Parallel Discourses Research Articles

An Alternative Narrative.

An Alternative Narrative.

Shifting from disorientation to orientation: Reading student discourses of success

Academic success in higher education is generally evaluated by means of concrete and measurable criteria that function as an institutional discourse of success. However, a parallel discourse of success that is far less evident is the languaging and identification of success or failure that students hold and circulate. This paper investigates as success from students' perspectives using a critical lens informed by Stuart Hall's discursive analysis and James Gee's inclusive articulation of discourse. We argue that students tend to describe and evaluate their success in a consistent way, making it more than a highly individualised set of statements. Being well versed in terms of what counts for the institution, we consider what counts for the students: do they endorse, contest or negotiate as markers of success? We subsequently tease out the similarities and distinctions in these two discourses that function in parallel and read the recurring themes and nuances of (dis)orientation that come through in the interviews as markers for an alternative discourse of success or failure that stands alongside of (and occasionally in opposition to) the institutional discourse.

Abusing text in the Roman and contemporary worlds

In this comparison of portraits of authorial anxiety, I focus on contemporary attitudes to fan fiction and on discussions of authors in Imperial Rome (notably Galen and Martial) to consider the assumptions of textuality that frame imagined textual abuse. Revealed are parallel discourses for different concerns—for the reader as a potentially ill-educated consumer and the text as an object in the ancient world; in the contemporary world, for the author's personal violation and the text as an agent within readerly experience. I discuss how fan fiction's lack of commercial publication is used to distinguish it from other contemporary literature within this framework. Fan fiction's noncommercial publication can thus be appreciated as a marginalizing act in itself.

Concurrent Practices

Douglas and Trubridge have worked alongside each other and in aligned relation through the roles of artist, producer, director, critic, and collaborator in a variety of international contexts since 2013. A relationship to the liquid (and, in turn, the liquid to solids and gasses) provides an undercurrent in their shared modes of practice. Most recently Douglas curated the ‘Performing Mobilities’ cluster for the PSi#21Fluid States cluster in Melbourne, with each using this opportunity to develop their works in parallel discourse. Through these and other projects in New Zealand, the USA, The Bahamas and Australia they have experienced an ease of navigating creative relationships between each other’s work. This fluid shifting through different roles and modes of operation has maintained a consistently speculative approach to the outcomes of each process and the collaborative intersections between their practices. This document charts this creative exchange and dialogue between the authors, drawing upon examples in their work to chart their parallel and interweaving currents of creative practice over the past three years.

A Alteridade Negada: O "Descobrimento" das Américas Segundo o Discurso Imagético de Selos Europeus de 1992

Resumo A ideia do outro diferente é nas relações internacionais um aspecto importante para a forma do estabelecimento e da manutenção dessas relações. Enquanto os discursos e as declarações de políticos e governos passam hoje por filtros profissionais jurídicos e políticos sofisticados, existem outras expressões culturais que estabelecem discursos oficiais paralelos. Este artigo apresenta as representações do outro nos selos postais europeus lançados por ocasião das celebrações da chamada descoberta da América em 1992. Como referencial teórico, parte das reflexões sobre alteridade ou outridade de Tzvetan Todorov (1991) e Enrique Dussel (1993). Como método, propõe uma análise das narrativas imagéticas dos selos como expressões de suas respectivas culturas visuais. O estudo identifica o discurso imagético dominante e apresenta três discursos alternativos.

Parallel discourses with unparalleled effects: early years workforce development and professionalisation initiatives in Germany

Just over a decade ago, an OECD Starting Strong team reviewed the system of early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Germany. Regarding the staffing of early childhood provision and referring in particular to resistance at the political level to raise the formal qualification level of educators in alignment with European trends, the evaluative report noted in 2004 that the chosen approach may be overlooking the issue of the sustainability. The article explores key discourses and paradigmatic shifts which have shaped early years professionalisation initiatives and workforce developments since this time. One of the most notable changes has been a remarkable growth in the size of the workforce, which has almost doubled over the past eight years. What are the reasons for this fast-paced expansion, and can it be sustained? Have qualification requirements been lowered, and has the composition of the workforce changed? What are current challenges facing the sector? As ECEC provision develops across Europe, other countries face similar issues. Exploring how they are played out in one particular country context may help to stimulate critical analysis in others.

