Local Discourses Research Articles

From record keeping to a new knowledge regime: the special school pupil as a new pedagogical object in Prussia around 1900

ABSTRACT The history of the Hilfsschule (special school) is contested and multifaceted. For the German context, most research to date has focused on institutions or professional pioneers in special education. This paper, through a “New Historicism” perspective, asks how a group of pupils, described as “retarded”, could become a new pedagogical object within a discourse among teachers, psychiatrists, school doctors and local administrations at the end of the nineteenth century. Linking national and local discourses, this paper analyses the emergence of the special school pupil (Hilfsschulkind) in Germany within a broader discourse of educability as well as through knowledge practices, namely record-keeping systems.

Engendering a monoculture of the mind: implications for mental health policy development in Saudi Arabia

ABSTRACT The contextualization of mental health in a medical context in the age of neoliberalism within a Northern disciplinary context has been generalized to the global South through health management. Though many cultural and social idiosyncrasies shape the understanding of mental health in Saudi Arabia, it has been well documented that, by far, the most decisive influence is religion. Muslim beliefs predominantly structure every aspect of life, including ways of dealing with pathology and stress. Critical discourse theory and post-colonial hybridity theory can help integrate local discourses to alter the “discursive fabric” of mental health and subsequent policy initiatives.

Can Agroecology Provide a Panacea for Sustaining the Adoption of Soil Erosion Control Measures? A Case of Smallholder Coffea arabica Production in the Rwenzori Mountain Region, Uganda

Agroecological approaches can provide context-specific and sustainable solutions to issues confronting farming communities, by enabling consorting of the socioeconomic and ecological constraints on the farm. This study is the first attempt to test this argument, based on the challenge of sustaining the adoption of soil erosion control measures among smallholder farmers producing Coffea arabica on the Rwenzori Mountain in Uganda. Here, the adoption of soil erosion control measures remains a challenge, despite the efforts of conventional agricultural advisory services in local governments. Using a qualitative research approach, we contrasted the elements of agroecology with the local discourses, to identify if they would provide a panacea for sustaining the adoption of soil erosion control measures. The results indicated that, generally, the agroecology elements harmonized with the local-context discourses on soil erosion control, in contrast to the conventional approach promoted through the agricultural advisory services. For example, the local discourse on a participatory process in developing soil erosion control measures linked with the Co-creation and Knowledge-Sharing element of agroecology; the discourse on concurrent and joint implementation of soil erosion control measures matched with the Synergy and Diversity elements of agroecology; and the argument for sustaining soil erosion control adoption through rewarding adopters and penalizing non-adopters, in line with the Responsible Governance and the Circular and Solidarity Economy elements of agroecology. Drawing conclusions on the implications of these findings, we argue that consideration of the Agroecology Elements at all stages in the process of soil erosion control would foster the sustained adoption of soil erosion control measures.

What are the roles of regional and local climate governance discourse and actors? Mediated climate change policy networks in Atlantic Canada

AbstractAs a global problem with diverse local and regional impacts, climate change is an inherently multilevel issue. Focusing on Atlantic Canada, we examine regional‐local dimensions of Canadian climate politics, drawing on data from six legacy newspapers (two national outlets, four regional outlets). Claims about the importance of provincial governments and municipalities have low levels of media visibility and are more salient in regional news outlets. However, federal, provincial, local government and political party sources articulate the ideas that regional and local actors have important roles to play in climate action. While these ideas are not highly visible, they are diffuse and high consensus across multilevel political, civil society, and other actors. Articulations of the importance of regional and local climate governance tend to connect this with issues of carbon pricing and other economic dimensions of climate governance. While a few municipal actors are highly visible in the mediated policy network, local policy actors tend to receive little visibility in either national or regional media spheres. By contrast, regional actors from provincial governments and political parties are among the top tier of actors in both national and provincial media. Our analysis highlights the significance of regional political arenas and actors that have received less attention than national governments or municipalities as sites of climate governance.

