Predominant Discourse Research Articles

Part-time working and the teacher mother: panacea or poison?

ABSTRACT Part-time work is often suggested as a panacea to the work/life challenge for teacher parents, and most notably, mothers. This paper reports findings from a wider study on the experiences of Primary and Early Years teachers who are also mothers. Four participant stories are draw upon, collected through unstructured life-history interviews with current teacher-mothers, then analysed using ecological systems discourse analysis (ESDA) to highlight predominant discourses. These include the benefits of flexible working, as well as barriers to accessing part-time work. The barriers include perceptions of flexible working and reticence from school leaders to offer job-share, as well as practical and emotional challenges that securing part-time work can bring. What is not captured in the recent literature is the way school cultures, senior leaders and discourses from the wider system could be an influential resource in supporting women to stay in teaching. It concludes that whilst the option of part-time work may be a supportive measure for some, for others it is an invitation to ‘work full-time effort for part-time reward’, both financially and emotionally. By considering individual demands and resources, part-time working models could be the ‘cure’ for some teacher-mothers; not quite a panacea, but certainly a useful tool in retaining some teacher mothers.

Home-based care services for elderly dependent adults. A comparative analysis of Madrid and Stockholm

This article analyses the situation of the Home Care Service in the two European cities of Madrid and Stockholm. There are significant differences in the development of this service in these cities which can explained by their diverse welfare models. At the same time, they also show similar trends, such as an ageing population and new demands by the elderly. The text focuses on the evolution of the service in three different dimensions: governance, working conditions and the tendering/monitoring system. The analysis is based on qualitative research, showing the predominant discourses among the key actors involved in the design and provision of the service. The results reveal the urgent need to redefine this service to respond to the new demands of the elderly as well as the changing regulatory frameworks.

‘Where are we?’: The ghost as interrogative haunting in The Others

The ghost raises fundamental questions of reality, identity and epistemology. The ghost is the shadow image of otherness that threatens our notions of life, humanity and permanence by intimating that if death is permanent and the afterlife eternal, then perhaps it is our present tangible reality that is the simulacrum. The ghost interrogates the quotidian, not vice versa. The fetishization, aesthesizing and ritualizing of death in the Gothic aims consistently to defer the final definitive ending of death and the state of non-existence. As a memento mori, ghosts remind us that our ruminations of death are not morbid, but life-affirming. This article will explore the depiction of the afterlife in The Others () in which the living are simulations of the dead and vice versa. Unlike the typical horror movie, the predominant discourse of The Others is a postmodern interrogation of belief, truth and doctrine. The haunted house is an in-between land of purgatory, a death space of self-loss and separation that plays out in the conflict between religion and the supernatural. The questions with which the films ends – ‘What does all this mean? Where are we?’ – is not just a geographical question, but an ontological one. The interrogation of Biblical narratives causes the audience to evaluate the reliability of the discourse of established religion and its doctrine of the afterlife. By defying audience expectations of the generic conventions of the ghost story, the movie relies on the viewer’s faith that what we see on-screen is real, when this cinematic reality is as deceptive as seeing dead people artificially propped up to appear alive. Suspended between being and nothingness, both absent and present, the ghost is a metaphor for the simulacrum of film. The cinematic thus serves as the Other by which the real can be defined.

A critical race analysis of Māori representation in university strategic documents in Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT Following the recent claims lodged at two universities in Aotearoa New Zealand alleging the existence of racism, there has been scepticism towards the professed commitments by universities to create an inclusive and safe environment for Indigenous Māori. As a Kaupapa Māori-informed study, we (a group of Māori and Tauiwi scholars) employed tenets of Critical Race Theory to examine how the representation of Māori is racialised and subordinated in university strategic documents. We located five predominant discourses portraying different mechanisms that reify whiteness in university practices such as the selective interpretation of Te Tiriti articles, targeted recruitment of Māori, framing of Māori as dependent on the Crown to succeed, commodification of mātauranga Māori, and avoidance of conversations about structural racism, colonisation, and racial equity. Our findings suggest that university strategic goal statements need to incorporate a critical race analysis, or else risk perpetuating practices that fall short of challenging the status quo.

