Individual Discourse Research Articles

From ‘healthful exercise’ to ‘nature on prescription’: The politics of urban green spaces and walking for health

The article traces the recent ‘discovery’ of the importance of walking in urban green spaces to health to its historical roots, and situates it within its discursive and political–economic context. It shows, using the UK as a case example, how the nineteenth century urban parks movements had public health as one of its key objectives, linked to a hegemonic middle class project of promoting order and ‘rational recreation’ to the working classes. It then shows that as health problems and understandings changed, along with broader political–economic shifts, park aims shifted from enhancing ‘health’ to promoting ‘fitness’. With the growth of modern notions of citizenship, decline of infectious disease, and the rise of the biomedical model in the welfare state era, parks ceased to be seen as means to health and were transformed into municipal services. After the oil crises of the 1970s and the rise of Thatcherism, they went into decline, though from the 1990s there were political efforts to revive them as part of a wider set of sustainable urban policies, and growing preoccupations with the health costs of a sedentary and obese society. In this context, the article provides a critical commentary on the science and policy of individualist discourses of ‘green walking’ and health. It argues for a broad ‘ecological health promotion’ approach, using economic crisis as an opportunity to move forward in ways consistent with environmental justice and an emancipatory ‘capabilities’ approach to public health.

An Evaluation of Critical-Reflection on Service-Users and Their Families' Narratives as a Teaching Resource in a Post-Graduate Allied Mental Health Program: An Integrative Approach

In this article, the author argues for the need for students to have opportunities to dialogue with service users in social work education. Through such conversations spaces for critical-reflection are created in which individual, team, and professional discourses can be safely critiqued among a community of learners. Within professional courses of study the constructed nature of distinctions between service users and the professionals who “treat” them become apparent when consumers and their families tell their narratives of recovery to an audience of allied health students who are in their first year of hospital-based practice. The author proposes that social workers need to take a critical-reflective stance in relation to the teams and the professional discourses they work within. A critical-reflective approach enables students to analyze their practice within their organization's policies to look beyond the boundaries while paradoxically learning to work within them. This perspective is evoked by the use of service user narratives in educational programs of professional development. The implications for integrating consumer perspectives in social work education are discussed.

The management of social problems talk in a support group

The comprehension of the health-disease process from a multifactorial perspective has allowed important transformations in the healthcare practices. In this article, we discuss the use of the support group as a resource for mental health care, analyzing how conversations about social issues are managed in this context. Based on contributions from the social constructionist movement, we analyzed the transcripts of the conversations developed in meetings of a support group offered to patients of a mental health outpatient clinic. The analysis of the process of meaning making indicates that the discourse of the social influence on mental health is not legitimized, due to a predominant individualistic discourse, which psychologizes care and is centered on the emotional analysis of the problems of the quotidian. We argue that this mode of management brings limits to the construction of the group as a device for promoting autonomy and encouraging the social transformation processes.

Fiat Tocantins: Histórias d(e) Poderes

The writ on the autonomy of the state of Tocantins, Brazil, in the 1988 Federal Constitution employs the term 'creation'. This concept reinforces the idea of empty space and abandoned peoples through the discourses of individuals. Current research analyzes the specific and symbolic behavior of the first governor Jose Wilson Siqueira Campos, coupled to debates on the sociological, psychological and theological interpretations. The above produces the genesis of public authority and guidelines towards the legitimating of ownership and merit that involves social representation.

The implicated advocate: the discursive construction of the democratic practices of school principals in the USA

Changes in the public service sector during the last stages of the twentieth century contributed to an international reconfiguration of state-centric governance. Supported by the discourses of individualism, marketization, national governance, and competition, this (re)shaping of governance presents a specific dilemma for the political identity of educational leaders. In response to the troubling lack of international scholarship focused on the political role of educational leaders, this article provides insight into the ways in which the political identity of school leaders within the USA is influenced by dominant discourses. The understandings highlight the ways in which educational leaders are expected to realize their roles as resolute implementers of state policy, while also being directed to act as deliberative advocates within the jurisdiction of educational policy making. We believe that these competing discourses have altered the identity of educational leaders into what we have labeled as the implicated advocate. The purpose of this article is to provide the field of the politics of educational with a concept that may expose the double bind that is experienced by the educational leaders.

