Discursive Threads Research Articles

Discursos sobre descolonización y conflicto social. El caso de la VIII Marcha Indígena en Bolivia (2011)

This article examines how the narrative of the plurinational state provided the common symbolic framework for the conflict over the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (Tipnis) in Bolivia in 2011. The central dispute, one of the most important in Bolivia’s recent history, was whether or not to construct a highway through this area, a debate that has led to a major rift between peasant and indigenous social organizations that shared common reivindicative imaginaries but ultimately experienced profound divisions. This discussion serves as a key observation point to understand how decolonization imaginaries actually function, which I consider a anchoring point (point du capiton) in the narrative of the plurinational state. Through discourse analysis, review of chronicles, press statements, and accounts of the VIII Indigenous March, I aim to identify the discursive threads that framed the debates on decolonization, showing that it can be used as a rhetorical tool to mask extractivism or defend “national sovereignty,” or as an argument to uphold the self-determination of indigenous peoples. I also examine how the repertoire of the indigenous march was constructed discursively and symbolically, and the impact it left on Bolivia’s recent history. I intend for this analysis to contribute to understanding how Bolivian social perceptions are shaped in relation to the narrative of the plurinational state and its potential for social transformation as a new regime of truth.

"This was never about a virus": Perceptions of Vaccination Hazards and Pandemic Risk in #Covid19NZ Tweets.

In this paper, we draw on qualitative methods from the medical humanities and quantitative approaches from corpus linguistics to assess the different mappings of pandemic risks by Twitter (X) users employing the #Covid19nz hashtag. We look specifically at their responses to government measures around vaccines between August and November 2021. Risk, we reveal, was a major discursive thread in tweets during this period, but within our tweets, it was the vaccine rather than the virus around which hazard perception and response were grouped. We find that the discursive stance of those opposed to the vaccine evoked entangled medical and political hazards, untrustworthy experts, obscure information, restrictions on sovereignty, threats to children, and uncertain future dangers, all of which positioned them within what Ulrich Beck termed the world risk society. We also found that these narratives of risk manifested in specific Twitter styles, which employed a consistently larger number of hashtags. The lack of conjunctions between the hashtags, we argue, encouraged a disordered reading of doubt and precaution, as the hashtags presented triggering phrases whose interconnections were hinted at rather than specified. By contrast, those who tweeted in support of government measures were rhetorically led by solutions rather than risks, with one exception: their perception of those who were vaccine opposed. We use scholarship on risk and precautionary logic to map out the contrasting positions in tweets addressing Aotearoa New Zealand's pandemic experience during the closing months of 2021.

Virtual Ethnography of Female Migrants: a WhatsApp Group as a Support Tool During Their Migration Process

This research aimed to describe the use and functionality that migrant women provide to social networks and the role they play in the social integration of migrant women. Using a qualitative methodology design, a virtual ethnography approach, and with the support of ATLAS, this research analyses 863 discursive threads of a WhatsApp group comprised of 123 migrant women belonging to an association related to the social and labour integration of the migrant population. The results indicate that the WhatsApp group is a reliable source of information as well as spaces of solidarity and emotional support among women who experience similar situations during the migration process. The originality of these results is that they provide insight into the uses of social networks by migrant women, on which there is little research, through observations in a WhatsApp group. Organisations working with migrant women should rethink the functionalities of these social networks and the importance of these tools in improving the social and labour integration of migrant women.

Rediscovering Identity: Autobiographical Memory and Media Discourses of Russian-Germans in Germany and Russia

This paper compares the processes of rediscovering identity in autobiographical memory and media discourses of Russian-Germans living in Germany and in Russia. According to R. Brubaker, the Russian-Germans are viewed as a transnational group with a specific “hybrid identity”, whose identification varies depending on the cultural project, which they are involved in. In Germany and Russia, the boundaries of this identification are the politics of memory of the host society and the dominant narratives regarding this group as repatriates (Germany) and as a diaspora with its own culture (Russia). Our analysis, which was based on the methodology of the critical discourse analysis by S. Jäger, revealed that such a dominant narrative in Germany is the “narrative of return”. In Russia, however, there are two discursive threads: the image of Russian-Germans as a repressed group and the narrative about the outstanding role of Russian-Germans in the history of Russia. The curves of autobiographical and family narratives of the three generations of Russian-Germans in Russia and Germany were analyzed and compared according to the biographical method of F. Schütze. People aged 30–50 were the most open to the influence of collective “standardized” narratives both in Germany and in Russia. Despite the fact of living in Russia, those respondents who were preparing to repatriate to Germany actively reproduced the “return narrative” and used international mnemonic frameworks to structure their autobiographical and family story. Our study showed that the influence of the discursive media environment on the autobiographical and family memory of Russian-Germans living in Germany and Russia depends on the respondent’s individual life experience (the curve of their biography), age, and some peculiarities of their family history.

