging themes were identified so as to represent different motherhood discourses, and the power struggle among discourses was addressed.ResultsFour discourses were identified. In theEquality discourse, parenting was presented as ideally shared between co‐parents, and equality between family members and various family forms was promoted. In theFamilistic discourse, traditional stay‐at‐home mothering, good housekeeping, and the unity of the family were emphasized. In theIntensive Mothering discourse, the importance of the mother to her child was highlighted. In theBalance discourse, the needs of all family members were presented as equally important, and flexibility in parenting choices was promoted. The results demonstrated discursive struggles within mothers' answers, suggesting that contemporary Finnish motherhood is a contested terrain of competing ideologies.ConclusionThe findings suggest that Finnish mothers' mothering discourses are multivocal and often competing. The results contribute to the current understanding of motherhood ideologies and provide new insights to be utilized in counseling and clinical practice.

Keeping the forest above to phase out the coal below: The discursive politics and contested meaning of the Hambach Forest

The exit from socio-technical regimes enjoys increasing scientific interest. While many studies which cover energy or sustainability transitions focus on system contexts, there is still a lack of research focusing on the locations and arenas of negotiation. The Hambach Forest in Germany is one such opportunity to investigate the discontinuation of coal energy production. Reconnecting the global with the local sides of policy issues, we focus on the local policy arena in the context of the national coal phase out. The question is how the coal discontinuation is negotiated in the context of the Hambach Forest conflict and how actors engage in framing interaction over the course of the conflict, and how the competing framings changed over time. With an analysis of the controversy in the social and mass media about lignite mining in a very specific location, we were able to identify framings along which two groupings clashed in a physical and discursive struggle in 2018–2019, the ‘Climate and Landscape Protectors’ and the ‘Protectors of Public and Economic Order’. We found the framing categories of ‘responsibility’, ‘cost-lose-gain nexus', and ‘dependencies' and identified their fluctuation during the period of analysis. Energy transition and environmental protection clash with energy production incumbency, primacy of economy or ecology, and law and order. The Hambach Forest conflict has become a representative struggle about the speed of the coal exit pathway in Germany.

‘Endorsing a dictatorship and getting paid for it’: Discursive struggles over intimacy and authenticity in the politicisation of influencer collaborations

Politically motivated criticism of influencer collaborations with certain brands or organisations is a recurring feature on social media today. This article is based on a case study of followers’ reactions to collaborations between two popular Swedish influencers and Visit Dubai, the governmental tourism agency of the United Arab Emirates. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, the article takes a sociocultural approach to influencer marketing and examines how and why politicisation happens in comments to sponsored posts. The analysis focuses on discursive struggles over the construction of political issues and the role of influencers, as well as expressions of perceived interconnectedness and authenticity work among followers. It offers a qualitative understanding of audience perceptions of influencers’ political power and responsibilities, and argues that this is connected to how the role of influencers is constructed – as a friend or as promotional professional.

The Politics and Sub-Politics of Mad Cow Disease in South Korea

In 2008, the South Korean government decided to resume importing beef from the United States, which had been stopped since 2003. The government’s attempt to reassure citizens with scientific claims met severe resistance, resulting in a whirlwind of political and technoscientific controversies over risks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). This article examines memories of protests in 2008 with two objectives; first, to discuss how sub-politics evolves when matters of concern become matters of fact and second, to better understand the aftermath of Korean BSE controversies. Thirty-eight semi-structured interviews with proponents and opponents of the BSE protests were conducted in 2019 and analyzed. Focusing on the complicated discursive struggles over science, society, and their relations, we demonstrated that, along with what people widely accept as the “facts” about US beef, a modern imaginary of science and politics as two separate spheres was reconstructed in Korea.

