Dominant Narratives Research Articles

A qualitative exploration into diagnostic barriers of gender-diverse autistic individuals

Research investigating gender disparities between autistic individuals has been restricted to a binary scope, focusing on how and why females are often overlooked within the diagnostic process. While this research has provided valuable insight, it neglects gender-diverse youth, limiting the understanding of why there are higher rates of autistic youth identifying as gender diverse compared to neurotypical children. A potential explanation for this trend is that challenges understanding illogical social norms, including the performance of gender, may be an autistic trait. As such, this qualitative study utilized reflexive interviews to examine how 24 autistic adults, 14 of which identified as nonbinary, make sense of their intersectional identities separate from dominant narratives within cisgender and autism spaces. Using the theories of gender performativity and the feminist model of disability, themes were created from participants’ narratives of how the rigidity of being autistic disrupts the system of internalizing gender socialization, as does the lack of logic in gender as a social construct. Through this, our participants discussed their refusal to make sense within the dominant narrative of autistic and gendered presentations.

Understanding the performance of discretion at the Polish-German border through the lens of emotional labour

This study investigates the role of emotional labour in the discretionary practices of Polish Border Guards operating along the Polish-German border – an interface where global migration regimes intersect with national ideologies. Amid Poland's increasingly nationalist stance on migration, Border Guards face complex social and institutional pressures, continually navigating personal biases, professional norms, and societal expectations. Drawing on ethnographic methods, including participant observation, field notes, and semi-structured interviews, the research explores how officers manage emotions such as empathy, detachment, and authority, and how these affect their discretionary decision-making during encounters with migrants. The findings reveal that both discretion and emotional labour in border policing are profoundly shaped by cultural and institutional contexts. Polish officers often perform discretion through assertive or emotionally detached behaviours, moulded by organizational norms and dominant narratives around ‘Polishness’. This alignment between individual predispositions and institutional ideology enables officers to rationalize aggressive or exclusionary practices, which are frequently reinforced by informal reward structures privileging assertiveness over procedural impartiality. The study argues that Polish Border Guards engage in a form of ‘emotional governance’, wherein emotional regulation becomes a tool for enacting nationalist agendas. This fusion of emotional labour and discretionary authority reflects broader dynamics at the EU's external borders, where local ideologies may conflict with EU principles of free movement and humane treatment. Ultimately, the research calls for further comparative analysis of emotional labour and discretion in border control across diverse cultural contexts, highlighting implications for policy harmonization within the Schengen framework.

Narrative democracy: notes on (the failure of) Chile's constituent process

Democracies today face intensifying political polarization over the principles and values that should structure social life. Amid interconnected global crises, public discourse is saturated with narratives which depict democracy as rapidly degenerating or nearing collapse. This article proposes to shift the focus away from the dominant narratives of democratic crisis to a less visible yet equally urgent phenomenon: the crisis of the democratic narrative itself. What is the value of narratives in democracy? Which stories can become shared accounts of collective life and which deepen fragmentation? What happens when the democratic narrative loses its audience, cannot be heard, or is weaponized against the very ideals of democratic life? To explore these questions, this article examines the puzzling experience of the failed Chilean constituent process and the stories that circulated about its democratic worth and purpose. Drawing on this case, it invites a reconsideration of democracy as a narrative achievement whose vitality depends on our ability to tell, hear, and confront diverse stories. The failure of Chile's constitutional project underscores a broader challenge: contesting the narratives that threaten democracy's existence but also making room for those that can repair the damaged fabric of our shared social worlds.

Algorithmic Culture and Sartorial Prosperity

The article defines the term "prosperity fashion" by focusing on the nature of work in contemporary fashion. Our aim here is to redefine the concept of labour by balancing solitary work against collective imagination, creative invention against algorithmic creativity informed by sartorial knowledge, and solitary genius against empathy towards local communities. The paper deals with three main assumptions. First, it posits that in contemporary fashion design there is a newfound interest in tailoring and sartorial literacy. Secondly, it argues that this interest in tailoring is a consequence of contemporary algorithmic culture. Tailoring can be seen as an agency that unites craftsmanship, algorithmic culture, and a spiritual approach to clothing. Thirdly, in the final part of the argument we deal with the case study of a contemporary designer community (Terike from Budapest) connected through sartorial literacy, highlighting how this community embodies the principles of the sartorial turn. The article concludes by advocating for the decolonization of tailoring as a civilizing process (Wild 2014), using the Terike community as an example of local sartorial creativity and of "defashion" (Niessen 2022). This examination underscores the need to recognize and preserve diverse sartorial practices that challenge dominant narratives within the fashion industry.