Contributions towards a plurality in design narratives: Addressing dynamics between global and local discourses

The present research addresses empirical evidence of the predominance of a macroscopic, canonical narrative in design: it argues that design education and research may benefit from a substantial expansion and diversification upon this traditionally prevalent narrative. Furthermore, we posit that this diversification of design may begin by acknowledging and addressing its multiple narratives at a local level, upon which a global web of detailed knowledge may emerge complex, global discourses and paradigms may require articulations of the intrinsically contextual. With this premise in mind, prior research has been held in Porto, Portugal, from 2018 to 2021, through in-person interviews with retired design teachers and professionals, and field work with local crafts and industry; these actions have confirmed the above hypothesis within the context of the case study. We now aim at further reverting these findings into higher education curricula and propose a working dynamic between the intrinsically contextual and a scalability of enquiry and relevance.

Building towards community-oriented policing: Forming an academic medical center partnership with local police

In the Spring of 2020, protective services for the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center (MRMC) Campus began a year-long transition process from the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department to the Wauwatosa Police Department (WPD). This transition occurred during a time of focused local and national discourse regarding policing in diverse community settings. In response, the MRMC leadership formed the Ad Hoc Advisory Committee for the Transition of Protective Services (AATOPS). Over the course of six months, AATOPS members conducted site visits, developed a training manual, and divided into subcommittees to establish recommendations and key performance indicators in four primary areas: 1) Diversity and Inclusion of the WPD; 2) Psychological Evaluation of WPD Officers; 3) Use and De-Escalation of Force within the WPD; and 4) Communicating the Imminent Transition of Protective Services to MRMC organization employees, faculty, students, trainees, and patients. In this paper, we detail the process of organizing an accountable and collaborative approach to police and medical and academic campus relationships. At the end of the transition period, both the WPD and MRMC expressed commitment to a continued partnership to ensure the safety and security of all on the MRMC campus.

Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of “Illegal” Immigrant

Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of “Illegal” Immigrant

International Engagement or Local Commitment? Investigating the Publication Practices of Chinese Returnee Scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences

A growing number of PhD scholars graduated from Western universities are returning to China, and this raises a range of research topics for scholars. Previous studies of these returnee scholars have mainly focused on the challenges of publishing in English but have ignored their difficulties in choosing between international and/or local academic communities. Academic publishing is regarded as a social practice in this study. Based on the data collected from 102 Chinese returnee scholars in the humanities and social sciences and drawing on the concept of discourse community, it is found that these volunteers’ publication practices are shaped by the culturally specific academic norms established in particular academic communities. This study highlights the differences between international and local discourse communities and identifies factors influencing Chinese returnee scholars’ publication practices. The ways in which they seek to exercise agency and strategies for publishing in the international and local academic communities are considered. The complexity of these returnee scholars’ publication practices is revealed through their lived experiences, adding depth and detail to current research into returnee scholars across the globe.

Linking discourse-level information and the induction of bilingual discourse connective lexicons

The single biggest obstacle in performing comprehensive cross-lingual discourse analysis is the scarcity of multilingual resources. The existing resources are overwhelmingly monolingual, compelling researchers to infer the discourse-level information in the target languages through error-prone automatic means. The current paper aims to provide a more direct insight into the cross-lingual variations in discourse structures by linking the annotated relations of the TED-Multilingual Discourse Bank, which consists of independently annotated six TED talks in seven different languages. It is shown that the linguistic labels over the relations annotated in the texts of these languages can be automatically linked with English with high accuracy, as verified against the relations of three diverse languages semi-automatically linked with relations over English texts. The resulting corpus has a great potential to reveal the divergences in local discourse relations, as well as leading to new resources, as exemplified by the induction of bilingual discourse connective lexicons.

TheChangingMeaning ofCooperation:Rural Electrification in Cold War Peru, 1964–1976

AbstractThis article deals with the politics of Peruvian rural electrification during the Cold War years. In 1964, the inhabitants of the Mantaro Valley established the Cooperativa Eléctrica Comunal del Centro Ltda. 127, with the help of the central government and American aid agencies in the context of the Alliance for Progress. At first, this rural electric cooperative was seen as a legitimate way to channel traditional communal practices through an institution that was seen as modern, capitalist, and Western. However, in the fluid context of Peru's Cold War, electric cooperative development quickly became a heated political battleground. After a “revolutionary” military regime took power in 1968, the armed forces eventually defined the cooperative as an obsolete institution and quickly adopted their own cooperative model, free from any capitalist “vices,” as they sought to implement their own “revolution from above.” While the Cooperativa Eléctrica Comunal del Centro represented a successful combination of local discourse, foreign aid, and modern technology, its history also shines a light on the volatile politics of infrastructural development: as its political and economic meaning changed wildly as different political regimes oversaw its expansion and eventual downfall.

