Political Commentary Research Articles

Сміх / laughter у сучасних англійських та українських політичних текстах

The paper deals with the semantic features of the representation of the abstract-emotional concept of «laughter» in terms of its central-peripheral structure in contemporary English and Ukrainian political texts. The concept is defined as a complex, culturally labeled, mentally affective notion that has a conceptual, figurative and value meaning and is actualized in dictionaries and political texts by various linguistic means. The research material includes articles, interviews, debates, messages, political commentaries published in the contemporary English and Ukrainian political press of the last decade and actualizes the abstract-emotional concept of «laughter». In Ukrainian and English political texts the abstract-emotional concept of «laughter» is perceived through the prism of fun and tears as expressions of happiness and unhappiness, but for the Ukrainian language, laughter is more often associated with the sound and events that cause it. Cognitive and discourse methods used in the article allow to establish the content and structure of abstract-emotional concept «laughter» not only in everyday life, but in discourse by means of nominal, descriptive and expressive embodiment. In political speeches, «laughter» is a traditional manifestation of arrogance and contempt; it helps express opposition to ideas, plans, forecasts, actions of the object of ridicule. Although, a person can laugh out loud as a result of happiness, in political texts the token «roar» and its Ukrainian equivalent «реготати» denote negative emotional states. Loud / Homeric laughter is contrasted with silence or giggles. In Ukrainian fiction «giggling» denotes fun, positive emotional reactions, but in the context of political speeches or commentary, this token represents a disparaging attitude towards a subject who laughs in this way or verbalizes manifestations of meanness, inferiority. The results of the study showed that the abstract-emotional concept of «laughter» is a coherent system, the components of which not only interact, but complement each other, forming a conceptual field. The content of the concept includes everything that a person knows about this phenomenon, emotional associations of different nature. The verbalization of the concept «laughter» in Ukrainian and English political texts is worked out taking into account its representation in synonyms as well as in free expressions and idioms. Idioms and phraseological expressions clarify the meaning of the concept on the basis of metaphorical similarity to other sentence components that is the object for studying in further works on this topic. Nominal expressions decipher and express the meaning of the concept, reveal the peculiarities of verbalization of emotions, affective states in the linguistic consciousness of the individual through the lens of political text.

My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File by Katherine Verdery

Reviewed by: My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File by Katherine Verdery Meghanne Barker Katherine Verdery, My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 344 pp. Katherine Verdery introduces My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File as a "polyphonic" work. Indeed, it masterfully interweaves Verdery's voice at the moment of writing, that of herself during her fieldwork in the 1970s and 1980s, and the voice of the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, who were surveilling her throughout her research. My Life as a Spy works through Verdery's many identities—those produced by the secret police and those that emerge as she changes over time. She shows how the intimate friendships made in her fieldwork profoundly transform who she is and have important implications for others, ultimately revealing that the preoccupation of the Securitate with whether or not she was a spy was a less preposterous notion than she originally expected. By reading her Securitate file and working through it with many who appear within it, Verdery finds that, in fact, ethnography and spying have much in common. A rigorous scholar through and through, even in her autoethnography, Verdery could not be accused of navel gazing. She frequently relates her own encounter with her file to others' accounts of the topic, such as Sheila Fitzpatrick's A Spy in the Archives (2015) or Timothy Garton Ash's The File: A Personal History (1998). Nonetheless, My Life as a Spy has the ability to continually humble the nascent ethnographer with the realization or reminder that only an extraordinary field worker would have achieved such a file as Verdery's. The archive is no less than 2,781 pages, beginning with her first visit as a graduate student in 1973, when a 25-year-old Verdery on a motorbike accidentally goes down a road she doesn't know is forbidden [End Page 1641] to her, a mistake that has lasting repercussions. The file follows her into the 1980s, when she gets herself into new trouble by beginning her monograph with jokes reflecting on ethnic relations that were not hers to retell, and by having a suspiciously Hungarian-seeming name. These accounts of Verdery's fieldwork offer instruction to the young anthropologist, but Verdery recounts these more in order to help the reader understand the repercussions they had for the Romanian secret police's beliefs about her. Stylistically, the book is consistently engaging, mixing humor, pathos, and acute political commentary. Verdery expertly blends the intrigue of the secret police file with painfully honest reflections on the complexity of intimate relations in the field. She makes herself vulnerable, while always pushing toward a rigorous analysis of her own conduct and its consequences. The book is divided into two parts: "Research under Surveillance" and "Inside the Mechanisms of Surveillance." Structurally, the organization of the first chapters into decades (with Chapter 1 focusing on the 1970s and Chapter 2 on the 1980s) seems less elegant than the rest of the book. However, the split between decades aligns with a number of differences: Cold War tensions increased; Romania's World Bank loan led to severe austerity measures on the local population; Verdery shifted field sites; and, moreover, her position within the community changed with the publication of her controversial first book. These issues were all interconnected to the Securitate's impressions of her and the actions taken against her and her associates. In later chapters of Part II, "Reflections" and "Revelations," Verdery works to understand how reading her file revealed who was informing on her, ultimately allowing her to realize that her actions not only motivated reactions from the Securitate surveilling her, but that the Securitate's interest in her had far more profound consequences for those around her than she ever imagined. By the end of the book, having worked through her file and having sat down with friends who informed on her and even a few Securitate officers involved in her surveillance, Verdery observes that these latter—the Romanian secret police—were not the invisible, aloof specters she had imagined but were in fact enmeshed in a complex...