The discourse of the Anthropocene and posthumanism: Mining-induced loss of traditional land and the Mongolian nomadic herders

For over five millennia, Mongolia has been home to a remarkably resilient, land-connected, pastoral nomadic way of life and cultural heritage. Traditional local communities of Mongolian nomadic herders are custodians of the land. Since Mongolia’s transition to a democracy and neoliberal capitalist economy in the 1990s, an unprecedented mining boom has set in as large deposits of mineral resources were discovered. The mining boom and climate change impacts have put mounting pressure on herders’ ability to access their traditional land. Drawing on ethnographic research through storywork with Mongolian nomadic herders ( malchid) in their traditional land ( nutag) in the Gobi Desert region in Mongolia, this study aims to expand the discourse of the Anthropocene by engaging with the concept of posthumanism. We unpack the predominant discourse among Mongolian nomadic herders – loss of traditional land – induced by mining. In the Anthropocene – the epoch of human-induced planetary change – herders have become victims of both human-induced global environmental and climate change and the neoliberal capitalist extractive economy. Driven by mining-induced forced displacement from their traditional land and the natural resources on which they depend, herders are marginalised, resulting in the loss of their livelihood and severing of their special relationship and spiritual connection with their traditional land. We conclude that Mongolian nomadic herders’ voices urge us that it is crucial to expand and pluralise the discourse of the Anthropocene by relearning our ancestral ways of knowing, being and doing, and reconnecting to our holistic, spiritually and physically entwined, reciprocal and symbiotic relationship with land, non-human beings and the natural world that are all regarded as living and sentient entities with identity, agency and intentionality. Mongolian nomadic herders’ ancestral cosmology and onto-epistemology turn us to posthuman or more-than-human ways of understanding and interacting with the world, which decentre human exceptionalism and dominant position in the Anthropocene.

Types of discourse disseminated by food influencers: Trends on Instagram in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom

This research examines the discourse of nutrition influencers on Instagram within five European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom) during 2021. The research aims to analyse the visual and textual content disseminated by these influencers and compare the predominant narratives among them. The corpus consists of 98 food influencers, and computer vision networks were employed to analyse visual discourse, linguistic analysis software for text analysis, and quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse hashtags. While promoting global trends (such as vegetable juices or bowls made with natural and unprocessed cereals, nuts, and fruits) to a lesser extent, influencers from the five countries highlight traditional food from their respective cultures in their visual discourse. The predominant discourse in all countries promotes the need for physical change through exercise and nutrition, sometimes fostering a diet culture. Sports and fitness are present in the discourse of influencers from these five countries, predominantly emphasising weight loss, muscle gain, and sports training with specific diets. Sports plays a significant role, with a preponderance of photographs depicting physical transformations and the promotion of food products and sports brands through inspiring images. Spain stands out in this regard as having the most images showing physical changes, especially in women. Although no evidence has been discovered to suggest that the sponsorship of unhealthy foods affects consumers’ preferences for them, the results show the widespread promotion of diet-related goods and foods. Notably, the real food movement was not emphasized in this extensive data analysis.

Interactions about Coping - Social Support during Pandemics by Brazilian Users: A Media Analysis Study

Objective- Explore how the Brazilian online community mobilized its own coping resources during the COVID-19 pandemic to deal with mass vaccination concerns, manage and cope with personal stressors brought on by the pandemic, and seek social support. Method- The Canadian Population Health Promotion Model and the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping framed this media content analysis focusing on a socially impactful event: the authorization of COVID-19 vaccinations in Brazil. Results- The retrieval of posts (January-May 2021) found 488 contents distributed as modus operandi (n=117; 24%), coping strategies focused on emotion (n=175; 35.8%), on problem (n=40; 8.1%), on reflection (n=67; 13.7%), and offer of social support (n=89; 18.2%). Among the top-five (n=393; 80.5%) actions and coping strategies, 255 contents about coping strategies with a predominant discourse on emotion-focused coping (n=160; 63.2 %). Conclusion- Interactions sustained a feeling of connection and created a context for belonging, support, and motivation.

Reflective practice in medicine: The hidden curriculum challenge.

