Interplay Of Discourses Research Articles

Curriculum Making Across Sites of Activity in Upper Secondary School Vocational Education and Training: A Review of the Research in Sweden

Purpose: This paper presents a qualitative systematic review of Swedish research on vocational education and training (VET) at the upper secondary school level over the past 20 years. The review is based on a theoretical model on curriculum making as social practice that may serve as model for comparative studies between countries. By introducing the model, the ambition is to open for new perspectives on VET curriculum in policy and practice. Questions regarding key themes and the interplay of discourses and processes across multiple sites in the education system have not been addressed in previous systematic reviews of Swedish VET research. Methods: The methodological approach in the present paper is a qualitative systematic research review with an integrative and interpretative purpose and research design. The qualitative review is based on the conceptual model of curriculum making as social practice, seeking to capture the inherent complexity and porous boundaries of education systems and movements of ideas, discourses and actors between sites of activity. The model is used for mapping the research, and a content analysis for identifying main themes and emphases and exploring and discussing the potential gaps that may inform future international research studies. Findings: The results show that the research is focused on the micro and nano sites of curriculum making, with connections to macro site activities of national curriculum policy enactment. Research focusing on the macro site of activity has an emphasis on national policy and policymaking regarding the relationship between academic and vocational knowledge/programmes and apprenticeship and employability. In the micro and nano sites of activity – which comprise the majority of the research – the main themes are vocational knowing and identity, teaching, learning and assessment practices and work-based learning. Conclusion: An observation is the absence of principals and middle leaders as actors and informants in the studies. There is little evidence of actors moving between sites of activity and the meso site of activity only comprise a very small part of the research. In this respect, there is a potential gap to be explored, not least regarding how local curricula and syllabi are made and shaped in terms of the influence of representatives from local authorities, companies, trade unions, employer associations, universities and regional agencies. Curriculum making as social practice has the potential to be used for comparative international studies and as a framework that takes national differences in VET education systems into account.

Can You Get There from Here? Difficulties in Generating EU Strategic Culture

Abstract Despite conceptual and methodological ambiguities, strategic culture has become a useful notion in international politics. An extension of this is the emergence of debates concerning the EU’s endeavors to cultivate a strategic culture at a supranational level. The EU has functioned as a constructivist laboratory insofar as its integration has been synonymous with the formation of institutional identity and decision-making processes that are building blocks of strategic culture. Employing the definition of strategic culture as the interplay of discourse and practice arrived at through an elite-negotiated reality, we undertake a document analysis that addresses an often neglected issue: what are some of the mechanisms that have led EU strategic culture to advance or stagnate? Beyond simple constructivist accounts, we investigate EU strategic culture formation through lessons gleaned from political and organizational/institutional psychology’s understanding of how biased reasoning affects decision-making. We claim that groupthink bias and other biases within the decision-making apparatuses of EU institutions have shaped EU strategic culture formation. This approach enables us to better understand the specific nature of the EU’s efforts to solidify its strategic culture, as well as the prospects for the EU to coherently execute grand strategy addressing challenges in the EU neighborhood and the Indo-Pacific.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of the US and China Political Speeches—Based on the Two Speeches Respectively by Trump and Wang Yi in the General Debate of the 72nd Session of UN Assembly

The research attempts to analyze two political discourses delivered respectively by American president Donald Trump and Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi in the 72nd session of UN assembly. With Fairclough’s 3-Dimensional Discourse Model as the analytical framework, we make an investigation into the two political discourses so as to gain insights into the interplay of discourse, ideology and society, by examining linguistic characteristics of text, discursive and social practice dimensions. On the first dimension of text, we find that both leaders prefer Judgment resources to the other two resources within the Affect System in their remarks, by resorting to the new advancement in Systemic Functional Grammar—Martin’s Attitude subsystem under his Appraisal framework, and closely examining the interpersonal metafunctions, coupled with statistical measures. Within the Judgment subsystem, there exist significant differences between the two speeches in terms of Tenacity+ resources. On the dimension of discursive practice, our research reveals that both leaders use a great number of intertextuality resources in the remarks. Besides, both leaders have a preference to the sub-category of “The Original Producer of Discourse being the Speaker’s Compatriots” under the category of “Intertextuality”. That is, Wang Yi has a preference for the lines of Chinese sages in the Antiquity, whereas Trump is fond of using intertextuality resources from a diversity of domains, such as laws and statues, legal texts and documents of governments. Lastly, we develop an understanding of roles played by “American First” ideology and Chinese government’s national interest in today’s political arena through analyzing technologizing means of discourses.

