Reductionist Discourse Research Articles

“Density Done Well” in the Pursuit of 20-Minute Neighbourhoods: Navigating Fluid Discourses in Melbourne

ABSTRACT The pursuit of 20-minute neighbourhoods has been recently combined with calls for “density done well”. However, this catch-phrase is not well defined in planning policy and there is little understanding of what is being meant by it. This article investigates its meanings and how it may or may not contribute towards more liveable cities. Semi-structured interviews and analysis of participants’ examples showed a multiplicity of nuanced and diverse meanings, the catch-phrase serving as an empty signifier. This reveals the pitfalls of masking divergent desires through linguistic tactics, but also the opportunities for mediating them through a less reductionist discourse.

Intersectionality and Transnationalism in Lailā Al-Johanī’s Jāhiliyya (Age of Ignorance)

Abstract Lailā Al-Johanī’s 2007 novel, Jāhiliyya (Days of Ignorance), is an innovative fictional work that employs the concept of “Jāhiliyya,” a period of ignorance that is thought to have characterized pre-Islamic Arabia. Jāhiliyya expresses Al-Johanī’s critique of the prevailing social and religious practices adapted by some tribal members of her society. These practices, including racial discrimination, negative stereotyping, and marginalization of women, as depicted in Al-Johanī’s text, are detrimental in their effect on the cultural fabric of society. This study uses intersectionality as an analytical framework through which to examine Al-Johanī’s Jāhiliyya. The essay demonstrates the novel’s integration of aspects of gender, race, and religion as interlocking systems of oppression and sites of transgression in the characters’ lives as they attempt to comprehend their subjectivity, while articulating and negotiating their society’s essentialist and reductionist discourse.

Neurological Impairment and Literary Empowerment in Nicole Krauss’s Man Walks into a Room

In Man Walks into a Room, a neuronovel staging an amnesiac, Nicole Krauss challenges the memory-identity equation. While she draws on neuroscience, she also writes against it, as she emphasizes the explanatory gap and the problem of qualia. To resist the growing authority of neuroscience and its often reductionist discourse, Krauss features a neurosurgeon as a mad scientist coming straight out of a science-fiction novel, who uses discursive strategies borrowed from the humanities. She also displays the power and plasticity of literary narrative. Hence, her generic experimentations—borrowing from traditional genres, revising and combining them—are far more successful than her scientist’s brain experiments. In numerous passages focused on ordinary moments of life, Krauss draws her reader’s attention to the singularity of experience and the power of storytelling, through figuration in particular, to account for it.

The performativity of terrorism: subversive experimentalist techniques in Pornography (2007) by Simon Stephens

ABSTRACT Although terrorism has a complex genealogy as a political concept, contemporary discussions on “new terrorism” use a reductionist discourse on the legitimacy of violence. In this article, I discuss the “performativity” of terrorism – its repetitive, citational, and necessarily discursive composition within the established social system – in the context of Pornography (2007) by Simon Stephens. I argue that subversion of conventional playwriting techniques in Pornography reveals the complex social and political dynamics that continually refigure terrorism as the counter-image of war.

A history of abuse: Documenting the harms experienced by the “Trainspotting generation”

The story of the past 40 years has been the relentless hollowing-out of industrial Britain leading to long-term unemployment and discarded generations that have been excluded socially and economically (Pearson 1987a, 1987b, Buchanan and Young 2000). In an attempt to block out these harsh social and economic realities of their lives, the youth of the 80s and 90s turned to heroin (Buchanan and Wyke 1987). By adopting a social harm approach to the analysis of semi-structured interviews with twelve opiate users (OUs), I argue that the problems often associated with drug use – experiences of stigmatisation, unemployment, and physical and mental health – might be best understood as harms resulting from a reductionist discourse that misrepresents drugs and drug users as a threat to society and focuses treatment on reducing the risks that OUs pose rather than enhancing the social resources necessary for human flourishing.

