Early Discourse Research Articles

Ruin and Knowledge in Pera: Discovering Istanbul’s Genoese Heritage at the Moment of Its Destruction

Abstract The 1860s and 1870s saw a massive campaign of reordering of Galata and Pera’s urban space, led by the newly founded district municipality of Altıncı Daire-i Belediye (the Sixth District)—the model municipal organization for the rest of the Ottoman Empire. The most striking and widespread part of this campaign was the destruction of the district’s medieval Genoese walls, dating back to the fourteenth century. The walls and the attached moats were replaced by wider streets and modern apartment buildings, owned mostly by the local elites. This episode in the history of Istanbul has conventionally been narrated as a careless – albeit necessary—case of urban modernization, often in relation to the similar and roughly contemporary destruction of city walls in European cities. In this article, I rather argue that the destruction of the city walls was actually framed as a project of heritage and knowledge production from the very start. I trace how the history of the Genoese Pera was produced in the popular and scientific circles amidst the destruction of its most important physical manifestation, by concentrating especially on the central role played by the municipal archivist Victor-Marie de Launay. Launay’s later collaborations with Osman Hamdi Bey are relatively well known, but his contributions to the history of the district and an early discourse on urban heritage and archaeology are underappreciated, and, I argue, critical to understanding how the ruins of the district’s past were instrumentalized in making of a space for historical expertise. Launay was a central figure in the emergent antiquarian and archaeological networks in the Ottoman capital in the second half of the nineteenth century, the scholarly output produced in these circles had a lingering effect on the modern history-writing of Pera that has conventionally underlined its “European” heritage at the expense of its Ottoman past.

UNVEILING FEMALE FORTITUDE IN CHAN LING YAP’S A FLASH OF WATER: A FLȂNEUSE’S PERSPECTIVE

This study seeks to expand the established critical discussion regarding the presence of a flâneuse in the rapidly transforming Malaya during the flourishing days of the British Empire, as depicted in Chang Ling Yap’s work, A Flash of Water (2015). Earlier discourse has explored the term flâneuse in Yap’s fifth novel, positioning and making sense of her presence in the postcolonial Malaya modernity. Using flânerie as the method for literary analysis, Yap’s protagonist assumes a distinct position in her life compared to the characters in Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s works. Shao Peng defies the image of a degraded heroine who needs sympathy and embodies the allure of the flâneuse persona, delineating it throughout her journeys to the city and public realms, and transitions while dealing with issues in the novel. The critical approach highlights her urban experiences and closely examines how she explores her public realms through walking and observing. Customs and traditions are dealt with from the perspective of a flâneuse, linking accounts from daily life to her social engagement within the culture of the spectacle. This study finds that she is also breaking free from the confined roles traditionally associated with a flâneuse.

Early Discourse on the Legal Protection of Photography: Focusing on the Fine Art Copyright Act in U.K. (1862)

Early Discourse on the Legal Protection of Photography: Focusing on the Fine Art Copyright Act in U.K. (1862)

Made in China: Chinese Re-Conceptualization of the Ideal of Judicial Independence (1906–1937)

Abstract Judicial independence has always been an important theme of China’s judicial reforms, both historically and in recent years. This article sheds light on how Chinese elites and intellectuals created a unique concept of judicial independence in the context of early twentieth-century China, seeking to trace the historical roots of the ongoing judicial reform in the People’s Republic. This uniqueness was characterized by three features: the heterogeneity within the Chinese conception of judicial independence, the reinterpretation of judicial independence into a tool for reinforcing China’s sovereignty, and the applauded control over courts and judges. These features resulted from the inherent tension within China’s pursuit of a modern state. By examining the early discourse and reform efforts, this paper not only highlights the historical struggles for judicial independence, but also, it contributes to understanding contemporary China’s distinctive path in judicial modernization, deviating from liberal constitutionalism.

