Dominant Political Discourse Research Articles

New urban spaces under Modi’s digital India – digitization of urban governance and state-citizen relationship

Few studies have examined how Indian ULBs have responded to the government’s informationization agenda, particularly the use of geospatial technologies for urban governance. Drawing upon insights from Critical GIS, neoliberalization and governmentality studies, this article addresses this gap by examining the case of Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) and the evolution of their modernization efforts that have progressed from office automation practices to active use of GIS technology for urban governance. SMC’s regional and political environment have favored their modernization efforts. However, as ULBs are expected to manage a diverse urban population and shoulder responsibilities with fewer resources they must adapt. Surat Municipal Corporation has adapted by aligning local political agenda with national agenda and adopting a strategy that echoes the dominant political discourse of utilizing technology to govern from a distance and as a modality of biopolitics. Use of geospatial technologies serves as an important tool for the ULB to introduce new modes of bureaucratic governmentality.

Defining Swedishness: When Swedes Without a Migration Background Are a Local Numerical Minority

In this study, we examine how people without a migration background living in majority–minority neighbourhoods in Malmö, Sweden, define national identity in daily life. This setting provides a look into the intersection between the dominant position these people occupy in the Swedish national context and the confrontation with ethnic diversity as a result of becoming a local numerical minority. We address articulations of what being Swedish means in interviews with 22 Swedes without a migration background. We find that people mostly reproduce the national identity discourse that is nationally dominant. Most people explicitly articulate an achievable national identity, presenting Swedishness as accessible to everyone, in line with how Swedish integration policy is framed, and the current dominant political discourse. However, when talking about Swedishness as an identity and an attribute, the Swedishness of Swedes without a migration background is taken for granted, which indicates that despite changing local hierarchies, the establishment of the Swede without a migration background as the dominant Swede remains unchallenged. Swedishness might be achievable, but only because the dominant Swede defines it as such. Nonetheless, some respondents engage critically and reflectively with their own position of power as the nationally dominant group. This discourse is mostly expressed by raising the issue of white privilege and acknowledging it as a hindrance to the social positioning of people with a migration background in Swedish society. This reflexivity might be a result of confrontation with diversity and becoming a minority.

Kartini, Online Media, and the Politics of the Jokowi Era: A Critical Discourse Analysis

ABSTRACT The indigenous education activist and feminist of the late Dutch colonial era, R.A. Kartini, has remained an enduring public icon for more than a century. While celebrated as a national hero in Indonesia, like many iconic women of the Global South, Kartini’s symbolic force has been readily appropriated for political ends. As a ‘floating signifier’, her image absorbs fluctuating meanings and ideologies, making the analysis of her representation at a given point in time a valuable approach to political analysis. This article focuses on Kartini’s portrayal in the second term of the Jokowi presidency in mainstream Indonesian online media discourse. Recognising the dialectical relationship between the online news media and dominant political discourse, we use critical discourse analysis to identify and examine the mainstream ideologies embedded in the news media’s representations of Kartini. Our analysis provides a snapshot of dominant Indonesian political discourse, revealing a set of intersecting ideologies: conservative feminism, neoliberalism, softened Islamic piety, and perfunctory nationalism.

Reporting assassinations in the Ethiopian press

This paper aims at analyzing the reporting of assassinations in the Ethiopian press from a discourse analytical perspective. The study attempted to answer three questions: 1) How are assassinations represented in the press? 2) What identities are set up for those involved in the assassinations? And, finally, how is meaning communicated in various discursive structures and communicative events? To that end, the study employed Jeffrie’s critical stylistics as an analytical framework within a qualitative design. The data were collected from five Ethiopian newspapers that were selected purposively in line with predetermined criteria. A corpus of 102 media stories that were published from June 2018 to June 2020 was setup. The findings show that each outlet reported the incidents synonymously, emphasizing a scapegoating process that could ideologically reaffirm the dominant political discourse. In doing so, four naming and labeling strategies were identified: lionizing (making the dead a hero), blaming and demonizing, victimizing (making the dead innocent and martyrs), and ethnification (connecting both the victims and offenders to their ethnic belongings). Polarized representations of actions, space, time, and society were evident in the selected stories. The government, together with its different organs and affiliates, was used as the sole and primary source of information. The voices of the government on the incidents were reported as widely accepted facts, as evidenced by the blurred line between direct and indirect speeches. This in turn helped to reaffirm the existing dominant political discourse – the status quo.

