Negative Discourse Research Articles

Bastard Immigrants: Asylum Seekers Who Arrive by Boat and the Illegitimate Fear of the Other

Bastard Immigrants: Asylum Seekers Who Arrive by Boat and the Illegitimate Fear of the Other

Learning, literacy and identity: ‘I don’t think I’m a failure any more’

The impact of participation in adult literacy programmes on learners’ identities is examined through an interrogation of their past and current experiences and the assessment of the effect of particular pedagogies. The findings show how learners’ positive experiences in their programmes had caused them to re-evaluate their previous understandings and enabled the construction of new identities as people that are able to learn. These changes had come about through the challenging of negative discourses, the creation of new figured worlds and imagined futures, and the use of a learning curriculum where learners’ experiences were utilized as positive resources.

Australian Muslim leaders and normalisation discourses

Social integration is a contested concept that has been defined in various ways by different stakeholders. Drawing on research with Australian Muslim leaders, we argue that social integration can be usefully conceptualised as both a process of normalisation and the end product of this process. In this paper, we first discuss the identity aspect of social integration and then outline the discursive strategies the Muslim leaders utilise in their attempts to achieve the goal of being viewed as normal Australians. We illustrate how the leaders exercise agency in challenging dominant negative discourses, which assign to them a stigmatised position in Australia. The empirical evidence comes from 30 interviews conducted in Melbourne and Sydney in 2010 and 2011 with prominent Australian Muslim leaders.

Critical Discourse Analysis of Attributive Words Used with the word Muslim: A Corpus Based Study

This study will examine all the attributive words with the word ‘Muslim’ in the time magazine corpus. This study will basically focus on the choice of attributive words which time magazine used for the Muslims. Language is a discourse so the study of attributive words from the time magazines corpus is a type of media discourse. The critical discourse analysis explores all those social aspects which analyze power, ideology and the interaction of language in various contexts. This analysis is based on Fairclough's three dimensional models which show the ideology of the Americans about the Muslims and only the use of vocabulary has been analyzed under the dimension of textual analysis. The results show various approaches of the Americans towards the Muslims and which type of thinking is emerging in the society about the Muslims. The study will also explore that how various authors of newspaper use specific attributive words to highlight the image of the Muslims through various attributive words to control the mind of the readers and maintain power in the whole world. Ten words are analyzed having maximum frequency in 1990s TIME MAGAZINE corpus. In time magazine 1990's corpus, it has been proved that how diplomatically they present the Muslim and emerge a hidden negative discourse in the society about Muslims.

Double-standards in reporting of risk and responsibility for sexual health: a qualitative content analysis of negatively toned UK newsprint articles.

BackgroundThe need to challenge messages that reinforce harmful negative discourses around sexual risk and responsibility is a priority in improving sexual health. The mass media are an important source of information regularly alerting, updating and influencing public opinions and the way in which sexual health issues are framed may play a crucial role in shaping expectations of who is responsible for sexual health risks and healthy sexual practices.MethodsWe conducted an in-depth, qualitative analysis of 85 negatively toned newspaper articles reporting on sexual health topics to examine how risk and responsibility have been framed within these in relation to gender. Articles published in 2010 in seven UK and three Scottish national newspapers were included. A latent content analysis approach was taken, focusing on interpreting the underlying meaning of text.ResultsA key theme in the articles was men being framed as a risk to women’s sexual health, whilst it was part of a women’s role to “resist” men’s advances. Such discourses tended to portray a power imbalance in sexual relationships between women and men. A number of articles argued that it was women who needed to take more responsibility for sexual health. Articles repeatedly suggested that women and teenage girls in particular, lacked the skills and confidence to negotiate safer sex and sex education programmes were often presented as having failed. Men were frequently portrayed as being more promiscuous and engaging in more risky sexual health behaviours than women, yet just one article drew attention to the lack of focus on male responsibility for sexual health. Gay men were used as a bench mark against which rates were measured and framed as being a risk and at risk.ConclusionsThe framing of men as a risk to women, whilst women are presented at the same time as responsible for patrolling sexual encounters, organising contraception and preventing sexual ill health reinforces gender stereotypes and undermines efforts to promote a collective responsibility for sexual health. This has implications for sexual ill health prevention and could continue to reinforce a negative culture around sex, relationships and sexual health in the UK.