The Figure of the Knot and the Inertia of Hypermobile Territoriality

ABSTRACTContemporary spatialities shaped by mobility have often been conceptualised as open, fluid, and unstable—places, territories, or identities that risk dissolution in the primacy of process over form. However, this emphasis on relational flows has been criticised for overlooking the material and affective dimensions of space: its inertia, resistance, and structuring capacities. Building on recent geographical research advocating a more‐than‐relational perspective, this article investigates the territorialisation of hypermobile individuals through detailed fieldwork in Paris and Copenhagen. Combining a survey of 300 individuals with semi‐structured interviews and mental maps of 38 intensely mobile subjects, it examines the micro‐processes by which individuals appropriate and embed themselves in space. The knot metaphor serves as a conceptual tool to capture the entangled dynamics of movement and stability, revealing how territorial forms persist and evolve amid constant transformation. This approach challenges dominant narratives of spatial dilution by emphasizing the embedded, dense, and ‘sticky’ qualities of contemporary mobility and territoriality.

‘Nothing Ever Really Vanishes’: a Prescription for Imperialised Eyes in Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020)

ABSTRACT Richard Flanagan’s writings seek to reveal the links between global environmental crises and exploitative colonial attitudes. By critiquing dominant human perceptions of nature, he proposes alternative ways of seeing that resist denigration and exploitation, pointing instead to the possibility of healing and renewal. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) exemplifies this endeavour by challenging dominant narratives, while rearticulating the non-human and reanimating its operations as deeply embedded in the making of the history of communities, of both the human and the non-human. This paper examines how the novel attempts to prescribe a ground where such a healing of eyes could occur, imperialised as they are by narratives in whose face even the activism of portentous movements is rendered ineffective. It also contributes to scholarship on Flanagan’s oeuvre, examining how the novel fulfils the imperative within the realm of literary studies to actively engage with environmental concerns.

Beyond Nyaya rhetoric: the relevance of anti-caste rhetoric in communication studies

ABSTRACT In comparative rhetorical traditions, scholarship focusing on South Asia, especially on Vedant, Bhagwat Gita, and Nyaya presents itself as unique and distinct from western traditions of rhetoric. Though marginalized in western academic spaces, these dominant (brahmanical) narratives focusing on South Asia present themselves as dissenting discourses offering alternative thinking and meditation on communication and culture. But the discussion on caste and anti-caste tradition often goes missing in this discourse. This essay argues that caste is often ignored and silenced in rhetorical studies scholarship. I highlight the anti-caste tradition and importance of its praxis in doing rhetorical scholarship. Through critical analysis of hegemonic brahmanical rhetorical tradition I argue that communication scholarship in general and rhetoric in particular must be attentive to caste oppression due to its increasing global prevalence and the harms it causes to oppressed castes.

Leisure events as catalysts for narrative change: the case of Kaya Kaya festival, Curaçao

ABSTRACT This qualitative study explores how leisure events can facilitate the creation of new narratives by analysing the case of the Kaya Kaya festival in Otrobanda, Curaçao. Kaya Kaya has played an instrumental role in transforming the dominant narrative of Otrobanda from a stigmatised area, perceived as problematic, to a vibrant, artistic neighbourhood. Through interviews and participatory workshops, including collage making, the study provides a nuanced view of how the event enabled narrative change by engaging the local community and altering physical spaces through murals and other art forms. It also examines the consequences of this narrative shift for the place, community, and individuals. The paper contributes to event studies by applying a narrative approach to understand the social value of events and by demonstrating how they can foster new, positive narratives for neighbourhoods. Ultimately, the study reveals that the new, progressive narrative remains incomplete, as a result of narrative construction.

