Local Discourses Research Articles

“Locality” on the Borderlands

A key characteristic of the gazetteer genre is its systematic intertextuality through citation. In this, it is a precise exemplar of Bakhtin’s secondary genres. This article examines the representation of place in the Ming borderlands through close reading of the earliest extant gazetteer of Dali Prefecture, the 1563 Dali fuzhi. Through examination of the poems, histories, and inscriptions referenced in the text, as well as the paratextual material, this article situates Li Yuanyang’s Dali fuzhi in relation to both the gazetteer genre and the literary world of sixteenth-century Yunnan. I argue that the concept of the locality realised in Dali fuzhi was as complex as its sources, creating new knowledge out of the interplay of local and imperial discourses.

Culture-Led Urban Regeneration: How Does Melukis Harapan Catalyst The Transformation of Dolly Prostitution District?

The position of cultural regeneration to develop social and economic growth in a post-black economy district like a former sex leisure business is becoming a thought-provoking investigation. This research focuses on a specific observation to find the relationship between regeneration and former prostitution in culture-led urban reinforcement to develop through the creative industry? What are the influences behind the rise of culture-led borough redevelopment in such a place of ex-prostitution? This research used the post-positivism paradigm with qualitative method approach. Some of the opinions behind the growth of culture-led urban regeneration have linked not only in cultural icon and urban identity but also in community consolidation to support the creative industry elaboration. Further, the products of culture-led urban renewal, we can say youth movements, has the assumption to potentially advance the local cultural policy discourses within creative industry outcome. This research presents the effect of accepted place in Dolly, the ex-biggest well-organized prostitution in southeast Asia located in Surabaya, Indonesia. It implication is to show the result of observations and experiences conducted with the local youth community, Melukis Harapan, as a cultural flagship development subject that successfully transform Dolly into an education-tourism-based creative village.

A critical inquiry into in-service EFL teachers’ intercultural self-efficacy beliefs and experiences

This paper examines the intercultural self-efficacy beliefs and experiences of university EFL teachers from socially and linguistically diverse backgrounds working at English language preparatory schools in İstanbul. Adopting a mixed-methods case study design under a critical interpretivist theoretical framework, the study included both quantitative and qualitative data collected through an intercultural self-efficacy beliefs and experiences scale and via interviews with interculturally experienced participants from Turkish, Western and Middle Eastern backgrounds. Descriptive statistical and thematic analyses revealed that the teachers had intercultural experiences mostly in their workplaces and that they developed positive attitudes toward diversity in the classroom though they were concerned about intercultural language teaching in practice due to the time constraint. The teachers highlighted some of the features that could be regarded as a part of having intercultural competence: being respectful and willing to communicate with diverse people, accepting diversity, discussing the different and unknown, and displaying humour. Their accounts of intercultural experiences were indicative of a complex, layered and overlapping view of culture influenced by several discourses, the most frequently referred ones of which were ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’. In the light of the study, we offer implications and new insights into ‘non-monocentric’ cultural threads through the eyes of language teachers as one of the key actors in classrooms, where local praxes and discourses may have more impact than national or international ones.

Ethnic trauma in migration: FSU-born Israeli women’s narratives in an online support group

This article lays ground for the concept of ethnic trauma for understanding the crisis of migration and its aftermath. The analysis is based on autobiographical stories recently published by the online community of the women who immigrated to Israel from the USSR/FSU as children or adolescents (Generation 1.5) in the early 1990s. Despite its self-selected nature, this story-telling project captures many generic features of the Russian-Israeli (and other) immigrant experiences. These stories form a collective narrative featuring trauma, coping and eventual victory – a discursive plot quite typical for contemporary Israeli therapeutic culture. In the age of identity politics, ethnic trauma becomes a political tool deployed in the struggle for recognition by different immigrant and minority groups. The discourse of trauma, resilience and overcoming/catharsis incorporates immigrants in the local discourse, letting them negotiate their identity and claim full belonging. Thus, ethnic trauma emerges as a political resource to support immigrants’ claims of equal rights and demands for symbolic reparations.