‘You can’t be green if you’re in the red’: Local discourses on the production-biodiversity intersection in a mixed farming area in south-eastern Australia

Limiting biodiversity loss is a global challenge, especially in areas where biodiversity conservation conflicts with intensifying agricultural production. The different views and preferences about how to protect biodiversity, and why it is valuable, make concerted action to improve conservation outcomes difficult. Exploring different discourses that represent shared understandings of an issue or a topic can help to understand this plurality. We focused on a mixed farming area in south-eastern Australia where intensive agricultural production is linked to an ongoing loss of biodiversity. Using the Q-methodology, we conducted 94 interviews with people who may influence biodiversity outcomes in farming landscapes to explore shared understandings of the farming-biodiversity intersection. We also sought to understand how such discourses relate to perceptions of biodiversity in agricultural contexts and if they are associated with particular stakeholder groups. We identify four discourses on the relationship between farming and biodiversity, the farmers’ role and responsibility for biodiversity, and the preferred approaches to improve biodiversity outcomes. Our findings highlight how perceptions of biodiversity by agricultural stakeholders varied substantially between discourses, but that discourses were not significantly associated with stakeholder group. We discuss our findings in the context of policy development and broader governance. We consider how a balanced mix of policy instruments, including market and community-based instruments, can better engage with contrasting understandings of the production-biodiversity intersection. To improve biodiversity outcomes, it is necessary to integrate a plurality of biodiversity values and ensure a broad and balanced set of policy instruments that supports land managers as stewards of the land.

Pre-owned fashion as sustainable consumerism? Opportunities and challenges in the Vietnam market

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify opportunities and challenges for small- to medium-sized pre-owned fashion enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam. While recent studies have identified the growth of pre-owned fashion in developed economies, pre-owned clothing remains negatively associated by some consumers with overseas charity donations of second-hand clothes to Vietnam, following the economic upheaval of the 1980s.Design/methodology/approachQualitative data were collected via semi-structured in-depth interviews with founders and/or owners of pre-owned fashion SMEs (n = 5, aged 25–40 years) with physical stores located in Ho Chi Minh City alongside online retail platforms. All interviewees are significant industry and consumer influencers.FindingsYounger Vietnamese consumers are motivated by (1) pre-owned fashion's value for money compared to buying new western branded luxury items and (2) the ability of pre-owned and vintage fashion to allow the wearer to create a unique personal style. While Vietnamese consumers and retailers associate “sustainable fashion” with various, often unrelated concepts, the impact of global and local discourse around sustainable fashion in the last five years has generally supported wider interest in pre-owned fashion.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the relatively modest pool of English-language research on the fashion and textiles industry in Vietnam, a global fast-fashion manufacturing hub. The findings advance understanding of how pre-owned fashion is growing as a high-end niche market despite significant supply chain restrictions as well as a lingering perception of pre-owned fashion as charitable donations.

Угольный регион как дискурсивный конструкт: смыслы угля в медиаповседневности Кузбасса

In the Kemerovo Region, coal is a local socio-cultural construct that receives its substantive content through the local mass media discourse. Social studies of extractivism reveal the deep-rooted and significant impact of resource extraction on the modern society. This research relied on a discourse analysis of media routine and the meanings of coal it specifies. The method of discourse analysis is a phenomenological strategy of socio-cultural description; it clarifies the conceptual content of local media communities and registers the current state of the discursive environment. In the Kuzbass media, coal is an important resource that provides well-being, while coal mining is an extractive practice based on an unfair distribution of benefits and costs. This discourse objectifies the acts of collective signification of regional coal development activities. The economic discourse cultivates the idea of sustainable economic development of Kuzbass, while the ecological discourse defines the understanding of the specific coal-mining ecology. Media routine forms a social field of presence, where the regional community reproduces its collective identity and develops a language to describe the reality in which coal is the intersection point of economics, politics, ecology, and culture.

