Major Discourses Research Articles

Advancing a Political Ecology of Global Environmental Discourses

In the past decade international and national environmental policy and action have been dominated by issues generally defined as global environmental problems. In this article, we identify the major discourses associated with four global environmental issues: deforestation, desertification, biodiversity use and climate change. These discourses are analysed in terms of their messages, narrative structures and policy prescriptions. We find striking parallels in the nature and structure of the discourses and in their illegibility at the local scale. In each of the four areas there is a global environmental management discourse representing a technocentric worldview by which blueprints based on external policy interventions can solve global environmental dilemmas. Each issue also has a contrasting populist discourse that portrays local actors as victims of external interventions bringing about degradation and exploitation. The managerial discourses dominate in all four issues, but important inputs are also supplied to political decisions from populist discourses. There are, in addition, heterodox ideas and denial claims in each of these areas, to a greater or lesser extent, in which the existence or severity of the environmental problem are questioned. We present evidence from location‐specific research which does not fit easily with the dominant managerialist nor with the populist discourses. The research shows that policy‐making institutions are distanced from the resource users and that local scale environmental management moves with a distinct dynamic and experiences alternative manifestations of environmental change and livelihood imperatives.

Globalizations

Globalization is a plural phenomenon. There are at least five major discourses on it that usually ignore each other: competitive economics, social criticism, state (im)potence, culture and planetary ecology. The dimensions of globalization include a number of substantial social processes as well as two different kinds of dynamics: systemic and interacting exogenous actors. Globalizations are not new phenomena. At least six historical waves, beginning with the spread of world religions, may be identified. An attempt is made to systematize the effects of globalizations on different world regions and social actors. Issues of governance are raised, focusing on states and norms.

Mardi Gras Says ‘Be Drug Free’: Accounting for Resistance, Pleasure and the Demand for Illicit Drugs

Focusing on the outcry which followed the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Board’s anti-drug statement of late 1992, this article explores the overwhelmingly negative reaction against Mardi Gras’ position from both health agencies and members of the gay and lesbian community. Based on an analysis of ‘Letters to the editor’ in the Sydney gay press, counter discourses and subjugated knowledges used to contest Mardi Gras’ position are identified. The significance of these counter discourses in relation to major discourses evident within drug theorizing and research is examined. This article argues that cultural and subcultural constructions of pleasure, lifestyle and health need to be considered if the demand for illicit substances is to be adequately accounted for.

In the Shadow of Chaos

The posing of the question is philosophy? is, for Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a response to what they perceive as philosophy's devaluation in the face of disciplines and tendencies that attempt to undermine it, to question its relevance, or even to displace it. They are concerned to reinstate philosophy as one of the primary disciplines of thought and and to place it alongside art and science as a mode of inquiry distinct from these but of equal importance and value. They do not argue for a new philosophy that gains validity by compromising with the hegemonic forces that pervade the current social, cultural, political, and economic climate. Rather they try to clarify what it is that philosophers do, what they have always done, and what they must continue to do. They seek to expose as myth philosophy conceived as the discovery of truth, as the unveiling of the eternal, irrefutable foundations of being, knowledge, and thought. This ideal has been brought seriously into question, following Nietzsche, by the recent so-called postmodernist and poststructuralist movements. While Deleuze and Guattari insist that they are not associated with these traditions, being critical of their tendency to be too limited and pessimistic in their outlook,' they do sympathize with the resistance such thinking proposes to what they call major discourse. Certainly they do not see this critique of philosophy as problematic for philosophy's continued importance, and neither do they see it as diminishing interest in philosophers who have presupposed these traditional ideas and goals; what continues to be interesting and often remarkable in the works of the great philosophers are the ways that they invent for coming to terms with their historically and geographically, socially and politically oriented world and with the events which take place therein. Philosophy, art, and science all make claims about the world and the ways in which we think about it. The focus of the arguments in Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? (Columbia University Press, 1994a book that represents the swan song of a collaborative writing career spanning more than twenty years-is to show that each discipline has its own distinct methods and fields of inquiry and orientation: philosophy is defined from the outset as knowledge through pure concepts, science as through functions and reference, art as through percepts and affects. It should be stressed here that these are not purely stipulative definitions, What is Philosophy? being rife with examples intended to demonstrate and test these definitions as clearly and precisely as possible. The purpose of the boundaries which Deleuze and Guattari draw between these three Thought-forms, as they call them, is not strictly to exclude, that is they are not intended to preclude the involvement of philosophy in science or science in art, etc. In fact what may often be most interesting is to explore the interferences of each Thought-form in the others. The intention is rather to demarcate, to show that no one of these forms is reducible to the other, and that any attempt to blur the boundaries is to be resisted. For example, while the scientist may claim to understand beauty, and witnesses it in the quality of certain equations or geometrical figures, this beauty is not reducible to and may not replace aesthetic beauty, a point which Kant shows with such force in the Critique of Judgment. So, in the process of formulating an answer to the question is philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari are set the task of qualifying specifically artistic or scientific fields of inquiry and of showing how these differ from that of philosophy. Before we begin to examine the factors that allow differentiation between them, we need to understand what it is that links them together, what unites them under the banner of Thought. The uniting factor is that each maintains an essential relationship with chaos. …