Representations of parenting autistic children: A critical interpretive synthesis

Background Many taken-for-granted expectations for parents in Western societies are situated in normative assumptions. Social constructions of ‘good’ parenting may be a poor fit for parents whose children’s development varies from a so-called typical trajectory. Normative assumptions about parenting can have harmful effects for parents of autistic children. Aims/Objectives This paper examines representations of parenting autistic children in contemporary research and considers the potential effects of these representations on these parents’ occupational possibilities. Methods Informed by a critical occupational perspective, a critical interpretive synthesis (CIS) of 27 research articles focussed on parenting autistic children was conducted. Findings Three major discursive threads were identified regarding how parents of autistic children are represented in research: gendered assumptions, caregiving as all-consuming, and disruption of normative expectations of parenting. Conclusions and significance Normative discourses about parenting were (re)produced within this body of research which may perpetuate limitations in the occupational possibilities of parents of autistic children. Critical investigation into contemporary research is necessary to challenge taken for granted expectations for parents of children with autism, to mitigate harmful effects for parents, to inform transformative OT practices and policies, and to promote equitable service provision.

Discursive threads in entrepreneurship policy texts: A comparative analysis between The Netherlands and Kosovo

ABSTRACT Because entrepreneurship is socially embedded and influenced by societal discourses, this study combines content and discourse analysis to analyse entrepreneurship policy texts in The Netherlands and Kosovo. These discursive threads, as portrayed and produced by policy texts, reveal discursive nuances across these two contexts that each accommodate entrepreneurship in their own ways. Discursive threads within entrepreneurship policy texts, pertaining to (economic) power, protectorates, and enterprises, reveal constraints on entrepreneurial agency by enforcing a limited view of entrepreneurship. In a transitioning economy (Kosovo), discursive threads seem more rigid than in an advanced economy (The Netherlands). Policy texts in the former setting attribute entrepreneurial achievements to government intervention; in the latter, the role of government appears diminished and complemented by other explanatory factors. Policy texts in the advanced economy also exhibit a broader understanding of entrepreneurship, such that they link it with societal issues, instead of reducing the phenomenon to an economic logic, as is the case in the transitioning economy. These findings advance a more nuanced understanding of the relations among discourses, ideology, entrepreneurship, and policymaking, by bringing differences across social contexts to the surface, as well as linking policymaking to a contextual view on entrepreneurship.

Post-disaster neoliberal normalization in the 1985, 2010 and 2015 Chilean earthquakes

PurposeThis article analyzes biopolitical strategies for the recovery of neoliberal normality in urban areas affected by earthquakes in 1985, 2010 and 2015 in Chile (intensity >8.0Mw).Design/methodology/approachThis is a qualitative design research. In total, 198 semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven focus groups. The data were processed in search of discursive threads, guided by the categories contained in the analysis and those arising from the interview transcripts.FindingsResults describe three clusters of discursive threads: disruption of normality, strategies of disaster biopolitics and narratives on the recovery of normality in the medium to long term. In the analyzed cases, disaster biopolitics entered domestic and community spaces to govern life; while the aim was to safeguard lives, it also sought to ensure the continuity of the neoliberal regime. The disaster biopolitics used the exception to normalize, constructing subjectivity and memory around the idea of catastrophes.Research limitations/implicationsThe qualitative design can be used in sudden and extreme situations, but it is not possible to anticipate similar results in other kind of disasters (e.g. drought).Social implicationsThis study wants to contribute a political vision about disasters by describing the process of restoring order, which follows highly destructive disasters, by demonstrating that in Chile, the biopolitical exception was key to returning to neoliberal normality.Originality/valueThe findings can help improve emergency responses and propose the necessity of political contextualization in post-disaster recovery processes.

Lithic devotionality and other aesthetic strata: Buddhist garden shrines in rural Java

In this article I explore the contemporary practice of establishing garden shrines in Buddhist rural Java. While on the surface the placement of shrines follows the demands of environmental upgrading and beautification strategies, often in accord with eco-tourist imaginaries, the practice reveals a complex aggregation of material and discursive threads. The article situates the project, ethnographically, as a sensorial practice in which environmental awareness and a sense of “atmosphere” are directly involved. This perceptual domain, particularly the relationship of the villagers to the Sakyamuni statuettes, is simultaneously articulated in continuity with the religious field of Javanese Buddhism, as it encompasses notions of sacralization and rituality. I recover the idea of aesthetic practice in order to bring these sensorial stems on a common platform. In blending discursive and materialist approaches, the article converses with the idea of strata as devised by Deleuze and Guattari as a pivotal image in their work on rhizomes. Through the concept of stratification, I argue, it is possible to apprehend Buddhist shrines as cultural formations in which “everything is involved,” that is, as multiplicities in which layers of materiality and discourse are intertwined in meaningful and generative ways.

