Politeness is a communication strategy that involves both positive and negative face, aiming to prevent face-threatening acts and help individuals maintain each other’s social image. Communication that takes place in cyberspace has now become common and accepted by various groups of people, regardless of age, background, or social status. Through social media, individuals can not only communicate and exchange information, but also establish connections, interact with old friends, and find new friends from different across the globe. This study aims to identify types of politeness strategies and the most dominant types of politeness strategies used in the @nikizefanya account Twitter (X) platform. The study uses qualitative descriptive method. The findings reveal that there are six positive politeness strategy and two negative politeness strategies used in the @nikizefanya account Twitter (X) platform. The most dominant strategy is the fourth positive politeness strategy (Use in-group identity markers) with the percentage of usage reached 45,5%. This shows the strong tendency of users to build and emphasize group identity in their interactions. Meanwhile, from the category of negative politeness strategies, the first strategy (Be conventionally indirect) dominates with a much higher percentage of 89,4%. These findings show that the users’ comments in NIKIZEFANYA account use language or references that identify them as part of the same group as their audience, creating a sense of closeness and community. This research contributes to understanding how politeness functions as a tool to maintain harmonious communication and avoid conflict in social media context.

ABSTRACT This article identifies forms of creative visual resistance to a prevailing logic of border enforcement around the world – a logic aimed at curbing undocumented human movement, often with deadly consequences. These forms of resistance serve to highlight the porosity and triviality of borders, as well as the violence that increasingly defines their global management. This phenomenon is perpetuated through policies, rhetorical strategies, speech acts and media narratives that together sustain a toxic discourse of exclusion. Following a discussion of the theoretical framework of border abolitionism and a critical reading of performative and ritualistic state power, the article undertakes an analysis of two instances of artistic digital practices that mock the state border performance while subverting it. Both were prompted by the spectre of the ‘Trump Wall’ in the US-Mexico border during the 2016 election campaign. From the perspective of this article, visual forms of resistance transgress the border, exposing its violence and absurdity while reimagining it as a space for creative and alternative political strategies. The analysis engages with the concept of the carnivalesque, foregrounding its ambivalent character as a mode of transgression that can both reinforce sovereign power and, when reclaimed from below, enable forms of visual resistance that unsettle bordering practices.

ABSTRACT This study examines the predictors of variation in militarisation across nation states’ coercive apparatuses from 2011 to 2021. It tests two competing explanations of militarisation: as a functional response to changing crime threats, or as a politically driven strategy emerging from economic, political, and social crises. Drawing on cross-national longitudinal data covering 161 countries, we estimate six linear panel regressions with country fixed effects and robust standard errors clustered by country, using a multiply imputed dataset that ensures the inclusion of developing countries. We employ three distinct measures of militarisation and find that, contrary to prevailing assumptions, none is associated with the level of crime threat. Instead, political stability emerges as the strongest predictor of militarisation levels. These results challenge functionalist, or crime-control, accounts of militarisation. Rather, they suggest that militarisation operates primarily as a political strategy: it provides a veneer of stability, restores public confidence in ruling parties’ ability to maintain control during crises, and reflects a logic of control in which elites expand coercive capacity to deter dissent and project authority. In this light, the militarisation of the coercive apparatus may serve as a mechanism of power projection.

African theatre scholarship has largely privileged playwright-centred criticism, foregrounding dramatic texts while giving comparatively limited attention to directing practice, rehearsal methodology, actor training, and production architecture. Across diverse regional contexts, critical discourse has prioritized literary interpretation over the processes through which directors organise performers, space, technology, and production cultures. Directing therefore warrants sustained conceptual attention as a creative, pedagogical, and organizational formation within African theatre. This article proposes Afroterradelogy (ATD) as a decolonial framework for analysing directing practice through comparative African case studies. ATD reorients the analytic grammar through which directing is conceptualized in contemporary African theatre, positioning it as an integrated field in which indigenous epistemologies intersect with rehearsal systems, technological mediation, institutional infrastructures, and material negotiation. It offers an inductively derived analytic model grounded in situated practice. Drawing on comparative performance analysis and practice-based production study across West, Southern, East, and North Africa, the article identifies recurring structural tendencies in rehearsal organization, political staging strategies, disciplined improvisation, and hybrid aesthetic mediation. Across these contexts, the director emerges as pedagogical architect and institutional mediator, structuring creative agency across spatial, technological, and material conditions. Afroterradelogy offers a disciplined analytic vocabulary for examining directing praxis as pedagogical, aesthetic, and institutional architecture across contemporary African theatre.