Salmakis and the Priests of Halikarnassos

SummaryEarlier studies of the “Pride of Halikarnassos” have emphasized its role situating Halikarnassos in the changing geopolitical landscape of the second century. In these interpretations Rome looms large. The inscription, however, is also an example of a Local Discourse Environment, in which different versions of Halikarnassian myth and history, some Greek, others Karian, are used to assert the competing traditions of the different groups who inhabited Halikarnassos. Comparison with other inscriptions from Halikarnassos underscores the continued existence of local groups, defined by ethnicity, familial affiliation, even neighbourhood, each vying with the other for preeminence. The “Pride of Halikarnassos” offers a vision of the reconciliation of local rivalries through shared narratives.

Having a voice and a place: local youth driving urban development in an East German town under transformation

ABSTRACT In small towns with ageing societies, the voices of the young often tend to get marginalized in local policy discourse. The paper explores how young people are trying to counter this trend through the creation of a self-organized youth and sociocultural centre in Görlitz, a town that suffered major transformation in the aftermath of German reunification. Görlitz also made national headlines when a Eurosceptic right-wing party gained a large share of votes in recent elections. In this context, it is quite surprising to see an initiative like the sociocultural centre emerge and grow into a relevant urban development player. By combining research on youth participation and spatial (in)justice, the paper argues in favour of the important role of youth as active drivers of local development and creators of less institutionalized platforms for democratic engagement. In transformation towns such as Görlitz, initiatives like the youth and sociocultural centre can be game changers in terms of countering spatial injustices by creating positive narratives over the town, fostering pluralistic public discourse, and preventing youth outmigration.

“Truth Is the Keenest Weapon Ever Drawn”

In the 1920s and early 1930s, Robert P. Shuler, head of Trinity Methodist Church, rose to fame in Los Angeles as a tireless evangelical muckraker. Shuler, via Bob Shuler’s Magazine and his popular radio station KGEF, charged that many powerful Angelenos were involved in various vice pursuits—drinking, drug use, even prostitution—and that the city’s image as a moral, middle-class metropolis was just a facade. Using Shuler’s writings, Los Angeles City Council files, Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce minutes, and local newspapers, I argue that Shuler headed an alternative grassroots power structure in Los Angeles, founded during Prohibition. In those years, Shuler’s efforts found a receptive audience among the many midwestern migrants who had arrived in Los Angeles during previous decades. The city had once rigorously enforced alcohol restrictions, but in the 1920s, police officers and political leaders often protected illegal leisure activities. City leaders eventually retaliated against the preacher, and his power precipitously declined after the end of Prohibition, but for a time Shuler held a unique power to shape local public discourse. This essay reveals one of the battles over Los Angeles’s public image that shaped the city’s prewar rise.

Online Child Sexual Exploitation in the Philippines: Moving beyond the current discourse and approach

Online child sexual exploitation (OCSE) is an issue of increasing concern in the Philippines. The current local discourse concerning OCSE is that it primarily involves children being sexually exploited by adults within their household or in ‘dens’, with ‘raid and rescue’ operations and public awareness campaigns as the most publicised strategies employed to address the issue. Whilst the true prevalence of OCSE is unknown, ongoing research and the experience of many stakeholders suggest that self-generated sexual content involving children is common. However, this is not being widely discussed or addressed. This article argues that more holistic, long-term, and community-based interventions targeted at vulnerable families and children are needed that address the deeper determinants of OCSE in the Philippines.

Communities of Practice in the Warlpiri Triangle: Four Decades of Crafting Ideological and Implementational Spaces for Teaching in and of Warlpiri Language