Three histories of one Slovakia. On Polish literature of the interwar period on the situation of Slovaks in the face of the fall of the Habsburg monarchy

The aim of this article is to show the attitude of Polish interwar literature (political commentary, historiography) towards the role of Slovaks in building the First Czechoslovak Republic and their situation in the state they shared with Czechs. The collected material has been divided into three categories: pro-Hungarian, pro-Czech (pro-Czechoslovak) and pro-Slovak, but the author also notes an interest in Slovakia related to the Slavic studies conducted during the Second Polish Republic. The works discussed in this article attempted to compare the Slovaks’ situation under the Hungarian rule and in Czechoslovakia; to answer the question whether the Czechoslovak nation existed; and to suggest to whom the Polish state should bind its future on the international arena (support Hungary’s aspirations to recover Slovakia, establish good relations with Prague, or support the Slovak nationalist movement against Czechs).

Political communication on social media: A tale of hyperactive users and bias in recommender systems

A segment of the political discussions on Online Social Networks (OSNs) is shaped by hyperactive users. These are users that are over-proportionally active in relation to the mean. By applying a geometric topic modeling algorithm (GTM) on German users’ political comments and parties’ posts and by analyzing commenting and liking activities, we quantitatively demonstrate that hyperactive users have a significant role in the political discourse: They become opinion leaders, as well as having an agenda-setting effect, thus creating an alternate picture of public opinion. We also show that hyperactive users strongly influence specific types of recommender systems. By training collaborative filtering and deep learning recommendation algorithms on simulated political networks, we illustrate that models provide different suggestions to users, when accounting for or ignoring hyperactive behavior both in the input dataset and in the methodology applied. We attack the trained models with adversarial examples by strategically placing hyperactive users in the network and manipulating the recommender systems’ results. Given that recommender systems are used by all major social networks, that they come with a social influence bias, and given that OSNs are not per se designed to foster political discussions, we discuss the implications for the political discourse and the danger of algorithmic manipulation of political communication.

RETRACTED: Prevalence of unprofessional social media content among young vascular surgeons