‘Without white people, the animals will go!’: COVID-19 and the struggle for the future of South African conservation

This article examines the potential for online activism to contest hegemonic neoliberal conservation models in South Africa, using the Covid-19 crisis as a window onto discursive struggle. National lockdown measures during the pandemic sent the vital tourism sector of an already fragile economy into deep crisis. Neoliberal and militarized conservation models, with their reliance on international travel, are examined as affected by a conjunctural crisis, the meaning of which was contested by a broad range of social actors in traditional and on social media. In 30 online news videos, racial hierarchies of land ownership and conservation labour geographies are reproduced and legitimated, as is a visual vocabulary of conservation as equivalent with guns, boots, and anti-poaching patrols. Here, hope is represented as residing in the increased privatization of public goods, and the extraction of value from these goods in the form of elite, luxury consumption. In a corpus of posts on Twitter corpus, on the other hand, significant counter-hegemonic resistance to established neoliberal conservation models is in evidence. In their replies to white celebrity conservationist Kevin Pietersen, critical South African Twitter users offer a contrasting vision of hope grounded in anti-racist equality, a rejection of any special human-animal relations enjoyed by Europeans, and an articulation of a future with land justice at its centre. The analysis supports the idea that in the “interregnum” between hegemonic social orders, pathways towards transformed futures may be glimpsed as “kernels of truth” in discursive struggles on social media.

The Social and Political Significance of Technology-Driven Organisational Change: Discursive Battles to Frame, Define and Decide in ‘a Space of Points of View’

Struggles over new organisational technology are, almost without exception, studied inside organisations. This paper aims to advance our understanding of how technology is embedded in social forces and relations of power that reach beyond individual organisations. It examines the ongoing discursive struggles in public media outlets between consultant doctors and regional actors concerning a controversial electronic health record (EHR) system, called the Health Platform, which was implemented in 20 Danish hospitals. A theoretical framework inspired by Bourdieu’s understanding of discursive activity in a field subsumed in a multi-level and cultural understanding of framing is used to examine the interests connected to platform design and its organisational future states. It is demonstrated that winning the support of the public is pivotal in the construction of frames by both groups of actors in their efforts to define problems and solutions and, ultimately, influence a political decision concerning the platform’s future.

Winning the discursive struggle? The impact of a significant environmental crisis event on dominant climate discourses on Twitter

The devastating 2019–2020 Australian bushfires attracted significant activity on social media, both in Australia and worldwide. We use corpus-based discourse analysis to explore the impact of this significant environmental crisis event on climate discussions on Australian Twitter, with a focus on discursive struggle and (de-)legitimation. We examine the most-retweeted tweets across three 30-day time periods, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. Methodologically, we analyse hashtags to identify dominant Twitter discourses in the three phases. We also explore tweets that support or oppose the link between climate change and the fires, and the misleading arson discourse. We use collocation and concordance analysis, developing a new approach to categorising tweets for support and opposition. Results show that the bushfires had a clear impact on dominant Twitter climate discourses, that this intensified at the height of the bushfires, but receded significantly afterwards. Additionally, climate disinformation discourses seem to be a ‘minor’ dominant discourse rather than a ‘major’ dominant discourse in the Twitter datasets under investigation. Our study suggests that discursive legitimation becomes an outcome of discursive struggle; the very act of retweeting a tweet suggesting the bushfire crisis is indicative of the urgent need for broad climate action is, in a sense, contributing to the legitimisation of this discourse and countering the arguments of those who do not see the issues as linked.

Ohne-Tun und Selbstwandel

AbstractIn the text “The Principles of a Liberal Social Order”, Friedrich A. von Hayek quotes from Chapter 57 of the Daoist classicLǎozǐ老子 (alternative transliterations are Lao Tzu, Laotse, etc.; the text is also known under the titleDàodéjīngorTao Te King道德經). Appearing in a text devoted primarily to the concept of “spontaneous order”, the quote opens up questions regarding the relationship between liberalism and Daoism, which I address in this essay. The discussion comprises three parts. In the first part, I turn to the translation cited by Hayek and, by way of a commentary to the translation, I attempt to gain access to the motifs of “effortless action/without doing” (wúwéi無為), “self-transformation” (zìhuà自化) and “self-government” (zìzhì自治); the second part offers a hermeneutic commentary through which I discuss interpretative approaches found in the Chinese commentarial tradition; finally, the third part outlines transcultural correspondences which explore the political meaning of the Daoist “without doing” and the idea of “spontaneous order” in the context of the discursive struggle between the “democratic West” and “authoritarian China”.

