Precarious Relationship Research Articles

“How nicely you talk; I love to hear you”

“‘How nicely you talk; I love to hear you’: Speech as Cultural Capital in Emma, Middlemarch, and The Portrait of a Lady” (pp. 286–315) In this essay, I examine how, in Emma, Middlemarch, and The Portrait of a Lady, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James craft heroines who unite a precarious relationship to the British gentry with a talent for conversation. I argue that, through this glorification of their heroines’ eloquence, Austen, Eliot, and James align this socioeconomic positionality—what I term “precarious affluence” or “gentry-adjacence”—with novelistic protagonicity. Through this analysis, I study the differing degrees to which these three major nineteenth-century novelists use their smooth-talking heroines to imagine an emerging, alternative elite to the gentry and the aristocratic upper classes. Ultimately, the article suggests that, as the nineteenth century progresses, Eliot and James begin to give increasing credence to the possibility that a monied class distinct from the aristocracy and gentry could offer unique powers and freedoms to its members.

Admissions, Organization, Culture, and Policy: Understanding the Postsecondary Structures that Shape Women’s Entry into Computing Bachelor’s Programs

Despite the growing popularity of computing bachelor’s programs, women remain vastly underrepresented in these fields. Using Social Cognitive Career Theory and intersectionality as guiding theories, this qualitative study explores how postsecondary institutions shape women’s experiences choosing and entering computing bachelor’s programs. Twenty-eight of 40 participants entered their institutions with plans to study computing, while 12 developed a new (or renewed) interest in computing as postsecondary students. Findings outline four postsecondary structures that shaped women’s entry into computing majors, including university-level admissions and participant perceptions of financial and cultural accessibility; academic college-level organization and admissions processes; institutional computing cultures, namely introductory course experiences and social environments; and major declaration policies. Findings also show how these structures differentially shaped participant experiences based on intersecting social identities. Overall, findings illustrate the precarious relationship between computing interest development, major intent, and major enrollment for undergraduate women in computing.

THEORIZING AND ANALYZING THE CONTINGENT CASINO

Gambling games are composed of risk and contingency - the gambler stakes their bet on the spin or a reel or a roulette wheel completely dependent on forces outside of their control, uncertain of the outcome. This potent combination is not only being used to fuel the nearly $500 billion USD global gambling industry, but also to organise the current app economy. Digital platforms, their complementors, and their users are brought together by risk and contingency into a dynamic political economy, with the platform accruing the most advantage (Poell et al., 2021). Unpacking these unequal and sometimes precarious relations requires studying a “representative commodity” (Kline et al., 2003). Social casino apps, a niche, but still significant digital game commodity, embody how risk and contingency manifests in the app economy (Nieborg & Poell, 2018; Zittrain, 2008). In particular, when other industries interface with digital platforms, they become subject to their institutional imperatives (Gorwa, 2019). Social casino apps are representative of how platforms have been able to influence and shape even niche genres of digital leisure, but also the constraints and resistance to these techniques. In this paper, as a political economist of communication, I conduct a structural and critical analysis of the social casino industry, using institutional analysis as my methodology.

‘The Girls are Alright’: Beauty work and neoliberal regimes of responsibility among young women in Urban India

This article addresses the complex ways in which poor urban women’s educational and training needs are embedded in official discourses of capacity creation and are constructed in opposition to their community and kinship networks, an aspect that is very often overlooked when such programmes are designed. It argues that this oversight is not a coincidence, as neoliberal policies and discourses of empowerment construct young women as ‘subjects of capacity’. Where they are addressed directly, young women are framed as the single, autonomous subjects of liberalism who, once enabled, overcome ‘traditional’ kin and community attachments. Based on the ethnographic study of vocational training for beauticians provided by an Indian NGO, the article argues that such interventions are geared towards ‘community development’ and therefore reference broader social landscapes, but that the participants in training see themselves and the process as part of, rather than as opposed to, kin and community obligations. While education and training are more often than not conceived as stand-alone projects offering young women a way into employment and the labour market, the article foregrounds the class-based limits of such workist approaches and the entanglements between body work, caste/class, and histories of feminized poverty. It demonstrates how young women from lower-caste and lower-class backgrounds see opportunities in the beauty industry mainly as supporting their roles as responsible daughters, future wives and daughters-in-law realized within the complex economies of marginal urban communities. They are also acutely aware that while the actual work of the beautician allows some access to the world of ‘professional’ modern and classed notions of femininity and, arguably, a more dignified workplace than in domestic service, the pitfalls of an industry built on gendered, racialized and classist inclusions and hierarchies are noted too. Critiquing the mainstream feminist focus on access to the labour market, the article argues that young women are fully aware of their own precarious relationship with ideals of neoliberal constructs of autonomous subjectivities promoted by the state and its agents.

