Negative Discourse Research Articles

Ukrainian Elites Discourse in Respect of The Donbass Territory and Population of 2009-2018: Analysis of The National Facebook Segment

The conflict in the South-East Ukraine has acquired a protracted character, primarily due to the lack of consensus among key players. Ukrainian elites and society have not formed a consolidated position in relation to the Donbas. The study attempts to answer the question: what are the specifics and dynamics of the Ukrainian elites' discourse in relation to the Donbas over the past 10 years? The aim of the study is to analyze the semantics, frequency and emotionality of the two major discourses – in relation to the population and the territory of Donbas – using the analysis of the national Facebook segment. This work proceeded in several stages: from November 2016, when my colleagues and I began brainstorming, until May 2018, when the final schedules were obtained: the allocation of opinion leaders in the social network, downloading their posts from January 1, 2009 to February 15, 2018, the isolation from the discourse of posts devoted to the Donbas, the creation of a vocabulary that allows differentiating discourses according to the degree of their emotionality, an assessment of their frequency degree, an explanation of the discourses dynamics through event analysis. The database consists of 653 662 739 characters in 7 languages from 1,069,687 posts of 376 Ukrainian Facebook top-bloggers, downloaded and analyzed using the information-analytical system «Semantic Archive». The results of the analysis show that, firstly, the «birth» of discourses about both the territory and the population is the 2013-2014 boundary. Before that, the frequency of mentioning the Donbas is zero. Secondly, unlike the territory in relation to the population there is a significant negative discourse, and it has slightly increased in relative degree after 2014, but has always existed. Regarding the territory, on the contrary, the hatred discourse is absent. The neutral discourse dominates this agenda. At the very beginning of the period under review, it displaces positive discourse, showing how great is the uncertainty with regard to the territory, maintaining its relative share, beginning in January 2011. The number of positive and negative discourses in relation to the territory is a multiple of that for the population, which allows to draw conclusions about the high degree of uncertainty of elites in relation to the territory and the low probability of the transition of this neutral discourse into positive ones.

Oral History and the Discursive Construction of Identity in Flint, Michigan

This article explores the ways that Flint residents report on their encounters with various kinds of “outsiders” who are influenced by mass‐mediated images that position Flint and its residents in a certain way. Through the voicing of outsiders who engage in the circulation of negative discourses about Flint, residents then insert their own voices as they contest negative discourses about the city. Here, the images that they project about life in Flint provide a powerful counternarrative about what it means to have lived in the city during its deindustrializing period. This suggests that oral history interviews are an important site for the discursive production (and contestation) of individual and collective identities for Flint residents.

Museum in negative discourse of modernization

The purpose of the article. To find out the role of the museum in the negative discourse of modernization. Methodology. Deductive logic when checking out the premises, which lay on the basis conclusion, that the concept of modernization denotes negative social phenomena. Scientific novelty. It has been found out that the discourse of negative modernization includes the substitution of concepts: the notion of modernization is marked by pseudo-modernization processes. Within this discourse, the museum itself appears as an object of pseudo-modernization. Conclusions. The concept of «modernization» is ambiguous. On the one hand, modernization refers to utopian social projects of rebuilding of the entire society (the largest among them was the Soviet one). Thus, in practice, we have seeing fragmentary reorganization with unexpected negative consequences, in particular, with trends towards degradation. All this, in fact, is pseudo-modernization. The concept of «modernization» also refers to a gradual move forward based on trials and errors when innovations undergo comprehensive testing and verification, while traditionalist tendencies are also strong. In this case, true modernization is the evolutionary development of civilization, when modern project don’t build in empty place, but creatively re-think and improve the historical and cultural achievements. It is unacceptable to combine utopian and piecemeal engineering (Popper's terminology) in one concept. Transformation museums into a hub, coworking, etc. is example of utopian engineering. But if we lay on basis concept of modernization regarded to piecemeal engineering, we saving museums from destroying, and these institutions can be a good tools for positive modernization of society.