Multicultural mediations, developing world realities: Indians, Koreans and Manila’s entertainment media

In this article, I examine the mediation of multiculturalism in the developing world city of Manila, the Philippines. Drawing on both a thematic analysis of the Manila-centric Philippine entertainment media and six focus group discussions with the city’s local Filipinos, I reveal that this instance of mediation is entangled with the broader discourses of the Philippine postcolonial nationalist project. For one, the mediation of multiculturalism in Manila tends to symbolically marginalize the city’s Indians and Koreans and, in so doing, reinforces existing negative discourses about them. I contend that this is linked to the locals’ preoccupation with establishing a unifying cultural identity that tends to make them elide the issue of their own internal cultural diversity, as well as of the increasing diasporic population of the city. Second, the said mediation also tends to valorize the lighter-skinned Koreans over the darker-skinned Indians. I posit that this is related to how the locals’ discourse of cultural homogeneity has resulted in their continued reluctance to publicly discuss the persistence of their unspoken skin-tone-based racial hierarchy not only of themselves, but also of their cultural others.

Discursive Struggles Animating Individuals’ Talk About Their Parents’ Coming Out as Lesbian or Gay

The goal in the present study was to understand the discourses that animate children’s talk about having a parent come out and how these discourses interplay to create meaning. Data were gathered through 20 in-depth interviews with adults who remembered a parent coming out to them as lesbian or gay. One discursive struggle animated the participants’ talk about their parents’ coming out: the discourse of lesbian and gay identity as wrong vs. the discourse of lesbian and gay identity as acceptable. Analysis of participants’ talk about their familial identities revealed a range of avenues for resisting the negative discourses regarding lesbian and gay identities. The findings highlight discursive power in participants’ talk about their familial identities and how participants organize the conflicting messages they receive in their culture and in relationships regarding family identities.

Clicktivism: A Systematic Heuristic

This article argues that clicktivism is a legitimate political act. It emphasizes that such acts, through a recurrent negative discourse, have been marginalized. As a result, new modes of participation that draw upon the simplification of social connectivity have largely been ignored in the mainstream Political Science literature. In addressing this issue, the article develops a heuristic that identifies seven dimensions (or characteristics) of clicktivism. This new heuristic will allow for the analysis of clicktivism as a form of civic engagement separate from digital activism more broadly. Subsequently, the article applies the heuristic to several popular forms of clicktivism, including social buttons and the creation of memes, demonstrating both its utility and flexibility.

Xenophobia, sovereign power and the limits of citizenship

African foreigners in South Africa have frequently been the targets of violent and discriminatory practices, which occur in the enabling context of negative discourses concerning African foreigners that circulate in various spheres of public life. This study is interested in one particular field of interaction between African foreigners and the South African state, namely the public health sector. Discriminatory and, sometimes, violent practices towards African foreigners on the part of South African citizens are widely documented. Less discussed are the ways in which these practices of violence and discrimination are in fact state practices. We show this with reference to the treatment of African foreigners in the public health sector. We refer to this prejudicial treatment as health-care Xenophobia which is made possible by a wider set of discourses related to citizenship and the rights accruing to citizens which suggest the ‘non-rights’ of the non-citizen.

Roma in the News: an examination of media and political discourse and what needs to change

Roma, Gypsies and Travellers in Britain are marginalised in society and often the subject of negative discourse in media and political debate. This article examines why this matters through an example of a specific discourse incident in late 2013/ early 2014, with the media reporting and political comment on the size and behaviour of the Roma population in the Page Hall area of Sheffield. Using a framework of antagonistic discourse as control startingfrom Foucault’s work and bringing in Laclau and Mouffe, the article adapts concepts such as Galtung and Ruge’s ‘news values’ in this particular episode and places it in the context of the wider Gypsy debate. It offers suggestions to think about taking forward a more positive debate on Roma, Gypsy and Traveller communities in Britain, which could try to counterbalance the hysteria that often takes place in the press.