Online Podcast Production as Co-Creation for Intercultural Participation in Neighbourhood Development

This article describes the usage of an online podcast workshop as an arts-based research method to reflect on intercultural participation. The podcast workshop was co-developed by researchers, local civil society actors, and administrative employees and deployed in a research infrastructure based on real-world labs. We show how the online podcast workshop as a research tool elicits co-creation with agonistic as well as communicative practices. The podcast combined practices of making with socially engaged research, using digital storytelling. It aimed at enhancing intercultural dialogue and participation and was used as an opportunity for voices that are not sufficiently represented in local public discourse on neighbourhood development to become recognised and challenge marginalisation. Based on one online podcast workshop, the article addresses new possibilities for collective and collaborative action during the Covid-19 pandemic and frames the podcast as a moderated place for exchange and reflection in the digital space. The podcast workshop intended to foster further discussion on the topic of intercultural participation and was conceived as a tool for empowerment that participants can use for further conversations and exchange in their communities.

Repressive Equality Regimes: Theorizing the Disconnections in Organizational Equity Practices

For decades Western organizations have been subject to equal opportunity and anti-discrimination laws, gender equality policies, and diversity and inclusion strategies. Still, this paper suggests that there has been little fundamental change to the structure of outcomes for the workforce labelled diverse. This paper draws on data from three Australian organizations with advanced gender diversity and inclusion (GDI) programs to explore why this is the case. Our research found: 1) dominant managerial GDI practices co-exist with multiple, unacknowledged, local discourses and competing interests; 2) managerial GDI practices operate in a system that segregates ‘diverse’ employees and the performance of ‘equity’ work; and 3) GDI strategies inadvertently legitimize dominant western forms of leadership associated with white masculinity. We explain our findings through the concept of ‘repressive equality regimes’: organizational diversity and inclusion practices and policies that confirm an organization’s positive engagement with equality but remain wedded to the structural conditions that perpetuate legitimize unequal social and organizational hierarchies.

Marginalizing Disorder: Paradoxical Tensions and the Failure of Local Collective Organizing

Using an in-depth qualitative field study of homelessness in the city of Eugene, Oregon in the United States over a 10-year period, I investigate the dynamics leading to the failure of long-term local collective action in resolving social issues. Despite waves of mobilizing, organizing, coordinating, and sometimes organizational and policy outcomes, many local societal issues such as homelessness, crumbled urban transits, and urban police violence, persist. I synthesize insights from social movements research, organizations, and crisis management to unpack how different forms of collective organizing emerge, evolve, sediment, and decay over decades. I analyze these localized long-term dynamics using a tensions-based lens to identify the conflict affecting collective organizing on three levels, socio-historical local discourse, tensions around the social issue, and tensions from collective organizing. These nested multi-level tensions shape and are shaped through the contentions between local communities and how power shifts between settled and disrupted times. I reveal these dynamics and the mechanisms sustaining them to induce a process for the long-term attenuation of local collective organizing.

International human rights teachers in Myanmar universities: The individual constraints of structure on intermediaries

The literature on the transnational promotion of human rights looks to the role of intermediaries who facilitate connections between global and local discourses. Local discourses, however, may host actors and dynamics with diverse perspectives not entirely receptive to international norms, and so call for attention as to how they impact the work of intermediaries. Myanmar university human rights teachers serve an intermediary role, receiving international human rights training from international aid programs and promoting such training within their professional work environments. The actors and dynamics of their work environments constitute local discourses affecting the conduct of university teachers, and thereby influence their efforts to promote international human rights norms. The analysis draws on empirical fieldwork involving the experiences of Myanmar university human rights teachers, using their concerns to demonstrate the ways their professional environments constrain their teaching of human rights. From such findings, the analysis raises implications for theories of intermediaries and international aid policies to promote human rights norms.