The Importance of Ontological Commitment and Linguistics in Relation to the Elucidation of Design Requirements

One of the design process’s earliest and most critical stages is establishing and determining requirements. Design requirements are often expressed through language, whether in written documents, diagrams, or verbal discussions in terms of the client’s “wants” and “needs” or balancing what they can “afford.” Designers use of quotes around “wants,” “needs,” and “afford” signals ambiguity or doubt in the meaning of the terms. The language used during early discourse is crucial for expressing and translating theseambiguous terms into specific unambiguous design requirements, which significantly shape and constrain possible solutions. In philosophy, this concept is known as ontological commitment. Embedded language in requirements documents, expressed through constraints, objectives, and functions, establish the ontological commitment to a specific solution space. Prior marine design research has focused on the wicked problem of requirements elucidation, with the goal visualizing potential solutions derived from language, and a more direct link to ontological commitment was developed by Andrews in the concept of style Duchateau (2016) van Ores (2011) Andrews (2012). However, the role and impact of linguistics in translating and interpreting uncertain or ambiguous terms into specific design requirements has been largely overlooked. This paper presents modern direct examples of ontological commitment from requirements development for the Littoral Combat Ship.

Black Measurement: The Contributions of People Racialized as Black to the Field of Psychometrics

Psychometrics is a branch of psychology concerned with the measurement of mental attributes, behavior, and performance, in addition to the design and analysis of tests and other instruments. The origins of this field are rooted in the explorations of 18th century scientists concerned with capturing phenomena in empirical ways. Less discussed is the use of tests and assessments to validate racialization, which thrusts persons racialized as Black into the early discourse on psychometrics. Scholars, scientists, and psychometricians racialized as Black have long engaged psychometrics providing two major contributions: infrastructure via personnel and training programs built by persons racialized as Black; and interdisciplinarity, which include disciplinary standards and knowledge production. This commentary names these important figures and describes their contributions to the field of psychometrics.

Discursive designing of autobiographical memories in speech ontogeny: Longitudinal survey

Autobiographical memories have been investigated, experimentally rather than in real interactional settings. This study explores the role of language in mental processes through the linguistic explication of memories in discursive practices in early ontogenesis. It considers the ways and means of early oral memories evolvement in the interdisciplinary paradigm. The goal is to identify the mechanism of early discourse formation in recalls. The data were collected from the multimedia corpus CHILDES Transcript Browser with speech transcripts of German-speaking children from three to seven years old and were subjected to communicative, pragmatic, cognitive and discursive analyses. Adults’ verbal discursive strategies and tactics were examined to explicate the mnemonic content of children’s narratives. We identified the pragmatic orientation of stimulating statements of adults and described the linguistic features of a child’s mnemonic utterances. It has been found that the main discursive strategies of adults prompting children are: the strategy of discursive socialization, the strategy of dialogic narrative with its further transformation into a mnemonic narrative and information extraction from memory. As a result, the psycholinguistic (verbal) model of the ontogenetic generalization of childhood memories typical for German-speaking communication partners was developed. The model includes six stages according to the age of a preschooler. It displays the evolution of the surface structure of mnemonic utterances-recollections, which make up the framework of primary autobiographical narrations. This research fills in the niches in discourse studies, in ontogenesis and in the primary and secondary text models. The findings may have practical application in corpus and empirical studies.

When resilience is not enough: Imagining novel approaches to supporting Black youth navigating racism.

The narrative surrounding the impact racism has had on the well-being of Black youth has shifted across sociocultural and historical context. Early discourse around these topics were problem-saturated, focusing on deficits "within" Black youth. Over time, an important narrative shift occurred: greater attention was paid to the inherent assets of Black youth, their families, and communities, including how racial-ethnic protective factors such as racial socialization afforded them resilience. What resulted was decades of research seeking to understand the mechanisms that allow Black youth to bounce back in spite of racism-related adversity. Notwithstanding the viable practice and policy implications that have emerged from such inquiry, at what point does our focus on the resilience of Black youth - whether individual or multisystemic - fall short? It is with this question in mind that this paper challenges those committed to the optimal development of Black youth to consider yet another narrative shift: one that stands upon the legacy of cultural ecological frameworks and the seminal models underlying resilience research, and calls us toward not supporting Black youth's adaptation to racism, but toward collective efforts to transform our approach, pushing back against the perniciousness of racism.