Warlpiri communities in Australia’s Northern Territory (NT) have long advocated for the inclusion of Warlpiri language, values and knowledge in their government-run schools. After the first bilingual programs were established in the NT in the 1970s, educators and community members from four Warlpiri communities formed a professional network known as the Warlpiri Triangle, a platform for meetings and professional development focusing on teaching and learning in and of Warlpiri language in schools. On these platforms, educators have consistently articulated the goal of the Warlpiri programs as maintenance of Warlpiri pirrjirdi, ‘strong Warlpiri language’. In this paper we seek to explore the development, refinement and consolidation of a consensual ideology around teaching and learning of and in Warlpiri pirrjirdi, ‘strong Warlpiri language’ that has informed Warlpiri language-in-education management. We analyse interviews with five Warlpiri educators at Yuendumu school in 2018/9 and a body of grey literature from four decades of Warlpiri educator professional development activities that has been less widely acknowledged and visible in local education policy discourse. We draw on the theoretical concept of communities of practice to understand the ways in which Warlpiri educators negotiate ideological and implementational spaces for inclusion of Warlpiri language teaching in the context of an ambivalent language-in-education policy environment. The results of this study exemplify the reiteration and reproduction of language-in-education goals through a community of practice in a sustained arena of action, the Warlpiri Triangle. The findings render more visible the vital efforts of Warlpiri educators and their professional networks in shaping language-in-education policy and practice to realise community aspirations of Warlpiri language maintenance in the school context.

Bridging Development and Heritage: Expert Gaze, Local Discourses, and Visual Aesthetic Crisis at Hampi World Heritage Site

In this article, I explore the complex trajectory of two bridges that were proposed for construction across the River Tungabhadra in the early 1990s at locations that now fall within the boundary of Hampi, a UNESCO Cultural World Heritage Site (WHS) in India. The proposed bridges were considered improper forms of infrastructure development in the visual context of a WHS, and the site was placed on the World Heritage in Danger List in the late 1990s. Popular media framed the controversy as a ‘classic clash’ between heritage and development where conservation goals and developmental needs opposed one another. Heritage experts, agencies, and activists read the crisis as one of ‘heritage or development’, normatively typecasting residents north of the river as ‘uneducated, ignorant locals’ wanting development at the cost of heritage. However, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival material covering nearly three decades, I demonstrate that residents wanted the bridges not as physical infrastructure towards some obscure development goals, but as the means to link their overlooked contributions to the founding of the Vijayanagara Empire, the capital region and its contemporary remaking as a WHS. In this instance, the binary opposition lay in the ‘expert gaze’, not in local discourses. It was experts, rather than ‘local people’, who saw conservation and development as inherently opposed to each other. I explicate how various views on what constitutes heritage and development intersect with each other, and suggest that dissonance need not be the inevitable result but may be built into the gaze of expertise.

New Gatekeepers in Town: How Groups in Social Networking Sites Influence Information Flows in Russia’s Provinces

The study focuses upon “city public groups” (“gorodskie pabliki,” local newsgroups on social networking sites)—the new entrants in the local media space of the Russian province that have recently become important actors of regional public communication. Such groups combine news posting and citizen discussions, report on local affairs and gossip, and entertain. Some groups are based on user-generated content; others create their own content or act as aggregators. Being non-registered and grassroots initiatives, these media enjoy higher freedom in comparison to official local newsrooms. Given the popularity of city public groups among local citizens and local authorities’ interest toward them, owners and moderators of these media are playing an influential role for local mediated discourse. Based on the gatekeeping theory and its extensions for digital space, this article explores the emerging roles of these new gatekeepers in the local communities. Based upon 28 in-depth interviews collected by the author in Russian towns in 2017–2018, the article also analyses the professional norms and values of the owners and moderators of local city groups that they employ to perform their gatekeeping function.

Belongings and Expulsions: Marriage, Borderlands, and the Management of 'Queerness' in Global Taiwan

This work explores the international politics and practice of LGBTQ rights, specifically the practice of same-sex marriage, as a constituent of the Taiwanese state’s security regime. Through exploring the discourse around family and marriage and their particular relations to the state’s security, a series of belongings and expulsions that constitute the global progressive neoliberal rights regime entangle “Taiwan” in the globalized relationships of empire. This necessitates a reparative return to line work as a queer method to recover the lives lost to forms of imperialism. This work's data sources include textual analysis of local news reports and media discourse, while Allan Sekula’s Fish Story (1995) and Hsu Yoshen’s Stones on the Shore (2003) figure dominantly in the second chapter. My methods include discourse analysis and photo analysis. By questioning the Taiwanese state’s regulation of marriage and migration, I reveal the Taiwanese nation-state project's contingency on the developmental economies and production of identities, security issues, and incorporation of global discourse. I conclude with some ideas on the future of queerness and the centrality of “Asia” in international security.