Wielokulturowe estetyki w dyskursie publicznym w Polsce. Próba postkolonialnej interpretacji

The aim of my paper is to present the concept of postcolonial aesthetics, as well as to analyse the phenomena of multicultural aesthetics in public discourse in Poland. In my work the sociological perspective is accompanied with pedagogical one. I point out that aesthetics may be considered as space for identity formation. While analysing multicultural aesthetics in Polish public discourse, I focus on several phenomena. First, I describe invisibility of multicultural aesthetics in art discourse, as well as in educational discourse, and analyse the representations of multicultural aesthetics. I reconstruct the discourse of superiority of The Global North civilisation, and a parallel discourse of primitivism of the Global South. Next, I describe the proces ses of commercialisation and folklorization of multicultural aesthetics occurring in public sphere, especially in mass culture. Finally I reconstruct types of identities formed in the analysed material. The papers concludes with reference to Edward Said's demand for a constant critical reading o f culture.

In search of ‘lost’ knowledge and outsourced expertise in flood risk management

This paper examines the parallel discourses of ‘lost’ local flood expertise and the growing use of commercial consultancies to outsource aspects of flood risk work. We critically examine the various claims and counter‐claims about lost, local and external expertise in flood management, focusing on the aftermath of the 2007 floods in East Yorkshire, England. Drawing on interviews with consultants, drainage engineers and others, we caution against claims that privilege ‘local’ floods knowledge as ‘good’ and expert knowledge as somehow suspect. This paper urges carefulness in interpreting claims about local knowledge, arguing that it is important always to think instead of hybrid knowledge formations. We conclude by arguing that experiments in the co‐production of flood risk knowledge need to be seen as part of a spectrum of ways for producing shared knowledge.

Consensus rationales in negotiating historical responsibility for climate change

This article explores strategies in consensus-making processes in international climate diplomacy. Specifically, it examines the consensus-making politics, in the case of negotiating historical responsibility within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In doing so, analytical concepts from the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe are utilized to look for rationales that underpin discursive structures as well as agreement. To conclude, three rationales have dealt with conflicts over historical responsibility. While the first rationale hid conflict behind interpretative flexibility, the second reverted to “reasoned consensus,” excluding perspectives commonly understood as political rather than scientific. The third rationale has enabled equivocal use of the concept of historical responsibility in several parallel discourses, yet negotiators still stumble on how to synthesize these with a potential to foster future, more policy-detailed, consensuses with higher legitimacy. Understanding the history and current situation of negotiations on historical responsibility from this perspective can help guide policy makers toward decisions that avoid old pitfalls and construct new rationales that generate a higher sense of legitimacy.

Reframing the Climate Change Debate to Better Leverage Policy Change: An Analysis of Public Opinion and Political Psychology

U.S. climate change-related policy response is failing, despite scientific consensus on core realities, in part because of comprehensive, simultaneous, yet incommensurable doctrines and political biases. Climate disruption is a critically important agenda for homeland security and emergency management, yet as framed today, the policy communication regime frequently requires many skeptics or deniers to abandon their opinions, cultural commitments and epistemic frameworks. Public opinion consensus would be optimal, but the traditional education/information approach is flawed, and continued delays in significant mitigation and adaptation policy implementation will mean far larger future costs to protect civilian environmental security and national interests. Thus, effective response demands new messaging strategies, pursuing interim progress, leveraging overlapping consensus, enhancing risk analysis literacy, and constructing alternative, intermediary categories of multiple parallel discourse. These framings would center on security, economic interests, public health, religious stewardship, and other themes. Customized audience discourses may enable better public and opinion leader buy-in, partly transcending polarization, since such leaders have a unique ability to help translate and promote these various discourses. In addition, eventual construction of a multi-dimensional map could optimize effective messaging and supportive coalitions. Otherwise, stalemate on climate-related policy and environmental security will continue, with increasingly likely catastrophic implications.

Bursting bubbles between sand and sea: teaching dance on the edge of the Mediterranean

In July 2010, on the crest of ‘The Arab Spring,’ 28 independent dance teachers from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Malta, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, gathered in Bodrum, Turkey, for the Symposium on Dance Education in Arabic Speaking Countries. This article reflects on the symposium experience, examining the sociopolitical environment and cultural history in which the event took place, while also revisiting the philosophical tensions behind the design and implementation of this dance teaching and learning event. The experiences and voices of the participating teachers are shared, and the opportunities and threats that continue to face dance education in the region are considered. From the symposium, strong questioning of dominant models and meanings of teaching and learning dance emerged, along with a demand for tolerance towards different ideas and approaches. The pedagogical philosophies and challenges expressed by many of the participating dance educators appeared to be parallel wider political discourses on how society might be organized, and how speaking up about these visions can enhance pride and engender solidarity within a diverse dance community.