Pickled eggs: GenerativeAIas research assistant or co‐author?

Pickled eggs: Generative<scp>AI</scp>as research assistant or co‐author?

REB/VODKA IS MY OTP: SCHOOL SHOOTER AND MASS MURDERER FANFICTION AS NARRATIVES OF RESISTANCE

Early work in fan studies deliberately focused on the positive aspects of fandom. This approach was designed to combat the stereotyping and pathologizing of fans perpetrated by mass media (Jenson, 1992; Zubernis and Larsen, 2012) and has broadly been successful. Yet popular culture is a site of political meaning and ideological conflict and recent shifts point toa pressing need to understand the dominant narratives being espoused. Work in fan studies is now being carried out on white supremacy, conspiracy theories and serial killer fandom (Stanfill, 2020; Reinhard et al., 2021; Wiest, 2016), but communities rising around people like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev remain unexplored. This paper returns to some of the early discourses surrounding fandom and applies them to contemporary expressions of ‘dark’ fandom, in particular school shooters and mass killers. Using surveys and undertaking a content analysis of fanfiction posted to Archive of Our Own, as well as media reports focusing on these fans, I demonstrate that some forms of fandom and fan behaviour are still dismissed and Othered. Typically stigmatised through its gendered associations, fanfiction dedicated to mass killers is subject to multiple discourses of othering, but also offers multiple forms of resistance to these dominant narratives. Rather than fanfiction as a practice through which fans express emotional connections with popular media texts, I argue that fans write fanfiction about school shooters and mass killers as a way to recontextualize and understand their motives and actions in ways that other media do not.

Revisiting the Early Discourse of the Information Age and Its Interplay with Humanity

This paper examines scholars’ discourses on the coming of the Information Age. It starts by discussing scholars who measured the emergence of the Information Age in the early 1960s. Machlup and Galbraith used economic indicators, followed by the exploration of network and knowledge sharing, which is a crucial process in the formation of the Information Age. Ellul (1964) paralleled humanity with technology as a “system,” and Mumford (1966) coined the term “megamachine.” These early arguments were pessimistic that humans were considered as inevitably confined by uncontrolled structures due to information and its byproducts—technology. However, in the 1980s, Nora and Minc considered the Information Age optimistically by introducing the concept of “Decentralization” to indicate the freedom of “choices” for modern people.

How do Antecedent Semantics Influence Pronoun Interpretation? Evidence from Eye Movements.

Pronoun interpretation is often described as relying on a comprehender's mental model of discourse. For example, in some psycholinguistic accounts, interpreting pronouns involves a process of retrieval, whereby a pronoun is resolved by accessing information from its linguistic antecedent. However, linguistic antecedents are neither necessary nor sufficient for interpreting a pronoun, and even when an antecedent has been introduced in earlier discourse, there is little evidence for the retrieval of linguistic form. The current study extends our understanding of pronoun interpretation by examining whether the semantics of antecedent expressions are retrieved from representations of past discourse. Participants were instructed to move displayed objects in a Visual World eye-tracking task. In some cases, the semantics of the antecedent were no longer viable after an instruction was completed (e.g., "Move the house on the leftto area 12," where the result was that a different house is now the leftmostone). In this case, retrieving antecedent semantics at the point of hearing a subsequent pronoun ("Now, move it…") should entail a processing penalty. Instead, the results showed that antecedent semantics have no direct effect on interpretation, raising additional questions about the role that retrieval might play in pronoun interpretation.