Freedom of belief, the right to withdrawal and Christian religious education in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT Parents of a seven-year-old child (JR87) in Northern Ireland took legal action against the Department of Education, arguing that the school’s religious education, including Christian collective worship during assemblies and a compulsory ‘Core Syllabus for Religious Education (RE)’ devised by Christian denominations, undermined their choice to raise their daughter in a non-religious way. Under judicial review, Justice Colton concluded that the laws on Collective Worship and RE breached European Human Rights articles, specifically Article 2 of the First Protocol ECHR read with Article 9 ECHR. Further, the RE syllabus was judged not to be compliant with the ‘objective, critical and plural’ standards of the European Court of Human Rights. On appeal, however, the court found that the parental right of withdrawal meant that the rights of the parents and child had not been breached. Nonetheless, the appeal judges agreed with the original critique of the syllabus. With consideration of similar European cases and, drawing on Benhabib’s concept of ‘jurisgenerative power’, we investigate the dominant narratives prominent in news media reports in the case of JR87. In conclusion, we argue that, in light of the legal judgements, pressure for change will continue and further ‘democratic iterations’ are likely to emerge.

Decolonial encounters in Diyarbakır: imbricated subjectivities, gendered tactics, and everyday resistance

ABSTRACT This article examines how the AKP’s centralized cultural and gendered policies in Diyarbakır – particularly after the 2016 trustee appointments – operate as part of a neocolonial project. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores how inhabitants and institutions of Diyarbakır respond not just through open resistance, but also through everyday negotiations and tactics. Drawing on de Certeau’s strategies and tactics, Gill and Pires’ imbrication, Mignolo’s border thinking, and Collins’ outsider within, I show how gender, ethnicity, and religion are deeply intertwined in power relations. The study highlights how youth and Kurdish women craft subjectivities challenging dominant narratives, contributing to decolonial feminist scholarship.

The Mediation of Reggae During its 'Golden Age' in the British Music Press

This article examines the mediation of British reggae culture in the 1970s in Melody Maker and Black Music. In Melody Maker, rock critics come to terms with this new music culture in real time. Black Music comes into being in 1973, orienting itself around this new British reggae market. This analysis explores each publication’s discursive construction of itself, its audience, and crucially, this new Jamaican form of popular music, in the context of their common ownership by IPC Magazines Ltd. The analysis of reggae in the British music press reveals the editorial and discursive strategies employed by Melody Maker to make sense of reggae. In this context, the reportage of reggae journalist Carl Gayle in Black Music provided an important counter to the dominant narratives mediating black British music culture. This article contributes to debates about black British music culture, and on the larger phenomenon of European writers addressing popular music cultures of the black Atlantic in the twentieth century.

Articulating Indigeneity, other-than-human relations and environmental crises in Cambodia through participatory film

This article reflects on a participatory filmmaking project that was intended to explore and raise awareness about intersecting social and environmental challenges facing a Bunong Indigenous community in Cambodia. Participatory research and arts methods are often deployed because they promise less extractive approaches that lend themselves to challenging dominant narratives, and the erasures, harms and inequalities that they produce. Recent literature has, however, cautioned about the instrumentalisation of Indigenous experiences as a solution for environmental crises, and pointed to the risks of reproducing flattening representations of Indigeneity as synonymous with nature in ways that might instead serve to regulate and essentialise Indigeneity. This article reflects on the project through the lens of these risks. We ask whether, methodologically and substantively, the project imposed its own set of expectations and demands that in fact served to contain and dictate the performance of Indigenous authenticity ? To what extent were the project films constrained by our initial assumptions about Indigeneity as a site of potential ecological renewal? To answer these questions, we pay particular attention to the ‘emic’ (insider) and ‘etic’ (outsider) positions that are assumed to govern work within participatory research and participatory arts. We show how the emic and etic dimensions of participatory projects can be multiple, complex and contingent, and highlight how these distinctions remain a generative problematic and set of tensions within the films produced through the project. The article shows how the project's participatory methods allowed films that simultaneously reproduce but exceed the more flattening expectations, constraints and assumptions placed upon them.

