Key Discourses Research Articles

Hemp for health: a historical perspective on the marketing of cannabis-based foods in Sweden

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide the first comprehensive examination of the early cannabis-based food products industry, using Sweden as a case study. Drawing upon historical newspaper articles and advertisements from the Swedish Historical Newspaper Archive, the authors trace the short-lived development of the industry, from the initial exploitation of fears of tuberculosis in the late 19th century, followed by the “boom” in hempseed extract products and the widening of its claimed effects and, finally, increased skepticism and critiques of such products across the popular press in the early 20th century. Design/methodology/approach A rigorous search of the Swedish Historical Newspaper Archive was conducted to gather newspaper articles and advertisements on cannabis-based foods. The collected resources were scrutinized using critical discourse analysis to tease out key discourses at work, particularly around the concepts of health, nutrition and science. Findings The authors find that central to the marketization of cannabis-based foods was the construction of disease based on scientific and medical discourse, fearmongering to create a strong consumer base and individualization to place responsibility on consumers to take action to protect their family’s health. This demonstrates not only the long historical relationship between science and food marketing but also how brands’ health claims could often be fraudulent or overstated. Originality/value It is important to cast a historical lens on the commercialization of cannabis-based food products because demand for similar types of products has rapidly grown over the past decade. Now, just as before, manufacturers tap into consumers’ insecurities about health, and many of the same questions continue to be mooted about products’ safety. Paying greater attention to the broader and problematic history of commercial cannabis can, thus, serve as a reminder for both consumers and policymakers to think twice about whether hemp really is for health and if the claims it espouses are a mirage rather than a miracle.

Assembling tigers, dragons and hells: relational materialist geographies of curated themed spaces

Themed spaces and theme parks constitute of significant human-based desires and linguistic discourses that stabilises/destabilises their social identities and materialities. This paper draws on a relational materialist perspective to examine Singapore’s longstanding themed space, Haw Par Villa, to offer insights into its social and material stability and instabilities. Relational materialism facilitates observations and analysis of interactions of humans and their material worlds on the same ontological plane where human’s agencies are de-centred. Social and material objects are seen to operate in mutually constitutive fashions. The development of a site/theme park and its larger country context are conceptualised here as ‘assemblages’ using DeLanda’s brand of assemblage theory to reveal the operations of human-based ‘desires’ alongside material agencies. Specifically, the desires of the founder and the key discourses related to the founder’s name helped constitute and stabilise the social identity and materiality of the Haw Par Villa through its eventful history of physical destruction, reconstruction, rebranding and reimagining. Despite his eventual non-involvement with Haw Par Villa’s management due to his passing, the founder’s desires and discourses linger on in various forms, resulting in subsequent attempts to rework the identity and materiality of this themed space failing if the attempts are not congruent on some level with the founder’s desires and discourses. This resulted in the failure of first, the state and, subsequently, private endeavours in re-constituting the themed space. In doing so, this paper contributes to a socio-material understanding of the resilience and sustainability of themed spaces.

국제개발협력과 로컬라이제이션: 이론적 변천과 실천적 적용

Purpose: By introducing localisation and exploring its key issues, this study aims to raise awareness of localisation within the context of international development cooperation in Korea and derive implications. Originality: Localisation is an approach for promoting sustainable development by strengthening local capacities and expanding the use of locally available resources, with its necessity being increasingly highlighted amid the global economic crisis and various international challenges. Methodology: This study analyzes key discourses of international development cooperation, the theoretical background and major concepts of localisation, as well as evaluation frameworks and issues, through a literature review. Result: Localisation is regarded as a key paradigm in international development cooperation, as it enhances the autonomy of partner countries and incorporates the local social and cultural context. Moreover, it has been identified as playing a significant role in reshaping power dynamics between donors and local actors, while fostering the active participation of local communities. Conclusion and Implication: The successful implementation of localisation necessitates equitable partnerships, active engagement of local communities, resolution of conflicts over control between donors and local entities, and a development approach that prioritizes sustainability. Addressing these challenges requires establishing a forum for dialogue grounded in mutual trust and cooperation between donors and local actors, thereby enhancing the sustainability of international development cooperation.