“Reflective practice” in physical education

Physical education (PE) is rooted in a historically evolved subject culture that goes largely unquestioned in everyday teaching and learning. It is characterized by a normative primacy of movement practices, placing it in a precarious relationship with the intellectual practices required by sports pedagogy and school curricula. The present case study is based on praxeological classroom research and examines how didactic interferences between intellectual reserves and movement reserves are represented in the principle of “reflective practice” in PE. To reconstruct key orientations toward the interfering practices of teaching and learning that guide teachers’ actions, we conducted six expert interviews in a PE development project in North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) and analyzed the interview data based on the coding procedure of grounded theory. The reconstructed orientations guiding PE teachers’ actions can be described according to three key dimensions: On the temporal level, one key interference is the scarcity of time for movement. On the spatial level, the space of the gymnasium often stands in the way of establishing and routinizing intellectual practices. On the media level, the use of written forms in PE classes appears to be regarded as a requirement that is imposed upon teachers and that should be kept to a minimum. The results are particularly relevant to research on the institutional professionalization of PE teachers.

Pocodisco: The sonic performativity of grief, grievance, and joy in diaspora

AbstractThis article examines the intersection between diasporic melancholia, dance, and world music. These phenomena coalesce at postcolonial discos, or public gatherings where political movement takes the form of dance, sound, and eros. I explore the network that connects various times and places to this fantastical dreamland of a sonic postcolonial future and the DJs and producers who keep those records spinning. Focusing especially on the queer and feminist nature of these spaces and sounds, I explore how these artists/activist/curators work outside of institutional contexts as public media archaeologists who excavate and re‐present sounds thought long lost to diasporic communities who occupy a precarious relationship to histories of belonging. These artists contribute to radical acts of space‐making that are not merely fleeting and ephemeral events but instead participate in a legacy of the postcolonial disco, or acts of place‐making with the potential for radical forms of diasporic and postcolonial belonging across space and time.

Between conflict and cooperation: The Contrasting image of the Ottoman Turks in Late Medieval Ragusan Sources

The present study focuses on the late medieval commune of Dubrovnik, known in Latin and Italian sources as Ragusa, and its precarious relationship with the Ottoman Turks, while placing a particular emphasis on the various strategies that Ragusans employed throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in attempting to navigate a difficult political existence between their own interests and the interests of a unified Christendom which stood in complete opposition to the Ottomans. Numerous surviving records created in Ragusa at the time depict the Ottoman Turks in a completely inconsistent light, demonstrating that historians, as always, need to take particular care about accepting claims from diplomatic sources at face value, and that relations between Christians and Muslims during the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans were not always as unambiguous or constantly hostile as they are often presented to be in contemporary works, modern historiography and public discourse.