Neoliberalism and the marginalisation of social justice: the making of an education policy to combat social exclusion

The paper analyses how the establishment of neoliberalism, as the new global orthodoxy, in the field of education implies a substantial subjugation and marginalisation of policies and practices informed by the values of social justice and equity. The evidence from a case study on an inclusive education policy enacted to combat social exclusion and dropout in a disadvantaged inner-city area in the south of Italy are presented. The study shows how neoliberalism is increasingly re-defining the domains of validity, normativity and actuality according to an economic rationale; within these domains the actors frame the problems of social exclusion and dropout and choose the solutions to address them. It is argued that the overall framework of discourses of human capital, individualisation, school improvement, performativity and standardisation impedes any contextualised, multidimensional and critical approach to social exclusion as well as the pursuing of any egalitarian outcomes, be they (re)distributional, cultural or associational outcomes.

Fight or flight? Competing discourses of individualism and collectivism in runaway boys’ interpersonal relationships in India

An examination of interpersonal relationships of runaway youth in varying cultural contexts provides an important glimpse into processes that help construct their personhood. Informed by Relational Dialectics Theory (RDT; Baxter, 2011), this ethnographic study explored competing discourses that animate the meaning of personhood in conflict communication of runaway boys in India. A discourse of individualism with accompanying themes of individual rights, fairness, and protection of self-worth dominated youths’ communications with peers, with secondary emphasis on interpersonal harmony. In contrast, a discourse of collectivism along with themes of respect for elders and non-expression were privileged over individual desires in the relationships between runaway youth and adults. A nuanced understanding of what it means to be a child in the context of relationships in India emerged.

Adopting the European Model versus National Egoism: The Task of Surpassing Political Hysteria

Analysing the images of the self and the enemy of the two main kinds of political language in the post-communist countries of East Central European, this Hungarian case study shows the shift from personal liberty to social protection, from liberal democracy to a mixture of oligarchic and ochlocratic phenomena, from constitutional revolution to a search for forging collective identity, from individual universal human-rights discourse to collectivist, including ethnicist, public speech, and from establishing the constitutional bases of the new democratic political system to different political hysterias. Its ultimate question is how to surpass political hysteria through research into the ways and means of processing collective traumas.

“Dynamic Infertility”

Critical content analysis of eight years' of newspaper coverage of advanced reproductive technologies in Israel demonstrates that the public debate over assisted reproduction is largely characterized by personal narratives that accentuate, on the surface, a discourse of individualism. However, this study claims that beneath the surface, these women's “personal dreams,” are in fact realization of the “national dream” that promotes particular social values and demographic goals. The news coverage was found to promote a process we name “dynamic infertility,” in which women are encouraged not to accept physiological infertility but rather undergo as many fertility treatments as necessary, for as long as it takes, ultimately to bring their genetically related children into the world.

Encontros e desencontros entre adolescência e educação: relato de pesquisa-intervenção

O artigo é fruto de uma pesquisa realizada na interface entre a psicanálise e a educação cuja proposta é investigar e intervir sobre a relação do adolescente com a escola hoje. Baseou-se em uma pesquisa-intervenção realizada junto a adolescentes e aos educadores que trabalham diretamente com este segmento, desenvolvida numa escola pública do estado do Rio de Janeiro, localizada no município de Niterói. O trabalho na escola se deu através da realização de oficinas oferecidas aos integrantes de um projeto para alunos com dificuldades na conclusão do ensino fundamental. A construção de categorias de análise permitiu uma organização dos dados e das falas registrados nos relatórios, facilitando a discussão teórica a partir do campo. Dentre diversas questões observadas pela pesquisa, destaca-se a dificuldade dos adolescentes em sustentar um discurso próprio e singular sobre si, o que é reforçado pela proposta da turma especial na qual estão inseridos.

Finnish Girlhood in the Twentieth Century: Public Representations and Private Stories

Abstract This article focuses on change and continuity in the meanings of girlhood and adolescence in Finland during the twentieth century. There is an emphasis on the time period from the 1960s to the 1990s, but the article also includes a historical summary of early twentieth-century debates on girlhood and education, based on earlier research. In the article, public, normative views of girlhood are contrasted with the private experiences of girls and linked with an overview of the changing social and cultural ideals of femininity. Two main data sets will be drawn from: firstly, advice books for girls from the 1960s to the 1990s, and secondly, autobiographical stories written by girls and women of different ages in the mid-1990s. The analysis of the texts has been inspired by feminist poststructuralist theory, narrative analysis, and discourse analysis. In the course of the article, it is shown that Finnish girls’ position as individuals and citizens has constantly been questioned. Their sexuality has been seen as particularly vulnerable, and their relationship to parents has often been full of tension. However, towards the end of the twentieth century, positions invested with more agency were gradually opening up for girls and young women in Finland, especially in relation to the neo-liberal individualist discourses that had become more and more prominent during that time.