Loss and autonomy: Making sense of rural life at the inner periphery

AbstractWe have studied how people make sense of their lives in peripheral rural regions. While there are disadvantages in terms of infrastructure, transportation and so forth, we have focused on the ways that people understand their specific position and how they feel about it. Using the tools of the Strong Programme in cultural sociology, we have identified two key discourses: the discourse of loss and the discourse of autonomy. Through the former, residents describe the decline of traditions, of rural community and, in particular, the vanishing ideal of rural childhood. Through the latter, they re‐frame these societal developments as problems of individuals. The dichotomy between individual autonomy and individual dependence is employed as a key cultural framework for explaining and understanding life in a peripheral rural region. The research is based on interviews with residents of small rural municipalities located at the inner periphery of the Czech Republic.

Funded, then forgotten: politics, public memory and national school reform

ABSTRACT Governments apply education policies and funding compacts to shape school reform. Yet, once agreements are endorsed and ratified, the ongoing commitment to the enactment of agreed education reforms can be ‘forgotten’. In this paper, the Australian National School Reform Agreement is examined as an illustrative example of the ways in which policy promises are articulated by politicians as key policy actors. We draw on Wodak’s discursive analytic framework, alongside Ricoeur’s conceptualisation of the ‘forgetfulness’ of collective public memory to demonstrate how successive politicians have attempted to frame public discourse through official ministerial pronouncements in ways that obscured earlier promises. By focusing on key discourses surrounding funding, achievement and equity, and collaboration, politicians have sought to redefine public accounts of school reform in deliberate ways, in which politics takes priority over policymaking. In doing so, politicians work as key educational policy actors who seek to discursively shape public sentiment and collective memory regarding school reform. Given the increasing emphasis on national school reform in Australia and elsewhere, it is important to ‘remember’ the need to work towards more deliberative mediations of national school reform, in which the purpose and value of policymaking is rendered purposefully in the collective public memory.

Beyond inclusion politics: A critical discourse analysis of sex and gender in medical education.

Medical training refers frequently to sex and gender, yet these terms are often used vaguely and interchangeably with little critical engagement. We aimed to better understand the key discourses around sex and gender in medical training. All verbal and written instances of gendered/sexed language, occurring in lectures, slides and provided written materials, within 1year of preclerkship medical education at a single institution in Canada were recorded autoethnographically by a medical student. We analysed these instances using critical discourse analysis informed by anticolonial, feminist and queer theoretical perspectives, particularly contrasting the concepts of governmentality and ungovernability to better understand how sex and gender are deployed in medical training. Despite the proliferation of ostensibly queer- and trans-positive content in medical curricula, sex and gender were frequently communicated inconsistently and imprecisely. In addition to, and perhaps as a result of, this inconsistent use, we uncovered three key discourses of (1) gender policing, (2) misogyny and (3) gender legibility. Collectively, these discourses can illustrate how medical education governs and reinforces gender norms. The repetitive and everyday use of ill-defined and uncritical gendered and sexed language can be seen to discursively uphold systems of cisheteropatriarchy and transphobia within medicine. Trans and intersex bodies cannot be considered addendums to be tacked on to a foundation of cisnormative and inaccurate teaching in medical education. Institutional attempts to improve curricula must go beyond the addition of new modules, which can be undermined by otherwise cisheteropatriarchal understandings of sex and gender.