From “colonial reciprocity” to international supremacy: Scottish chartered accountancy and its “discourse of superiority” in context, 1854 to the present

This article examines developments in the history of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS) and its predecessor professional bodies, in an attempt to shed fresh light on the means by which the Institute has attained the position of considerable power, repute and international influence that it occupies today. It shows that, over its history, ICAS has been responsible for creating and maintaining a discourse, in a Foucauldian sense, which has asserted the superiority of the CA qualification over other professional accounting qualifications both nationally and internationally. It is argued that this discourse first arose out of a crisis facing the Institute’s predecessor bodies in 1853, continuing afterwards and then reappearing at further pivotal points in the Institute’s history. The study utilizes the Foucauldian concepts of discourse, power/knowledge, discontinuity and exclusion in its arguments, showing how these relate to fluctuations in the, at times, parallel discourse concerning Scots national identity that has also been in circulation, concluding with an evaluation of the usefulness of a Foucauldian approach.

I'm going to make sure I'm ready before I leave: The complexity of educational and mobility decision-making in a Canadian coastal community

This paper draws on an analysis of migration from a coastal community in Atlantic Canada through the fisheries crisis of the last decade. Despite a persistent rhetoric of crisis and decline, the community remains difficult to leave for many young people. This paper examines the dimensions of this difficulty and the way that formal education sets up expectations for outmigration but few supports to families who have multi-generational linkages to local communities. Ironically the very discourse of crisis that is meant to propel youth out of the community may end up playing into a parallel discourse that has long predicted the collapse of urban economic and social structures. This in turn generates and propels a survivalism that inflects educational decision-making in ways that create deeply ambivalent and problematic conceptions of place and mobility for rural youth. This discourse in turn complicates simplistic neoliberal notions of educational choice.

Ageing, Difference and Discrimination: Property Transactions in the Crucible of Human Rights Norms

The emergence and intensification of an international debate concerning the role of human rights norms in addressing difference and discrimination linked to ageing has culminated in the campaign for a new international convention on the rights of older people. At the same time, the demographic and socioeconomic implications of the 'ageing society' have coincided with asset-based welfare to generate a new environment of risk around housing equity transactions. These parallel discourses invoke competing images of the older person as a vulnerable legal subject and a self-responsible autonomous consumer, with the domain of private, market-based property transactions to liquidate housing equity almost exclusively underpinned by a narrative of self-responsible individualism. This paper explores the issues surrounding differential vulnerabilities as they affect older owner's housing equity transactions, and reflects on alternative strategies to develop a coherent theoretical framework for older owners' legal subjectivity.

A “Rightful Place” in the World of Languages: Rethinking Discourses of Dis-Ability in Indigenous Language Planning and Policy

The labels used to name, classify, and analyze language varieties and competencies construct realities that enable or disable the (re)acquisition of those languages and the empowerment of their speakers. Focusing on Indigenous American languages, I first consider the classificatory schemas used to assign linguistic vitality hierarchies. I then examine parallel discourses of linguistic “dysfluency” (Meek, 2011)and disinterest often assigned to younger members of Indigenous speech communities. Expanding upon Ramanathan's (2010, 2013) notion of dis-citizenship, I argue that linguistic naming and classification, while foregrounding important issues of endangerment, can create a logic whereby threatened languages are viewed as “dis-citizens” in the world of languages—incomplete, non-normative, and disabled—potentially undermining revitalization efforts. Drawing on comparative ethnographic research on Native American language loss and reclamation, I explore the ways in which Indigenous communities are interrupting these discourses. I conclude with the implications for language rights.

Apichatpong: Staging the photo session

When Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Loong Boonmee raleuk chat /Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2010, many international critics acclaimed its modernist cinematic vocabulary coupled with what they perceived to be Thai exoticism in character depiction, local custom, and environment. Focus on exoticism in Apichatpong’s films has been a familiar refrain in international critical reception of his films. This article explores reception of Uncle Boonmee in two registers: that of the international critic who knows little about Thai history or localisms, as opposed to that of a spectator with a wider and more nuanced appreciation of Thai history and custom. It is argued that the film is structured around a thematics of history/memory/remembrance. Texts speaking to recent Thai history are explored in order to exemplify the rich cultural associations surrounding Uncle Boonmee. Additionally, it is argued that this thematics and its surrounding cultural texts are woven together by a central trope of photography, theoretically enlivened by using Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘optical unconscious’. Apichatpong has constructed a film text that ingeniously melds a slice of Thai history with that of the fictive life of Uncle Boonmee and his relationships to set in motion parallel discourses – a personal life suggestive of the ‘life’ of the Thai nation.