El discurso femenino de resistencia frente a la violencia dictatorial en Carne de Perra de Fátima Sime

In the present study, the main objective is to uncover the implications of the textual strategies deployed by the enunciating voice to confront violence exercised against her, both under the Chilean dictatorship and post-di tatorship. For these purposes, the argument is based on three main axes. The first one aims to the reconstruction of a broken memory, which is a product of post-traumatic conditions. The second one deals with the practices of violence, considering the nuances that they acquire when the aggression is towards a woman and, in this sense, is of particular interest the role reversal game that occurs between the victim and the victimizer. Finally, in a final section, we will explore the positioning of these marginal individual discourses in the public space, mediated by a dictatorship or a post-dictatorship, and the consequences of this in front of the hegemonic discourses.

Correct information unit analysis for determining the characteristics of narrative discourse in individuals with chronic traumatic brain injury

Primary objective: To investigate differences between individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and a control group regarding quantitative characteristics of narrative discourse including correct information units (CIUs). The secondary objective was to explore cognitive correlations with narrative discourse measurements.Research design: Case-control study.Methods: Twenty-six individuals with TBI and 24 age-, gender- and education-matched subjects without brain injury were examined. Four-frame comic strips were used for elicitation of narrative discourse. Six variables of discourse measurements (total time, total number of units and CIUs, units per time, CIUs per time and CIUs per unit) were calculated. The relationships between the 6 discourse measurements and results of standard cognitive tests were also examined, including logical memory, working memory and executive functions.Main outcomes and results: The time efficiency for narrative discourse (i.e. total time, units per time and CIUs per time) was significantly decreased in the TBI group. Moreover, time efficiency was significantly related to measurements of working memory and executive function. The TBI group did not differ from the control group with regard to total number of units and CIUs and CIUs per unit.Conclusion: Decreased time efficiency is the most critical characteristic of narrative discourse in individuals with TBI.

Constrained by choice: Young women negotiate the discourses of marriage and motherhood

This project explored young women’s identity constructions in the context of competing and changing cultural ideals of womanhood, such as feminist discourses and neoliberal discourses of choice and individualism. Specifically, we were interested in how young women attending university in the new millennium envisioned their futures. Thirty women, aged 18–26, who were university students taking courses in Psychology, participated in 15 research conversations with two participants and an interviewer. Using discourse analysis, we show how the young women routinely privileged the ideal of women as wives and mothers, yet positioned themselves as autonomous individuals making free choices and, thereby, personally responsible for managing the problems in their lives. They also ignored gender politics by avoiding or glossing over talk about women’s inequality and criticisms of traditional family and workplace arrangements.

Order in ‘polylogue’: an investigation of argumentational discourse units in diplomatic negotiation

Examination of negotiation as a formal and informal interactional activity within institutional contexts has increasingly become prevalent in the literature (see for example Arminen 2005; Firth 1995a, 1995b). Many of these studies have focused on a fine-grained microanalysis of the local determination of meaning of utterances and their sequential organization invoking Conversation Analysis as a methodological tool in monolingual settings. Few crosslinguistic comparisons of turn-taking or the organization of turn design in different linguistic and cultural contexts have been made and few investigations of language use in large multilingual, international meetings such as the European Union or the United Nations have been published. Polylogue within these proceedings are highly regulated but contributions are also ‘discontinuous’ and ‘chaotic’ (Sannino, 2006). Conversations are better characterized as a collection of ‘discourse units’ (Houtkoop and Mazeland, 1985) which may or may not be linearly ordered. This paper will focus on describing the structure of argumentational discourse units (Kjaerbeck, 1998) as constructed by bilingual delegates in interventions to a plenary debate in an international organization. It will be argued that despite the seemingly ‘discontinuous’ and ‘chaotic’ nature of the debate, order can be found in the construction of individual discourse units. A crosslinguistic and crosscultural comparison is drawn by comparing findings with Kjaerbeck’s (op.cit.) analysis of the structure of argumentational discourse units in simulated business negotiations in Denmark and Mexico.

