Oppositional Stance Research Articles

Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) Government through the Lense of Print Media: Exploring the Predominant Narratives

Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) was a significant political alliance formed in 2020, comprising major opposition parties in Pakistan. The PDM came into power as a result of a 'no-confidence-motion' (NCM) against the then Prime Minister Mr Imran Khan in April 2022. The NCM and its consequences are very interesting given the fact that this 'political move' was very first of its kind in the history of Pakistan which resulted in the toppling of a democratically elected PM. The move and its subsequent political result i.e. the formation of the PDM government received a variety of coverage in the media. This study is an attempt to explore the coverage of PDM government-related issues by dailies The Dawn and The News International from February 2022 to August 2022. This research is an attempt to determine and analyze the predominant narratives produced by the selected newspapers regarding the PDM government in their editorials. Employing the content analysis, we have found out that the variety of viewpoints on the PDM government have been highlighted by the selected newspapers. The Dawn exhibited a slightly oppositional stance through a range of tones and critical evaluations. The News International, on the other hand, acknowledges the complexity of the government's performance and offers a more measured review.

Many Bodies, One Heart

Many Bodies, One Heart

Pro or Anti? A Social Influence Model of Online Stance Flipping

Social influence characterizes the change of an individual's stances in a complex social environment towards a topic. Two factors often govern the influence of stances in an online social network: endogenous influences driven by an individual's innate beliefs through the agent's past stances and exogenous influences formed by social network influence between users. Both endogenous and exogenous influences offer important cues to user susceptibility, thereby enhancing the predictive performance on stance changes or flipping. In this work, we propose a stance flipping prediction problem to identify Twitter agents that are susceptible to stance flipping towards the coronavirus vaccine (i.e., from pro-vaccine to anti-vaccine). Specifically, we design a social influence model where each agent has some fixed innate stance and a conviction of the stance that reflects the resistance to change; agents influence each other through the social network structure.From data collected between April 2020 to May 2021, our model achieves 86\% accuracy in predicting agents that flip stances. Further analysis identifies that agents that flip stances have significantly more neighbors engaging in collective expression of the opposite stance, and 53.7% of the agents that flip stances are bots and bot agents require lesser social influence to flip stances.

Loodusmõttest aktivismini: saateks keskkondluse erinumbrile / From Nature Contemplation to Activism: A Special Issue on Environmentalism

Loodusmõttest aktivismini: saateks keskkondluse erinumbrile / From Nature Contemplation to Activism: A Special Issue on Environmentalism

GENERALLİKTEN İDAM SEHPASINA (DADAŞ) RÜŞTÜ PAŞA: ASKERÎ VE SİYASİ FAALİYETLERİ

Millî Mücadele yıllarının kurtuluşa odaklanarak tüm farklılıkları ortadan kaldıran kenetlenme süreci Cumhuriyet’in ilk yılları ile beraber bir yol ayrımına dönüşmeye başlamıştır. Bu sürecin ilk evresinde kurtarıcı sıfatıyla hareket eden askeri ve siyasi yöneticilerin birçoğu yeni dönemde köklü devrimler karşısında muhalif bir tavır takınmışlardır. Bu radikal değişimin en önemli örneklerinden birini teşkil eden Rüştü Paşa’nın konu edindiği bu çalışmada onun askeri safhadaki başarılı çalışmalarının ardından siyasi anlamda Mustafa Kemal Paşa’ya başlatılan muhalif çalışmalardaki rolü ve bir suikast planına kadar varan süreci ele alınmaktadır. Düşünsel farklılıkların ve mevcut siyasi atmosferin kendisini muhalefete ittiği bu yıllarda, Rüştü Paşa, bağımsız ve tek başına muhalefet yerine tüm kariyeri boyunca olduğu gibi geri planda kalmayı ancak yine muhalif bir görev edinmeyi ihmal etmemiştir. Askeri faaliyetleri boyunca güvenilir ve sadık bir ikinci adam sıfatını hak eden Rüştü Paşa, Meclis faaliyetlerinde ise sıkı bir muhalif haline gelmiştir. Onu İzmir Suikastı gibi bir olay içinde yer almaya ve dolayısıyla idama götüren süreci ortaya koymak çalışmanın temel hedefidir. Çalışma arşiv belgeleri, gazeteler, anılar ve çeşitli araştırma eserler incelenerek hazırlanmıştır.