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (https://www.elsevier.com/about/our-business/policies/article-withdrawal). This article has been retracted at the request of the authors, the Editor-in-Chief and the Senior Editor of the Journal of Vascular Surgery. This article has been retracted in accordance with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Retraction Guidelines because the authors did not have permission to use the Association of Program Directors in Vascular Surgery (APDVS) directory of program directors and trainees to conduct research. In addition, the methodology, analysis and conclusions of this article were based on published but not validated criteria, judging a series of behaviors including attire, alcohol consumption, controversial political and religious comments like abortion or gun control, in which significant conscious and unconscious biases were pervasive. The methodology was in part predicated on highly subjective assessments of professionalism based on antiquated norms and a predominantly male authorship supervised the assessments made by junior, male students and trainees. The authors did not identify biases in the methodology, i.e., judging public social media posts of women wearing bikinis on off-hours as “potentially unprofessional”. The goal of professionalism in medicine is to help ensure trust among patients, colleagues and hospital staff. However, professionalism has historically been defined by and for white, heterosexual men and does not always speak to the diversity of our workforce or our patients. The Editors deeply regret the failures in the Journal’s peer review process which allowed this paper to be published. The Editors and the review process failed to identify errors in the design of the study, to detect unauthorized use of the data, and to recognize the conscious and unconscious biases plaguing the methodology. For this, we express our most sincere apology.

The role of social media in emergency management during the 2019 flood in Poland

Objectives<i>The aim of this article is to discuss the role of social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, during the floods that took place in Poland in May 2019. The following research questions guided the study: (1) How is social media used by different actors at various stages of the disaster management cycle? (2) To what extent were social networking sites used during the 2019 floods in Poland?</i>Methods<i>The study employed social media analytic tools to analyze social media data published on Facebook and Twitter qualitatively and quantitatively in the period from 1 March to 10 June 2019.</i>Results<i>Social Media is used during emergencies by various actors for different purposes: emergency services use it to broadcast weather alerts and situational updates; authorities communicate weather alerts and offer assistance; mass media outlets share up-to-date information; individual users connect and share their experiences of the disaster as well as express political views; organizations spread general comments, situational updates and political comments.</i>Conclusions<i>Despite several drawbacks, such as the chaotic spread of messages, their unreliability and the politicization of the news- feed, social networking sites support disaster management. Therefore, they should be incorporated as an additional communication channel during emergencies.</i>

Māui Street

For better or worse, the emergence of social media has created platforms for a range of diverse voices often left out of mainstream media. In particular, Indigenous voices have found amplification through new media channels that allow Indigenous people to tell their own stories rather than being “othered” as a subject in someone else’s. Morgan Godfery’s Māui Street blog was a New Zealand example of this potential to subvert traditional political commentary. Beginning as a university student addressing a variety of Indigenous and other political issues, Godfery has carved a path over three electoral cycles (and counting) as an astute observer and analyst of political and social issues in New Zealand, the Pacific region and beyond. Outside of his blog he has written articles for online and hard copy newspapers and magazines; peer-reviewed academic journals; and book chapters. He has also provided comment on radio and television. Māui Street is now the curation of published pieces from across sources such as The Guardian, E-tangata, Overland Literary Journal and The Spinoff in addition to the original blogsite.

Is Social Media a Digital Pulpit? How Evangelical Leaders Use Twitter to Encourage the Faithful and Publicize Their Work

Social media is altering how some religious leaders communicate with their followers and with the public. This has the potential to challenge theories of religious communication that have been developed through the study of traditional modes such as sermons. This study examines how leaders in U.S. evangelicalism take advantage of the public platform provided by Twitter. Using over 85,000 tweets from 88 prominent evangelical leaders, we find that these leaders often use their social media platforms as a natural extension of their current modes of communication. More specifically, evangelical leaders use their account to encourage and inspire their followers, while also conveying information about upcoming personal projects such as tours and book releases. In a small number of cases, evangelical leaders do make reference to political issues, but those individuals are ones who have already built a brand based on political commentary. Speaking broadly, the usage of political language by evangelical leaders is rare. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this analysis advances theories of religion and communication.KeywordsTwitter – social media – evangelicals – leaders

Candidate Authenticity: ‘To Thine Own Self Be True’

In recent electoral contests, political observers and media outlets increasingly report on the level of “authenticity” of political candidates. However, even though this term has become commonplace in political commentary, it has received little attention in empirical electoral research. In this study, we identify the characteristics that we argue make a politician “authentic”. After theoretically discussing the different dimensions of this trait, we propose a survey battery aimed at measuring perceptions of the authenticity of political candidates. Testing our measure using data sets from different countries, we show that the answers to our items load on one latent concept that we call “authenticity”. Furthermore, perceptions of candidate authenticity correlate strongly with evaluations of political parties and leaders, and with vote intention, while they are empirically distinguishable from other traits. We conclude that candidate authenticity is an important trait that should be taken into account by future research.