Embracing colouredness in Cape Town: Racial formation of first-generation Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa

Sociologists of ‘race’ studying ‘coloured’ racial identity in South Africa have exclusively focused on its socio-historical invention throughout the colonial and apartheid eras and its continuity in post-apartheid South Africa as it relates to South African nationals. What has been missing in the literature, however, is how coloured identity is being navigated by foreign-born non-South African nationals in post-apartheid South Africa, such as refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants more generally. Furthermore, migration scholarship in South Africa has paid little attention to this phenomenon to date. This article addresses this lacuna by interviewing first-generation Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers residing in Cape Town to explore the extent of their attachment to coloured racial identity in their everyday lived experiences. An interpretative phenomenological analysis was employed to examine the lived racial self-identification patterns of the participants. Convenience and snowball sampling were utilised to select study participants. This article forms part of the results from a larger project. Sixteen participants were recruited and three major themes identified: (1) awareness of one’s phenotype; (2) adopting spouse and offspring’s racial identity; and (3) embracing colouredness as a positive racial identity. The article argues that, in everyday life, coloured racial identity, which was historically created to categorise South African citizens, is being adopted by refugee and asylum-seeker communities for whom coloured identity was never socio-politically constructed. It is also argued that extra-somatic social and perceptual factors informed the racial self-identification choices of the participants rather than their racial phenotype, which has traditionally informed the racial self-identification practices of South African citizens. Furthermore, the participants redefined coloured as a positive racial identity, effectively displacing negative discourses associated with coloured racial identity.

Having children outside a heterosexual relationship: options for persons living with HIV

This article presents information about the social, legal and medical issues that medical and non-medical practitioners in the UKi should consider in order to signpost options for people living with...

Narratives of change: the role of storytelling, artefacts and children’s literature in building communities of inquiry that care

ABSTRACTXenophobic discourse surrounding migration, resulting in marginalisation of the other, is on the rise. This article tracks the formation of a professional community of teacher inquirers who wanted to challenge the prevalent negative discourse by generating narratives of change. Using narrative inquiry methods to capture ‘stories of experience’ told in response to artefacts of value, the community of inquiry revealed through their storytelling the value of excavating knowledge connected to language, culture and identity. This personal knowledge evoked care and empowered the teachers to confidently select and use children’s literature alongside creative response strategies to re-imagine their classrooms as spaces to welcome refugee and new-arrival children. The article argues that communities of inquiry provide potential ways forward for educators to pre-figure ‘an imperative of mutual care’.

‘Age of despair’, or ‘when life starts’: migrant and refugee women negotiate constructions of menopause

There has been a call for research on migrant and refugee women’s negotiation of diverse discourses and cultural constraints associated with sexual embodiment, including menopause, in order to facilitate sexual and reproductive health and understand gendered subjectivity. This study examined the construction and experience of menopause among migrant and refugee women who had settled in Australia or Canada in the last 10 years. Eighty-four individual interviews and 16 focus groups comprising 85 participants were conducted (total n = 169), with women aged 18 years and over from Afghanistan, India (Punjab), Iraq, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri-Lanka (Tamil), Sudan and various South American (Latina) backgrounds. Thematic decomposition identified three discursive themes: Menopause as the Age of Despair; a Discourse of Silence and Secrecy; and Menopause as a Life Stage – or when Life Starts. Negative constructions of menopause, associated with silence and secrecy, were evident across different cultural groups, with implications for women’s positioning and experience of menopausal change and embodiment. However, resistance to negative discourse was also evident. This was primarily associated with having received menopause education and more open communication about menopausal change, suggesting that education and health information can facilitate affirming aspects of menopause.

Between Belonging and Longing: Why do Young Rural-urban Migrants Leave Their Places of Birth, What Do They Leave Behind, and Do They Consider Moving Back?