Costellazione

<i>Costellazione</i>

Tom Stoppard: A Life

Tom Stoppard: A Life

Towards a Credo by Brian Arkins

Reviewed by: Towards a Credo by Brian Arkins Dr William Adamson (bio) Brian Arkins, Towards a Credo (Clifden: Little Gull Publishing, 2021), 36 pages. Dr Brian Arkins is Emeritus Professor of Classics at NUI Galway and has published extensively on academic subjects, ranging from studies of Catullus, Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, James Liddy to Desmond Egan. His powerful standing as the author of scholarly works is beyond doubt. His latest work, however, is his first collection of poetry and literary translations, entitled Towards a Credo. The volume contains twenty-two poems and seven translations of poetry from the French (Verlaine and Baudelaire), German (Heine) and Latin (Catullus and the anonymous twelfth-century author known as the Archpoet) and Greek (Sappho). Plato wrote that poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. This point is well stressed by Brian Arkins in these poems, which accommodate a range of themes, including religion, sex, love, politics, and society, and which are frequently, but by no means exclusively, seen through a critical lens, often humorous, never trite, and always energetically true. The poems represent a highly personal and radical epistemological stance in their approach to life – by no means as a fait accompli, but rather as an unfinished, ongoing process of experience, reflected in the title of the collection, ‘Towards a Credo’, a stimulating journey towards a set of beliefs that influence the way we live, laying bare the relationships between our attitudes and the things at which they are directed. Yeats once commented on the Englishman’s idea of compromise: ‘He [the Englishman] says, some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements’. Arkins is no Englishman. A strong sense of commitment permeates the poems, not least when dealing with the relationship with God. Here Arkins refuses to become involved with the platitudes of institutionalised religion but rather reveals a deeply personal connection between the ‘I’ of the poems and God, with an honesty and directness that refuses to proselytise but rather defines a deeply individual bond of belief that challenges the reader, but no more. In ‘To Atheists’, for example, the poet addresses his audience apophatically, denying those functional, theological arguments designed to evidence the existence (or not) of a deity within the dispassionate confines of narrow dogma. Arkins invokes the spirit of Tertullian, the second-century author and mystic credited with the statement certum est, quia impossibile. [End Page 208] The poem ends with these words (in translation, of course): it iscertainbecause it isimpossible Sex and love are dealt with playfully but succinctly, as in the poem ‘Du’, a response to Heinrich Heine’s love poem ‘Du bist wie eine Blume’ (also translated in this collection by Arkins). Whereas Heine’s poem reflects upon the transience of love, Arkins takes an opposite stance: love is directly experienced, is the substance itself, with no need of comparison. The poem begins by directly contradicting Heine: Du bist wie eine Blume […] – Heinewhy can’t you Germans keepflowers out of your poetry?du bist nicht wie eine Blume The lyric ‘I’ of the poem goes on to refute emphatically and succinctly in three two-line stanzas Heine’s proposition before ending: ‘I praying that God / keep you beautiful, clever, passionate’, distilling the very essence of being into the one word ‘Du’ of the title. At other times there is almost a Yeatsian feel to the theme of love (we are reminded of the poem ‘Politics’ and the theme of the supremacy of love), as in the first of two haikus: girls were made to loveand kiss and who am Ito interfere with this? And global politics too is dealt with, but always within an inclusive context and not as something experienced from afar, forcing the reader to confront and respond to the tragedies which affect us all. In ‘Bosnia’ the misery of ‘a far-off country’ is brought home with the line ‘from Sarajevo Fazla came to Millstreet’1, for example. And in ‘Afghanistan’ (for Michael D. Higgins), the political conceit of powerful first-world nations is held up to the mirror...

Les préjudices professionnels des jeunes victimes de dommages corporels. Partie 2 : Les difficultés liées à l’évaluation des pertes de gains professionnels

Though professional damages in respect of young personal injury victims are recognized in principle by the Dintilhac group, and confirmed by the Court of Cassation in terms of full compensation for damages suffered, the assessment of such professional damages remains difficult, and the source of myriad legal disputes. Assessment of lost future earnings requires a specific approach: As regards the benchmark salary, judges base this on the average or median salary in France, taking into account the social and family environment which may represent a loss of opportunity. The jurisprudence recognizes that the permanent incapacity of the victim entitles them to lifetime compensation, mostly in the form of an annuity. However, while the civil judge considers that the payment of an allowance for disabled adults (AAH) or an educational allowance for disabled children (AEEH) does not interfere with the calculation of lost professional earnings, the administrative judge takes the opposite stance.

The Portuguese Radical Left and Europe: The Case of the PCP

This paper takes a qualitative, rhetorical and historical approach with a view to analyzing the Portuguese Communist Party’s (PCP) long-term, oppositional stance and tactics towards European integration (EI) by briefly covering early opposition, while focusing on 1990s onward stages. The economic crises (Euro Crisis 2008/2009 and Pandemic) Portugal faces, and the rigid, neo-liberal solutions imposed by the European Union, have led the PCP to feel its constant criticisms of increased federalism have been justified. At its XXI Congress in 2020, the PCP used the same rhetorical arguments as it had in the past, including that the only solution is to break with the right’s pro-EU policies.