A SINGLE GRAIN OF INDIGO: A READING ON MONGOLS AND TURKS IN THE U.S. LOCAL PRESS (1850-1923)

In the 19th century, when belief in racial discrimination and superiority could find a response at social and even moral levels, claims about humanity as a biological species turned into a number of pseudoscientific assumptions. This inevitably constituted a legitimate ground for Orientalist stereotypes such as barbarism, despotism, ignorance, fanaticism and backwardness directed towards Eastern societies. Orientalism, which has been a baseline for the pride and superiority discourse inherent to the Western society since the second half of 18th century has been a method for their struggle to examine, learn and reign the East and the Easterners through a number of biased theories and practices which are considered as facts without any doubt. It is possible to approach the American society as a large-scale and heterogeneous sample that represents the West in the analysis of race-based reductionist discourse, which is steered to Eastern civilizations and endeavored to gain legitimacy through Orientalism.
 
 This study aims to reveal the locally-penetrated reflections of a number of racist stereotypes claiming to be scientific and which take their place in the American press since the second half of 19th century in regards to Turkish and Mongolian identities that are frequently positioned opposite to Western societies in the context of being an ‘other’. These two ethnical groups which embrace historically archaic bonds in between has been demonstrated in the local American press as unique sometimes, and neighboring at times; but at the same time, as the carriers of a low-profile culture that can easily be differentiated from Western civilization at every attempt due to its racial specifications.
 
 The image of Central Asia and its peoples in the American local press throughout the 19th and 20th centuries was represented by travel notes, columns, political news, short stories, and funnies. These texts and illustrations, which are mostly of pseudoscientific concerns, were sometimes published simultaneously in different states with a number of old articles and columns were reprinted in accordance with the conjuncture of the day. Among these, there are texts that tried to establish kinship ties between Germans and Mongols based on so-called scientific data obtained from skull measurements during the Great War, thus accusing Germans of being aggressive by nature. The anti-German propaganda that took place in the American local press also reveals that the word Mongolian turned into one of the main reference points of the racist paradigm during this period. Indeed, terms such as Mongol, Mongolian, and Mongoloid have expanded in meaning to characterize all peoples classified as yellow race by Westerners such as the Chinese and Japanese.
 
 The image of Turks in the American local press offers a common area that can be analyzed in the same context. The texts in question reveal the mentality in which the racist belief that constitutes the basis for hate speech is preserved, but a much harsher and uncompromising style is adopted. This can be explained by the fact that, while the American local press spread orientalist content during the 19th century, and at the same time hosted the anti-Turkish campaigns of the Armenian diaspora throughout the country.

Avoiding the stigma. A qualitative study of socially included women's experiences of drug use and dealing, health services and the police in France

The figure of drug user and dealer is stigmatized, linked to violence and illness. This is due to a reductionist discourse which implements othering processes generating scapegoat figures in the drug world. All drug users and sellers are assimilated with these spoiled identities in the media or in drug policies, while the reality is much more diverse. This article draws on relational sociology to focus on figures who are the antithesis of stereotypes: socially integrated women who use or sell drugs (WUSD) and are invisible to the health and control enforcement agencies. By seeking to avoid the stigma of the drug user's and dealer's identities, how do socially included WUSD distance themselves from the control enforcement agencies and health institutions? This qualitative research is based on 26 semi-structured interviews conducted with socially included WUSD in France. Participants were recruited using a snowball sampling strategy. It appears that the participants normalized their drug use and integrated it into their professional and personal lives. Some were drug user-dealers and had social supply practices, selling the drugs they used to their friends in order to finance their consumption. None of the participants have ever been in contact with harm reduction and addiction services, both because they do not identify with the users of these services, and because these services are not designed to support this population. With the police, the participants play gender games and show their social inclusion to protect themselves from arrest. In both cases, the stigmatized figure of the drug user and drug seller alienate the participants from the health systems and control enforcement agencies. One of the consequences of the othering process is the invisibility of those who do not want to be identified as “others” by the health and law enforcement services. Rethinking drug policy is essential to reach populations that may need information and support.