This study is based on telephone interviews in 2012 with 25 arbitrarily chosen adolescents between 20-27 years who had recently migrated from the rural Danish municipality of Lemvig, supplemented with results from a 2011 survey (n=120). Within a theoretical framework of belonging (Cohen, 1982) combined with Bourdieu’s (1986) general theory of the economy of practices, the purpose is to shed light on three, interrelated questions: Why do young rural-urban migrants leave their places of birth, what do they leave behind, and do they consider moving back later in life? The new empirical contribution is to shed light on the latter, important question, which has been somewhat overlooked within rural studies. In line with previous studies, adolescents’ decision to move was often complex, although achieving legitimate cultural (educational) capital in urban areas was crucial. However, most of them still felt a strong emotional attachment – belonging – to their local area, mainly to family, friends, local community and place. In what regards potential return migration, difficulties in getting a good job and thus securing good incomes and social recognition seemed to be the main obstacle for moving back. Hence, many seemed trapped between two ‘competing’ sets of emotions – security/warmth and personal pride/ambition – that is, between their belonging to a specific local field characterized by ‘survival’ networks (Corbett, 2013) and their longing for a non-specific, other place where they could achieve, and capitalize upon, highly state recognized forms of educational and symbolic capital targeted at the national ‘field of fields’ (cf. Hektner, 1995; Johnson et al., 2005; Bourdieu, 2014). At the macro level, the rural-to-urban migration trend mirrors an unequal distribution of legitimate symbolic capital in space, i.e. the rural-urban power divide, reinforced by a negative discourse of rurality (Winther and Svendsen, 2012).

Gaming–playing on social media: using the psychoanalytic concept of ‘playing’ to theorize user labour on Facebook

ABSTRACTPolitical economists have argued that user activity on corporate social media is regarded as labour that appears playful and fun but is exploited and sold to advertisers for profit maximization. This article begins with the working assumption that such user labour on social media constitutes a form of playing. It is theorized through a psychoanalytic perspective on the term as developed by D. W. Winnicott and André Green. The notion of gaming–playing is put forward to account for set interface structures on Facebook that resemble a game as well as free-flowing dimensions more akin to playing. Some user discourses on Facebook are analysed through this prism. A psychoanalytic conceptualization of user labour as playing allows one to analyse both positive discourses that emphasize Facebook as a space for creativity, exploration and the unknown, as well as negative discourses that critique the platform with regard to lacking privacy controls or data ownership. Both discourses are conducted in a playful manner that creatively utilize a sense of user agency in relation to others and Facebook itself, but often remain without consequences.

Coping with the stigma of home birth: Strategies of engagement and disengagement

BackgroundHome birth in most developed countries is stigmatised. Negative discourses frame women planning home births as risk mothers who put their desire for a particular birthing experience above the health and safety of their children. As a result, one of the primary challenges home-birthing women face during pregnancy is how to cope with this stigma.Participants and procedureThis study was conducted in the upper Midwest region of the United States with women who were planning home births with midwives. Eleven women participated in the study. Data included in-depth interviews, participant-observation field notes, and content from one participant’s blog. Data were analysed using inductive content analysis.ResultsParticipants coped with home birth stigma in three ways: (1) avoidance, (2) engaging in an education campaign, and (3) focusing on a family tradition of home birth. These responses represent both disengagement and engagement approaches to coping. Nine participants exhibited one dominant coping strategy: three relied on avoidance, three on an education campaign, and three on family tradition. Two participants used more than one approach. Both of these participants used avoidance and family tradition.ConclusionsHome birth stigma is a source of chronic stress for women who choose to give birth at home. Women cope with this stress in a number of ways. Interventions to increase women’s coping resources and processes may be helpful. Changing the environment through efforts to destigmatise home birth may reduce the overall stress experienced by home-birthing women and improve their wellbeing.

7. Teenage Motherhood, Responsibility, and Docile Female

This research paper critiques the harmful dominant discourse in America which posits that teenage mothers are “unfit” parents because they bore a child outside the confines of heterosexuality, monogamy, marriage, and middle-class status. Based on secondary research, the paper uses a Foucauldian feminist perspective to argue that the negative discourse around teenage pregnancy and motherhood reified by America’s abstinence-only sex education curriculum and advice from sexual health experts seeks to produce docile female bodies. America’s abstinence-only sex education curriculum promotes gender differences in bodily movements whereby female sexual activity is demonized while male sexual activity is normalized. Sexual health experts also morally judge the teenage mother’s actions under the guise of professional knowledge, and fail to recognize the structural factors that may have contributed to teenage pregnancy as a means to produce docile female bodies. Additionally, both America’s abstinence-only sex education curriculum and sexual health experts absolve the teenage father of any responsibility. By challenging the sex education curriculum and sexual health experts, the power of language and discourse of authorities in framing what they consider to be a social problem will be brought to light.