Drawing the lines: Studying the Common Man caricatures by R.K. Laxman to understand dominant political discourse around legitimate political contestations in postcolonial India

ABSTRACT The paper studies the Common Man political caricatures by R.K. Laxman, a staff cartoonist at the Times of India, to understand dominant political discourses in postcolonial India. It argues that constructs like the ‘common man’ and ‘vote bank’ through popular cultural discourse like caricatures have a critical impact on the political landscape of the country. While the former is associated with an urban English-educated middle class, the latter is used to denote the socially marginalised sections of the electorate voting en masse as a form of political assertion. The latter is perceived as an aberration in the modern secular democracy and its political voice is often delegitimised. Further, the former is associated with economic liberalisation, development and anti-corruption. The paper demonstrates how Laxman’s Common Man is a proponent and mascot of these in the popular imagination. Thereby indicating that the popular cultural archive has indeed had a visible impact on the political, economic and sociological cartography of the nation.

Constructing counter-hegemony on Twitter: Discourse of Ibero-American political women of “change” in the digital environment

Women are occupying more and more space in the public sphere, not only through pressure on the streets, but increasingly in digital spaces. It is at this intersection that different ways of engaging in politics coalesce with the presence of women who demand their own voice and visibility beyond the mechanisms of traditional politics. Those requiring a transformation of the current political reality are the political women “of change.” One of their main attributes is that they generate and spread counter-hegemonic narratives as a form of empowerment and a way to question the dominant political discourse through digital media. Our objective herein is to analyze, in a comparative way, the use of this communicative strategy to understand its articulation and mechanisms. To do this, we study the discourse of ten Ibero-American political women on Twitter who are linked to social change. The methodology is based on the application of the content analysis technique that combines a quantitative dimension with another of a qualitative nature focused on critical discourse analysis. The results show that criticism and denunciation, to give voice to the voiceless and make social problems visible, are the main components of these political actors’ counter-hegemonic discourse on Twitter. Likewise, they display a practical and constructive counter-hegemony oriented in applied and positive terms. Finally, the institutional position in the government–opposition axis sharpens or minimizes the use of these types of communication strategies.

Navigating the Af-Pak arena: India-US relations under the Trump administration

ABSTRACT The gradual elevation of India-US relations over the past few decades highlights a significant convergence of interests, a similarity in dominant political discourse and a converging geopolitical environment that has aided this elevation. This article explores engagements between India and the US within the Af-Pak arena, reflected in policy discourse and public pronouncements in both countries. It does so through a critical discourse analysis and examination of personal, national interest, and broader structural calculations that have driven Indian and American policy engagement reflected in their policy positions with regards to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Decommodify the 2030 Agenda: Why and How to Finance What Is Not Profitable?

The 2030 Agenda serves as a guide for current economic policy. Despite this, the dominant political and economic discourse still relies on the market for success. Incentives are being developed to create business opportunities that align with the sustainable development goals. However, funding for these projects ultimately depends on their potential profitability. As a result, economic growth is seen as a necessary condition for achieving the 2030 Agenda. This approach leaves culture and the arts behind, as they are difficult to commodify. The artist job market highlights the tension between the democratic value of the arts and the values of the capitalist system. This challenge is seen in both the field of cultural economics and in discussions of culture’s role in meeting the 2030 Agenda’s sustainable development goals. To address this, the study proposes incorporating culture into a funding strategy not based on the private market by using the employer of last resort or job guarantee policy for future applications. This will redirect focus from the economic value of the arts to their value for human development, ultimately realizing the goals set by the 2030 Agenda.

Rethinking polarization: Discursive opening and the possibility for sustaining dialogue

ABSTRACT Increased polarization and divisive political speech threaten meaningful civic discussion. This study examines a campus public dialogue to understand how dialogic commitments sustained discursive openings for talking across polarizing positions. Specifically, our analysis identifies three patterns of interaction that constituted sustained openings: conceptual expansion, deliberation of meaning, and dialogic moments. Additionally, we contend two communicative practices extended dialogic commitments: discursive vulnerability and critical reflexivity. Finally, we draw on structuration theory to explain how participants disrupted polarizing political tropes to instead enact rules and resources associated with dialogue. Our analysis asserts a rethinking of polarization as communicative – that is, an enactment of dominant political discourses – and elucidates how students with limited instruction instead sought mutual understanding and authentic engagement.