"Snake flu," "killer bug," and "Chinese virus": A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of lexical choices in early UK press coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now mostly known as "COVID-19" (or simply "Covid"), early discourse around the pandemic was characterized by a particularly large variation in naming choices (ranging from "new coronavirus" and "new respiratory disease" to "killer bug" and the racist term "Chinese virus"). The current study is situated within corpus-assisted discourse studies and analyses these naming choices in UK newspaper coverage (January-March 2020), focusing on terminology deemed "inappropriate" as per WHO guidelines on naming infectious diseases. The results show that 9% of all terms referring to COVID-19 or the virus causing it are "inappropriate" overall, with "inappropriate" naming being more prevalent (1) in tabloids than broadsheets and (2) in the period before compared to the period after the virus was officially named on 11th February, 2020. Selected examples within each of the categories of "inappropriate" names are explored in more detail [terms (1) inciting undue fear, (2) containing geographic locations, and (3) containing species of animals], and the findings are discussed with regard to the contribution of lexical choices to the reproduction of (racist and otherwise problematic) ideologies in mainstream media.

From performative anti-fascism to post-fascism: the Lega (Nord)’s political discourse in historical context

ABSTRACT This article addresses a significant gap in the literature on the Lega (Nord) by examining the resemiotisation of the party’s early discourse of ‘performative anti-fascism’ under Umberto Bossi into the current ‘post-fascist’ discursive strategy of Matteo Salvini’s Lega. Employing a Discourse Historical Approach (DHA), we perform a two-step analysis. First, through an examination of textual and visual documents produced by and about Umberto Bossi’s party, this article examines the Lega’s process of reconceptualizing and recontextualising anti-fascism; second, through an analysis of Matteo Salvini’s Lega, the article identifies how ‘post-fascism’ has evolved from ‘performative anti-fascism’. The article makes three contributions: first, it encourages a shift away from a focus purely on the Lega’s populism towards articulations of its far right ideology; second, it illustrates the importance of focusing on long-term enactments of discursive shifts and a normalization/mainstreaming of far right ideology; finally, it contributes to a new conceptualization of post-fascism as a discursive feature of far right ideology rather than an ideology in and of itself.

The meaning of existence (bhava) in the Pāli discourses of the Buddha

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to reconstruct the meaning of existence in the Pāli discourses of the Buddha by considering how the notion is used in the most systematic contexts in which it appears, and how it could be best interpreted. The discourses are concerned with how existence is used to support and consolidate a certain attitude of ownership, appropriation, and entitlement over contents of experience, in virtue of which one can claim that this or that is ‘mine’. The problem with this move is that it seems to require a degree of stability that is at odds with the fundamental uncertainty (anicca) of all conditioned realities. Existence is used to somehow cover up uncertainty, and thus allow for a semblance of genuine ownership and possession, while in fact possession and ownership are just deluded views doomed to be contradicted by the structural uncertainty of actual experience. This reading entails that the early discourses do share with later traditions an anti-realist inspiration, which is worth exploring in its own right.

International politics in Turkish Islamism during the Cold War, 1947–1964

This article will discuss the early discourse of Islamism on international politics in Cold War Turkey. It brings forth four main findings. First, while Islamists bandwagoned onto the discourse of the Turkish state and the Western bloc in presenting the Soviet Union as a national and global threat, they also sought to operationalize their anti-Sovietism for their broader political agenda. Second, Islamists effectively committed to the Western bloc during the period, but this commitment was replaced by anti-Westernism particularly from the mid-1960s onwards. Third, they substantially discussed decolonization with Pakistan, Palestine, and Algeria at the forefront, but their treatment of decolonization oscillated between glorification and devaluation and never paved the way for a Third-Worldist approach. Fourth, while pan-Islamism had an important place in their thinking, it came along with a commitment to the states-system as well as Turkey’s Cold War alliance, a retreat from classical Islamic concepts, and a conception of Turkish exceptionalism. In so doing, this article shows how the course of the Cold War shaped Islamism. It also demonstrates the pragmatism and eclecticism of Islamism. It is equally evident that Islamism was developed in interaction with, not in opposition to, nationalism and the discourse of national interest.This article will discuss the early discourse of Islamism on international politics in Cold War Turkey. It brings forth four main findings. First, while Islamists bandwagoned onto the discourse of the Turkish state and the Western bloc in presenting the Soviet Union as a national and global threat, they also sought to operationalize their anti-Sovietism for their broader political agenda. Second, Islamists effectively committed to the Western bloc during the period, but this commitment was replaced by anti-Westernism particularly from the mid-1960s onwards. Third, they substantially discussed decolonization with Pakistan, Palestine, and Algeria at the forefront, but their treatment of decolonization oscillated between glorification and devaluation and never paved the way for a Third-Worldist approach. Fourth, while pan-Islamism had an important place in their thinking, it came along with a commitment to the states-system as well as Turkey’s Cold War alliance, a retreat from classical Islamic concepts, and a conception of Turkish exceptionalism. In so doing, this article shows how the course of the Cold War shaped Islamism. It also demonstrates the pragmatism and eclecticism of Islamism. It is equally evident that Islamism was developed in interaction with, not in opposition to, nationalism and the discourse of national interest.