Tasting but not Tasting: MasterChef Australia and Vicarious Consumption

This article explores how people “taste” food media in order to develop cultural taste. It examines the vicarious consumption practices of three households of the popular reality television talent quest, MasterChef Australia (MCA). Vicarious consumption is the enjoyment of something, in this case gourmet food, through a third party (Veblen). The paper argues that the audience’s use of vicarious consumption is an empowering practice. As such, the article challenges Veblen’s negative view of vicarious consumption – the sentiment of which continues to underpin contemporary reality television and food media discourse (see Rousseau). Furthermore, this article expands upon Adema’s exploration of the practice in relation to food television in which she highlights that households gain more pleasure from watching food television rather than cooking and eating. Each audience member engaged in vicarious consumption and used MCA in conjunction with other food media for different reasons. For instance, one viewer used vicarious consumption to control her food intake, while another gained nostalgic pleasure from food media. These approaches to vicarious consumption allow the MCA viewers to negotiate conflicting discourses of cultural taste to construct a positive identity for themselves as "everyday foodies." "Everyday foodies" are individuals who embrace and incorporate an appreciation of gourmet food culture into their busy lifestyles, but are limited by time, money, health or confidence.

Tourism and the reconfiguration of host group identities: a case study of ethnic tourism in rural Guangxi, China

This paper examines the role of tourism in providing cognitive alternatives for the strengthening of place-based ethnic minority group identities in China, and scrutinises subsequent affects of China's integrative policy of ethnic and economic assimilation through tourism. During China's post-1978 reform period, tourism has been utilised in many rural areas as a tool for the economic and social development of rural toured communities. Consequently, tourism has been responsible for huge social, economic and political changes for ethnic minority peoples and landscapes that have been foregrounded into nationalistic tourist discourses. The research is based on ethnographic interviews and observation in the Dong ethnic minority village of Ma'an in south-western China's Guangxi province. Findings are considered with Tajfel and Turner's ‘Social Identity Theory’, which is utilised as an approach to understand how minority groups adapt and react under situations of social change in order to create and maintain positive group identities. The discussion highlights the role of tourism in providing a stimulus for the creation of a local group identity based on ethnic and rural difference and local cultural achievement, which in turn subverts wider negative discourses of rural areas and ethnic minorities. By heightening ethnic and social differences, tourism is shown to be exciting feelings within the Dong host community which are contrary to the wider integrative and socio-economic ideology of State tourism policy in ethnic minority areas.

Medieval Wenches and Other Icky Connotations: How Young People's Constructions of Sexually Transmitted Infections Deepen our Understanding of Their Sexual Health

Purpose: Genital chlamydia infection mainly affects young people and can have long term health consequences. Despite Australian guidelines recommending chlamydia screening for all sexually active young people, testing rates remain low and the epidemic continues to grow. This qualitative study involved interviews with participants from a randomized controlled trial and employed Foucauldian discourse analysis to explore in depth how young people understand sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and the subject positions they take in relation to testing, diagnosis and communication with partners. Methods: Young people (16 e 25 years) who completed a randomised controlled trial about a chlamydia testing intervention were invited to take part in a subsequent, qualitative study using indepth interviews. The interviews were unstructured but guided by topic prompts and explored participants’ views on chlamydia testing and the meanings attributed to STIs. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. Two researchers read and analysed the transcripts in order to describe the discursive fields and subject positions taken by participants when discussing their understandings and experiences of STIs. The study was approved by the relevant ethics committee. Results: Seven young people (5 female, 2 male) participated in indepth interviews. Sources of knowledge, information seeking and interpersonal communications about STIs were constructed as proximal or distant and these constructs played different roleswhen coming to terms with STIs. Participants were more comfortable discussing STIswith close friends thanwith sexual partners and took up a position of caring for others in doing so. Themedical consulting roomwas seen as the most appropriate place to get personal advice but even here proximity and distance played out. STIs were unanimously constructed as negative entities in participants’ lives. However as their proximity to STIs increased, the struggle to resist these negative beliefs led to taking up a new subject position of caring for self. Participants unanimously attributed their negative beliefs about STIs to sexual activity itself. Sexual activity among young people, especially females, was taboo. Within the discourse of shame, participants found ways to resist being positioned in negative ways by carefully choosing others with whom they could discuss STIs, by taking up roles as informal peer educators or by gradually rejecting notions of guilt, shame or immorality. Participants produced subject positions for individual STIs. Not all STIs were equally negative. Different STIs had different meanings including ‘gross’ ‘disgusting’, ‘serious’, ‘scary’, a ‘medieval wench’ and ‘having icky connotations’. Conclusions: By emphasising ‘risks’ associated with sexual activity, health and education professionals could be reinforcing negative discourses about shame. Instead, approaches to STIs could acknowledge the struggle young people face in resisting negative discourses about their own sexual activity. By focusing on positive concepts such as caring for self and caring for others, young people might find safer spaces to seek help and discuss STIs with their partner/s and health care providers. Sources of Support: The study was supported by a grant from the Australian Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing.