Racism and radicalisation in Denmark: outline for a social pedagogical prevention model

This article focuses on social pedagogical work with young people from minority ethnic communities who are at risk of becoming radicalised. The aim is to contribute to the further qualification of general social pedagogical work, so that radicalisation and extremism can be more effectively prevented. In Denmark there has been an increased focus on radicalisation and extremism in recent decades. Radicalisation is often characterised as a process where extremist attitudes develop before an act of violence takes place. It is a politically charged subject with a series of discourses that link radicalisation with parallel societies and a lack of integration. The prevailing discourse often portrays ethnic minorities as living in ethnic enclaves that are isolated from the majority of society, where they reproduce their religious and cultural values which can lead to a form of radicalisation and a threat to the national social cohesion. One profession that engages with this topic is social pedagogy, which aims to intervene in such situations. However, we are far from seeing social pedagogy succeeding in this intention. In practice, many social pedagogical initiatives take an individualising and disciplinary approach and are therefore ineffective solutions to young people’s challenges. In this article, we first analyse the dominant political discourse on ethnic minorities and connect it to the Danish government’s various action plans against radicalisation and extremism. We then discuss the implications of European and Danish prevention work against radicalisation and raise a criticism of this work for its individualising, disciplinary and uncritical nature. We highlight the need for a community-oriented approach to prevention work, where the cornerstones are involvement, network building and critical insight.

Towards a new methodological approach to social historiography of translation

AbstractIn an attempt to appreciate the contribution that social network analysis (SNA) might offer to translation historiography, two main approaches are presented and discussed in this study: explanatory SNA and exploratory SNA. The former is more concerned with SNA measures while the latter deals with three potential narratives of social networks. The aim is to employ SNA in diachronic and synchronic dimensions of literary translation publishing historiography in Iran from 1991 to 2010, a micro-macro framework that seamlessly integrates agents’ relationships, visualization and network analysis techniques to explore the impact of ideological-political shifts on the quantity as well as quality of major agents’ relations. Furthermore, the study attempts to explore how the synergy between Giddens’ Structuration Theory (GST) and SNA can support a deeper and more empirically grounded understanding of translation historiography. The goal of the study is both methodological and scientific. The results of SNA graphical outputs suggest that there is a significant relationship between the structure of relationships in fiction publishing field and the dominant political discourse in Iran.

Geopolitics of the colonial prison island: The case of Poulo Condor (Con Dao)

This article takes up the specific example of Poulo Condor (the Con Dao archipelago in Vietnam) as colonial prison island in order to examine this persistence of colonial island imaginaries built around the imagined project of the prison island well into the middle of the 20th century. Such imaginaries appear to run counter to dominant political discourse of the period along with ongoing media campaigns calling for the end to penal transportation and overseas penal colonies. This article contends that closer attention needs to be paid to the disjuncts and gaps between the official discourse of the French colonial authorities located in France and the enactment of such discourse in the colonies themselves. The central focus of the article is a close analysis of correspondence between colonial officials stationed in French Indochina from 1925 onwards; these documents will be contextualised with reference to the longer histories of both the Con Dao archipelago and France’s use of prison islands. An understanding of Poulo Condor as a complex extralegal space will be framed by Ann Laura Stoler’s concept of the ‘colony’ as it develops Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the ‘state of exception’ and Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘security’. What emerges is an ongoing colonial pathology which continues to fixate on the prison island as a key colonial stake even after such a stake has become increasing untenable.

Russian School in the Socio-Political Space of Latvia (1991 – 2021)

Russian-language teaching schools, or bilingual schools, are the most important institution for the reproduction of the ethno-cultural collective identity of the Russian and Russian-speaking population in modern Latvia. The present and future of these schools are included in a very complex legal and socio-political context. On the one hand, Latvian legislation proclaims the right of ethnic minorities to preserve their identity, on the other hand, the dominant political discourse is focused on reducing teaching in Russian in these schools to a minimum. The article shows that it is the political context constructed by the leading political parties, and not the rights guaranteed by the constitution to ethnic minorities, that is the main factor that leads to a sharp weakening of Russian (bilingual) education in Latvia. The research material is based on the Latvian legislation in the field of education and language, the programs of political parties, the data of scientific research of Latvian sociologists, including the author of the article, expert assessments of scientists and public figures of the process of education of ethnic minorities.

Beyond the dominant discourse on internationalization of higher education

Research on internationalization of higher education has been predominantly non-theoretical and positivist rather driven towards the consecution of practical objectives than concerned with the structures in which internationalization operates, or its dilemmas and contradictions. Dr. Chrystal George Mwangi, an Associate Professor at the College of Education of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, United States, is one of the academic voices that has questioned the idea of internationalization as an ‘unconditional good’ as often emphasized by dominant political and academic discourses. In this interview, conducted in June 2020, Dr. George Mwangi reflects on internationalization of higher education from a critical approach, addressing issuessuch as the impact of choices on how to engage on this process; the challenges of being a scholar-practitioner in this field; and the role of internationalization in the Covid-19 pandemic context.