The Negro Laborer: William Hooper Councill and the Rhetoric of Compromise

The Negro Laborer: William Hooper Councill and the Rhetoric of Compromise Theresa McWilliams-Wessels (bio) By 1887, William Hooper Councill had been president of the State Normal and Industrial School of Huntsville, Alabama, for 12 years and had taught for 20 years. He filed suit against the federal government in a landmark discrimination case when his first-class ticket was refused on a train that did not have a car for people of color. That same year, he published The Negro Laborer: A Word to Him, a manuscript with his musings on the Labor Question—after the collapse of the slave-labor based economy and the rise of white supremacy combined with widespread illiteracy, the Black man’s position was precarious in the South. Councill hoped to gain support from white Southerners by demonstrating his willingness to train Black students in the industrial arts and by encouraging fellow Blacks to enter the work-force and prove their value in this new economy. In this manual, Councill uses a very specific rhetoric to reach his intended audience, which I will argue was not Black laborers but, rather, the whites who had the personal economic means to support his work and the political power to provide support in Montgomery, Alabama. Using coded language, Councill appeals to the paternalism of the southern whites as he seems to be promoting accommodationist practices among the Black laborers; at the same time, he makes a more radical argument by advocating for fairer treatment by their employers and fellow citizens. Because Councill has not received much attention from scholars, it may be useful to consider his contemporary Booker T. Washington to better understand the history and context of Councill’s contributions. Both men were presidents of their respective institutions, they became known for their oration skills, and they competed for private and public funding. Both Washington and Councill used the power of the printed word to secure support for Tuskegee Institute and the State Normal and Industrial School. Jane Gottschalk argues that the use of a very specific rhetorical strategy—the use of the homiletic, second--person, personal anecdotes and the careful wording—was selected to simultaneously disarm the white and inspire the Blacks in the audience of Washington’s speeches. Frederick K. McElroy proposes that Washington used trickster methodology in his writings, particularity in his autobiography, Up From Slavery. McElroy notes that “the black success narrative was Brother Rabbit conning and duping the larger animals, the slave trickster outsmarting his master, and the former slave Booker T. Washington mouthing subtleties in order to magically [End Page 246] remove money from the pockets of the rich in order to build Tuskegee Institute” (90). I shall argue that Councill, too, used these same rhetorical strategies in order to gain the confidence of his audience, but he did so in a more subversive manner. Councill was eight years older than Washington, and he had been a teen, not a child, when slavery ended. He would have had more time to understand the complexities of the relationships in the Deep South as he had lived in Alabama the majority of his life whereas Washington moved to Alabama only after his appointment to Tuskegee College. Councill spent his entire professional career in Madison County, Alabama, and had established a precarious relationship with the whites in power, and it was imperative to him that he maintain the support that he had. Thus, his text The Negro Laborer: A Word to Him may be addressed to the Black worker via its title, but the intended audience is the white reader; his rhetorical strategies allow him to address both audiences, white and Black, while simultaneously reassuring white and Black readers that there is a way to work together peacefully. The preface to The Negro Laborer, dated December 1887 and from Huntsville, reads as follows: Many friends have invited me to deliver addresses at various points upon the LABOR QUESTION. Being unable to attend all the appointments, I have concluded to reach them through the following pages. The LABOR QUESTION is one of vast importance to all good citizens, and continues to increase in magnitude with the growth of population. I claim no superior foresight...

The uses of victimhood as a hegemonic meta-narrative in eastern Europe

ABSTRACT Narratives of wartime suffering, communist evils, and maltreatment by the ‘West’ have started featuring prominently in the political discourse across eastern Europe in the past decade and half. Permeating the public sphere, such narratives imply complex victimhood and often gain a hegemonic status. Why have such victimhood narratives become so pervasive? And what has been their purpose across eastern Europe? This interdisciplinary article provides a conceptual and empirical explanation of how hegemonic narratives of victimhood have been used to enhance ontological security and as an instrument of power-seeking political leaders, especially (but not exclusively) right-wing populists. It shows that although the local attachment to memory and history is often portrayed as irrational, victimhood as a narrative has clear benefits regarding national ontological security as the self-understanding of a state and a tool to justify policies. Using concrete examples, the articles identify three main sub-narratives of direct, historical and structural victimhood linked to World War II, communism and the precarious relationship with the ‘West’, arguing that the combination of historical traumas and the post-1989 transformations explain the pan-regional proliferation of victimhood.

Oscillating Imaginaries: War, Peace, and the Precarious Relations between Eritrea and Ethiopia

While the 2018 peace declaration between Ethiopia and Eritrea was widely celebrated, Eritrean refugees expressed concern that peace would be destabilising, and their status in Ethiopia would change. Their concerns were shaped by a long history of oscillating imaginaries of how Eritrea “fits” with Ethiopia. Drawing from historical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork leading up to the peace agreement, we explore how these oscillating imaginaries create an uncomfortable and unstable situation for Eritreans in Ethiopia, rendering refugees vulnerable to unpredictable violence. Better understanding the way identity categories have been subject to constant slippage and have been instrumentalised by political elites could help to forge a more peaceful future among Ethiopia’s nationalities and between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton by Andrew Porwancher