Since the mid-1990s, many countries have introduced Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) to build hospitals and deliver health services. While numerous studies have been conducted on the policies surrounding PPPs and their social and financial impacts, limited research has focused on the attitudes and perspectives of stakeholders who have experienced the reform- specifically their subject position-takings towards hospital PPPs. Even fewer studies have explored the situation in China, and the theoretical explanations underpinning this policy process remain underdeveloped. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining how healthcare stakeholders in China, particularly public and PPP/private hospital managers and administrators, experience hospital PPPs and investigating the social mechanisms that underpin these experiences. Based on Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, habitus, and the state, and a case-centred qualitative study, 33 key informant interviews were thematically analysed. The study reveals a field of struggle between the dominant public hospitals and the subordinate PPP hospital for state recognition. Rather than passively accept neoliberal changes in the healthcare field, our participants respond innovatively to hospital PPPs, where there are antagonistic understandings of the role of the state and its relations with the market regarding the financing, provision, and delivery of healthcare. These conflicting position-takings and dispositions reflect how differential power relations - manifested in the disparity in accumulated capital - between public and PPP hospitals materially and symbolically shape the struggling experiences of those working in the system. The study concludes that understanding hospital PPPs as existing in the healthcare field compensates the existing interpretation as a "political strategy" from the pluralist perspective or a "powerful discourse" in a Marxist tradition, and in doing so, the field struggles between public and private/PPP hospitals over state recognition and power differentials in resource allocation can be revealed. The findings also emphasise the importance of defining the boundaries between public and private hospitals, as well as determining the level of private capital involvement in health service delivery and funding.

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of pragmatics in translation studies. It begins by tracing foundational contributions, such as those of Catford and Nida, who highlighted the importance of context in achieving dynamic equivalence. The article then introduces key pragmatic concepts that have influenced translation research, including speech acts, implicature and inference, the cooperative principle and its maxims, relevance theory, and notably, politeness and impoliteness. Subsequently, it reviews prominent publications that integrate pragmatics and translation, followed by a discussion on translating (im)politeness strategies, encompassing the use of swear words. Finally, the article presents the five papers included in this special section.

The global wellness industry has multifaceted impacts on health and well-being, including through the sale and consumption of wellness products, the provision of health information to consumers, and the promotion of specific norms and values. Despite its growing prominence, the wellness industry and its impacts on health and policymaking remain understudied. This article examines how the wellness industry operates as a commercial, social, and political determinant of health. We draw on commercial determinants of health and corporate political activity frameworks to analyze the strategies, structures, and discourses of the wellness industry. We examine existing academic literature, regulatory documents, industry data, and media and policy sources to map the wellness industry's characteristics, regulatory environment, and political dimensions, including its role in shaping US public health policy through the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. The wellness industry deploys political strategies closely resembling those of other harmful commodities industries, including undermining scientists and policymakers, promoting personal empowerment, and lobbying against regulation. While wellness products and practices are often framed as responding to the erosion of institutional trust and health care systems' failure to address persistent health inequities, their promotion may deepen, rather than alleviate, these crises. The MAHA movement illustrates how wellness logics have become embedded in policymaking, platforming individualized wellness while falling short of addressing the systemic drivers of ill health and inequity. Applying a commercial determinants of health lens to wellness highlights the need for stronger regulatory oversight of health claims, demonetization of harmful online health misinformation, and structural investment in equitable health care systems. This is particularly urgent given the MAHA movement's alignment of wellness with populist politics. Further research is merited to systematically document wellness industry practices across diverse national contexts and investigate links between wellness discourse, health inequalities, and political polarization.