Paynter, Eleanor, Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present

In Emergency in Transit, Eleanor Paynter redefines contemporary Mediterranean migration, challenging dominant narratives, especially in Italy, that portray it as a sudden, unmanageable “crisis.” The book identifies the Italian government's response to migration as a problem of short-sightedness, since it approaches migration as an emergency situation. The weight of this critique comes from its focus on witness testimonies, a methodological commitment that is also a call to action. Paynter believes that changing the language around migration will change the dominant narrative that migration is a crisis. The book highlights how people held “in transit” respond to and resist this narrative and its government apparatus by analyzing the testimonies and cultural productions of migrants themselves. Drawing on oral histories, ethnography, and analysis of literature, film, and visual art published and set in Italy, Paynter contributes to critical refugee studies and postcolonial Italian studies, offering a call to reimagine mobility and belonging within the migrant experience. One of Paynter’s most compelling contributions is the use of migrants’ memoirs as witness literature, which challenges the erasures of official narratives and asserts migrants’ right to narrate their own histories.

Marine resource procurement as everyday resistance in Ireland during the Great Hunger (1845–1852)

This article seeks to challenge dominant narratives surrounding the Great Hunger in Ireland (An Gorta Mór, 1845–1852) by focusing on the often-overlooked aspect of marine resource exploitation. Traditional historiography of the famine typically centres on the failure of the potato crop, British colonial policies and the resulting socio-economic devastations. However, this narrative largely omits the daily survival strategies and forms of resistance employed by the Irish populace, particularly in their interaction with the marine environment. This study explores how coastal communities turned towards the sea as a resource for sustenance, autonomy and resistance against oppressive conditions imposed by the crop failures and British colonial rule. By critically engaging with the role of colonial control, external aid efforts and local resistance in primary accounts, the authors argue that marine resources played an important role in the everyday survival of Irish communities in the face of systemic failures.

Reparation for extractivist genocide: harm, responsibility and implications for a just transition

ABSTRACT There has been increasing focus on the links between genocide and extractive megaprojects. Meanwhile, proposals for a ‘just transition’ to low carbon energy are increasingly concerned with ecological, social and cultural repair for harm caused by fossil fuel extraction. Yet there has been limited attention to proposals for reparation that might follow from recognition of (i) the genocidal harm attendant upon energy resource extraction and (ii) the structural dynamics and historical responsibilities giving rise to genocidal processes. In this article, we consider what is at stake in giving weight to allegations of genocide in the context of fossil fuel extraction and explore the implications for how movements for a just energy transition might approach reparation. Putting dominant legal narratives of harm and responsibility into dialogue with the epistemic and political claims of movements seeking reparation for genocide produced in contexts of fossil fuel extraction, we undertake a decolonial re-reading of established provisions for reparation in the wake of mass atrocity. On this basis, we re-think reparation beyond material repair, to include demands for truth and non-repetition that address the legal categories and architectures that continue to underpin genocidal processes of extraction within the prevailing model of energy transition.

“Radical Listening for Racial Exhaustion”

ABSTRACT Radical listening is a way to hear minoritized speakers’ reframed, reclaimed, counter-histories which amplifies the stories that dominant narratives miss, ignore, or silence. As a critical communication of race strategy, radical listening hears racialized power differentials, listening to personal story alongside history, structures, and institutions. Radical listening can soothe racial exhaustion, an embodied experience for both people of color (who are tired of their race stories not being heard) and white people (who are tired of having to listen to race stories). I draw my radical listening data from the intergenerational, racial dialoging project called Interrupting Privilege that my team at the University of Washington’s Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity and I have run since 2016. Interrupting Privilege participants gather to listen to stories shared by participants; engage in deep and sustained dialogs about race, racism, and its many intersectional iterations (racialized sexism, racialized homophobia, racialized ableism, racialized transphobia, racialized colorism, racialized Islamophobia, and on); learn how to process their own discomfort around these topics; and construct solutions to each other’s concerns. Radical listening as a way of moving through racial exhaustion ultimately leads to racial changemaking, an individual-meets-structural means of more equitably reshaping our racialized world.