Challenging the Discourse of Beginning Teaching: Only One Crying Phone Call

The first year of teaching is a significant period in a teacher’s life but for many it can signal the end, rather than the beginning, of their career. The demands of beginning teaching are well documented (Devos et al. in Teach Teach Educ 28(2): 206–217, 2012; Fantilli and McDougall in Teach Teach Educ 25(6): 814–825, 2009) and the attrition rate of new teachers is an international problem (Buchanan et al. in Aust J Teach Educ 38(3): 112–129, 2013; Le Cornu in Aust J Teach Educ 38(4): 1–16, 2013). So why and how do some beginning teachers persist and overcome early career issues, going on to have rewarding and positive teaching careers? This study examines the positive experiences of three first year primary teachers in New Zealand, interrupting and challenging the negative discourses about beginning teaching dominant within the existing research literature. Accounts of beginning teachers’ experiences were gathered through a series of semi-structured interviews during participants’ first year of teaching. The findings demonstrate that school culture and the nature of the individual were key factors in shaping their experiences. The paper concludes with a discussion of the transition to work of teaching graduates, including implications for initial teacher education and school based practices.

What is “old” and “past” in New Age discourse? A qualitative analysis of corpus evidence

In this article, we examined the collocational behavior as well as discourse prosody of two lexical items, “old” and “past”, in a specialized corpus of talks by Osho, the leader of one of the New Age movements. For our research purposes, we conducted a qualitative textual analysis of pertinent concordances from the corpus which revealed co-occurrence of “old” and “past” with collocates related to religion and society, consciousness, as well as the old and the past of humanity. In the concordance evidence, both lexical items, in the company with their lexical collocates, receive negative connotations, especially with reference to cultural institutions, as well as the old and the past, thus assuming a negative discourse prosody. Further, in the specialized corpus, “old” and “past” as well as their related concepts contrast with the positively connoted lexical items “new” and “present” and their related concepts. Overall, our findings reveal the linguistic manifestation of the ideology of the New Age movement in the concordance evidence on “old” and “past”, specifically criticism of the old cultural institutions of the past for their negative impact on humanity, advocating liberation from their effects and promotion of life in the present.

Blame and fear: Roma in the UK in a changing Europe

Anti-Gypsyism is not a new phenomenon. For centuries Roma have been blamed and feared; their social identities constructed to fulfil a function to be the visible ‘other’. The Brexit debate offered fertile, but well-trodden, ground for negative discourse. Gypsies, Travellers and Roma (GTR) embodied three key gripping anti-EU arguments: sovereignty of policy making, immigration control and potential cost savings of withdrawing from the EU. The research shows the felt hostility by GTR and suggests that the successful performance of the social construction of Roma in the debate was vital to the hegemonic, anti-EU, fear and blame discourse of Brexit.

‘Our Hielandmen’: Scots in Court Entertainments at home and abroad 1507–1616

AbstractThis article pays attention to the ways in which Highland identity was coopted and constructed through Renaissance court entertainments both at home and further afield in Europe. Analysis of the Tournament of the Wild Knight and Black Lady staged by James IV (1507/8) reveals the tropes of wildness and blackness to underpin a particular representation of Highland identity that is appropriated and adapted by the Stewart Crown. These associations are shown to be enduring, and championed by the Scottish Crown to negate a long‐established negative discourse of Northerness, albeit these pejorative resonances continue to resonate and are eventually displaced onto depiction of Irish national identity in court culture. Pitscottie's description of the temporary hunting lodge constructed by the Earl of Atholl to host James V and the papal ambassador (1529), and Mary Stuart's festival at Stirling Castle (1566) to celebrate the christening of her son, show the Scottish Crown's deliberate evocation of the Highland characteristics of wildness to proclaim indigenous Stoic and martial virtues justifying Scottish imperial ambition to the North and South of the border.