Queering discourses of coming out in South Africa

The performative act of “coming out” authenticates a homosexual identity and in the South African context the coming out narrative has gained such momentum that it is now regarded as an imperative for closeted homosexuals by the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project (LGEP). However, coming out has been critiqued by queer theorists who argue that it is problematic because it forces a person into an already established identity category, strengthens the regulation of sexual categories and is complicit in the reconstitution of these categories. In this paper, these queer critiques of coming out will be employed in order to explore the question of why a person is compelled to confess to the ‘truth’ about their homosexuality in South Africa. The data for this exploration is drawn from three non-fiction gay and lesbian books: “Male Homosexuality in South Africa: Identity Formation, Culture and Crises” (1992) by Gordon Isaacs and Brian McKendrick, “Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men and Ancestral Wives: Female Same-Sex Practices in Africa” (2005) by Ruth Morgan and Saskia Wieringa, and “Performing Queer: Shaping Sexualities 1994-2004 – Volume 1” (2005) edited by Mikki van Zyl and Melissa Steyn. The data was analysed using content analysis and the findings show how homosexuality is extricated from negative discourses of abnormality, promiscuity and fraudulence and reformulated into positive discourses associated with identity politics, normality and progress. In such positive discourses, a person is compelled into disclosure because it is viewed as a necessary step to combat homophobia and conservative family and social norms. This paper argues that as long as the coming out narrative is embedded in the positive discourses of progress, health and enlightenment, it will remain immune to critique of the role that it plays in strengthening heterosexuality as unitary and normative. Finally, this paper suggests that refusing to succumb to the pressure of categorisation could potentially undermine the constraints of the homosexual/heterosexual binary on which the categories of male and female are contingent.

The Trouble With Triumph: Discourses of Governmentality in Mainstream Media Representations of Urban Youth

The Assets Coming Together for Youth project conducted a critical discourse analysis of mainstream media depictions of Jane-Finch to better understand the discursive strategies used to constitute urban youth. Although a substantive body of literature investigates the negative discourses, little analysis interrogates the nominally positive discourses deployed by mainstream media. The findings suggest that the sociopolitical significance of these nominally positive discourses may go uncontested and pose a challenge to communities advocating for policies to support urban youth development. These discourses are examined using governmentality theory to reveal how racialized narratives of individual triumph re/produce troubled communities.

Contra Novum: Continuities in the Negative Discourse about New Religions

Contra Novum: Continuities in the Negative Discourse about New Religions

Constructing health and physical education curriculum for indigenous girls in a remote Australian community