The Rise of #Cartels: Exploring the Organizational Operations and Messaging of Public Perception on Twitter

Mexican cartel activity has become increasingly violent, causing civilians to question the government’s ability to defend against this social and political threat. Within this context, the current study utilizes an exploratory framework to evaluate cartel portrayal on Twitter. We conducted a thematic analysis of data collected via the NVivo NCapture tool yielding 2,652 tweets spanning multiple countries, seeking to understand the key discourse associated with social perception of cartel activity, as well as the status and operations of Mexico’s cartels. Results revealed several areas of focus and varying sentiments based on population demographics, such as location, and type of content.

The psychosocial foundation of China’s state-led nationalism

ABSTRACT Existing research extensively documents the Communist Party of China's strategic utilisation of nationalism to bolster its legitimacy, primarily through shaping the nationalist belief system in alignment with its political agenda and historical narrative. However, this article proposes an additional viewpoint: the success of the state-led nationalist endeavour also hinges on resonating with the common psychological traits of the Chinese masses. Without such resonance, the nationalist project may encounter resistance. Therefore, this article posits that Chinese face culture constitutes a foundational aspect of the common psychological makeup of the Chinese people. It serves as a frame for the Party-state to construct nationalist narratives and beliefs, fostering sentiments of national pride, shame, and attitudes towards international affairs. Key discourses such as 'the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation', 'the century of humiliation', and 'the backward will be beaten' symbolically appeal to Chinese notions of face and contribute to the narrative's effectiveness.

Inclusion for STEM, the institution, or minoritized youth? Exploring how educators navigate the discourses that shape social justice in informal science learning practices

AbstractUnderstanding equitable practice is crucial for science education since science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and STEM learning practices remain significantly marked by structural inequalities. In this paper, building on theories of discourse and situated meaning developed by Foucault, Gee, and Sedgewick, we explore how educators navigated discourses about social justice in informal science learning (ISL) across four UK sites. We draw on qualitative, multimodal data across 5 years of a research–practice partnership between a university, a zoo, a social enterprise working to support girls and nonbinary youth in STEM, a community digital arts center, and a science center. We identify three key discourses that shaped social justice practices across all four practice–partner sites: (1) “inclusion” for STEM, (2) “inclusion” for the institution, and (3) “inclusion” for minoritized youth. We discuss how educators (n = 17) enacted, negotiated, resisted, and reworked these discourses to create equitable practice. We argue that while the three key discourses shaped the possible meanings and practices of equitable ISL in different ways, educators used their agency and creativity to develop more expansive visions of social justice. We discuss how the affordances, pitfalls, and contradictions that emerged within and between the three discourses were strategically navigated and disrupted by educators to support the minoritized youth they worked with, as well as to protect and promote equity in ISL. This paper contributes to research on social justice in ISL by grounding sometimes abstract questions about power and discourse in ISL educators' everyday work.

Newspaper media representations of athlete experiences with eating disorders: a critical discourse analysis

ABSTRACT Athletes are at a greater risk (13.5%) of developing eating disorders (EDs) compared to the general population (4.6%). Recently, media attention on athletes with EDs has substantially increased. Given the considerable role of the media in shaping our thoughts, attitudes, and behaviours, the purpose of this study was to examine dominant discourses surrounding newspaper media portrayals of athletes with EDs. Data were collected using the NexisUni Academic database to search for newspaper articles published from 1 January 2021 to 7 June 2022. We included 154 articles for analysis. We performed a critical discourse analysis to examine what journalists say about athlete experiences with EDs, how such experiences are described, and how this constructs athlete identities (i.e. subject positions). Two key discourses were identified, each composed of underlying subject positions. The first discourse, A discourse of healthism, constructed meanings of who to hold accountable for the ED. Within this discourse were two subject positions: The self-destructive woman athlete and The legitimate athlete. The second discourse, A discourse of reductionism, centralised journalists’ reduction of the complexity of EDs. Underlying this discourse were two subject positions: The denialist man athlete and The (hyper)feminised athlete. Findings reveal how journalists drew upon discourses surrounding the body, food, and sport participation that were limiting for both women and men athletes, thus playing an active role in (re)producing gendered and physical stereotypes about athletes with EDs. These findings highlight the importance of media guidelines to resist and avoid perpetuating such stereotypes.