Female Body, Discipline, and Emerging Male Spectatorship in Yoruba Video Film

This essay examines the increasing display of female sexuality in Yoruba video film. The investigation focuses on this development especially because these sexualized female images have now become an integral part of a video film tradition that emphasizes moral discipline alongside entertainment. The images and motif of discipline tend to constitute two seemingly parallel discourses and it is this apparent contradiction, in relation to spectatorship, that this essay explores. As a result of the liberal deployment of female sexuality in Yoruba video film, almost all the genres are suitable for this investigation. However, Omotara Johnson I, II, III, Eye E , and Iwajowa have been selected for analysis not only for presenting the female body, but also for interrogating the filmic process. These video films are examined within the contexts of objectification and gender theories, including the Yoruba notion of “good character.” Crucial observations that emerge from the research include the discovery that eroticized female body functions as a component of the film’s didactic motif, obliterating possible contradictions between the images and instructional goals of the narratives. In other words, female objectification becomes justified through its centrality to the development of the film’s instructional machinery. The implication of eliminating the opposition between female objectification and didacticism is the creation of a unique spectatorship, which is male and heterosexual. This spectatorship supplants the previous undifferentiated one, because until about ten years ago, Yoruba video film was more preoccupied by dialogue and narrative than capturing the female body. Objectification of the female form and the emergence of specifically male and heterosexual audience are recent phenomena in the development of Yoruba video film.

An Outlaw Ethics for the Study of Religions: Maternality and the Dialogic Subject in Julia Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater”

In this essay I examine Julia Kristeva’s transgressive body of work as a strategic embodiment of, and argument for, an ethical orientation towards otherness predicated on the image of divided subjectivity identified by Jacques Lacan but powerfully re-theorised as dialogic by Kristeva. I focus on what is, for Kristeva, a stylistically unique essay – “Stabat Mater” – which examines a number of institutional discourses about motherhood from the western philosophical, religious, and psychoanalytical traditions, and simultaneously subverts them with a parallel discourse (and enactment) ostensibly by an actual mother. The text itself, I argue, can be read as a performance of dialogic subjectivity and of Kristeva’s conception of maternality, which implies a radical ethical imperative – termed “herethics” – towards alterity. I propose that this herethical model might heuristically inform current debates regarding the ethical orientations of the study of religions as an academic field.

English

This article elaborates that a pluralist English School perspective offers a number of possibilities that are useful in analysing SEA. Its prime contribution is to help locate the middle ground that is often missing from theoretical debates. Thus, it can bridge parallel discourses, whether they be realist and constructivist, or realist and liberal. It can also provide a socially oriented understanding of the role of great powers – an understanding that provides a much more subtle interpretation of what Indonesia offers the region, and the challenges it faces there.

Scientist or science‐stuffed? Discourses of science in North American medical education

The dominance of biomedical science in medical education has been contested throughout the past century, with recurring calls for more social science and humanities content. The centrality of biomedicine is frequently traced back to Abraham Flexner's 1910 report, 'Medical Education in the United States and Canada'. However, Flexner advocated for a scientist-doctor, rather than a curriculum filled with science content. Examination of the discourses of science since Flexner allows us to explore the place of various knowledge forms in medical education. A Foucauldian critical discourse analysis was performed, examining the discourses of scientific medicine in Flexner's works and North American medical education articles in subsequent decades. Foucault's methodological principles were used to identify statements, keywords and metaphors that emerged in the development of the discourses of scientific medicine, with particular attention to recurring arguments and shifts in the meaning and use of terms. Flexner's scientist-doctor was an incisive thinker who drew upon multiple forms of knowledge. In the post-Flexner medical education reforms, the perception of science as a discursive object embedded in the curriculum became predominant over that of the scientist as the discursive subject who uses science. Science was then considered core curricular content and was discursively framed as impossibly vast. A parallel discourse, one of the insufficiency of biomedical science for the proper training of doctors, has existed over the past century, even as the humanities and social sciences have remained on the margins in medical school curricula. That discourses of scientific medicine have reinforced the centrality of biomedicine in medical education helps to explain the persistent marginalisation of other important knowledge domains. Medical educators need to be aware of the effects of these discourses on understandings of medical knowledge, particularly when contemplating curricular reform.