This study investigates politeness strategies represented in the German textbook Netzwerk A1 and contrasts them with documented Indonesian politeness norms to explore their pedagogical implications for German language teaching in Indonesia. Grounded in contemporary politeness theory and contrastive pragmatics, the research employs a qualitative descriptive design based on systematic document analysis. Dialogic interactions in the textbook were examined to identify patterns of directness, grammatical mitigation, hierarchical encoding, lexical politeness markers, and the use of Konjunktiv II. A micro-contrastive analysis of representative request forms further illustrates divergences between German structurally direct but grammatically mitigated formulations and Indonesian relationally oriented, lexically mediated politeness strategies. Interpreted through the distinction between pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic dimensions, the findings reveal that differences extend beyond linguistic structure to culturally grounded evaluations of appropriateness and hierarchy. These divergences highlight potential areas of pragmatic transfer among Indonesian learners of German. This study contributes to the field of pragmatics by expanding contrastive analysis beyond English-centered paradigms and by providing a multi-layered account of politeness that integrates structural, lexical, and grammatical dimensions. The findings also offer pedagogical insights for developing intercultural pragmatic competence in German language teaching.

In India, a communitarian society, concerns over public-truth disputes are widespread. The Indian National Congress (INC) and allies promoted secular-liberal nationalism but, eventually, they failed, as they lacked grassroots connections. The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) capitalised on Hindu-majoritarian religious sentiments, politicised the grassroots and mobilised them, and formed the government – first in the mid-1990s, for a relatively short period, and then again since 2014. In power, the BJP seeks to divert the political focus away from neoliberal accumulation and increasing inequality by polarising Hindus against religious and ethnic minorities and consolidating their vote. Through sociopolitical strategies and modalities, polarisation has shaped a majoritarian ‘religious nationalist’ identity among Hindus in India – in three phases (1992–2010, 2011–2022 and 2023 onwards) – and it has helped the BJP consolidate their political power, charisma and influence. Social media has amplified the effect of religious polarisation as a political strategy. Since 2023, the BJP has contextualised their strategy to ethno-religious segregation and polarisation among the Christian ethnic minority Kuki and Hindu Meiteis in Manipur, North-East India, that is also affective in deployment, and that suits the already fractionalised ethnoscape. The result is electoral-political shifts in voting behaviour and ethno-religious identity differentiation.

This paper examines how street vendors in Chandigarh deploy everyday design as a political strategy of spatial negotiation. Focusing on the rehri—a mobile handcart, it traces how restrictive bylaws produced non-compliance by design. In response, rehriwallas collaborated with local technicians to retrofit existing carts, developing an electrified rehri that was affordable, locally sourced, and legally legible. These interventions exemplify everyday design—iterative material adaptations produced within the constraints of informal work, where technical decisions are inseparable from questions of formal compliance and affordability. Read against Chandigarh’s modernist legacy, where mobility functioned as a technique of discipline and displacement, the redesigned rehri reclaims mobility as a tactic of presence. Electrification also enabled the cart to be reframed as municipal innovation and adopted as a formal program, culminating in a mayoral launch of an electric rehri fleet. The paper argues that everyday design operates as a material politics of legibility—an ongoing negotiation through which informal workers reconfigure the terms of recognition. By centering retrofit and affordability as forms of technical expertise, the case expands what counts as design beyond professionalized planning and demonstrates how informality is not residual to the city, but a generative mode of city-making.

ABSTRACT In the post-truth era, where facts are eroded by emotional narratives and digital misinformation, strengthening political resilience among the younger generation has become a critical democratic challenge. This qualitative case study examines the political education strategies implemented at State Senior High School 3 Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The research explores how Civic Education, student council organisations, alumni networks (PADMANABA), and pentahelix collaboration (academia, business, government, community, media) synergistically build students’ epistemic agency and critical citizenship. Findings reveal that transformative civic pedagogy, deliberative democratic simulations, transgenerational value curation, and multi-sectoral networking create a layered political resilience ecosystem. This model shifts political resilience from a state-centric to a networked, bottom-up paradigm, fostering citizens who are epistemically sovereign and resistant to disinformation. The study contributes to global debates on democratic resilience from a Global South perspective, emphasising the strategic role of schools as counter-hegemonic sites for regenerating democracy.