Migration and the Making of Ireland by Bryan Fanning (review)

Book Reviews Migration and the Making of Ireland, Bryan Fanning (Dublin: University College Dublin Press/Preas Choláiste Ollscoile Bhaile Átha Cliath, 2018), 347 pages. While it is not universally acknowledged, as most people do not want to know, immigration and thus emigration is the big political question of our time. There is a sense in which it was always thus, since we found our way out of eastern Africa some 60 or 80 or more thousand years ago. This study attempts to look at our own tiny little corner of the flow of peoples and, by doing so, wittingly exposes the global nature of our island home. It would be difficult for a study to be more comprehensive, unless it was given a double or more hundred pages. Each paragraph is packed with information, duly footnoted and sourced to its lair in a reputable publication or study. The style is easy, direct and informative, so much so that you would wonder why it is not the regular bedside read of journalists and politicians, who see the question of immigration as a problem and that of emigration to be ignored. Yet, because of the cool and dispassionate exposition of the facts, it is unlikely to raise a storm in Leinster House or in the non-smoking back rooms of journalistic joint-chat. Facts do not an argument make, unless brought into the armoury of some other prejudicial ideology. Yet again, this is a book that is rich in facts. Not facts as just statistics, but as events that were and are embedded in our time and place. It is part history, part sociology and part cultural and political commentary, but so what? The study of life and existence is a happy mish-mash of all our divided disciplines, and to leave any one in the jar that is kept by the door is an act of stupid exclusion. But before these facts, there is the general exposition of the history of emigration and of immigration during our longish history. Following the introduction and a brief chapter masterfully telescoping thousands of years into a few short pages, we are taken on a roll through plantations and transplantations and then the stories of people from different cultures and religions, including the German Palatines, Jews, and Scottish settlers, leading on to the more recent immigrants, particularly Poles, Africans, Muslims from Studies • volume 108 • number 432 498 Winter 2019/20: Book Reviews different countries, our own journeys to America and elsewhere then and now, while not ignoring Latvians, Brazilians, Chinese, Indians, Filipinos and other nationalities, as well as dealing with the travails of refugees and asylum seekers in a measured and plainly readable way. It is difficult to see how anyone could set down in such a clear fashion the tangled story of those first thousands of years as is done in that opening chapter. Although ancient pre-history is the most embedded in the past of all, in recent years it is the most open to modern revision. This is because of the astounding new work being done on the DNA of bones and cadavers as they arise from beneath the bogs, or not. In one sense, it can only be a brave intrepid researcher who will enter this field, as it is always shifting, depending on each new discovery in both swamp and laboratory. On the other hand, it would be difficult to quibble with the direct provisional inclusions set down in this chapter. Later centuries provide their own difficulties, as different and more diffuse evidence arrives in great abundance. Again, this is handled with great sensitivity, analysing mountains of material with only a mouse of space in which to make sense of it. Not often understood is the author’s clear argument that the twelfth and thirteenth century Church was part of the Anglo-Norman cultural and political conquest, an argument which finds its own echo in a later chapter with his statement that ‘The Catholic Church preached a quietist doctrine of accommodation to English culture’; and while this is said in the context of the Irish in Britain, there is some evidence that it had a certain validity in the...

Rhetorical Elocution: Figurative Expression of Political Discourse

The modern definition of rhetoric is based on the conception of rhetoric as a universal system of persuasion, so persuasive discourses are the main object of rhetorical researches. Political discourse, the primary purpose of which is persuasion, is a textbook example of persuasive discourse. The paper presents a study into political rhetoric: the comments ant political programmes of the candidates in the presidential election in the Republic of Lithuania. This research aimed to determine the dominant figurative expression in political comments according to the methodological approach of the discipline of rhetoric and on previous studies. Figurative expression is a broad linguistic category involving the use of (non-)linguistic tools of expression which perform the aesthetic and (or) persuasive function. In rhetorical studies, a figurative expression is realised and analysed not as a standard embellishment of discourse, but primarily as an instrument of persuasion. It must be noted that for elocution-level rhetoric analysis of political discourse, essential expression tools are those that reflect the worldview and the values of discourse participants. Therefore, besides the rhetorical analysis, the methods of content and context analysis are also invoked. Discourse studies reveal a direct interaction between rhetorical tools and persuasion of the message. Rhetorical figures perform the function of information “framing” and adapting the expectations of the addressee.