Creative arts and social engagement in contemporary Kenya

The chapter defers to the general principles of the Kenyan Government’s National Policy on culture and Heritage (2010), this study foregrounds the important but often overlooked connection between creative arts and social engagement. The study specifically illustrates the ways in which selected Kenyan creative artists across three distinct artistic genres creatively and imaginatively use their art to foster the kind of wisdom and activism that is required of citizens in a democratic nation. The chapter positions Kenyan creative cultures art as democratic philosophy which is central to ensuring that citizens freely engage with politics of the day thereby promoting democratic governance. Specifically, the study locates three distinct creative artistic genres, which are digital narratives, popular music and participatory theatre and considers the social role of creative artists to imaginatively observe, evaluate and develop artistic models for addressing social problems and to create collective forms of citizen engagement. To achieve its objectives, the study uses a qualitative research approach involving discourse analysis of creative artistic works by contemporary Kenyan artists within the selected genres. The discourse analytical tool helps to sift through key discourse related to Kenyan creative arts and social engagement. The information gathered is interpreted, organised and described thematically.

President Jokowi's Lip Service: Politicization of Discourse on Democracy and Anti-Corruption

Communication requires attention to honesty and trust. Communicators must have credibility that can be trusted. The speech will be rewarded if it matches the action. The discrepancy between speech and implementation action will only make a speech as lip service. This research aims to identify lip service from President Jokowi and reveal its context. This intertwined reading of the text and context will provide a comprehensive understanding of President Jokowi's lip service communication as well as an understanding of why this lip service communication occurred. This research uses the Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) method. PDA method analyzes Jokowi's lip service texts and contexts: the permissibility of demonstrations, KPK law revision, call for more criticism, and TWK for KPK employees. It has been observed that President Jokowi engages in lip service communication when the topic of discussion revolves around two key discourses: fundamental democratic values and anti-corruption measures. The research findings suggest that such communication is employed to politicize these discourses and maintain President Jokowi's image as a democratic and anti-corruption leader

Exploring the Systemic Structures That Affect Access to Physical Therapist Services for Non-Indigenous Black People in Australia.

Physical therapy is generally considered to be a white profession in Western nations. Australia's increasingly diverse population, driven largely by growth in immigration, invites Australian health systems to be responsive to factors that may impact on non-white Australian population's access to health care. Here, the authors sought to explore non-Indigenous Black people's perspectives of physical therapy in Australia. Eligible participants (n = 12) took part in semistructured, in-depth interviews and were prompted to discuss their experiences and perceptions of physical therapy. Interview data were analyzed using critical discourse analysis, underpinned by critical race theory. Participants were on average 29.4years (SD = 12.9) from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Participants described mostly positive experiences with physical therapists, but they noted that it was not widely accessed by their communities, with 2 key discourses underpinning these discussions. Discourse 1, "physiotherapy is a solution for white people," established physical therapy as primarily accessed by and welcoming of white people. "Whiteness" and the perpetuation of Western norms in physical therapy resulted in little consideration of other cultural practices. Participants' discussions also pointed to the intersections of systemic racism and social inequities such as low income and language barriers, impacting Black people's engagement with physical therapy. Discourse 2, "physiotherapists are white," was mostly concerned with how the perceived "whiteness" of professionals and lack of Black physical therapists impacts cultural safety and comfort when accessing physical therapy. Our results suggest that Westernization and whiteness persist among discourses surrounding physical therapy. Such discourses are likely to inform Black people's perceptions and experiences of physical therapy. Our analyses suggest avenues to enhance the cultural diversity of the profession and improve physical therapy accessibility for Black people in Australia by providing culturally appropriate material, including critical reflexivity, epistemic and cultural humility in the curricula, recruiting staff from diverse backgrounds, and providing outreach services to underserved populations. These findings highlight the need for increased cultural safety and diversity within the physical therapy profession to improve equity.