Tamar’s narrative in Genesis 38:15-24 is often read within a traditional moral framework that emphasizes piety or sexual transgression. Traditional moral frameworks emphasize piety or sexual transgression, but such approaches often mask the power imbalances that shape the story. This article applies the hermeneutics of suspicion, a critical approach that suspects ideological structures in texts, to reread the story of Tamar in a subversive and liberating way. By interrogating constructions of gender, power, and the body in the text, the article reveals how the narrative reinforces patriarchal structures while concealing women’s agency. Tamar’s act of disguising herself as a prostitute is understood not as a form of immorality but as a political strategy to demand genealogical justice and her rights as a woman in a patriarchal society. Combining feminist theory, sexuality critique, and postcolonial approaches, this article reads Tamar’s body as a political and theological space that challenges the boundaries set by male authorities, especially the figure of Judah. It also explores how the text creates a visual duality between Judah’s perception and Tamar’s performative identity, exposing mechanisms of both oppression and resistance. This article offers a new contribution to feminist biblical studies by placing women’s marginalized voices and bodies at the center of interpretation and locus of theology. Finally, this article invites faith and academic communities to revisit biblical narratives that have been considered normative and replace them with interpretations that favor gender justice and humanity.

Abstract Despite the significant role of politeness markers in managing interpersonal communication, relatively little attention has been paid to the modal forms could you and would you , particularly regarding their functional differences and sociolinguistic variation. This corpus-based study investigates these two politeness markers in contemporary British English using data from the Spoken British National Corpus 2014, a large collection of conversational British English across regions and social groups. Furthermore, the study examines how social variables (gender, age, and social class) influence the use of these expressions. The findings reveal significant functional differences between the two markers: could you is often used for checking possibilities, while would you is more commonly employed for making suggestions or offering something. Gender was found to have little impact on the use of could you , whereas would you was more frequently used by females. Age and social class also showed variation in the use of these markers, with younger speakers preferring could you for seeking information and middle-aged individuals using would you for making requests. This study contributes to the understanding of how politeness strategies vary across social contexts, offering new insights into how linguistic markers serve as tools for social negotiation and interpersonal communication.

ABSTRACT Institutions typically construct ‘access thievery’, the practice of disabled people gaining access ‘illegitimately’, as irrational or immoral behaviour. This paper explores the conditions where such behaviour is not only moral, but also a legitimate political strategy. I engage with distinctions between ideal and non-ideal, as well as distributive and non-distributive, theories of justice. The non-ideal approach provides justification on grounds of fair cooperation. The non-distributive approach forces us to question the validity of scarcity assumptions. This leads to an altered set of conditions to what has typically been engaged with, and therefore altered conclusions. I argue that, under certain conditions of injustice, lying to gain access is rational, and that there is a political imperative to do so.

Reality TV shows, such as First Dates Ireland, represent a site of gender co-construction which potentially influence audience language use conventions. At the same time, as largely unscripted discourse, such gender co-constructions may be claimed to mirror discursive patterns in Irish English. Research on Irish English in the media, particularly on unscripted media discourse, represents a research gap. Similarly, research on the interactional co-creation of gender roles in dating, and specifically in payment interaction, is limited, and represents a gap in the study of Irish English. The present paper explores gender co-construction as portrayed in payment negotiation interactions and experiential interview snippets broadcast on First Dates Ireland. Specifically, the study takes a metapragmatic perspective on heterosexual gender co-construction, with a focus on daters’ use of gendered categories, on their mobilisation of gender and on their indexing of stances towards discursive gender reproductions. Findings reveal both men and women to explicitly co-construct a traditional gendered identity and for these co-constructions to focus above all on men and their active role in extending payment offers. Men use metapragmatic references to gender and gender roles as objective grounders in payment offers. These serve a negative politeness strategy protecting women’s negative face. They also protect men’s positive face, ensuring that payment offers are not seen as social pleading, but rather dictated by social norms. Women use metapragmatic references to gender in offer acceptances, via compliments and gratitude, framing offers as socially appropriate. These references enhance men’s positive face, while protecting women’s negative face. Finally, challenges to norms, although not rejected outright, were negatively framed. The paper closes with a discussion of the implications of traditional gender reproduction in the media.

Politeness is a core aspect of language use and is frequently realized through modality, particularly modal verbs expressing permission and indirectness. In EFL contexts, textbooks play a crucial role in shaping learners’ pragmatic competence by modeling how modal verbs encode culturally appropriate politeness strategies. This study aims to explore modal verbs expressing politeness in English textbooks for grades 10, 11, and 12. A corpus-assisted approach was employed and the primary data consisted of reading and instructional texts from the three English textbooks constructed as a corpus. The texts were converted into txt format and processed using AntConc to analyze six modal verbs associated with politeness: may, might, can, could, will, and would. The analysis focused on frequency counts and contextual usage identification to determine how each modal conveyed politeness in different topics and tasks. The results showed an increasing frequency of modal verbs across grade levels, with 183 occurrences in Grade 10, 329 in Grade 11, and 343 in Grade 12. Across all grades, the modal verb can was the most frequently used, while modal verbs might and could were rarely used. Modal verbs like may, can, might, could, will, and would in the textbooks reflect Indonesian social norms of politeness. Among them, modal verbs can, will, and may are used most often, showing common expressions of permission and polite requests in formal and everyday contexts. The findings suggest that modal verb usage in the textbooks reflects Indonesian cultural values, particularly the preference for polite, indirect communication in formal and educational settings.