The Turmoil Of India In The Twilight Years Of British Empire – In Nayantara Sahgal’s Novel “Mistaken Identity”

Nayantara Sahgal is the author of nine Novels, ten works of non-fiction and wide-ranging literary and political commentary. She has received the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Sinclair Prize and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize.
 The Novel “Mistaken Identity” is an elegant, adroitly constructed, mordantly written story of the playboy Bhushan singh, son of the Raja of Vijaygarh. He is arrested and thrown into jail and charged with treason.
 The Novelist successfully depicts the British officers’ partial Judgements, tortures of Indian National Activists and the prison rules.
 As news of violent world events penetrates the prison walls – civil war in Turkey, the rise of Mussolini, Gandhi’s Dandi March, mass arrests, the death of hunger-strikers in Lahore – Bhushan discovers that fate has played a cruel trick on him.
 The present paper is an attempt to bring out the story of a love and obsession that brilliantly summons up the turmoil of India in the twilight years of empire.

The political commentary on May Fourth in 1950s Hong Kong and Taiwan

“May Fourth” has long been considered a turning point for modern China, resulting in continuous heated discussion on the topic since the 1920s. These discussions not only reexamine culture but also have political intent. Many recent scholars have discussed the “ideologization” of May Fourth from the perspective of “memory politics.” They argue that “May Fourth discourse” was not only used to understand and recapture the past, but also to help one’s own cherished values occupy a core position in modern Chinese history, thus using historical interpretation to create a compass for China’s future that conforms to historical tides. From the four great philosophies of modern China, the Nationalists and Communists have incorporated May Fourth into the “Three People’s Principles” and “New Democracy,” respectively. Liberals held up democracy and science as a need for China’s future, and made efforts to propagate and practice democracy in Hong Kong and Taiwan after 1949. As for New Confucians who had continuously criticized May Fourth for being anti-tradition, they supported traditional values but also believed that democracy and science were a “priority and necessity for China's cultural development,” and hoped to use the spirit behind this ideal. They along with liberals criticized the Nationalist and Communist autocracy for departing from May Fourth ideals, and especially noted how May Fourth created fertile ground for the rise and expansion of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), “resulting in the growth of the Communist Party,” and the Nationalist government’s move to Taiwan. After 1949, Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and the Guomindang (GMD) Nationalist Party he led primarily assessed the May Fourth Movement by synthesizing the views of the liberals and New Confucians. They highlighted the slogans of saving the nation, ethics, democracy, and science to promote ethical education and “national spirit education” as top-priority cultural policies. The focus of this article is to examine how liberals and New Confucians used the topic of May Fourth to criticize the CCP and GMD in Hong Kong and Taiwanese political commentary magazines during the 1950s (approximately 1949–1960). It also explores how the GMD synthesized liberal and New Confucian views to lay out their own position. This discourse shows how May Fourth had diverse interpretations under the context of conflict between the liberals and the New Confucians as well as Nationalists and Communists. The criticism of the ideologization of May Fourth in recent years is actually an important turning point in the scholarly study of May Fourth.

Famine, Trial, War: A Selected Review of Political Commentary in the New Masses from 1933 to 1939

Famine, Trial, War: A Selected Review of Political Commentary in the New Masses from 1933 to 1939