Filled pauses as markers of discourse structure

This study aims to test whether filled pauses (FPs) may highlight discourse structure. This question is tackled from the perspectives of both the speaker and the listener. More specifically, it is first investigated whether FPs are more typical in the vicinity of major discourse boundaries. Secondly, FPs are analyzed acoustically, to check whether those occurring at major discourse boundaries are segmentally and prosodically different from those at shallower breaks. Analyses of twelve spontaneous monologues (Dutch) show that phrases following major discourse boundaries more often contain FPs. Additionally, FPs after stronger breaks tend to occur phrase-initially, whereas the majority of the FPs after weak boundaries are in phrase-internal position. Also, acoustic observations reveal that FPs at major discourse boundaries are both segmentally and prosodically distinct. They also differ with respect to the distribution of neighbouring silent pauses. Finally, a general linear model reveals that discourse structure can to some extent be predicted from characteristics of the FPs.

Literate Design in the Discourses of Revolution, Reform, and Transition

In contemporary China, including Hong Kong, literate design from the choice of writing system or romanization to presentational formats articulates an inter-discursivity among three major discourses: the language reforms of the post-Liberation revolutionary discourse, the Dengist reform discourse, and the discourse of the transition of sovereignty of Hong Kong from Britain to China. Thus literate design represents the polyvocality of utterance in the public discourse of signs, announcements, and advertisements, symbolizing the new wine of reform by placing it in the old bottle of the symbols of the revolutionary discourse. There is also a smaller contrasting trend of re-symbolizing the revolutionary discourse with the designs of the reform discourse.

Changing Rationales For Governing the Child

This article is about a period of transition (1920-40) in the history of the Swedish preschool when Friedrich Fröbel's discourse on the child, which was the major discourse in the early days of the preschool movement in Sweden, gradually became replaced by the discourse of developmental psychology. The article's major concern is with the issue of change in preschool discourse about the child. Using the Foucauldian theme of governmentality, the article argues that change in preschool discourse is related to the emergence of new rationales for governing the child. In addition, the article argues that a comparison with the child that emerged in the context of schooling during the 19th century, is essential for the understanding of the post-Fröbel discourse about the child. It is suggested that the child of the post-Fröbel period is in fact the product of a reinvention of the evangelical streams of thought of the 19th century.

Power, knowledge, and the discourse of specialization in nursing.

The characterization of specialization in nursing varies across different time periods, contexts, persons, groups, and institutions. Therefore, it may be viewed as a discourse. The expression of this discourse is subject to contextual influences and social interests. For example, its perceived congruence or antagonism to other major discourses, such as specialization, medicine, and nursing, will impact on its expression and legitimization. This article explores the discourse of specialization in nursing, especially as it is expressed in the Australian and North American context, and focuses on the power and knowledge issues that relate to, and constitute, the discourse.

Infinitesimal risk as public health crisis: News media coverage of a doctor-patient HIV contact tracing investigation

Among the most prominent health or medical stories covered in 1994 by the Australian news media was that concerning an HIV positive hospital obstetrician and the attempt by the New South Wales Health Department to trace and test 149 women on whom he had operated. All press and television coverage of the issue was reviewed. The surface news narrative of the search for missing, “innocent” mothers potentially infected with a deadly and infectious illness is shown to serve as a “hard news” pretext enabling a wider major discourse to operate about a health system accused as being captive to gay and civil libertarian politics, allowing “guilty” doctors at high risk of HIV to endanger “innocent” patients. Expert consensus held that the women were at “infinitesimal risk” of acquiring HIV. However, media accounts of the investigation all but belied this, illustrating that the news media's framing of risk has more to do with its reproduction of moral outrage components than with “scientific” notions of calculable risk.

“Do you see what I see?” Reading a different classroom scene

This paper examines the problem of representing a research site in poststructuralist terms, suggesting that “data” often taken for granted cannot be read to represent “reality” or “truth.” The representation of classroom life produced for analysis is both multifaceted and contradictory. The researcher's positioning within the major discourses governing educational practice may have as much influence on what is seen in the classroom as does the researcher's physical positioning within material reality. Rather than being seen as an impediment to ongoing educational research for change, the findings presented offer a challenge to researchers to make explicit their underlying interests and agendas.