Economic Inequality and Political Imagination in Ghana: J.B. Danquah on Poverty, Land and Community

ABSTRACT This article reconstructs the discourse on economic inequality in the writings of Ghanaian lawyer, philosopher and politician J.B. Danquah. A focus on economic inequality (broadly defined to include not only the distribution of wealth and income, but also considerations of moral economy, class differentiation and land tenure) allows to challenge simplistic characterisations of Danquah as a champion of individualism and free markets, and provides an entry point into the entanglements of economic and political thought in colonial and early postcolonial Ghana. The article argues that Danquah’s reflection on economic inequality fulfilled three functions. Firstly, it indexed his attempts to theorise a social order characterised by a harmonious complementarity of individualism and communitarianism. Secondly, it shaped his critique of colonial and postcolonial state intervention in the cocoa industry. Finally, it underpinned Danquah’s commitment to disentangle Akan land tenure institutions from Eurocentric stadial histories. Through these discursive threads, Danquah contested colonial and postcolonial rulers, reappropriated notions of ‘socialism’ and ‘liberalism’, and mobilised indigenous cultures and institutions to imagine Ghana’s future.

Strangers in a strange land: The experience of physicians undergoing remediation.

The experience of remediation in practising physicians has not been widely studied. Remediatees frequently present negative emotions, but observers can only infer the underlying reasons behind these. Understanding remediatees' perspectives may help those mandating and organising remediation to structure the process in ways that improve the experience for all concerned parties and maximise chances of a successful outcome for remediatees. Seventeen physicians who had undergone remediation for clinical competence concerns were interviewed via telephone. Participant data were first iteratively analysed thematically and then reanalysed using a narrative mode of analysis for each participant in order to understand the stories as wholes. Figured worlds (FW) theory was used as a lens for analysing the data for this constructivist research study. Participants entering the FW of remediation perceived that their position as a 'good doctor' was threatened. Lacking experience with this world and with little available support to help them navigate it, participants used their agency to draw on various discursive threads within the FW to construct a narrative account of their remediation. In their narratives, participants tended to position themselves either as victims of regulatory bodies or as resilient individuals who could make the best of a difficult situation. In both cases, the chosen discursive threads enabled them to maintain their self-identity as 'good doctor'. Remediation poses a threat to a physician's professional and personal identity. Focusing mainly on the educational aspect of remediation-that is, the improvement in knowledge and skills-risks missing its impact on physician identity. We need to ensure not only that we support physicians in dealing with this identity threat but that our assessment and remediation processes do not inadvertently encourage remediatees to draw on discursive threads that lead them to see themselves as victims.

Assistive Technology Use among Older Adults with Vision Loss: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Canadian Newspapers.

Low vision assistive devices are often positioned as enabling continued social participation and engagement by older adults in everyday activities; however, previous research suggests that the use of such technologies is restricted by various environmental factors. With little attention previously paid to the discursive environment, this critical discourse analysis critically examined how aging persons with vision loss and assistive technology (AT) were constructed and the occupational possibilities promoted and marginalized through technology use in six Canadian newspapers. In total, 7,289 articles were screened, 1,867 articles underwent a full-text review, and 51 articles were selected for data analysis. Results highlight four key discursive threads related to the framing of disability and AT, positioning of seniors with vision loss, and the ideals and occupations to be attained through AT, and point to the importance of re-configuring discourses addressing AT for seniors with vision loss to expand occupational possibilities and embrace collaborative design approaches.