Epistemological Borders and Crossings in the War against ISIS in the Philippines

Abstract Following the approach of Judith Butler in Frames of war: When is life grievable? and similar theoretical perspectives, the paper examines how the war against ISIS in Southern Philippines discursively represents the “other” – the victims of war – as dispensable “collateral damage”. There is no disputing that the siege of Marawi City by an ISIS- inspired group has taken a terrible toll on human life and has exposed the increasing vulnerability of the country to terrorism. Yet, the relation between the state and the displaced victims that emerged, brought forth in and through media reporting and political commentaries, constitutes an epistemological border that casts the military (as the state’s instrument) as the uncontested heroic entity, yet at the same time keeps the dislocated inhabitants – mostly Muslim minorities – out of sight, inaccessible, and in due course ungrievable. Media texts and commentaries, privileging state perspectives and sources, implicitly establish what counts as “grievable” lives. A privileged hegemonic perspective has kept the war victims de-subjectified, rendering their suffering and the grave humanitarian conditions on the ground unproblematic. The paper then looks into how a “desensitized” political discourse is structured by this new cognitive orientation. While some Marawi voices still surface, the focus is on gaining direct public empathy and identification toward a particular side and engendering moral indifference toward the victims. Lastly, the paper looks at epistemological crossings in the form of alternative (and potentially disruptive) discourses that have emerged, despite the narrowed liminal space. It argues that war victims, in a context of new meanings, retain some form of agency that might engender change, and could reemerge as recognizable voices who can participate as full partners in the collective restoration of Marawi and the Muslim community.

Economic and Socio-political Views of Online Participants in Online Political Commentary during the 2014 South African General Elections

Economic and Socio-political Views of Online Participants in Online Political Commentary during the 2014 South African General Elections

Play as an Indicator of Public Opinion in Online Political Commentary: A Content Analysis of Online News Forums Leading Up to the 2014 South African General Elections

Play as an Indicator of Public Opinion in Online Political Commentary: A Content Analysis of Online News Forums Leading Up to the 2014 South African General Elections

African Modernism: A Comparative Study of Resistance in the Modernist Art of Nigeria and South Africa

This paper adopts comparative analysis as a classic art historic methodology for the study of resistance in the art during African modernism in Nigeria and South Africa. Other methodologies that are combined in this paper as an underlying paradigm and analytical methods include formal analysis and cultural history. While the comparative analysis is adopted to interrogate commonalities for similarities and differences regarding African modernism and resistance art produced by some modern artists in Nigeria and South Africa, the formal analysis is articulated to focus on gathering information exclusively from the visual elements of each work and the meanings conveyed to viewers and the cultural history method is adopted to narrate a history that is recalled or invoked in each art. The comparison reveals that, while the South African artists were engaged in resistance art which convey political commentaries, Nigeria artists were engaged in resistance art that relayed cultural commentaries.

Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship

Carrie Hyde's Civic Longing is a history of citizenship in the United States between the American Revolution and the Civil War. According to Hyde, the fractured, uneven, and inchoate nature of American citizenship during this period authorizes an expansion of what we should look at when recounting its history. As she puts it: “the history of citizenship cannot be told solely from the perspective of the law”; “to fully understand the prehistory of citizenship, we need to undo a relatively modern interpretative bias that treats fiction and other imaginative traditions as secondary and subordinate expressions of political practice”; and “although citizenship lacked substantive content in early U.S. law, Americans sustained an idealized image of citizenship by imagining it from the outside” (pp. 9–10). Accordingly, Hyde advances a history of pre–Civil War citizenship through readings of religious texts, political commentaries, and, especially, literary works. Nonlegal texts are often set alongside legal...

Narratives of Transfer, Dependence, and Resistance: Rastafarian Perspectives on US Colonialism in the Virgin Islands

AbstractIn 1917, the United States purchased the Virgin Islands—and the people living on them—for $25 million from Denmark. The US Virgin Islands is currently one of 16 remaining non‐self‐governing territories in the world. This political (and necessarily) economic status is fundamentally identical to the “colony.” The territorial status of the Virgin Islands severely hampers the human rights and social, economic, and political potential and autonomy of the dependents of the Virgin Islands. My work focuses on the ways in which Rastafarians on St. Croix, USVI resist, negotiate, accommodate, and internalize their dependent territorial status and the ways in which they critique Western cultural, economic, and political imperialism through historical narrative, personal history, and political commentary during ritual reasonings or sessions. Much of the following article is in narrative form, so that Rastas can speak on colonialism and hegemony in their own words.