Despite the known benefits of reflection in various health care professions, it is still not a thriving practice in medical education. The literature suggests that this may be due to tensions between epistemological tenets of reflection and biomedicine. Further research is needed into experiences of doctors as they implement reflection in medical education settings. We set out to explore how these experiences were influenced by hidden curricula to provide insights into personal and contextual features of medical settings influencing engagement in reflection. Using an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) approach, four semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted virtually. Participants were doctors who graduated from a postgraduate diploma in clinical education with core reflective practice components. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, coded and analysed using IPA. Opportunities to review and amend transcriptions were provided. Three superordinate themes were identified including epistemological divergence, fear of showing vulnerability and reflection volte-face. Challenges in engaging in practices epistemologically different to predominant discourses in medicine were compounded by fears of vulnerability and a common antipathy towards reflection. All developed more accommodating perspectives towards reflection with shared experiences of a programme incorporating reflective practice. The hidden curriculum can have positive and negative impacts on doctors' engagement in reflection. In facilitating reflective practice for this group, we recommend assisting with awareness of ways of thinking and being in medicine, offering reassurance that reflection may initially feel like running contrary to predominant discourses and finally, role modelling openness to vulnerability to better integrate and promote meaningful engagement in reflection.

“Happily Ever After” for the Twenty-First Century? Sex, Love, and Human Identity in C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia

For better and for worse, classic fairy tales have come under severe criticism as paradigms of sexist patriarchy in recent decades. Likewise, C. S. Lewis has been viewed as sexist, even misogynistic. While many fairy tale and Lewis fans might be tempted to dismiss all of these criticisms as nonsense, gender is one of the predominant discourses of our time, our questions and the varied answers are significant, and in this essay I consider how Lewis’ development of the fairy tale genre in The Chronicles of Narnia offers timeless, possibly even surprising, Christian wisdom. How does Lewis portray sex, love, and human identity in these children’s novels? How does he deal with the related “happily ever after” concept? Are his representations of fairy tale motifs in sync with the genre, or do his novels suggest a significant departure? When might Lewis even be in agreement with feminist critics of classic fairy tales? Which aspects of cultural heritage does he affirm and which does he reject? With the sixtieth anniversary of the 1956 publication of The Last Battle, we have another opportunity to reconsider these important questions for the twenty-first century.

From Cotton and Smoke: Łódź—Industrial City and Discourses of Asynchronous Modernity, 1897–1994

From Cotton and Smoke: Łódź—Industrial City and Discourses of Asynchronous Modernity, 1897–1994

Building a global community of health for all: A positive discourse analysis of COVID-19 discourse

‘A global community of health for all’ has become a dominant concept in China’s global health governance system. Although this concept has been investigated by several studies in different domains, little attention has been given to its discursive legitimation in China’s media communication from a linguistic perspective. To fill this gap, the present study employs positive discourse analysis to investigate how the aforementioned concept is legitimised via the predominant discourses associated with COVID-19 in state-run Chinese English-language newspapers. The findings show that the Chinese news media attempted to formulate the positive discourses, including cooperation as a win-win solution, people’s lives and well-being as the priority and science as the spirit, though the discourses may not resonate with some countries. The findings shed light on the use of language by the media in promoting official ideologies, projecting China’s national image and improving China’s international relations amid a global health crisis.

Looking Back at the Nehru - Mahalanabis Strategy : A Discourse Analysis

This paper discussed the constitutive relations between the Nehru-Mahalanabis strategy and the discourse of planning that had characterized Indian economic policy-making over 40 years after independence in their continuities and discontinuities of interaction. It understood and analyzed the theoretical underpinnings behind the heavy-scale industrialization policy through public investment (under export pessimism) in reflection of the predominant discourse of development that the third world subscribed to at that period — that of central-planning led capitalist accumulation. Rather than engaging in the multiple debates that had raged the political-economic policy-making of the post-reforms period, like that of agriculture vs. industry, state planning vs. market motive, growth vs. equity, etc., it cut through the analysis by the discourse method, which identified the particular way of knowing the reality – how the discourse produced and disseminated effects of truth, and brought players (e.g., the State) to act and intervene, thereby securing the legitimacy and power of the representation, or the regime of truth of the discourse.