Christine Wilks’ Women, Politics and Poetics

In this paper we present a close reading of the electronic literature works Sitting Pretty (2004), IntraVenus (2005), Fitting the Pattern (2008) and Underbelly (2010) by Christine Wilks with the aim of reflecting on how the body of the “Woman” is represented in these works, through which mechanisms the gender is constructed in them and how these bodies of women are registered in a feminine and feminist genealogy. There is, without a doubt, in Wilks’s work a unitary discursive thread about gender identity that evolves and transforms as the narrative mechanisms of the author and, consequently, our reading process, change; the power of the word over the body in Sitting Pretty and the strength of the naked body in IntraVenus are the initial drawing of a particular and personal discourse about the genre that will become more complex and profound in Fitting the Pattern and Underbelly. In Fitting the Pattern we have to cut, sew and weave to know the thoughts of the daughter, the addressee of the pattern that is made. Reading, as an act of creative craftsmanship, coupled with the memory of women who rework, stitch after stitch, maternal relationships, in a textual fabric that makes the identity of a young woman and the memory of a long female genealogy. Genealogy which, on the other hand, is omnipresent in Underbelly, an immersive reading experience that introduces mining women in the 19th century England along with the thoughts of a sculptress about her process as an artist who is wondering about the possibility of being a mother. The texts that narrate Sitting Pretty, IntraVenus, Fitting the Pattern and Underbelly appear in the most diverse and heterogeneous forms, however the images in these works are representations of the body of the woman from different points of view: the physical body, the body of desire, the body covered, the inner body. These works, in addition, due to their specific and special characteristics, experience a process of poetization with peculiar rhetorical mechanisms that are configured in digital poetic narratives: orality, metaphors, alliterations, metonimies, rhythm, analogies, polysemy … Reading these four works is an interactive experience of the body, an intellectual dialogue about the meaning of the word and power, the body and the image, reading and memory, women and the creation through times and spaces and practicing, with reading, the exercise of a poetic and political view.

Context is Everything: Environment and Education Intersections in the Rise and Fall of Iran’s Nature Schools

This study of the rise and fall of nature schools across Iran in 2014–2019 shows the environmental and educational context of modernization during and before the Iranian Islamic Republic commenced in 1979. The account provides the historical and cultural context for understanding the nature school movement. Ecologist Hossein Vahabzadeh’s environmental entrepreneurship establishing nature schools strategically fitted these to institutional patterns of Iranian society. The later change of heart by the government, delicensing nature schools, curtailed an environmental education success story. Key discursive threads in Iranian culture, society and governance moulded the rise and course of the nature schools education initiative. Multiple intersecting causes identified continue in environmental education developments in the national education system. This outline of the social and cultural shaping of nature schools provides a basis for future scholarship to tell a fuller account. It identifies the nature school movement’s complexity, seeing beyond simple terms of good, bad or failed.

THREADS OF A HASHTAG: ENTEXTUALIZATION OF RESISTANCE IN THE FACE OF POLITICAL AND SANITARY CHALLENGES IN BRAZIL

ABSTRACT The scenario for this paper is the combined sanitary and political crisis that Brazil has been facing in these unprecedented times of the COVID-19 pandemic. The country is ideologically polarized and this polarization has been enhanced in the last year and a half in Bolsonaro’s government. A bleak period characterized by a way of governing that Silva (2020) names “pragmatics of chaos” due to denialism (even of the very pandemic) and to the neoliberal values cherished by a radical right-wing that supports the President and backs the discontinuation of important public policies, mainly those directed towards minoritized groups and environmental protection. Having in mind such a scenario, and amidst the societal bewilderment and inaction regarding the President’s contradictory actions towards democracy, we chose to focus on a rare event of direct resistance featured by a migrant of Haitian origin, who told in the face of the president what maybe many Brazilians had not dared to say. What is of interest here is that this performance, recorded on a mobile phone, and posted as a tweet, went viral, and gave rise to a hashtag - #acaboubolsonaro [ItsOverBolsonaro] - that is still alive seven months later. With a focus on the man’s performance of resistance and its entextualization on social media, we analyze his discourse and the impacts of his positioning. In the analysis, we try to retrace some of the threads traversed by the hashtag in two Twitter accounts and some of the reverberations on Instagram. We also discuss how the discursive thread of the postings weaves a metareflexive fabric about the man’s performance. We see this meta-reflection as an acknowledgment of another praxis that we have called ‘pragmatics of resistance’.

Recepción clásica en la escritura periodística y política chilena a comienzos de la Guerra del Pacífico (1879): sobre héroes, gestas y dictaduras

Within the framework of classical reception studies, this article studies the references to motifs and elements of the classical tradition in a corpus Chilean public-opinion essays about the War of the Pacific written in mid-1879. The analysis highlights two discursive threads, one laudatory and one critical, in order to demonstrate how the use of the classical tradition reveals an idealized image of the ancient world, which served to strengthen the meaning of the arguments presented.