Deep learning goes to school: toward a relational understanding of AI in education

ABSTRACT In Applied AI, or ‘machine learning’, methods such as neural networks are used to train computers to perform tasks without human intervention. In this article, we question the applicability of these methods to education. In particular, we consider a case of recent attempts from data scientists to add AI elements to a handful of online learning environments, such as Khan Academy and the ASSISTments intelligent tutoring system. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), we provide a detailed examination of the scholarly work carried out by several data scientists around the use of ‘deep learning’ to predict aspects of educational performance. This approach draws attention to relations between various (problematic) units of analysis: flawed data, partially incomprehensible computational methods, narrow forms of educational’ knowledge baked into the online environments, and a reductionist discourse of data science with evident economic ramifications. These relations can be framed ethnographically as a ‘controversy’ that casts doubts on AI as an objective scientific endeavour, whilst illuminating the confusions, the disagreements and the economic interests that surround its implementations.

Menos pode ser mais: do decrescimento e descomplexificação à complexidade

Nos últimos tempos há um discurso reducionista que vem ganhando espaço em diversas publicações, conferências e debates amplos sobre o decrescimento e colapso associado aos limites biofísicos do meio que, por sua vez, levariam ao esgotamento de recursos naturais e às mudanças climáticas. Nessas abordagens é comum a defesa de que o decrescimento supõe uma descomplexificação desejada e/ou inevitável do sistema social. Esses pressupostos podem disseminar uma ideia equivocada sobre a forma de lidar com as questões socioambientais ao mesmo tempo em que aponta para limitações estruturais do ponto de vista social. Diante dessa problemática iminente, neste ensaio discutem-se alguns aspectos da perspectiva da complexidade partindo do pressuposto de que ela nos ajuda a compreender que o decrescimento não significa inevitavelmente uma diminuição da complexidade do sistema social. E nos mostra como uma formação mais criativa e crítica demandará intervenções que levem a uma proposta menos linear, pautada em uma mudança de paradigma e na própria forma de se relacionar socialmente.

Intellectual Property Rights, Biotechnology and Discourses of Development: Internal Contradictions and Forms of Resistance

The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights identifies freedom from hunger and malnutrition as a fundamental human right of every individual. The current global food crisis undermines this right and has multi‐faceted repercussions for poverty reduction and sustainable development in the Global South. A plethora of explanations have been proposed regarding the causes of the current food crisis, while a biotechnological solution involving the expansion of Genetically Modified (GM) seeds in the Global South has gained renewed momentum and simultaneously increased resistance. This presentation will provide a nuanced understanding of the promotion of IPRs and biotechnological ‘inventions’ as contemporary facets of a hegemonic modernization discourse of development. By first critically examining the development of IPRs and their relation to biotechnology I provide a basis for understanding the internal contradictions of this technologically reductionist discourse. Using a detailed case study from India, I then illustrate the way in which the internal contradictions of this discourse result in particular forms of resistance which significantly challenge the structure of the global food system.

“Beauty has no price, for a beautiful woman has the world at her feet”: representations of the female body in advertisements printed in “Realitatea Ilustrată” magazine