The future of Southeast Asia's tropical peatlands: Local and global perspectives

• People have occupied Sarawak’s coastal peatlands for c . 200 years. • In the last century deforestation & peatland conversion have been widespread. • Local stakeholders perceive few challenges & many opportunities in using peatlands. • This conflicts with the international community promoting peatland conservation. • Differences in knowledge between local & global communities need to be addressed. The effective conservation and sustainable management of tropical peatlands in Southeast Asia is a major challenge. Pervasive deforestation, drainage and conversion to agricultural land, is disrupting these ecosystems’ ability to sequester atmospheric carbon. Conserving peatlands in an intact state has been described as a “low hanging fruit in tackling climate change” by the international conservation community. Yet, peatland drainage and land conversion continue unabated. Focusing on Malaysia’s coastal peatlands, this study interrogates local and global perspectives on peatland conversion. We combine diverse datasets obtained using palaeoecological and social science research methods to provide a comprehensive context to this conservation challenge. We also identify where the local and global perspectives are in conflict and where they align. To do this, we employ a literature review and qualitative analysis of the interview data, enabling us to draw out key themes of local versus global discourses on the current management and future prospects of these peatland ecosystems. Palaeoecological data, derived from cores collected from three peatlands in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, provide a quantitative assessment of long-term ecological changes in these environments; qualitative surveys of local stakeholders provide complementary detail on the history of and future perspectives on human-peatland interaction. Finally, a comparison of interview data with key themes in the international discourses on peatland conservation, illustrates conflicts between the two. The coastal peatlands of Sarawak serve as a case study to explore the fragile context of sustainable tropical peatland management, illustrating the diversity of datasets and knowledges that can be integrated. This approach enables a more effective dialogue amongst the multiple stakeholders involved in the management of these globally important ecosystems.

Reconciling Locality and Globalization through Sense of Planet in Kiana Davenport’s the House of Many Gods

This study positions the House of Many Gods, a novel written by Kiana Davenport as a possible area of intersection between globalization and environmental/eco-criticism. The primacy of locality within American environmental discourse hinders the acceptance of global theory under the assumption that embracing the global will lead into the erasure of the local altogether. In her book, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008) Ursula K Heise asserts that what she considers as sense of place is incomplete without considering ourselves as a part of a global ecosystem, which she considers as sense of planet. The reading of the House of Many Gods contextualizes sense of place and sense of planet through the perspective of Ana, in which she complements her adherence of Native Hawai’ian epistemology of place with a broader outlook of environmental crisis. A global outlook of perceiving environmentalism also aligns with Transnational American Studies which perceives America from an internationalist perspective. The paper concludes that sense of place and sense of planet provides a possible intersectionality of conceptualizing local discourse of place within a global outlook of environmentalism.

Defining and transforming local migration policies: a conceptual approach backed by evidence from Germany

ABSTRACT What are the factors that drive municipalities to become active in the field of migration and migration-related diversity? Based on qualitative data from 126 German municipalities, this article proposes a new conceptual framework that allows for larger-scale comparisons and enables theory building on policy (in)activity at the local level. Setting the scene, the article discusses various theoretical approaches and empirical findings from the literature by using a heuristic of four categories of factors: institutional framework (e.g. competencies, discretionary spaces, multilevel governance), structural conditions (e.g. urbanity/rurality, socioeconomic conditions); local discourses (i.e. narratives creating a local space of possibilities), and local key actors (e.g. mayors, street-level bureaucrats). Empirically assessing the relative importance of these factors, the article focusses on local integration plans. In the German context, a municipality usually establishes an integration plan to actively control the outcome of integration processes, e.g. by orchestrating local stakeholders or allocating resources. Thus, the development of an integration plan can be used as a proxy for a municipality’s appetite to strategically engage with migration and migration-related diversity. As a result, the article proposes the ‘ISDA framework of local migration policymaking’, which distinguishes between ‘defining factors’ (institutional framework, structural conditions) and ‘transformative factors’ (discourses, actors).