EDUCACIÓN INTERCULTURAL Y TRAYECTORIAS EDUCATIVAS DE PUEBLOS ORIGINARIOS EN URUGUAY DESDE LA PERSPECTIVA INTERSECCIONAL

We present a reflection on new ways of approaching Intercultural, emancipatory and dialogic Education (Díaz, 2022a; Díaz, 2022b) of indigenous peoples in Uruguay (Picerno, 2008). Dialogic/dialogizing education (Freire, 2017) emerges from empirical research on dialogical leadership in Chile (Díaz, 2020; Díaz 2022). On this occasion, we focus on the educational trajectories (Álvarez, 2016; Ossola, 2010), of native peoples of Uruguay, in a historical context in which more than 25 civil organizations demand the ratification of ILO Convention 169, as well as than other Latin American countries. Our reflection aims to analyze from a critical perspective the possible ways of systematizing experiences, testimonies and ideas of social actors who define themselves as Indigenous and Afro-indigenous from an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw, 2017; Parra, 2021; Vázquez, 2020; Winker and Degele, 2011). Based on their leadership and educational trajectories, invisibility, adult centrism (Duarte, 2016), epistemicide (Correa, M. and Saldarriaga, 2014) and racism are themes that emerge in the living testimonies of indigenous and Afro-indigenous people. The story tells of a long family history over the years. "Uruguay: country without Indians" is a silent slogan that we learned at school after the battle of Salsipuedes on April 11, 1831, in the largest Genocide in our history (Picerno, 2008). The intersectional perspective tries to analyze the consequences experienced by families who are victims of three centuries of invisibility, indifference, racism, ethnoracism and epistemicide in a country that has a 5% indigenous population declared in the CENSUS (2011) and whose predominant discourse is the non-existence of this population.

Performing sedentary behaviors: Studying children's screen practices at home as affective assemblages

Growing concerns about children's sedentary behavior and health have drawn attention to their screen behaviors at home. However, this work leans on a deterministic and essentializing view of children, screen devices, and the home, such that it tends to equate any time spent on screens with being sedentary, device presence with increased use where children are passive receptors of screen influence, and the home as a place where parents control their children's screen use. This paper shows instead that children's screen use at home needs to be understood as a sociomaterial assemblage that is dynamic and contingent, and that affect is central to these assemblages. The paper draws on a mixed-methods exploratory study conducted with 6–12 year old children in their homes in Sweden, using accelerometry and observational data to note the children's movement behaviors as well as their screen activities. The findings show that children are both sedentary and active while using screens, questioning the idea of screen time as necessarily sedentary. Moreover, children's screen practice assemblages at home are composed of various elements that come together in dynamic and highly situated ways, challenging the device and parental influence narrative. The paper shows how we need to pay attention to the ways in which these assemblages come together and children's actual performances of screen practices in order to move beyond the predominant discourse surrounding screen time.

(Re)fashioning the Tribal Self-image: Reading Contemporary Tribal Writings from India in Translation

Tribal voices are perennially absent in the domains of disciplinary knowledges. Contemporary indigenous writings from different parts of the world contest this archival and textual invisibility of the indigenous subject by documenting the unremitting pain and anguish these communities undergo due to systematic territorial displacement and cultural dislocations. Literary narratives originating within these indigenous communities transcend paradigms of literature by offering a dynamic repertoire of indigenous epistemic practices and lived experiences. Keeping this understanding broadly in the background and contemporary tribal literature(s) from India at the focal point, this paper proposes to argue that critical readings of such texts problematize predominant discourses of ‘indigeneity’. Embedded within the (neo)colonial ethnic stereotypes is the reductionist understanding of ‘indigeneity’ which puts forward a dualistic image of the tribal subject who is either an innocent, vulnerable relic of the past requiring preservation or a savage primitive needing subdual. Contemporary tribal writings from India offer a critical departure from rigid one-dimensional reading of the tribal character/person. By getting further translated into multiple Indian languages and in English, these narratives carry the potential to respond to contexts of suffering, displacement and persecution far removed from the spatiotemporal boundaries of the local context in which they originate. Hence, the act of translation not only ensures mobility to such texts but creates new space(s) for similar narratives of indigenous resistance to engage with each other and also extend the practice of tribal self-fashioning.