Background: Over the last 20 years, curriculum development in Health and Physical Education (HPE) (or Physical Education, Physical Education and Health, Sport Education as it is variously called) has repeatedly attempted to address issues of equity and social inclusion. Why then does systemic educational disadvantage persist, and why do the poorest members of society acquire less privileged and privileging forms of HPE knowledge, skills and bodily dispositions? What constitutes relevant and responsive HPE curriculum for which groups of students remains a site of considerable contestation.Purpose: At a time when significant changes are being suggested to HPE curricula with the development of the Australian (National) Curriculum (see http://consultation.australiancurriculum.edu.au/), this paper is an attempt to refocus the analysis of education for Indigenous students in Australia upon the power and control relations operating within schools, rather than external social relations, using principles of pedagogic discourse from the sociological theories of Basil. The paper contributes to the growing corpus of studies on the social relations within schooling which constitute HPE curriculum, and the possibilities for interrupting systemic social inequity through the redesign of school curriculum and pedagogy.Methods: Using critical ethnographic methodology, a single, intrinsic case study of a school in a Torres Strait Islander community in Australia was undertaken. Document collation, observation and researcher notes, and individual and focus group interviews with stakeholders, comprised the data collection methods. Stakeholders including female students (n = 13), teachers (n = 7), parents (n = 2), school administrators (n = 4), regional education staff (n = 2), community advisors in education and health (n = 2), and regional health professionals (n = 6) comprised the group of key informants and research participants.Discussion and Conclusion: Government policy initiatives have reinforced a dominant and persistently negative discourse about ‘educational disadvantage’ when representing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous) students and educational outcomes. This paper challenges these negative discourses and focuses attention on the social relations within schooling which constitute the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of HPE curriculum, contributing to the large corpus of Bernsteinian studies of HPE curriculum which ‘look beneath the surface appearances of progress and innovation, to how inequities endure, despite rhetorical claims to the contrary that they have been eroded or have disappeared'. It also reveals the important contribution that Indigenous communities and educators have made and continue to make to curriculum decision-making in HPE for Indigenous Australian students.

An exploration of pregnant teenagers' views of the future and their decisions to continue or terminate their pregnancy: implications for nursing care

To explore teenagers' views of the future in relation to their choices to continue or terminate pregnancy. Despite recent decreases in the numbers of teenage pregnancies, across the world, the teenage pregnancy rate remains high. Consideration of views of the future (future orientation) appears to play an important part in teenage girls' decisions to continue with pregnancy. To date, no study has explored this in teenage pregnant girls at the time they make their decision to continue with or terminate their pregnancy. Cross-sectional mixed methods design. Three groups were included: termination of pregnancy (n=19), antenatal (n=9) and never pregnant (n=23). Participants were 13-18years old. The termination of pregnancy and antenatal groups were interviewed, and the never pregnant group completed postal questionnaires. Groups differed in individual aspects of future orientation, that is, education, career and family, and reasons for pregnancy resolution choice. The termination group had more clearly developed and longer-term plans for the future with a focus on career. The never pregnant group shared aspects of their future orientation with both the antenatal and termination of pregnancy groups. The impact of negative discourses about teenage pregnancy from others was identified as a significant issue. How pregnant teenage girls view the future has a relationship with their decision to terminate or continue with their pregnancy. The findings suggest that working with teenage girls to clarify their views of the future may be useful both in preventing future unwanted pregnancy and in supporting teenagers in making pregnancy decisions. Supporting pregnant teenagers in distancing themselves from negative stereotypes of teenage mothers may also be beneficial.

Doing Their Own Thing

Doing Their Own Thing

Dangerous Agent or Saviour? HPV Vaccine Representations on Online Discussion Forums in Romania

Whereas Romanian health officials have launched two national human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination campaigns, the uptake rate remained insignificant. Understanding local perceptions of the vaccine is necessary, as they could inform future educational programmes. Given that social media provide new opportunities to communicate about vaccination, this paper sought to explore the public's constructions of the HPV vaccine as they were expressed on Internet discussion forums. Twenty discussion forums, with a total sample size of 2,240 comments (2007-2012), were included. We conducted a thematic analysis with a focus on language, informed by a discourse analytic approach. Positive discourses relying on evidence-based arguments or cancer-related experiences battled with negative discourses that focused mostly on pseudo-scientific information and affect-based testimonials. Both camps made use of appeals to authority in order to provide powerful messages. Critics expressed high levels of mistrust in the health system and perceived the vaccine as dangerous, as part of a conspiracy, as unnecessary or as a promoter of promiscuity. By contrast, supporters considered the HPV vaccine to be helpful and criticized the irrationality of opponents. Ambivalence and uncertainty also emerged, along with criticism toward the suboptimal organization of the vaccination programmes. Findings highlight ways in which views about the vaccine are embedded in broader perspectives about science, the national medical system, society development and economic inequality. Online posts are likely to elicit fear and doubts around vaccination, which in turn may impair decisions. Findings indicate that targeted education campaigns are needed in order to address public concerns about vaccination.