The Room of Maps at Caprarola, 1573-75

This essay interprets the astronomical and geographical maps in the Villa Farnese at Caprarola in terms of the ideology of its patron, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. The decoration—programmed by Cardinal Farnese, Fulvio Orsini, and Orazio Trigini de' Marii, and executed by Giovanni de' Vecchi, Raffaellino da Reggio, and Giovanni Antonio Vanosino da Varese—is read as a sign system constituting meaning within biblical history and the major discourses of the Counter-Reformation, including the nature and claims of the Christian Commonwealth, challenges to papal authority and Church doctrine, and the conflicts of interest between the papacy and family dynasties.

The functions of topic-encoding zero-marked phrases: A study of the interaction among topic-encoding expressions in Japanese

This study analyzes zero-marked phrases which encode topic in Japanese. As topic-encoding zero-marked phrases most often occur in informal speech, they have been considered to be deviations of the more standard means of encoding topic. This study argues that zero-marked phrases have their own functions in discourse that are distinct from and interact with those of other topic-encoding expressions such as wa-marked phrases and zero anaphora. One of the functions involves marking of discourse structure. While zero anaphora represents discourse continuity and wa-marked phrases indicate major discourse boundaries, zero-marked phrases mark minor discourse boundaries. Another function is concerned with how prominence of referents is represented. Wa-marked phrases and zero anaphora refer to entities which play a central role in discourse. This tendency of wa-marked phrases and zero anaphora is noticed because of their interaction with zero-marked phrases. Zero-marked phrases tend to refer to entities which play a secondary role in discourse so that the centrality of entities referred to by wa-marked phrases and zero anaphora is highlighted. Both of these functions reflect general pragmatic principles.

Hong Kong in Chinese History: Community and Social Unrest in the British Colony, 1842-1913 (review)

256 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring 1995 Jung-fang Tsai. Hong Kong in Chinese History: Community and Social Unrest in the British Colony, 1842-1913. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 375 pp. Hardcover $45.00. With its 1997 retrocession to Chinese sovereignty looming closer every day, Hong Kong has, during the past decade, appeared frequently in the headlines ofdie international press and as a subject ofacademic discussion. Yet despite die proliferation of tides on Hong Kong, there is still an obvious lack ofserious scholarship in English on die historical development ofHong Kong, especially its local Chinese community. This volume goes a long way toward filling the gap by offering a very solid, original, and penetrating study ofthe first seven decades ofHong Kong society under British rule, from the Opium War to the aftermath ofthe 1911 republican revolution. Based on extensive documentation in both Chinese and English, this book delineates die gradual yet significant social and political changes that transformed colonial Hong Kong during a crucial stage of Sino-Western interaction and die global expansion ofcapitalism-imperialism. By placing his study in the context of modern Chinese history, Tsai offers an effective rebuttal to what he strongly criticizes (pp. 2-4) as the Eurocentric historiography of Hong Kong which is written from the perspective ofthe European elites and focuses on British colonial administration and formal institutions. In restoring the principal Hong Kong Chinese actors to center stage, this book reminds us ofRichard Hughes' famous title, Hong Kong: Borrowed Place, Borrowed Time (New York: Praeger, 1968)—and as this reviewer would like to add, "widi borrowed people." Tsai examines three main themes in Hong Kong's development: the birth of an urban community and its social relationships, the changing nature and patterns of social unrest, and die growth of nationalism among the Chinese mercantile elites, intelligentsia, and die laboring masses in colonial Hong Kong. The first four chapters of the book chart the economic conditions and sociopolitical structure ofHong Kong from its founding as a British colony in 1842 to the eve ofthe First World War. The following five chapters analyze the nature and significance of social unrest in Hong Kong—including patriotic and politically motivated collective actions such as the 1884 popular insurrection at the time of the SinoFrench War, the 1905 anti-American and 1908 anti-Japanese boycotts, and die 1912-1913 tramway boycott, inspired by die 1911 revolution, as well as the socioeconomic struggles which, like the labor strikes from 1861 to 1895, were protests© 1995 by University agamst colonial regulations. oj awai ? PressTsai's findings are, on the whole, persuasive and relevant to the major discourses in the study ofmodern Chinese history. For instance, one readily accepts his characterization ofthe common folk as "conditional patriots" responding Reviews 257 tìirough a rational articulation oflocal issues and socioeconomic self-interest to the appeal ofclass consciousness and the impact ofimperialism, both ofwhich were "situational" according to Tsai. His differentiation between "elite nationalism "—on the part Hong Kong Chinese mercantile elements and those intellectuals who practiced "cultural hegemony"—and die patriotic outbursts from the grassroots adds a useful dimension to our understanding ofthe rise ofpopular nationalistic consciousness in urban China. Several points in this book deserve further elaboration or more refined articulation . For instance, in Tsai's depiction of "Chinese patriots," he repeatedly includes die name ofRobert Ho Tung (pp. 161, 165, 169). In fact, Ho Tung was not a full-blooded Chinese, but a Eurasian with an English father and a Chinese mother. However, in the prewar official Hong Kong categorization, there were only "Chinese" and "European," with no separate or distinct provision for Eurasians . Furthermore, among the local Hong Kong Chinese populace and in the eyes of mainland Chinese officialdom, Robert Ho Tung was never regarded as genuinely Chinese. Even during the major strikes of the 1920s, when he was severely denounced by labor leaders and left-wing activists for his part in the British colonial state-Western capitalist oppression against workers' interests, he was never condemned as a "traitor," simply because he was not regarded as a Chinese and tiius could not be accused ofbetraying the interests of fellow Chinese compatriots. In drawing attention...