Online Equipment Repair Community in Russia: Searching for Environmental Discourse

Repair is recognized as an important part of the circular economy and leads to fewer resources being used, less waste, and less emissions generation. The crucial condition for scaling repairs is people’s perception of repairs as a significant social practice harmonizing the relationship between society and nature. This paper aims to analyze the key discourses of repair in the content of the posts of the biggest Russian online communities and to identify environmental discourse. These communities specialize in the repair of household appliances, IT, and telecommunications equipment and are organized by independent repairers. We collected all of the posts from the communities that contain textual information in the body of the post. Based on the analysis of the results of the theoretical discourses of repair, we identified four types of repair discourses: environmental, pedagogical, social, and the discourse of the right to repair. We formed lists of keywords corresponding to each discourse type and analyzed posts by computer processing. We concluded that the practice of repair is widespread in specialized online communities, but the content of these communities includes almost no mention of environmental discourse. Social and pedagogical discourses prevail. Based on our research results, we suggested some recommendations for greening and spreading repair.

Meanings given to race/ethnicity in everyday football talk by young adult Polish audiences: a reception study

ABSTRACT A wide body of research has focused on representations of race/ethnicity in sport media content, because of its central location in popular culture. These studies found that sport media content serves as a site where hegemonic and reductive discourses surrounding racial/ethnic identities are habitually reproduced. So far, these studies have predominantly been textual analyses. Studies that take into account the polysemic readings of media content by audiences remain few, especially beyond the Anglosphere and Western Europe. This audience reception study addresses this gap by exploring how young audiences of televised football relate to racialized preferred readings, and how they themselves give meaning to race/ethnicity and Whiteness in their everyday football talk, in the little-researched context of Poland. In 13 focus groups (n = 45) with young adults (17–30) several key discourses were identified. This study found that most of the interviewees reproduced hegemonic discourses surrounding racial/ethnic differences, in particular regarding Black football players. The study also identified that in their everyday football talk audiences (re)produced contingent hierarchies of Whiteness.

Experiences of an Insider in Qualitative Research: My Doctoral Research Journey in a Public University, Kenya

Qualitative researchers position themselves more as ‘insiders’ than ‘outsiders’ due to the nature of the research paradigm. In this paper, I will present and discuss my role and experiences as an insider researcher during my doctorate research journey. I begin by exploring the debate surrounding the role of an insider in qualitative research, in addition to highlighting key arguments within the literature, while reflecting on my personal experiences as a PhD candidate. In particular personal experiences that made the researcher play the role of an ‘insider’ more as compared to an ‘outsider’ researcher will be discussed. The first part of this paper will cover the conceptualisation of the terms ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’. This will be followed by a discussion and presentation of key discourses based on the role of an ‘insider’ in qualitative research. Being an insider researcher, I was able to access research institutions to collect data without having to organise ‘settling in’, which made it possible to collect data every day of the week at any time of the day, thus providing continuity in the data collection process. More so, I was able to control the research process by using stories, voice, and transcripts. Since it was a sensitive study, as an insider researcher, I did consider ethical concerns and the importance of counselling the participants. Challenges based on the risk of insider struggling between their role as a group member and a researcher are presented. In addition, the delicate balancing that the researcher engaged in while deciding how much of the insider information is to be shared with the participants is discussed