Decolonization Struggles at the United Nations: The Question of Algeria, 1955-1961

AbstractAlthough national self-determination emerged as an international legal norm with the formation of the United Nations (UN) in 1945, its implementation continued to be resisted by European colonial powers for decades after. This raises the following question: how was European colonial rule challenged at the UN? This article contends that existing accounts of decolonization have not fully theorized the processes through which colonialism was contested at the UN. It fills this gap by demonstrating the critical role of argumentation, narrativization and discursive struggles through deploying the crucial “Question of Algeria” that was debated between 1955 and 1961. It demonstrates that the Algerian question yielded two opposing discourses—an anticolonial internationalist discourse and a metrocentric civilizational discourse—with both drawing on distinct ideas about human rights and development. The analysis explains the eventual triumph of the former as states increasingly rallied behind the Algerian cause.

Coal versus Coral

The likelihood that climate change may destroy the Great Barrier Reef has been a central motif in Australia’s climate change politics for more than a decade as political ideologies and corporate and environmental activism draw or refute connections between the coal industry and climate change. The media fuel this debate because in this contest, as ever, the news media always do more than simply report the news. Given that the Reef has also been central to the evolution of Australia’s environmental laws since the 1960s, it is not surprising that the Reef is now a leading actor in efforts to test the capacity of our environmental laws to support action on climate change. In this contribution, we examine the news coverage of the Australian Conservation Foundation’s (ACF) 2015 challenge to Adani’s Carmichael coal mine to observe the discursive struggle between the supporters and opponents of the mine. Our analysis of the case shows that while the courts are arenas of material and symbolic contest in the politics of climate change in Australia, public interest environmental litigants struggle both inside and outside the courts to challenge the privileging of mining interests over the public interest.

Storying selves and others at work

Abstract This paper engages with the relationship between story ownership – so who owns a story, tellership – so who has the right to tell it, and functions of workplace narratives as well as the broader social practices at work. Drawing upon discourse and narrative analyses, the paper investigates specifically how the negotiation of meaning visible in the often incomplete and fragmented but naturally-occurring narratives points to the discursive struggle over the construction of self within the specific parameters of the notion of professionalism. The paper identifies the facets of story ownership and discusses how each one can be affected by such regulatory forces of the social practices of work.

Capitalizing on nature: a critical discourse study of nature policy concerning the Murchison Falls Conservation Area of Uganda

ABSTRACT This article explores discursive struggles between ideologies of nature development and nature conservation discourses in the context of the Murchison Falls Conservation Area (MFCA) in Uganda. Based on the concepts of critical discourse moments and discourse coalitions, the article offers a nuanced perspective on nature policy in a specific, though not unique, context. The purpose of studying tensions between different positions in nature policy from a critical discourse perspective is to increase the awareness of the role of discourse coalitions in the struggles. Thus, the study aims at enhancing the understanding of different interests by creating awareness about the conflict potential regarding the MFCA.

Beating the advertising drum for the employer: How legal context translates into good HRM practice

AbstractThe legal context is constitutive for the legitimacy of HRM practices. In this paper, we use an institutional work approach to investigate how a legal mandate requiring employers to state the minimum pay in job advertisements in Austria was translated into a legitimate HRM practice over time. In this process, HR practitioners translated the law into an HRM practice going well beyond the legal requirements. In contrast to merely constraining HRM practice, we find HR practitioners actively engaging with the legal context. In the discursive struggle over a legitimate translation of the law into practice, actors speaking ‘for HRM’ were mostly HRM consultants and service providers building on an individualist and unitarist frame of reference for employment relations. Our findings contribute to a contextualized understanding of HRM practices by considering the interaction of HR practitioners and legal context.