Beyond Utterances: Distributed Cognition as a Framework for Studying Discourse in Adults with Acquired Brain Injury

Considerable effort has been directed at understanding the nature of the communicative deficits observed in individuals with acquired brain injuries. Yet several theoretical, methodological, and clinical challenges remain. In this article, we examine distributed cognition as a framework for understanding interaction among communication partners, interaction of communication and cognition, and interaction with the environments and contexts of everyday language use. We review the basic principles of distributed cognition and the implications for applying this approach to the study of discourse in individuals with cognitive-communication disorders. We also review a range of protocols and findings from our research that highlight how the distributed cognition approach might offer a deeper understanding of communicative mechanisms and deficits in individuals with cognitive communication impairments. The advantages and implications of distributed cognition as a framework for studying discourse in adults with acquired brain injury are discussed.

The Western Reception of Buddhism

This article argues that the West’s positive reception of Buddhism from the late nineteenth century to the present has been informed by the continuing influence of three factors: first, popular cultural transmission of information about the religion; second, celebrity patronage and Buddhist celebrities; and third, the manipulation of the image of Buddhism to fit the pressing intellectual and social issues of the time. This has resulted in a distinctively modern form of Buddhism that is deeply imbued with the key cultural and religio-spiritual discourses of secularisation, individualism and consumer capitalism that have resulted in the transformation of Western religion since the late nineteenth century (McMahan 2008: 27-59). Recent scholarship has emphasised that the encounter of Buddhism and the West, mediated in the nineteenth century by popular cultural phenomena including Edwin Arnold’s poetic biography The Light of Asia (1879) and the World’s Parliament of Religions (held in Chicago in 1893 in conjunction with Columbian Exposition, a celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the New World), was a mutual affair in which certain Buddhists engaged with Western discourses in order to exhibit the congruence of Buddhism with modernity and science, and Western Buddhists and sympathisers attempted to incorporate Buddhism into the framework of Western philosophy and the emergent discipline of psychology (Snodgrass 2003: 115-22, 227-30). Central to this was the rhetorical construction of Buddhism as a religion that rivalled Christianity in ethical excellence and outshone it in compatibility with science and thus modernity (Prebish 1999: 6). This articles concentrates on the influence of celebrity and popular cultural forms in the familiarisation of Buddhism in the West to build on and reinforce the intellectualist scholarship of Prebish, Snodgrass and McMahan (among others), because until very recently these factors were rarely admitted to be of significance in matters of religion.

Individualisation and social exclusion: the case of young people not in education, employment or training

The characteristics, experiences and long-term prospects of young people outside the labour market and education have attracted widespread international attention in recent decades, and the specific category of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) has been a policy concern for the UK Government since 1997. This paper examines the analytical and empirical basis of our knowledge of NEET young people, in the light of more general conceptualisations of social exclusion and the individualisation of social risk. It relates the NEET category to a conception of social exclusion in which the central policy focus is on moving young people across a boundary between participation and non-participation, and inequalities within education and employment receive less attention. This focus, allied with discourses of individualisation, obscures the structural basis of inequality in education and training. However, the paper argues that the research evidence shows that individualised approaches based on personal and cultural characteristics of NEET young people are inadequate to understand this group and frame policy. The paper proposes that stronger versions of social exclusion need to be used in constructing solutions which acknowledge the basis of NEET issues in wider social inequalities.

Overcoming stigma: how young people position themselves as counselling service users

Increasing attention has been focused on adolescent help-seeking in relation to services aimed at promoting mental health and wellbeing. Much research reinforces the ubiquity of concerns about negative stigmatisation by peers as a barrier to young people accessing services. This paper draws on interviews conducted with young people, who completed a course of counselling in school, to investigate how they managed and negotiated this. Drawing on positioning theory from discourse analysis, young people's accounts are analysed with reference to the variety of positions they articulated and adopted. This demonstrates how they elaborated and reinforced virtuous problem-solver positions within broader discourses of individualisation and normalisation, and resisted positioning within a stigmatised mental illness discourse. Although focused on a small sample, the analysis offers potential insights into the ways other people may negotiate stigma concerns to access mental health resources, while also demonstrating the utility of positioning theory for understanding stigma and normalisation.

The National Myth of Receptivity in Brazil

The production of positive national images is currently high on the political agenda in Brazil. While Brazil’s economic growth and increasing importance in the international arena, both politically and economically, are undeniable, it seems that there is quite a lot of work to do in the social–psychological sphere to keep up with the economic advances. Our research has shown that while Brazil’s official discourse and Brazilians’ individual discourses are tendentious and tend to create an image of Brazil and of Brazilians as more receptive than other nations and indeed as almost xenophile, at the same time people hold strongly xenophobic views but tend to deny it and escape behind the normative discourse of receptivity. We analyse collected discourses and present various forms of denial of xenophobia in Brazil via a qualitative study conducted in a university setting in São Paulo.