Women without children

Heuristic methodology (Moustakas, 1990) was employed to explore the experiences and identities of women without children in relation to predominant discourses around womanhood and motherhood. Seven co-researchers participated in the study, a mix of intentionally and involuntarily childless women aged between 50 and 75. Individual depictions were created through a narrational technique of empathic explication, based on data produced from conversational interviews and historical material. A composite depiction was then created, illustrating an archetypal experiential journey unfolding from the position of being female and conveying key aspects of experience and processes of identity formation. Research findings reveal that embodied experiences of womanhood from the position of a woman without children demonstrate complex, diverse, and transpersonal experiences that challenge and surpass the boundaries of predominant conceptions of womanhood. The study’s findings support the development of a feminist participatory perspective in working to destabilise and reconceptualise essentialist conceptions pertaining to womanhood, and effectively challenge the widespread conflation of ‘woman’ with ‘mother’ in predominant discourses.

The dynamics and livelihood implications of illegal mining in Ghana: A critical assessment

AbstractDiscourses on “illegal” or informal small‐scale mining (galamsey) have presented it largely as a menace. Using Ghana as the focus of our study, we present a counter‐narrative to the predominant discourse. Employing qualitative in‐depth interviews with 193 local galamsey operators, the study found that economic factors coupled with the combative posture of state regulatory agencies explain the persistence of illegal activity. Although galamsey is not problem‐free, the study revealed it is the livelihood support base of such communities, providing jobs and incomes to many households. Since mineral‐rich local communities, at least, in part, depend on galamsey, the state and its regulatory agencies could collaboratively work with local agencies and mineral‐rich communities to fully exploit the hidden treasures in galamsey while reducing the proximate negative effects.

Actually Autistic at Forty

In October 2019, two months after my 40th birthday, I received a formal diagnosis that I was autistic. I joined all those other thousands of late-diagnosed women in the UK, previously undiagnosed and overlooked. I had spent my years being mislabelled, misunderstood, or misinterpreted. I dealt with feelings I did not understand and sensory experiences I could not bear to process. I felt a need to cope with the ‘normal’ aspects of everyday life. I never knew why I experienced these troubles and troubling feelings for all those years. The discourse surrounding autism is referred to as the cost of camouflaging. In this article, I critically discuss predominant discourses on autism and gender as I reflect on my auto/biographical troubles from my newly confirmed, acquired identity and perspective as an autistic, now 40-something-year-old woman.

Barricades: Between Resistance and Revolution

ABSTRACT In a reflection on his Marxist past, J. F. Lyotard described a différend between himself and the revolutionary discourse. This might also represent the relations between the latter and the contemporary discourse of resistance, with its characteristic fascination with non-teleological political action. The disdain for teleology apparently justifies the incommensurability of these discourses, thus disabling any inheritance of elements of the revolutionary tradition. This essay challenges the unbridgeable nature of this gap and explores alternative relations between the two discourses, such as mimetic ones, by reading Walter Benjamin's somewhat neglected fragments on barricades in his Arcades Project. Benjamin's concept of interruption – celebrated by contemporary theorists of resistance – alongside his non-teleological concept of revolution, provides the theoretical armature for this task. Thus, I use barricades, commonly conceived as the emblem of the revolutionary tradition, in order to reconsider the possibility of inheriting aspects of this tradition in times in which the predominant discourse is that of resistance.

Quantitative Analysis of Visual Representation of Sign Elements in COVID-19 Context

Visual representation as a means of communication uses elements to build a narrative. We propose using computer analysis to perform a quantitative analysis of the elements used in the visual creations that have been produced in reference to the epidemic, using 927 images compiled from The Covid Art Museum's Instagram account. This process has been carried out with techniques based on deep learning to detect objects contained in each study image. The research reveals the elements that are repeated in images to create narratives and the relations of association that are established in the sample. The predominant discourses in the sample do not show concern for the effects of illness. On the contrary, the impact and effects of confinement, through the prominent presence of elements such as human figures, windows, and buildings, are the most expressed experiences in the creations analyzed.