The prosody of information units in spontaneous monologue.

This article describes a perceptual evaluation of the prosodic structure of a spontaneously produced monologue. It was found that the speaker studied demarcates larger-scale topical units in spoken discourse by means of intonation (use of melodic boundary markers, scaling of maxima in pitch movements, general decline in average pitch) and by the use of pauses with variable durations. In a perception test, it was examined to what extent these prosodic devices may be important to listeners. Subjects were confronted with three unintelligible (band-pass-filtered) versions of a fragment of the elicited monologue: (1) with the original prosody unchanged; (2) with constant pause duration and the original speech melody; (3) with monotonous pitch and the original pause structure. They were instructed to indicate the boundaries of the larger-scale topical units in the three versions. Subjects were able to detect correctly the major discourse boundaries in all three filtered versions in a significant number of cases. They performed best when confronted with version 1. Versions 1 and 2, in their turn, did better than version 3, which suggests that, in the performance of this speaker, intonation is a perceptually more important factor than pause for the clarification of the topical make-up of a text, though the latter dimension is certainly not negligible.

Discourse Analysis and City Plans

The use of discourse theory as a tool for critical analysis has been ex plored by several planning theorists. Two understandings of discourse can be identified in planning literature: the understanding derived from Ha bermas's critical theory which has been adapted for planners by John Forester, and the understanding based on Foucault's work which has been employed by Christine Boyer. Brief summaries of these two tradi tions are followed by a reading of planners' own major discourse — the city plan — in order to identify some of its enduring discursive traits. The significance of these traits is then discussed in terms of some of the key tenets of current postmodern theory.

Critical reflection for educators of adults: Getting a grip on the scripts for professional action

This paper reports on a particular approach to the teaching of “foundations of practice” within a graduate program for the professional education of adult educators. Foundations are viewed in discursive terms as master texts that act to script the actions of adult educators. A grasp of these texts and their regulating capacity is seen as an important component of “critical reflection” directed at professional development. A brief account is given of a course structure that requires the formal ‘mapping’ of major discourses. Finally, the capacities and limitations of the approach are reviewed.

Rhetorical redundancy in Apachean English interlanguage

Abstract Navajo and Western Apache speakers use rhetorical redundancy in written English as a major discourse feature to express emotions, politeness and persuasion. Various levels of linguistic structure are so employed. The source of this feature seems to be language transfer from Navajo and Western Apache.

John the Baptist, Jesus and the Parable of the Tares

The parable of the Tares is introduced by Matthew into the third of the major discourses he attributes to Jesus, a discourse for which he relies heavily on both Mark 4 and Q (Matt. 13.16f = Luke 10.23f; Matt. 13.31f 33 = Luke 13.18f, 20f). While lacking any full parallel in either of these sources, the parable does recall in varying ways several other synoptic traditions, (i) The Markan parable of the Seed growing Secretly/Patient Husbandman (Mark 4.26–29) occupied in the Markan sequence the position now occupied in the Matthaean scheme by the parable of the Tares. Moreover, the occurrence of verbal reminiscences of the former in the latter has not infrequently impressed interpreters: anthrōpos, katheudein, sītos, blastanein, chortos, karpos, therismos, prōton. While some of these might be attributable to correspondences natural in the coverage of similar subject-matter, not all of them are necessary to such coverage (e.g. katheudein), not all of them are common words (e.g. blastanein), and the aggregate of all of them cannot easily be written off as coincidence, (ii) The parable of the Sower, with its appended interpretation (Mark 4.3–8, 14–20 = Matt. 13.3–8, 18–23), provides a precedent within this discourse for an explanation based on a series of 1:1 allegorical correspondences (see particularly, in the case of the Tares, vv. 37–39, which provide the basis for a summarising explanation in vv. 40–43: hōsper…).