Multipartite attitudes to enterprise: A comparative study of young people and place

The article examines young people’s attitudes towards enterprise, comparing prosperous and deprived neighbourhoods and two UK cities. Corpus linguistics analysis identified multi-layered attitudes and variations in how place prosperity and city affect attitudes. High interest in enterprise was associated with weaker place attachment and reduced social embeddedness. Young adults from prosperous neighbourhoods delegitimised other’s enterprises; the ‘deprived’ sub-corpus included more fluid notions of enterprise legitimacy. Liverpool accounts contained stronger discursive threads around self-determination; Bradford accounts included greater problematising of entrepreneurship versus employment. An original Multipartite Model of Attitudes to Enterprise is presented consisting of four layers: attitudes to enterprise generally, attitudes legitimising particular forms of enterprise, attitudes to enterprise related to place and attitudes to enterprise related to self. The conclusion explains why policies and research need to be fine-grained and avoid uni-dimensional conceptualisations of attitudes to enterprise, or deterministic arguments relating entrepreneurship to specific types of places or backgrounds.

Gestures in the speech-language pathology clinic: a study in the light of the materialist discourse analysis

ABSTRACT Objective: this study aimed to investigate gestures in the speech-language pathology clinic and the dominant ideology in the light of the Materialist Discourse Analysis. Methods: twelve speech-language pathologists who work in different clinical fields were interviewed to investigate the main discursive thread supporting their discourse. These semi-open interviews were recorded and the discursive data were later transcribed. Fragments were extracted and analyzed from the above mentioned perspective. Results: the analysis shows that the conducting thread of the therapists’ discourse is the positivist ideology of Science, which fragments the subjects, body and language allocating speech and gesture in a hierarchy system where gesture is subordinated to the former. The language materiality shows an unconscious identification of the therapists with the signifier “Fono-Speech, Audio-Audio, Logia-Study” (Fonoaudiologia, or Speech-language Pathology in Portuguese), since the return of speech and their professional identity is brought up. From this perspective, there are formations that challenge the dominant ideology welcoming gesture as an important tool in the clinic, both in evaluation and treatment. Conclusion: the dominant ideological belief shows a hierarchical and historical association between speech and gesture that excludes gesture of the speech-language pathology clinic as it represents a threat to the speech status and the identity of this professional.

Protagonismo teatral e protagonismo educacional: quais deslocamentos fazem surgir um a(u)tor?

RESUMO Este artigo visa promover um diálogo entre os sentidos de “protagonismo” nos campos teatral e educacional, a partir dos estudos de Bakhtin e o Círculo. Para tanto, analisa enunciados presentes em uma pesquisa documental, considerando as ocorrências da palavra “protagonismo” entre os sentidos emergentes, a fim de estabelecer possíveis pontos de contato com a categoria bakhtiniana de autoria. Para a investigação, partimos do texto da Base Nacional Comum Curricular do Ensino Médio (2017) e do Projeto Político-Pedagógico de uma universidade federal em diálogo com os sentidos de protagonismo no teatro, em perspectiva educacional. Ao resgatar as cadeias discursivas de cada esfera em particular, a análise permitiu compreender que essa apropriação pela BNCC-EM assume uma nova dimensão discursiva, descaracterizando seus enunciadores e interlocutores originais e não oferecendo subsídios para a construção do protagonismo/autoria. Além disso, evoca um sujeito estudante passivo, refém das determinações do documento que impacta as ações da escola.

Discourses of the Rural Rust Belt:

This article addresses the ways in which elementary teachers in the rural rust belt both reproduce and contest dominant discourses of schooling, rurality, and poverty in their particular local context. Situated within a 4-year postcritical ethnographic study, this analysis of teacher discourse took part during an embedded, 4-month-long teacher study group. Within this context, the authors examine how the group’s discourse on poverty claimed that inequity was the fault of those experiencing it, as well as that a neoliberal discourse of education emphasized a flattened accountability and growth-only perspective within teacher’s professional interactions. However, through the addition of a spatial lens, they also situate these discourses within a particular rural and rust-belt context. This article teases apart the discursive threads within two teacher study groups, revealing the construction by teachers of their own rural, high-poverty communities as deficient, as well as exploring the complexities of the intersections of these discourses for teachers working in such settings. Their analysis contributes to a more robust understanding of the particular intersecting discourses currently circulating and producing a White-majority, high-poverty rural rust belt where children go to school and are taught by educators with their own complex orientations to schooling, rurality, and poverty.

The Politics of Economic LiberalizationWueest, BrunoCham, Palgrave Macmillan (2018), 169 p., ISBN 978‐3‐319‐62321‐4

The Politics of Economic LiberalizationWueest, BrunoCham, Palgrave Macmillan (2018), 169 p., ISBN 978‐3‐319‐62321‐4