Reviewed by: The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton by Andrew Porwancher Dana Y. Rabin (bio) The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton. By Andrew Porwancher. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. ix + 254 pp. In The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Porwancher promises to reveal the place of Judaism in the life of Alexander Hamilton and to show the influence of Judaism on Hamilton's values, his politics, his economic policies, and his religious toleration. Porwancher claims that "the Hamiltonian-Jewish connections offer us an enriched perspective on the early republic, one that suggests the egalitarian rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence was not an empty promise, even if progress was halting" (9). Unfortunately, the author does not deliver on this promise. The book considers Hamilton's life and the founding fathers and their attitudes about both individual Jewish people and Judaism as a religion. It introduces real Jews in a peripatetic survey of events well known to Jewish historians of the period, featuring prominent Jewish men in the era and their interactions with political and economic affairs including each and every Jewish client that Hamilton represented or advised. The connection between Hamilton and Judaism is traced to his mother Rachel Faucette's marriage to Johan Levine in St. Croix. Porwancher posits that Rachel converted to Judaism in order to marry Levine and that she retained her ties to a Jewish identity even after the union with Levine dissolved, while she had a relationship with Alexander's father James Hamilton, and in the years that she raised Alexander and his brother Peter on Nevis before her death in 1768. The two documented [End Page 316] facts are that Rachel never gave up her married name and that Alexander Hamilton attended a Jewish school on Nevis. Having provided the details of Hamilton's precarious relationship with Jews during his short time in the Caribbean, the book's subsequent chapters take us through Hamilton's life from his move to New York at age 18, his matriculation at King's College (later Columbia University), his involvement in the American Revolution, his work ensuring the passage of the Constitution, his service to the new United States as Secretary of the Treasury, his profession as a lawyer, and his death in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804. The penultimate chapter on church and state revisits the much-known story of George Washington's letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island. Wherever possible, the author introduces Hamilton's relationship with Jews, whether in his practice of law or in his establishment of the Bank of America. The book demonstrates the virulent and widespread antisemitism so common in the American colonies and the early republic. The dismissive and hateful rhetoric of other founding fathers—John Adams, James Madison, John Jay, and particularly Benjamin Franklin—is quoted at length. Porwancher rehearses the conflicts between Federalists and Anti-Federalists and between those colonists who wished to embed a religious test in the Constitution and those who did not, those who believed that religion had a place in the governing structure of the United States and those who did not. The attempt to demonstrate the promise of the Declaration of Independence is belied by its entanglement with histories of racism, slavery, and the extermination of Native Americans. These atrocities formed the bedrock of colonial America and the United States and accompanied the dehumanization of the enslaved, the appropriation of Native American land, and the prejudices that withheld rights from the enslaved and circumscribed those of free people of color. The relationship of any rights bestowed on Jews in the early republic certainly is related to whiteness and an understanding of religious and ethnic groups that might come to be included or partially included in this shifting category. Religious hatred, which had always excluded Jews and Catholics from certain rights of English men, seemed to change in the context of the American colonies where the divides and hierarchies were oriented differently. Throughout the author seems determined to prove that Hamilton believed in the rule of law and its corollary, equality before the law. It is certainly possible that Hamilton was not antisemitic. But the law and its inequalities were...

Reply to Critics

Reply to Critics

A Forgivable Enthusiasm

A Forgivable Enthusiasm

Health care provider trust in vaccination: a systematic review and qualitative meta-synthesis.

BackgroundVaccine hesitancy is a growing issue globally amongst various populations, including health care providers. This study explores the factors that influence vaccine hesitancy amongst nurses and physicians. MethodsWe performed a qualitative meta-synthesis of 22 qualitative and mixed-method studies exploring the factors that may contribute to vaccine hesitancy amongst nurses and physicians. We included all articles that mentioned any aspect of trust concerning vaccination, including how trust may influence or contribute to vaccine hesitancy in nurses and physicians.ResultsOur findings revealed that vaccine hesitancy amongst nurses stemmed predominantly from two factors: distrust in health authorities and their employers, and distrust in vaccine efficacy and safety. Both nurses and physicians had a precarious relationship with health authorities. Nurses felt that their employers and health authorities did not prioritize their health over patients’ health, provided inaccurate and inconsistent vaccine information, and were mistrustful of pharmaceutical company motives. Like nurses, physicians were also skeptical of pharmaceutical company motives when it came to vaccination. Additionally, physicians also held doubts regarding vaccine efficacy and safety.ConclusionsThe relationship health care providers or their patients have with health authorities and other providers regarding vaccination serves as unsystematic clinical experiences that may bolster vaccine hesitancy. Providing accurate and tangible information to emphasize the safety and efficacy of vaccines to health care providers may help address their specific concerns that may ultimately increase vaccine uptake.