Belarus in the historical politics of Poland (2005–2020)

The political use of history to affirm dominant political discourses and form a system of loyalty has become an integral part of modern domestic and foreign politics. Poland represents a classic example of the instrumentalisation of history. History has become the subject of controversy, and sometimes acute conflicts of Poland with Russia, Ukraine, Germany and Lithuania. Until recently, Belarus remained a blank spot in Polish historical politics. The aim of the research is to study the Belarusian direction of Polish historical politics. The research is based on an institutional approach. The article reveals the influence of the foreign factor on the formation of Polish historical politics. The conceptual foundations and goals of the Polish historical politics in relation to Belarus are analysed. The characteristics of actors, institutions and practices of Polish historical politics are given. In conclusion, we raise the question of assessing the effectiveness of Polish historical politics in Belarus.

Many-faced orientalism: racism and xenophobia in a time of the novel coronavirus in Chile

ABSTRACT Ethnic Chinese and Asians have historically been excluded, invisibilized, or experienced conditional inclusion in South America. In Chile, the global pandemic provoked an increase in older patterns of anti-Chinese racism and anti-China sentiments. Orientalist and racist discourses have gone uncriticized, although anti-China statements by politicians and academics have provoked diplomatic backlash. Contextualizing the history of orientalism and representations of Chineseness in Chile, we show that dominant political and cultural discourses during COVID-19 strongly reproduce the dichotomy between the ‘Oriental’ and ‘Occidental.’ The pandemic reveals the superficial and problematic nature of the government’s recent attempts to articulate multiculturalism in an era of ‘rise in China’ tropes.

Social scientific knowledge in times of crisis: What climate change can learn from coronavirus (and vice versa).

"Crisis, by its very nature, requires decisive intervention. However, important questions can be obscured by the very immediacy of the crisis condition. What is the nature of the crisis? How it is defined (and by whom)? And, subsequently, what forms of knowledge are deemed legitimate and authoritative for informing interventions?""

Proliferation of Borders: On Border Policing, State, and Sovereignty

This article summarizes relevant literature in critical border studies and explores how contemporary changes in border policing and management affect the nature of the contemporary state and sovereignty. It asks: If it is not clear where exactly borders are, how does this impact our understanding of state sovereignty? How is the deterritorialization of borders challenging our understanding of territorial sovereignty? How is outsourcing "legitimate means of violence" to non-state actors on borders reshaping the state's authority? In dominant political and public discourse, borders are seen as a common and defining feature of modern statehood. The modern nation-state political theology has invested the monopoly of governance over borders exclusively to the state. However, contemporary border practices challenge such an idea. Ethnographic studies show that while borders are bound to the nation-state sovereign power, they are also sites where multiple actors come into play and are increasingly disentangled from the geopolitical lines on a map. Ethnographic focus provides insights into everyday workings of sovereign power, a topic often overloaded with abstraction and relegated to the realm of theory. However, while ethnographic studies about border control and management question the prevailing ideas about state and borders, these studies often remain trapped in statist logic and spatial assumptions of the modern territorial state. Considering the historical perspective and incorporating the analysis of economic processes on the state and border could help mitigate the shortcomings mentioned above.

Predictions, Pollification, and Pol Profs: the ‘Corbyn Problem’ beyond Corbyn

AbstractIt has been noted that UK political punditry has a ‘Corbyn problem’: an underlying hostility to the Corbyn project and its supporters. As the Corbyn era draws to a close, we take stock and argue that the Corbyn problem was never fully ‘about’ Corbyn. Instead, it was the outward manifestation of a conjunction of tendencies present in contemporary UK politics: the prominence of a relatively small group of ‘intensely involved’ individuals driving dominant political discourse; the inability of traditional purveyors of broadcast media coverage to adapt to contemporary political currents and an unwillingness to self‐reflect on possible biases in their approach; and the ‘pollification’ of election campaign coverage, aided by mainstream political scientists stereotyped in the figure of the ‘Pol Prof’. Combined, these tendencies are hostile to left‐wing political actors and movements. They will not disappear with Corbyn and may even intensify as their structural underpinnings strengthen further.

In Search of a New Indigeneity

Bolivians are inventing spiritual practices that fit into the current dominant political discourse of decolonization and revalorization of native beliefs by associating these new traditions with archaeological spaces and objects. This new Bolivia is believed to emerge from the ashes of the old economic and social order, which for centuries oppressed and elided native religious practices, and harkens back to precolonial values. Drawing from long-term ethnographic research, media reports, and scholarly works, I aim to examine these new practices to improve our understanding of emerging indigenous identities in this small Andean nation. I discuss two case studies that exemplify how the urban indigenous are rediscovering the power of ancestor veneration and animism in their heritage to construct a new sense of national belonging.