Being One’s Own Honoured Guest: Eating Out Alone as Gendered Sociality in Public Spaces

For a woman, eating and drinking alone in public is apparently seen as anomalous behaviour. Depending on location and time, there are attendant risks of being subject to negative moral discourses, surveillance, and unwelcome sexual attention. This article uses an autoethnographic account to examine an instance of ‘eating out’ alone as constitutive of the gendered nature of sociality in public spaces. It supplements emerging analyses of lone female dining in a context of ‘single’ women being an increasingly significant demographic category by offering further differentiation in terms of age and venue type.

Transforming Learning Identities in Literacy Programmes

This article draws on the theories of Mezirow, Foucault, and Holland and colleagues to investigate how students were positioned in relation to their own experiences, what opportunities they had to overcome their negative positioning in relation to the power structures that inform the worlds in which they move, and how their changed practices impacted on their positional and figured worlds. Data from community- and prison-based participants in Scottish adult literacy projects are used to interrogate the factors that contributed to overcoming the negative discourses that students had been embedded in. This article concludes that by the end of their programs, the students had experienced transformative changes in their learning identities, and these changes encompassed cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions.

Afro-pessimism and globalization: the stakes of symbolic death of Africa

This research strives to present the complexity of the Afro-pessimist concept, the conditions which made it possible and the way it is expressed on a daily basis. Straightaway, we need to precise that Afro-pessimism has a long pre-history. It is to be placed in the continuity of negative discourses towards Africa and Africans, the very discourses that conferred legitimacy to slavery and colonization. Yet, Afro-pessimism is a new and trend-related discourse arising after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. So, as a matter of fact, it is a discourse of/on ruin and collapse: the whole set of values preceding the collapse of the wall collapsed with the wall to make room for a new order. Thus, Africa is fated to imminent collapse since the new order, globalization, has nothing to sacrifice to the strategic stakes which were so profitable to the continent. The Cold War is just a bad memory now. The stakes of the new discourse are therefore clear: assistance to development has become an obsolete notion which is synonymous with squandering capital. Henceforth, Africa must take the pace of world economy and contribute to production according to the new standards of globalized capital: local governments and firms must renounce their capital in favor of multinational companies. Globalization means symbolic death for Africa. It is total destruction since not a single sector will be spared, even the culture and environment are hurt. Key words : Afro-pessimism, globalization, social discourse, otherness.

If You Want to Get Away with Murder, Use Your Car

The persistently high rate of pedestrian and cyclist road deaths in Canada is a major public health concern and a serious impediment to encouraging active transport. Despite empirical evidence that cyclist- and pedestrian-targeted policies like helmet laws and jaywalking tickets do not decrease fatalities, popular discourse continues to put the onus on vulnerable road users, often blaming them for their deaths. The negative effect of victim-blaming on vulnerable communities has been well established in the critical and feminist traditions, while recent studies have begun to examine the effects of negative discourse on cycling uptake and safety. To examine how public discourse reflects and affects the perception of blame in vulnerable road user deaths, this paper critically analyses news articles of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities in Edmonton in 2016. [results and analysis] Policy implications and avenues for future research are also discussed.

Risk literacy: Concepts and pedagogical implications for early childhood education

Taking risks and enjoying challenges are fundamental to the lives of young children from a developmental and evolutionary point of view. However, in modern societies, increasing concern about dangers and injuries has led to the escalation in regulation and provisions for the safety of young children. This intent to establish secure and risk-free environments for young children reaches, in some cases, the other end of the spectrum – that of overprotection, constraining children’s drive to explore, dare and experiment. This article explores the relationship between children and risk by focusing on the processes of thinking and acting, drawing on positive and negative discourses around risk. The article proposes that more interest should be directed towards enabling children’s own knowledge and understanding of risk, through early childhood education and risk literacy. The use of graphical representations, children’s probabilistic and possibility thinking, the risk culture of the classroom and a cross-curricular approach are pedagogical implications that could inform policy and practice in early childhood education aiming at present and future agents who are risk literate.