The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics by Victoria Pitts-Taylor

Reviewed by: The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics by Victoria Pitts-Taylor Keyvan Shafiei Victoria Pitts-Taylor, The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics, Duke University Press, 2016 The brain matters. Says the opening line from Victoria Pitts-Taylor’s The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics. On the face of it, the human brain matters inasmuch as it is the body’s central information processing organ; the CEO that presides over many of our executive bodily functions. But the brain matters beyond the ways in which it has biologically evolved and currently processes information. The brain also matters in social thought, as neuroscientific research has historically informed widespread perceptions of certain bodies and persons at the social and institutional level. Moreover, the brain is embodied, and bodies accrue social and political meanings beyond what they represent at the level of scientific interest. Pitts-Taylor takes this interplay between science and culture as her starting point, and she investigates the entanglement of brains and bodies with cultures and ideologies (1). [End Page E-3] The project of Pitts-Taylor’s book can be broadly situated at the crossroads of feminist theory, neuroscience, philosophy of biology, social epistemology, and queer and disability theory. In the introduction, she limns the broad historical architecture of this varied, interdisciplinary locale. For much of 20th century thought, the brain and the mind had been separately conceptualized as objects of philosophical and scientific inquiry. The brain belonged to the body, for the most part, while the mind was conceived as an epiphenomenal happening of its own. Toward the end of the century, however, such conceptual distinctions began to seriously weaken, as the boundaries between philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience started to erode. Soon, the brain and the mind coalesced into a biological whole, and a new conception of the mind as both embodied and deeply social came into prominence among some researchers in the neurobiological sciences. At this juncture, the mind/brain, with its deeply social profile and underpinnings, was no longer regarded as biologically fixed. Instead, the brain was now understood as “the product of embodied experience,” as “the foundation for (and reflected in) social structures,” and as “subject to intervention and transformation.” (5) The Brain’s Body follows in this lineage of naturalistic questioning into, among other things, the mindedness of the body, the bio-materiality of cognition, and the situatedness of cognizing bodies in material cultures. In the spirit of critical rebelliousness, however, Pitts-Taylor’s book turns this lineage on itself, animating its critique and commentary by calling the cultural situatedness of this tradition itself into question. If the brain, qua the object of study, is plastic and can be socially influenced, should we not, qua theorists of the embodied brain, also heed and problematize the ways that such influences configure into our theorizing about the brain and the body? Pitts-Taylor thinks that we should! But this means that our theorizing about the brain is itself deeply plastic and impressionable, and thus open to the influence of social and ideological structures. Pitts-Taylor’s book, in a nutshell, is concerned with this concentric interplay of brains, bodies, and power structures. In a view that the book persuasively argues for, this interdependence is not merely symbolic, but also extends into the ways in which material structures are configured, including the literal structure of the brain. As such, and as the subtitle of the work suggests, “the book is concerned with the corporeal politics of the brain and the neurobiological body”(5) wherein the interplay of discourse and ideology manifests not merely through symbolisms and at the level of representations, but also in the corporeality of the world around us. [End Page E-4] Along these lines, Chapter 1 offers a discussion of the phenomenon of plasticity. The concept of neural plasticity, which refers to the ability of our brains to change and be changed, captures an exciting reprieve from the orthodoxy of neurodeterminism and biological reductionism. But, with the advancement of various forms of biotechnology, plasticity research also now holds potential for different modes of biogovernance and pharmaceutical intervention into contemporary life.1As such, plasticity is a...

Food sovereignty and agro-ecology in Karnataka: interplay of discourses, identities, and practices

ABSTRACTKarnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS), a farmers’ movement, and a member of La Via Campesina, has been encouraging zero-budget natural farming in Karnataka, India, within the framework of food sovereignty and agro-ecology. Using the experiences of KRRS, this article addresses the question of the extent of pluralism within the discourse of food sovereignty. Focusing on the interplay of local and global practices, discourses and identities, the article throws light upon contradictions and negotiations between “necessary abstractions” and “particularisms”, spaces and places of resistance and implications it may have on struggles at both local and global levels.