Parents resist sexuality education through digital activism

South Africa has high rates of HIV infection among its young population, high rates of unintended pregnancy among the youth, and extremely high rates of gender-based violence. Given all this, it is essential that young people be taught skills that will enable them to manage their sexuality. Schools have been shown to be best placed to provide accurate and relevant information on young people's sexualities. Through the Life Orientation (LO) curriculum, the Department of Basic Education (DBE) offers age-appropriate sexuality education as a response to these concerns. However, research in sexuality education shows that there is a lack of guidance and preparedness by educators, and this hampers how sexuality education is delivered in South African schools. A recent attempt by the DBE to upscale and strengthen the sexuality education curriculum in South African schools was met with resistance from parents and other lobby groups. This resistance was driven across many different media platforms, and particularly through an online hashtag #LeaveOurKidsAlone, largely on Facebook and Twitter. Through this resistance, we are introduced to parents/adult response to the teaching and learning of comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in South African schools, a voice that has been missing to a great extent in this debate. Working within a broad feminist qualitative framework, I use critical discourse analysis to map out some of the key discourses emerging from the #LeaveOurKidsAlone resistance in an attempt to understand how parents/adults use social media to resist CSE in South Africa. I foreground critically adult voices and the implications of these for the teaching and learning of CSE in South African schools.

Nationalising Women’s Bodies: Discourse and Politics of Prostitution in Ireland and Spain

This article explores how women’s sexuality has played a central role in building and reproducing the collective identity of the nation in two countries, Ireland and Spain. It argues how a nationalisation of women’s bodies created a symbolic and idealised version of womanhood, reinforced by a complex infrastructure of criminal code, places of rehabilitation and a system of surveillance operating through government, medical and religious institutions. We explore these processes through an analysis of the discourses governing prostitution in leading newspapers between 1939 and 1975, corresponding to the public nation-building projects to Catholic nationalism through the idealisation of family, motherhood and domestic life. Three key discourses from the newspaper coverage have been identified around prostitution: protecting the national body, the exile of women in prostitution and ordinary women as a threat, to trace the process of renewed nation building that occurred in both countries from the 1940s onwards.

Dialogue Logic Aware and Key Utterance Decoupling Model for Multi-Party Dialogue Reading Comprehension

Multi-party dialogue machine reading comprehension (MRC) brings an unprecedented challenge due to the multiple speakers and the complex discourse linkages among speaker-aware utterances. The majority of current methods only consider the textual aspects of dialogue situations, and pay little attention to crucial speaker-aware cues. This prevents a model from capturing the speaker’s intention and important discourse information for questions in a complex discourse relationship, leading to the model giving wrong answers. In this paper, we construct a dialogue logic graph module by the relational graph convolutional network (R-GCN) to structure the dialogue information, and design a speaker prediction task to enhance the ability to capture discourse logic. Additionally, we construct a key utterance information decoupling module that focuses on the key discourse information flow involve questions, and filters out noise information. Extensive experiments FriendsQA and Molweni show that our approach outperforms competitive baselines and current state-of-the-art models, especially when dealing with more rounds of dialogue and questions involving people, events and time.

КУКЛА ОТТЕПЕЛИ: "ДОСТРАИВАНИЕ" СКАЗКИ О БУРАТИНО В СОВЕТСКОЙ ДЕТСКОЙ ЭКРАННОЙ КУЛЬТУРЕ 1950-1960-Х ГГ

The article is based on documentary materials on the film “The Adventures of Pinocchio” (A. Ivanov-Vano, D. Babichenko). During the years of the Thaw, cinematographers argued about the need for a film based on the fairy tale story by A. Tolstoy. By this time, stereotypes had formed in solving the image of Pinocchio, which were gradually revised in Soviet children’s culture: in theater, illustrations, comics, filmstrips. The new film adaptation was made by A. Ivanov-Vano and D. Babichenko. Different assessments of this idea are given, the cultural and historical landscape on which the film originated is reconstructed. The reference point for the new animated film was the production of W. Disney. The previously unpublished documents on the production of the film, materials of the art councils of Soyuzmultfilm (RGALI) are analyzed. They allow us to construct key discourses within which leading children’s artists (E. Migunov, V. Suteev, L. Atamanov, F. Khitruk, etc.), which were authors of the main animation studio of the country “Souzmultfilm”, created their images.