Fleet-footed Performers at the Edges of Colonial Law: Jack Johnson, Maud Allan and the Struggles of Cinema Censorship in British India

ABSTRACT This article explores the archival entanglements that brought together world-champion boxer Jack Johnson and world-famous dancer Maud Allan, with the legal and political history of cinema censorship in early twentieth century British India. Focusing on the battles waged to prevent these performers being viewed by Indian audiences, these episodes are situated within the wider context of developments in technology, economy and law in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Both famous stars in their own right, their expansive transnational reach presented a particular set of problems for colonial administrators tasked with managing the precarious relationship between race, gender and the imperial political order. Indicative of much more than exceptional moments, this article argues that these incidents were symptomatic of a series of changes within and beyond the British Empire which were pressuring the colonial state to reconsider the suitability of a legal architecture constructed for a nineteenth century world, and to imagine one that could meet the challenges of the twentieth century. As the article argues, the difficulties faced managing these two performances would expose the limits of the colonial state’s legal apparatus at this juncture, as well as the scope of its political imagination. When colonial lawmakers turned their hand to the radically novel challenge of the cinema, neither would be easily overcome.

Recoding the city: cultural mediation of short-term rental platforms in the US

ABSTRACT This paper explores the cultural mediation of short-term rental (STR) platforms in US cities. While many STR advocates emphasize ‘authentic’ cultural experiences and the support of local economies, less obvious are the ways that STRs like Airbnb can erode communities by transforming homes into hotels and neighbours into strangers. STR platforms have significantly disrupted many communities through increased gentrification, resident displacement, racial discrimination, and reduced city tax bases for the provision of services. As with all technological systems, STR platforms embody a politics that shapes human activities and relations. The platforms, in other words, present a set of scripts for the organization of practices and the configuration of space, tending, by design, toward impersonal commercial exchange and conceptions of neighbourhoods as resources for such exchange. I argue that as public infrastructures are absorbed into and recoded as platforms, the emerging ensemble normalizes market- over rights-based orientations to city spaces and services. The process supports the formation of platform cultures that cast precarious gig-economy relations as necessary and enabling while obscuring the social inequalities and human suffering engendered by those arrangements. In attending to the mediation of STRs by communities and to contestations over platform meanings, politics and power relations become visible, allowing for the problematization of destructive platform configurations.

Book Reviews

Book Reviews Nadia H. Barsoum FROM SHEIKHS TO SULTANISM: Statecraft and Authority in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Publishers C. Hurst Limited, Feb 25, 2021, 432 pages. Muhammad bin Salman Al-Saud and Muhammad bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the respective princely strongmen of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have torn up the old rules. They have spurred game-changing economic master plans, presided over vast anti-corruption crackdowns, tackled entrenched religious forces, and overseen the mass arrest of critics. In parallel, they also appear to have replaced the old ‘sheikhly’ consensus systems of their predecessors with something more autocratic, more personalistic, and perhaps even analytically distinct.These are the two wealthiest and most populous Gulf monarchies, and increasingly important global powers--Saudi Arabia is a G20 member, and the UAE will be the host of the World Expo in 2021–2022. Such sweeping changes to their statecraft and authority structures could well end up having a direct impact, for better or worse, on policies, economies and individual lives all around the world. Christopher M. Davidson tests the hypothesis that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are now effectively contemporary or even ‘advanced’ sultanates, and situates these influential states within an international model of autocratic authoritarianism. Drawing on a range of primary sources, including new interviews and surveys, ‘From Sheikhs to Sultanism’ puts forward an original, empirically grounded interpretation of the rise of both MBS and MBZ. [End Page 82] SYRIAN REQUIEM: The Civil War and Its Aftermath, by Itamar Rabinovich, Carmit Valensi 2021, 288 pages, Publisher NJ Princeton University Pres- 288 pages. “The Syrian crisis is not over yet but the period of full-fledged civil war in that country appears to be drawing to a close, and it is now possible to view this calamity with some perspective. This short book will address the following questions about the conflict: How and why did quiet demonstrations in Southern Syria develop into a brutal civil war? Why did the political opposition to the regime of Bashar al-Assad remain weak and divided? How did radical Jihadi Islamists take over the main military opposition to the Syrian regime? How did the Syrian conflict become a main arena of the Saudi-Iranian regional rivalry? What explains the ambivalent Western attitude towards the Syrian rebellion? How did US policy under the Obama administration evolve and why did both Obama and Trump decide not to make a major investment in it? How stable is the status quo? And how could the conflict re-erupt in a different form? According to Rabinovitch, the Syrian regime and its supporters (including the Russians and the Iranians) have indeed emerged as victors, but it’s a limited victory at best. The Syrian state under Assad controls only about 60 percent of the national territory and the potential for renewed violence is considerable. Assad’s continued survival has come at the cost of deep dependency on Iran and Russia; his is now, arguably, a vassal state. This means that the country will remain in crisis for the foreseeable future, even if the full-scale civil war phase has come to an end. In his last chapter, Rabinovich recommends policy options for the U.S.” [End Page 83] IRAN RISING: The Survival and Future of the Islamic Republic by Amin Saika, Publisher NJ Princeton University Press, 344 pages. When Iranians overthrew their monarchy, rejecting a pro-Western shah in favor of an Islamic regime, many observers predicted that revolutionary turmoil would paralyze the country for decades to come. Yet forty years after the 1978–79 revolution, Iran has emerged as a critical player in the Middle East and the wider world, as demonstrated in part by the 2015 international nuclear agreement. In Iran Rising, renowned Iran specialist Amin Saikal describes how the country has managed to survive despite ongoing domestic struggles, Western sanctions, and countless other serious challenges. Saikal explores Iran’s recent history, beginning with the revolution, which set in motion a number of developments, including war with Iraq, precarious relations with Arab neighbors, and hostilities with Israel and the United States. He highlights the regime’s agility as it navigated a complex relationship with Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, survived...