Printed interwar advertisements articulated a discourse that served both to promote specific meanings attached to femininity – physical beauty as a central social and symbolic female quality – and to define precise social sanctions that could be applied to women that did not know or follow normative beauty standards. Distinguishing constantly between what was desirable and what was repulsive, between the ideal and the imperfect, ad makers employed a series of visual and textual representations of the female body as a means to create a polarized and reductionist discourse, which in turn aimed to reduce the number and validity of definitions attached to femininity. The resulting symbolic antithesis stated that a beautiful woman was a model of social, economic and personal success, in stark opposition to the woman that did not value her physical appearance, doomed to live an unhappy and meaningless life, bereft of familial or professional fulfillment. This article will argue that representations of the female body created by the interwar advertising discourse played an important role in the structuring and dissemination of specific gender roles, expectations and stereotypes associated with femininity. The study is centered on qualitative analysis of a selection of ads printed between 1927 and 1940 in a well-known Romanian popular magazine – “Realitatea Ilustrată”.Printed interwar advertisements articulated a discourse that served both to promote specific meanings attached to femininity – physical beauty as a central social and symbolic female quality – and to define precise social sanctions that could be applied to women that did not know or follow normative beauty standards. Distinguishing constantly between what was desirable and what was repulsive, between the ideal and the imperfect, ad makers employed a series of visual and textual representations of the female body as a means to create a polarized and reductionist discourse, which in turn aimed to reduce the number and validity of definitions attached to femininity. The resulting symbolic antithesis stated that a beautiful woman was a model of social, economic and personal success, in stark opposition to the woman that did not value her physical appearance, doomed to live an unhappy and meaningless life, bereft of familial or professional fulfillment. This article will argue that representations of the female body created by the interwar advertising discourse played an important role in the structuring and dissemination of specific gender roles, expectations and stereotypes associated with femininity. The study is centered on qualitative analysis of a selection of ads printed between 1927 and 1940 in a well-known Romanian popular magazine – “Realitatea Ilustrată”.

TERRITORIALIDADE E A GESTÃO PÚBLICA DOS AMBIENTES NATURAIS DO RIO DE JANEIRO

Doi: 10.12957/geouerj.2015.9883 O povo brasileiro se orgulha por ter uma legislacao ambiental considerada das mais completas e modernas do planeta. Entretanto, o orgulho se transforma em decepcao quando individuos e organizacoes subvertem os dispositivos legais para alcancar seus objetivos sem se preocupar com o dano ambiental e com os conflitos sociais que suas acoes potencializam. O presente trabalho usa como estrategias metodologicas uma revisao bibliografica sobre publicacoes que discutem a construcao dos dois empreendimentos, um levantamento historico sobre o crescimento da regiao metropolitana do estado do Rio de Janeiro e uma critica pautada no conceito de territorialidade e de conflitos e vulnerabilidades socioambientais das ciencias ambientais de modo a constatar as manipulacoes juridicas, flexibilizacoes e arranjos na legislacao ambiental para que os empreendimentos sejam construidos. Evidenciou que os interesses publicos e privados conseguem se sobrepor a qualquer dispositivo legal que se coloca como impedimento destas acoes, que o discurso reducionista minimiza as criticas e os conflitos socioambientais sao recorrentes nestas situacoes.

Apropriação da Gestão do Território Pelo Poder Público Federal: O Aspecto Formal e o Real da Legislação Ambiental no Rio de Janeiro

O povo brasileiro se orgulha por ter uma legislação ambiental considerada das mais completas e modernas do planeta. Entretanto, o orgulho se transforma em decepção quando indivíduos e organizações subvertem os dispositivos legais para alcançar seus objetivos sem se preocupar com o dano ambiental e com os conflitos sociais que suas ações potencializam. O presente trabalho usa como estratégias metodológicas uma revisão bibliográfica sobre publicações que discutem a construção dos dois empreendimentos, um levantamento histórico sobre o crescimento da região metropolitana do estado do Rio de Janeiro e uma crítica pautada no conceito de territorialidade e de conflitos e vulnerabilidades socioambientais das ciências ambientais, de modo a constatar as manipulações jurídicas, flexibilizações e arranjos na legislação ambiental para que os empreendimentos sejam construídos. Os resultados evidenciaram que os interesses públicos e privados conseguem se sobrepor a qualquer dispositivo legal que se coloca como impedimento dessas ações, que o discurso reducionista minimiza as críticas e os conflitos socioambientais são recorrentes nessas situações.