Spatial transformation and water infrastructure in coastal Jiangsu: the role of land reclamation companies during the early twentieth century

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of land reclamation companies in early twentieth-century coastal Jiangsu, China, as key drivers of spatial transformation. Amid retreating state capacity during the late Qing and Republican eras, Chinese entrepreneurs, most notably Zhang Jian, established shareholding companies that reclaimed coastal mudflats and declining salt fields, and transformed them into cotton plantations. Engaging with global flows of knowledge and technology, including Japanese agricultural planning and Dutch hydraulic engineering, these companies integrated new techniques with native practices to build modern water infrastructure and reshape rural landscapes. By focusing on non-state actors in regional planning, this study argues that land reclamation companies represented a critical alternative model of spatial development that reshaped local communities and laid foundations for later state-led collectivized rural economy. This study challenges dominant narratives of state roles, and highlights how entrepreneurial initiatives mediated global and local forces to reshape space, economy, and environment. It also contributes to broader discussions on water infrastructure, rural development, and China's modern economic transformation.

Towards a Theoretical Account of the Refugee in International Law

Abstract The ambition of this work is to describe what it would mean to interject the concept of the refugee into theoretical accounts of international law and to argue that this undertaking is overdue and increasingly necessary. The starting point is the twinned observations that the refugee is almost entirely absent from international legal theory, and that refugee law scholarship has rarely engaged with the dominant narratives of international legal theory. Despite being a creature of the law, the refugee is more theoretically anchored in accounts of international relations than in theoretical accounts of the law. The article begins outside legal theory, with Arendt and Haddad, arguing that work in international relations theory provides insight into how and why this inquiry is worthwhile. It then traces where refugee law scholarship has encountered theoretical accounts of international law, as well as some leading accounts where the figure of the refugee is notably absent. The article considers how a deeper engagement with the refugee informs our understandings of sovereignty, humanitarianism, and the nature of obligation in international law. It closes by advocating for a larger project of theorizing the refugee within international law.

Discursive Competition in the Tourist Platform Economy of a Large City (Madrid)

This research analyzes the discourses and narratives surrounding the platform tourism economy in a highly touristified city, using Madrid as a case study. Rather than focusing on the socio-economic or spatial transformations themselves, the study examines how these processes are discussed, identifying the discursive strategies employed by different actors and ideologies, along with the power relations embedded in these narratives. A corpus of literature was compiled from twelve newspapers with varying ideological orientations and categorized according to political stance, access mode, and ideological radicalism. Using the LancsBox concordancer, a quantitative analysis was conducted to identify key discursive categories and preferred lexical items across ideological positions. These findings informed a subsequent in-depth qualitative analysis aimed at uncovering the rationalities behind each discourse: who speaks, how, and with what intent. The results reveal a dominant left-wing narrative that emphasizes institutional and economic mechanisms underlying platform tourism, highlighting associated social and urban harms. In contrast, conservative and liberal narratives are divided into two strands: a ‘heretic’ discourse that promotes and defends this new economic model, but also its urban results (e.g., gentrification), and a more institutional narrative framing platform tourism as inevitable and benign, thereby concealing the underlying structures of power.

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF BASSEM YOUSAF AND MORGAN’S DISCUSSION ON THE ISRAEL-HAMAS CONFLICT: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MEDIA FRAMING AND CULTURAL VIEWPOINTS

The media plays a pivotal role in shaping public perception of geopolitical conflicts, often reflecting underlying cultural ideologies and political agendas. This study conducts a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the televised discussion between Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef and British journalist Piers Morgan on the Israel-Hamas conflict, aiming to explore the contrasting media framings and embedded cultural viewpoints expressed during the exchange. The objective is to uncover how language, power, and ideology interact within media discourse to influence audience understanding of complex international issues. The primary data consists of the full transcript and video footage of Youssef and Morgan’s interview, which gained significant global attention for its contentious and emotionally charged content. Purposeful sampling was employed to select this discourse due to its viral reach and clear representation of divergent cultural and political stances on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The analysis is grounded in Van Dijk’s approach of CDA. The findings reveal that Youssef strategically employs satire, irony, and intertextuality to challenge dominant Western narratives, while Morgan adopts a journalistic framing rooted in liberal humanism and Western moral assumptions. The discursive tension illustrates how media framing can either reinforce or subvert hegemonic ideologies, depending on the speaker’s cultural positioning and rhetorical approach. This study contributes to the broader field of media studies by highlighting how cross-cultural dialogue in news media can both expose and reproduce global power asymmetries.