Longitudinality and community orientation in the context of indigenous health

to analyze, from healthcare professionals' perspectives, the longitudinality and community orientation in Primary Health Care, offered both in the Special Indigenous Health District and in the primary network that assists non-indigenous population in municipal health services in Upper Rio Negro region. a cross-sectional study with 116 professionals, 87 (75%) of indigenous health, 29 (25%) of municipal services. Primary Care Assessment Tool, professional version, used by Upper Rio Negro for Social Sciences region. For association of variables, chi-square test and Kruskal-Wallis were used. longitudinality obtained an unsatisfactory score (6.4 and 6.5), as well as community orientation (6.1 and 5.6) for both services. Weaknesses refer to professional turnover, little knowledge about users' living conditions, precarious employment relationship. In indigenous health, satisfaction was higher when compared to municipal services. it is necessary to improve work management in health services, seeking to guarantee the quality of performance of professionals.

Talkey Shows and Press: A Reading Based on Critical Speech Analysis

The purpose of this communication is to analyze President Jair Bolsonaro's pronouncements in his daily contact with reporters outside the Palacio da Alvorada in Brasilia, baptized by his advisors of "Talkey shows". We will focus on two episodes that explain the degree of breakdown in the relationship between journalists and the head of the national executive. The "scoop" episode, aimed at journalist Patrícia Campos Mello, from Folha de S. Paulo, and the bananas offered to reporters by a comedian during a "talkey show", in February and March 2020, respectively. We will use the theoretical tools of Critical Discourse Analysis, a theoretical aspect that postulates the social use of language in interactions in which power relations and domination are established by economic and political groups that use language as a form of social control, through various forms of discursive practices, such as mockery and demonization of the press. We use as theoretical references Van Dijk (1990, 2009, 2011, 2017), Fairclough (2003), Charaudeau (2003, 2015) and Sodré (2017), among others, using linguistic tools to analyze the relationships between language, power and social control. Instead of focusing on purely theoretical issues related to critical discourse analysis, our objective in this article was to examine paradigmatic episodes of the precarious relationship between the Brazilian State President and the press. His cynical, derogatory and misogynistic attitudes towards the journalists' class have decisively contributed, in the Brazilian case, to the demonization of the press among a portion of the Brazilian public opinion.

Iran 2019-2020: The double impact of crippling sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic

With its society deeply affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and its economy struggling due to low oil prices, 2020 was the year in which Kazakhstan’s government was compelled to continuously adopt emergency measures. This contributed to a looming uncertainty about the country’s ability to cope with the multiple crises constantly affecting it. Throughout this essay, the COVID-19 topic permeates all aspects of Kazakhstan’s politics, from the internal measures undertaken to curtail its spread, to the effects of the lockdown on the economy and relations with other countries. Internationally, Kazakhstan’s attempts to build a positive global image were threatened by the release of a sequel to Borat, the US satirical film portraying Kazakhstan as a backward country, as well as by slanderous misinformation from the Chinese Embassy in Nur-Sultan. Old refrains claiming that Kazakhstan’s northern regions belong to Russia were repeated by Russian nationalist journalists and politicians, highlighting the precarious relationship between the two neighbours.