Challenging the “Hierarchy of Nationhood”: Diasporic Entitlement and the Case of Korean Chinese (Chosŏnjok) in South Korea

With about 7.5 million people, the Korean diaspora is concentrated in China, Japan, North America, and the former Soviet Union. Since the 1990s, many ethnic Koreans have been “returning” to South Korea, their putative ethnic homeland. Significantly, their treatment by the state has been unequal: On issues of residency and employment rights, ethnic Koreans from China (Chosŏnjok) and the former Soviet Union were relegated to second-class status compared to those from North America. This inequality is encapsulated in the phrase, used by a number of scholars, the “hierarchy of nationhood.” Surprisingly, perhaps, the Chosŏnjok community challenged this unequal treatment by asserting rights based on colonial victimhood, ethnic sameness, and cultural authenticity. While such expressions of entitlement are not unusual among marginalized diasporic groups, the Chosŏnjok achieved something remarkable, namely, they succeeded in gaining political and economic rights initially denied by the Korean state. Simply put, they successfully challenged the hierarchy of nationhood. Using a discursive institutional framework, we endeavor to explain how and why entitlement claims by the Chosŏnjok were effective. More specifically, we argue that the struggle by Chosŏnjok to overturn the hierarchy of nationhood had little to nothing to do with a coercive, dyadic power struggle against the Korean state, but was instead a fundamentally discursive struggle, which itself is a product or reflection of discursive agency, both on the part of Chosŏnjok but also, crucially, on the part of their key allies—religious leaders and civic organizations—in South Korea.

Discursive struggles in “real” families: Korean adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth family reunions

AbstractObjectiveThis study explores transnational Korean adoptees' interactions with their adoptive families surrounding birth family reunion.BackgroundUsing relational dialectics theory as a guide, this study takes an adoptee‐centered approach to understanding the broader cultural and relational discourses that interplay with adoptee and adoptive parent messages surrounding birth family reunions.MethodIn‐depth interviews with 19 Korean adult adoptees from the United States and Denmark were conducted to explore adoptive family interactions surrounding reunion.ResultsMost participants reported that their adoptive parents responded supportively to reunion. Still, participants' responses revealed two main discourses surrounding their own communication with their adoptive family surrounding reunion: reassuring their adoptive family and holding back affection or questions toward the birth family in the presence of an adoptive parent. Cultural discourses about having only one set of “real” parents and other adoptees' experiences interplayed with the discourses of reassurance and holding back. Adoptees whose parents were open about their birth family from a young age tended recall reassuring their parents.ConclusionEven with adoptive parent support, adoptees may still feel the need to reassure their adoptive parents and hold back affection and curiosity toward the birth family.ImplicationsHolding back may prevent adoptees from engaging with their birth families fully. Reassuring turns the focus toward the adoptive parents. Practitioners should encourage ongoing communication about the birth family, and adoptive parents should show active support for the reunion and interest in the birth family afterward.

THE ONLINE LIFE OF LITERACY EDUCATION: HOW THE 2018 #PHONICSDEBATE IS RESHAPING THE FIELD

This paper provides an overview of the Reading Wars as a site of discursive struggle. Using a Bourdieu (1993) facilitated digital sociology, this paper will present a case study of the 2018 hashtag #PhonicsDebate to illustrate how literacy researchers and cognitive scientists used social media as a space to navigate, negotiate and reimagine the contours of the field of literacy. Using a digital sociological account of online events associated with the 2018 Phonics Debate hosted by the Australian Centre for Educational Research and the think tank the Centre for Independent Studies, this paper works to illuminate and challenge contemporary understanding of the politics online. If policy researchers are to clarify the relationship between politics and their field in the 21st century we must understand how boundaries are negotiated using digital tools and how fields are imagined.