Kathryn Ciancia. On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World.

Kathryn Ciancia. <i>On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World.</i>

Networks of culture creatives in Patras: the relevance of cultural lag

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the challenges posed by the early discourse of the creative city in the case of Patras, a regional city of Greece and European Capital of Culture in 2006 before the prolonged economic crisis in Greece. We focus on the relevance and the forms of cultural creation and artistic networking for the creative city rather than on innovation hubs and technological creativity. We develop a qualitative study of culture creatives in the city to examine the potential of local cultural and artistic agents, social groups and institutions to enhance networking and clustering in the urban milieu, which is also influenced or distorted by city planning capacities and politics. The culture management study identifies several constraints and frictions related to the potential transformation of cultural networks to clusters and analyzes the relevance of cultural lag in the literature of creative cities and urban regeneration. The constraints are discussed within a framework of cultural and institutional lag, which characterize city stakeholders. The study identifies practices that enable organizational facilitation and capacity for proactive culture creation, creative networking and potential clustering. Those activities support culture-led socio-economic urban regeneration planning and inspire the potential making of a creative city.

Necessity of The Abhidhamma for The Interpretation of Early Buddhist Discourses

This paper presents an overview about the necessity of the Abhidhamma for interpreting several main teachings found in the early Buddhist discourses. The study is based on the Tipiṭaka and some other information taken from exegetical literatures (Aṭṭhakathā). Several important points found in the early Buddhist discourses are critically analyzed in the light of the Abhidhamma. It is found that certain points referring the two kinds of truths which have not been clearly distinguished in the early discourses, are made clear in the Abhidhamma by introducing the two kinds truths, namely sammutisacca and paramatthasacca. Furthermore, some controversial matters such as the doctrine of puggala promulgated by some Buddhist schools, and the wrong views of eternalists and nihilists which are often stated in the early Buddhist discourses but yet not so much discussed, are successfully refuted in the Abhidhamma. Thus, the present study has highlighted the importance of Abhidhamma in giving a better explanation regarding some important and controversial points found in the early discourses.

Revisiting the Anthropo(S)Cene: Theatrical Practices Beyond the Human Stage?

This article outlines the specifically modern understanding of an anthroposcenic theatre by (among others) referring to August Wilhelm Iffland’s concept of the “Menschendarsteller” and takes a closer look at Max Herrmann’s article “Das theatralische Raumerlebnis”. As I will show in my reading of Herrmann’s now canonical text, the early discourse of theatre studies not only reproduces the anthroposcenic dispositive of theatre but also already hints at its limits and the breaking up of the closed and privileged scene of the Anthropos. The article tries to show how, by asking and focusing the question of space and theatrical transformation, while still focusing on the human actor, his actions and the mimetic relationship between actor and audience, Herrmann decenters and denaturalizes the anthropocentric, universalized, and naturalized framings of theatre. Article received: December 12, 2021; Article accepted: February 1, 2022; Published online: April 15, 2022; Original scholarly article