‘They want more of everything’: what university middle managers’ attitudes reveal about support for off-campus doctoral students

ABSTRACTAdvances in technology and a shifting demographic of post-graduate students have resulted in a larger than ever number of off-campus PhD students. These students tend to be less satisfied than their on-campus counterparts with their candidature experience. Improving the current situation requires effort from multiple university stakeholders, including academic middle managers, who play a role in allocating resources and setting research training agenda. However, with the intensification of academic workload, academic managers might not view the support of off-campus PhD students as a high priority. This study investigates the attitudes of middle managers in a large Australian university concerning the provision of training and support to off-campus PhD students. The findings reveal that a complex interplay of discourses hinder the provision of support to off-campus PhD students. Implications for practice are discussed.

Flooding the sanitary city

Urban water flows are constitutive elements of Hanoi's morphology. Regular floods across the city illustrate that Hanoi's amphibious character is a central impediment to the installation of a ‘dry and sanitary city', the global modernist ideal of a separation of urban wastewater flows from public space through their redirection into large underground networks. Currently, the first attempt by the city government to construct a citywide sewerage network since the colonial period is taking place. In accordance with the ideal of the sanitary city, it aims at a unification and centralization of hitherto socio-spatially diverse arrangements of sanitation provision in the city. At the same time, rapid urbanization has radically transformed Hanoi, contributing to a continuous diversity of urban sanitation infrastructures and thus defeating the goal of unification and centralization. Starting from an urban political ecology perspective, this paper takes a historical focus to explain Hanoi's sanitation system as emerging from an interplay of discourses and material urbanization dynamics. Arguing that discourses permeate the material reproduction of urban wastewater flows and infrastructures, the paper focuses on the role of the sanitary city ideal for the reproduction of sanitation infrastructures and the contestations and stabilizations of this ideal in Hanoi. Furthermore, the paper addresses the material reproduction of urban sanitation and drainage in Hanoi as part of broader urbanization dynamics, based on a conceptualization of regular floods at the urban fringe of Hanoi as indicators for persisting socio-spatial fragmentations of the city's sanitation system.

Recontextualizing Communicative Leadership: The Interplay of Discourses in a Swedish Multinational Organization

ABSTRACTThis study employs a discursive lens to empirically analyze the sensemaking of leaders’ and employees’ communication in four different cultural contexts within a multinational organization. Communicative leaders were defined and recontextualized as strategists, interpreters/translators, instructors/facilitators, and sensemakers, considering their communication behaviors and attitudes toward employees. Data suggest that the recontextualization of microdiscourses of communication and leadership emphasizes the interplay of local and global contexts in discourses of leadership. The data also indicate that contexts (and consequently macro- and microdiscourses) are blended in leaders’ and employees’ accounts, shaping constructions of communicative leadership depending on different contextual conditions. The interplay is important to form a suitable leadership discourse that makes sense for the local members and helps them work together more effectively.

Stem cell miracles or Russian roulette?: patients’ use of digital media to campaign for access to clinically unproven treatments

In this article, we examine how patients use digital media to gain access to treatments that have yet to be clinically proven as safe and effective. Making reference to the case of an Australian patient who achieved notoriety following a 60 Minutes television programme in 2014 following her travel to Russia to undertake stem cell treatment, in the article we discuss the dynamic interplay of discourses of hope, risk and trust in this digitally mediated context. As we argue, Web 2.0 digital media provides patient activists with a powerful means to generate their own framings of the significance of treatments especially when linked with more traditional media such as television. Our findings underline how citizens may use digital media to create ‘communities of hope’ that sustain optimistic portrayals of treatments that may be resistant to official, regulatory discourses of risk-benefit and trust. Patients’ growing use of digital media, we conclude, necessitates a reconceptualisation of ‘health’ and ‘risk’ and approaches to regulating treatments that are unproven and hence deemed ‘risky’.