Is Local Planning Really ‘Local’? National Planning Context as a Determining Factor for Local Discourse

ABSTRACT Local planning discourse is torn between three trends: the withdrawal of central governments from local issues, the rise of local expertise and powers, and the mobility of policies from one country to another. While these trends have an impact on local planning, their respective weight is left undiscussed. This paper analyses the textual discourse of 34 French and English local transport plans using textometry combined with the constitution of comparable lexical categories in two languages. Our results show that local discourses are shaped by the national context they belong to, and that no trace of trans-national homogenisation is yet visible.

Re-examining Norms of Disrespect and Abuse in the Second Stage of Labor in Tanzanian Maternity Care

ABSTRACT Globally, the widespread occurrence of disrespect and abuse (D&A) on maternity wards is well-documented. Using ethnography and cultural consensus analysis we explore how the practice of midwives hitting women who are in the second stage of labor (pushing) has become a locally accepted form of care in Tanzania if a baby’s life appears to be at risk. This analysis interrogates the deep uncertainty of birth outcomes in this setting that may motivate abuse during this time. Seriously engaging with local discourses on abuse and care sheds light on hegemonic norms and power dynamics and is critical for improving maternity services.

Representation Of The Feminist Perspectives In Pakistan’s Political Science Academia

The feminist perspectives entered the field of Political Science/ International Relations during the 1980s as part of the larger critical turn in Social Sciences. The marginalization of women’s role and voices in mainstream academic discourse of war and peace remained a key concern of the Political Science/IR feminist perspectives. The current study uses insights from Sandra Harding’s standpoint theory to explore how the feminist perspectives are represented in the Political Science/International Relations academia of Pakistan. This paper undertakes a systematic review of leading (HEC recognized) journals of IR and Political Science in Pakistan, to examine if and how the feminist perspectives is represented in Pakistani International Relations discourse. Since local academic discourses are underrepresented in the largely Eurocentric discipline of Political Science/IR, this study will contribute towards a better understanding of representation on a key critical academic perspective ( Feminism) in Political Science/IR. The results of the study show that feminist perspectives are marginalized in local academia in terms of representation. Serious efforts are required to promote academic research and development in this field with the support of the Government, academic institutions and researchers.

A constellation of stars: what a local newspaper talks about when it talks about star architecture

ABSTRACT Despite the broadly held assumption that having an iconic building designed by a celebrity architect can effectively rebrand a place, draw tourists, and stimulate economic activity, star architecture does more than just contribute to the economic fortunes of regional cities. Iconic projects also emerge from and reflect the discourses, desires, and identities of city dwellers in the places they are built. In this paper, we use newspaper coverage of five iconic or star architecture buildings in Denver, Colorado, USA, to expose how architecture contributes to local discourses. What emerges is a complex picture of how local press engage with star architecture projects. Star architecture buildings do more than just contribute to the economic fortunes of a city or region: they also contribute to the mental map of a place, become contributors to city identity, and create opportunities for conversations about culture and architecture, including the basis for comparisons with other cities.

Voting for Your Pocketbook, but against Your Pocketbook? A Study of Brexit at the Local Level

In explaining the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum in the United Kingdom, can theories emphasizing the importance of economic factors be reconciled with the fact that many people appeared to vote against their economic self-interest? This article approaches this puzzle through case study research that draws on fieldwork and a process of reciprocal knowledge exchange with local communities in five local authorities in England and Wales. It argues that the Leave vote can be attributed partly to political discontent associated with trajectories of relative economic decline and deindustrialization. Building on the growing literature about the role of narratives and discourses in navigating uncertainty, it contends that these localized economic experiences, interpreted through local-level narratives, paved the way for local-level discourses of resilience and nationwide optimistic messaging about the economic impacts of Brexit to resonate. Local and national-level discourses discounting the potential economic costs of leaving the European Union played a crucial role in giving precise, somewhat paradoxical, political content to the sense of discontent. The article contributes to the growing focus on place and community in understanding political behavior and invites further research on local discourses linking macro-level trajectories and micro-level voting decisions.