Spiritist delusions and spiritism in the nosography of French psychiatry (1850–1950)

At the turn of the twentieth century there was a wave of delusions which had a direct link to spiritism in their form and content. These so-called spiritist or mediumistic delusions were the object of detailed study, and clinicians assigned them a place in nosography, especially in France. This work of classification was carried out as a function of the convictions and paradoxes that these delusions aroused; it also made it possible to question the relationship between pathology and belief. It is therefore important to emphasize certain ideological views of psychiatry on para-normality. We observed both a reductionist discourse concerning these domains, and at the same time their utilization in the construction of psychiatric knowledge.

Tender for the night: After-dark cultural complexities in the night-time economy

The concept of the night-time economy emerged in Britain in the early 1990s in the context of strategies to counter de-industrialization and inner-urban decline. Despite registering a shift towards more fluid, fragmented and diversified structures and rhythms of work, leisure and urban space, a framework that acknowledges cultural complexity has not, in practice, characterized night-time economy policy. After-dark cultural complexity has been obscured, instead, by a discursive concentration on those night-time economy leisure practices entangled with rapid, high-level consumption of alcohol, especially among young people. This reductionist discourse – oscillating between stimulating and controlling leisure cultures – has restricted policy development within a complex governance environment composed of many (in)formal organizations and levels of government. This article addresses the confusing, contradictory influence of a polarized night-time economy policy agenda and exposes the contrasting multilayered complexities of the diverse cultural practices of urban nightlife. By engaging with cultural complexity as integral to the city after dark, new conceptual trajectories are proposed that can point the way towards a more effective framework for understanding the lived experience of night-time culture.

Participation Is Not Enough

■ The popularization of ‘new’ Internet-based media has generated much optimism about the social and participatory-democratic potentialities of these media, leading to predictions about the demise of the mass communication paradigm, and its replacement by a many-to-many communicative paradigm. But as happened before, the reappraisal of participation also produced a number of theoretical, conceptual and empirical problems. Participation became (at least partially) an object of celebration, trapped in a reductionist discourse of novelty, detached from the reception of its audiences and decontextualized from its political-ideological, communicative-cultural and communicative-structural contexts. These celebratory perspectives on participation cover how some of the basic concepts of the mass communication paradigm are still very much alive, providing the discursive frameworks for the reception of old and new media products. This article aims to show the persistence of (a number of components of) the mass communication paradigm through an analysis of the reception of two north Belgian participatory media products. One of these case studies is based on the ‘new’ world of a YouTube-like online platform called 16plus; the second case study is based on the ‘old’ concept of access television in a 2002 TV programme called Barometer. Through an analysis of these multilayered audience receptions, this article shows that participatory practices are not unconditionally appreciated by audience members, but are subject to specific conditions of possibility that are still embedded within the mass communication paradigm. Albeit in different degrees, these case studies show the importance of two ‘old’ key concepts — professional quality and social relevance — for these audiences’ evaluation of participatory practices. ■

Biotechnology, Sound Science, and the Foreign Agricultural Service: A Case Study in Neoliberal Rollout

This paper addresses the ways in which policy coordination, and technical assistance and training programs operated by the United States Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) have helped produce, internationalize, and enforce a neoliberal approach to the regulation of biotechnology, genetically modified crops, and food safety, through the reductionist discourse of sound science. The internationalization of US standards forms a major component of US agrofood trade strategies, while the contentious nature of biotechnology within international trade makes standards harmonization an important political battleground within ongoing processes of neoliberalization. Relying on appeals to sound science that posit US regulations as scientific and objective, and therefore superior to other regulatory models, FAS facilitates the rollout of neoliberal institutions within both the US state and in developing and post-Communist countries to harmonize biotechnology and food safety standards in line with US-led neoliberalization and capitalist internationalization. I examine the political and scientific contours of the sound science discourse, and offer two examples through which FAS has incorporated and deployed sound science in undertaking neoliberal rollout—first by creating a new internal Biotechnology Group, and second through focusing aspects of its Cochran Fellowship Program, a longstanding development and training program for foreign regulators, on biotechnology issues.