Reading Interventionist Research in Two Urban Elementary Schools Through a Discursive Lens

In this study, I reframe the debate on minority parents and their children’s educators by moving beyond concerns around student academic achievement and toward the quality of relationships among adult stakeholders. Using an interpretive lens based on Foucault’s notion of discourse, I examine three research vignettes drawn from an interventionist research project in two urban elementary schools. This examination identifies and responds to interpersonal, inter-institutional, and inter-epistemological dysfunctions. I make a concluding case for the transformative potential in the interplay of discourses: When inequalities and exclusions are redressed in the research, the project realizes a discursive and ethical possibility.

Landscape governance as policy integration ‘from below’: A case of displaced and contained political conflict in the Netherlands

Agrienvironmental schemes (AES) have been a predominant manifestation of environmental policy Integration in the EU. However, rather than strictly following formal AES policy, farmers across Europe have taken various other initiatives to integrate environmental and agricultural practices. Mostly, these integrative initiatives were based on dynamic actor networks at various levels, responding to local problems and challenges. Compared with situations where, from the top down, one (mostly weaker) policy domain is integrated into another, the kind of integration taking place in these examples may be called more ‘fundamental’. Here, integration is already embedded in the practical outcomes envisioned in specific places. The parts of the outcome require each other. However, this fundamental form of integration may render problems at other levels and sectors of governance. In this paper we present a case study of an initiative called Farming for Nature. The initiative aimed to integrate farming and nature more thoroughly than EU and national policies and incorporated some important other characteristics of the area, such as its water dynamics and relationships with the urban environment. However, it also involved some key differences from mainstream policy; and although it resonated with EU support for participative governance, these differences rendered a lengthy process towards implementation lasting more than half a decade. We use the concept of ‘landscape governance’—operationalized as the interplay of discourses, institutional practices, and natural–spatial conditions—to understand the politics of scale involved when mainstream government policies and local integrative initiatives meet. Particular attention is paid to how the local ideas toned down some of their integrative ingredients in order to comply with mainstream sectoral policy discourse. We find that the type of landscape governance implemented shaped the initiatives into a form that contributed to their implementation, but simultaneously displaced and contained political conflict in a way that prevented public debate.

‘I Just Don't Agree’: A Voice-Oriented Analysis of An IFPS Case of Alleged Child Maltreatment

In contrast to the many outcome studies of Intensive Family Preservation Services (IFPS), little is known about the underlying personal and relational dynamics of family crisis interventions. This article focuses on the core evolving dynamics of the changing self-presentations of a parent involved in an intensive home-based family preservation case of alleged child maltreatment. Three key family intervention sessions were videotaped and transcribed including both verbal and nonverbal behavior. The Listening Guide Method – a theoretically flexible, qualitative, relationally oriented method of in-depth interpretative analysis – served as our guide for this case analysis. In the processes of change toward a jointly constructed meaningful narrative on responsibility and self-care, two key elements emerged as playing a pivotal role: (1) the momentum of a potential referral of children to out-of-home care that precedes the start of an IFPS intervention and (2) the rhizomatic or root-like intertwinement of the voices of both parent and therapist with respect to the rationale for any involvement of society in the family. We argue that discourses on imminent placement in the context of family preservation deserve a genuine and valuable position in the initial discourse of a family therapist when entering a family in the context of crisis intervention. Both in understanding and driving any processes of change, we may need to reconsider our own willingness to step into the blending interplay of discourse and counter-discourse with our clients on the subject of our often drastic intervention. Consequently, we may read this narrative analysis as an invitation to reflect on the conceptualization of ‘client readiness’ in psychotherapy and to shift our thinking on preconditions for therapy from a client's readiness toward a therapist's attentiveness to listen.

The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema

This essay concerns the role of political affect in cinema. As a case study, I analyze the 2006 film V for Vendetta as cinematic rhetoric. Adopting a multi-modal approach that focuses on the interplay of discourse, figure, and ground, I contend that the film mobilizes viewers at a visceral level to reject a politics of apathy in favor of a politics of democratic struggle. Based on the analysis, I draw conclusions related to the evaluation of cinematic rhetoric, the political import of mass art, and the character and role of affect in politics.