Intertextuality in Translation: A Critique from Bangladeshi Perspective

In his book The Scandal of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference, Lawrence Venuti vehemently asserts that translation “…entails the creative reproduction of values,” and at the same time, it is usually seen with suspicion (1). He examines a bunch of reasons which instigate this suspicion. According to him, translation domesticates a foreign text and goes through a continuous inscription process in the stages of production, circulation and reception. While a foreign text is inscribed with linguistic and cultural values of the target readers, it runs into the risk of surrendering its individual tone and voice to the target readers’ interest and thus, the target text is re-written and reproduced in the local dialects and the framework of local discourses. It is a common belief that translation causes violence to the source text because intertextuality between two distinct languages, cultures and minds gives rise to a new space where it “suffers from an institutional isolation” (Venuti, The Scandal of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference, 2). If it is so, a lot of suspicion regarding the authenticity of translation immediately emerges out of this limitation. As translation contributes to the mobility and multiplicity of understanding, it goes hand in hand with ambivalence and destabilization in establishing communication while intertextualizing the source text with the target text. To reduce this ambivalence and bring about equivalence between the source text and the target text theoretical framework is followed sometimes knowingly and very often unknowingly by the translators. In Bangladesh, translation at present turns into a field of study and so it invites a critical evaluation. This paper seeks to explore from a Bangladeshi perspective how intertextuality impacts translation.

Analyzing multi-level governance dynamics from a discourse network perspective: the debate over air pollution regulation in Germany

BackgroundDesigned to set limits to air pollutant emissions, EU Directive 2008/50/EG has pushed city administrations to strengthen their commitment to environmental protection with mixed results. However, the effectiveness of these policies remains suboptimal. Within this context, this paper provides original empirical evidence on the nature and evolution of the debate over air pollution in the EU that helps readers understand how the interplay among discourse coalitions across levels of governance relates to the implementation of air pollution directives in Europe. To provide this evidence, we apply the discourse-coalition framework to a multi-level governance context by comparing debates over air pollution and examining their evolution in different contexts through the use of discourse network analysis.ResultsOur results show that the debate in the EU institutions is largely dominated by pro-environmental coalitions, whereas discussions in Stuttgart and Berlin show different degrees of permeability to such arguments. Hence, the relative prominence of certain actors and levels of governance in the local discourse helps explain the extent to which debates at the local level align with the arguments put forward by the EU institutions. For their part, governmental organizations have a tendency to act as bridges between discourse coalitions.ConclusionsThis novel empirical evidence provides clues that help make sense of the varying levels of implementation of EU air pollution directives at the local level. In this regard, the ability of supranational and national bodies to align their discourse with those of local organizations might facilitate a common understanding and the successful implementation of EU policies. Policymakers aiming to improve air quality at the local level may want to consider engaging actively with this debate by reinforcing the arguments of pro-environmental coalitions. They may also want to make a special effort to ensure that the messages conveyed to supranational and national bodies are also effectively conveyed to lower levels of governance.

Grisi Siknis: A cultural idiom of gender-based violence and structural inequalities in eastern Nicaragua.

For the Miskitu of Nicaragua, Grisi Siknis is a contagious illness that predominantly affects women. It is characterized by numerous psychosomatic symptoms, including headache, fear, aggressive behavior, loss of consciousness, and periods of rapid frenzy. Although Grisi Siknis has gained academic and public attention due to its unique cultural elements and perceived sexual aspects, little is known how the contextual and gender dimensions of Grisi Siknis are played out in relation to the socio-political context in the region. Based on 16 months of ethnographic work in the Nicaraguan Miskitu Coast, including semi-structured interviews (n = 20) and participant observation, this article documents a semantic shift in the embodied and symbolic language of a cultural idiom of distress. I show how duhindu (Miskitu spirit associated with illness and misfortune) and witchcraft are symbols that share cultural resonance in the Miskitu community, while gender violence discourse is a new language incorporated into the logic of this cultural idiom of distress. I argue that this semantic shift allows the individuals in this study to communicate local experiences of complex forms of structural inequalities (migration status, unemployment, ethnic identity) and gender-based violence that tend to be normalized as a ubiquitous cultural problem while preserving the broader socio-cultural meaning the Grisi Siknis represents. The ethnographic accounts of Grisi Siknis provide empirical data to unpack the unexplored contextual processes and local discourses that transform the meaning and logic of cultural idioms of distress at the individual level of experience.