Email communication plays a central role in professional interaction within the tourism and hospitality industry, where transactional efficiency must be balanced with interpersonal rapport. This study examines the interaction between genre structures and politeness strategies in authentic tourism-related emails. Drawing on Swales’ (1990) Genre Analysis Framework and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Theory, the study qualitatively analyzes eleven authentic emails exchanged between a Bali-based travel agency, hotel partners, and international clients. The analysis reveals a recurrent sequence of rhetorical moves, namely greeting, purpose statement, elaboration, request or confirmation, and closing, within which politeness strategies are systematically embedded. Positive politeness predominates through expressions of gratitude, inclusive pronouns, and affective tone, reflecting the service-oriented nature of hospitality communication. Negative politeness is employed to mitigate imposition in sensitive requests, while bald-on-record strategies occur in interactions characterized by established professional familiarity. These findings demonstrate that genre structures in tourism emails function not only as organizational frameworks but also as resources for relational work. The study contributes to English for Specific Purposes (ESP) by highlighting the pedagogical value of integrating genre-based instruction with pragmatic awareness to enhance learners’ intercultural and professional email communication competence in tourism and hospitality contexts.

General-purpose government actors (e.g., mayors) have become increasingly involved in education since the late twentieth century. But while education policy has moved from education-specific to general-purpose government arenas, school desegregation policy has moved in the opposite direction. General-purpose government actors’ involvement was key to reducing segregation from the mid- to late-twentieth century; however, Supreme Court cases leading up to Parents Involved in Community Schools (PICS) have left desegregation in district actors’ hands. This paper explores one county council's involvement in a recent attempt to desegregate schools by redistricting, or redrawing school attendance boundaries, in Howard County, Maryland—a unique case that presents an opportunity to learn whether the involvement of local government officials, who are well-positioned to support these efforts, could spark progress toward desegregation in the post-PICS era. I find that the council's efforts to promote desegregation in the Howard County Public School System were more symbolic than substantive. Council members’ actions contributed to community resistance that led the school board to enact a redistricting plan that would have further segregated schools, and the council failed to make good on their promise to simultaneously address housing segregation. Ultimately, this case serves as a call to local officials and school district leaders to create and capitalize on opportunities for collaborative, cross-sector desegregation efforts, and sheds light on the sources of political power and influence strategies that may be required to bring those efforts to fruition.

ABSTRACT This article examines the political discourse and rhetorical strategies of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah over a 42-year period (1982–2024), culminating with his assassination in 2024. Through comprehensive analysis of his major speeches, public statements and interviews, I argue that Nasrallah deliberately cultivated connections with leftist revolutionary movements worldwide while simultaneously embedding his leadership within traditional Shiite frameworks of authority and symbolism. This dual positioning allowed Hezbollah to expand its influence beyond sectarian boundaries and establish itself as part of a broader ‘axis’ against Imperialist hegemony. By comparing Nasrallah’s self-presentation with iconic Shiite figures, such as Imam Husayn ibn Ali, and modern iconic figures, such as Imam Musa al-Sadr, I demonstrate how he reframed traditional Shiite narratives of martyrdom, resistance and justice to resonate with contemporary anti-imperialist and leftist movements. Tracing Nasrallah’s rhetorical evolution through seven distinct phases, I show how he developed an increasingly sophisticated Islamic discourse that simultaneously appealed to traditional religious constituencies and international leftist movements without compromising either commitment. This research contributes to our understanding of how religious leadership can authentically absorb and transform secular concepts rather than merely appropriating them, creating new forms of political Islamic discourse that maintain religious authenticity while building transnational alliances.

Illocutionary Acts and Politeness Strategies in EFL Classroom Interaction and The Students' Perceptions