Creating Public Spaces and Practiced Places for Democracy, Discourse, and the Emergence of Civil Society

A question before us in the process of creating public spaces and practiced places for democracy and civil society concerns what democracy means for civil society and what civil society means for democratization of the national state in a globalizing world? In this article the author discusses the meaning of democracy and civil society, and the relation each shares. Following, the author examines the nature of space through the work of [Lefebvre H (1991) The production of space. (Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith). Blackwell, Oxford, Cambridge, Mass] drawing on the work of the French theorist to construct a tripartite model of public space. As well, the author examines the notion of creating practiced places for democracy civil society, drawing on the work of [de Certeau M (1984) The practice of everyday life. University of California Press, Berkeley] to understand the interplay of discourse in reconfiguring space as a practiced place. The author also examines social space and power-geometry as it relates to creating public spaces and practiced places for democracy and civil society. In the final section, the author provides reflections on the work that lies ahead for democratization of the nation-state and the emergence of democratic civil society.

Michel Foucault og kritiske perspektiver på liberalismen. Governmentality eller genealogi som analysestrategi

Kaspar Villadsen: Michel Foucault and critical perspectives on liberalism. Governmentality or genealogy as a strategy of analysis
 
 Although the literature on governmentality has produced a series of highly interesting studies focusing on questions of liberalism, government and the state, it is troubled by a number of problems. This paper suggests that some of these problems result from the unclear status of a core analytical concept within this literature: political rationality. The paper seeks to clarify the epistemological and analytical meaning of this concept and to give some suggestions as to which alternative concepts and analytical strategies we can draw from Foucault for future studies of government and its rationalities. It is proposed that we should avoid seeing politics as shot through by some kind of homogeneous, all-embracing rationality. Rather, we should explore, in its unique specificity, the interplay of discourses and counter-discourses and their complex relation to various institutions.

Deploying soldiers, deploying words

An underlying assumption of this issue's theme is that not only can language be manipulated to serve political interests, but using language differently opens spaces for political action which can reinforce or go beyond existing parameters of thinking. Often, linguistic strategies enable political action, for good or ill, which previously would have been proscribed. In postwar Germany, the use of the military abroad was a taboo written in the blood of the Second World War. Yet in 1995 German combat troops were sent with overwhelming support as part of a peacekeeping mission to the former Yugoslavia, a location that nary a year earlier the German Foreign Minister had sworn German troops would never again encounter. How was it possible that in the course of one year the German government garnered parliamentary support and undertook a historic first with relatively little public debate? The usual answers, which lie in the pragmatics of politics—the exigencies of the NATO alliance, for example, or the sheer urgency of the situation in Bosnia—are seldom adequate to explain how such a decision came to be. For this we need to look at the workings of language and politics in the development of policy. The post‐Cold‐War/post‐unification era in Germany unsettled myriad concepts and terms, from German national identity to the meaning of war and peace. New situations have arisen with no clear guide to political action, and existing policy and identity discourses stemming from the Cold War found themselves struggling to establish themselves anew. A discourse establishes itself by controlling meaning—by setting the boundaries of interpretation. A discourse is said to prevail when it succeeds in establishing linguistic dominance over the meaning of key terms in a given context. Controlling meaning is a linguistic strategy that sets the parameters of the possible, both for understanding the past and for constructing the future. Becoming aware of this process aids both political and historical analysis, and the search for ways to transcend some of the more confrontative strategies and consciously move the interplay of discourses to a more hermeneutic level. Let us observe this process at work in the case of the first postwar deployment of German combat troops, exactly 50 years after 1945. I refer to the supporters of deployment as the “prevailing discourse"—these consist primarily of the governing conservative—liberal coalition and a majority of the opposition Social Democrats. Those opposed to the use of the German military abroad I refer to as the counter discourse. They are almost exclusively composed of the remaining Social Democrats, Greens, and the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS; the successor to the defunct East German Communist Party).

Taleworlds and Storyrealms: The Phenomenology of Narrative

The Phenomenological Framework for Narrative Analysis.- One Edgework: Frame and Boundary in the Phenomenology of Narrative.- Two Multiple Contexting: The Story Context of Stories.- Three Presentation of Self in Storytelling.- Four Joint Storytelling: The Interplay of Discourse and Interaction.- Five Storyability and Eventfulness: Beyond Referential Theories of Narrative.- Six Taleworlds and Real: Ontological Puzzles about Narrative.- Appendix Transcription Devices.