К природе эстетического радикализма: Александр Блок и Уоллес Стивенс

Aesthetic radicalism characteristic of the modernist literary culture is explored in the work of Alexander Blok (1880 –1921) and Wallace Stevens (1879 –1955). Poetic imagination, Stevens wrote, is “always at the end of the era” — the two poets shared a sense of writing from a hiatus between no longer and not yet. Both were fascinated, however distantly, by radical ideologies of their time, particularly the power to produce and propagate heroic myth. Heroic visionaries are defined by the “warlike attitude” (R.W. Emerson), the oppositional stance that causes an enhancement and a reduction of imagination. The image of modern heroics in Blok’s and Stevens’ poetry is associated metaphorically with the energizing and deadening effect of the cold. In such poems as “The Twelve,” “The Snow man” and other the breakthrough to “absolute” reality is imagined as a result of the violent self-abstraction from all settled contexts and all subjective values. It is fraught with risk and associated, by Block, with the ability to hear the music of being through the noises of the time or, by Stevens, with the directness of seeing “things as they are.” Trust in the possibility of such a breakthrough, accompanied by the understanding of its utter impossibility is a characteristic paradox of the culture of modernism. It is most vividly observed as we compare the creative strategies of the two poets, however distant they are culturally.

Intra-party Conflict and the Emergence of Islamic-Based Parties in the post-2019 Election in Indonesia

This article explains the emergence of new Islamic-based parties after the-2019 election in Indonesia. They are Ummah Party, Masyumi-Reborn Party, and Gelora Party. By using intra-party conflicts and path dependency theories, this study reveals that the emergence of those new Islamic parties is associated with frictions among party actors that troubled their prior parties, namely PAN, PBB, and PKS. The formation of the Ummah Party and Masyumi-Reborn Party was also situated by the 2014 and 2019 political contest, which represent the oppositional stance that could not be accommodated by the prior parties. Meanwhile, Gelora Party offered itself as a middle ground between the pro and contra camps of the government and provided a solution for the Islamic conservatism. This article argues that the emergence of new Islamic parties continues a pattern that has long plagued Indonesian Islamic-based parties, namely political fragmentation.

Okresní školní inspektor a počátky státního dohledu nad obecným školstvím v Čechách v letech 1869–1873

The paper deals with the adoption of School Supervision Act from 1869 in Bohemia, taking into account both Czech and German speaking milieus. Using the example of appointment of District School Inspectors and looking into their activities, it analyses the system deficiencies and complications that the state authorities had to cope with in the first years after adoption and that, eventually, led into an amendment of the aforementioned act four years later. Apart from the inadequate organisational background and salary conditions of district inspectors, the paper points out the financial requirements that the school reform brought about and that had to be covered mostly by local municipalities. This fact significantly contributed to a generally passive or even negative attitude held by autonomous corporations as for the new school legislature implementation, which was enhanced by oppositional stance of Czech political representation.

Counter-narratives of achievement at South Africa's first apartheid-era black medical school, 1950s to the early 1990s

This article examines the construction and dissemination of two particular achievement narratives - one focused on high academic standards, the other on a Black Consciousness-inspired "Black pride" - that were produced by academic staff and students at the University of Natal's Medical School, South Africa's first apartheid-era black medical school in the highly racialised context of the 1950s to early 1990s. While quite different in terms of their producers and periods of origin, the article argues that both these narratives developed with a similar purpose: as counter-narratives, which intended to critique or challenge the pervasive and disparaging apartheid-era discourse that portrayed black South Africans as inferior. Indeed, both these narratives sought, in their own respective ways, to enable those producing them to reframe the dominant apartheid discourse, to offer alternatives, including more positive views about black South Africans, and to take an oppositional stance. Yet, while both developed as counter-narratives, they did so with different emphases and stances taken to challenge apartheid, highlighting the complexity of these narratives. In addition, this article examines how both these narratives could sometimes, in particular historical moments, overlap in time and even amalgamate, leading to the construction of hybridised narratives.

Arielism Versus Cosmopolitanism: Brazilian Reaction to 9/11/01 as Cultural Narrative and Identity Work

This research examines identity work vis-à-vis Brazilian discourse regarding the events of September 11, 2001. The data is drawn from Brazilian nationals and expatriates participating in a digital discourse forum hosted by the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo. In discussing the events of 9/11/01, Brazilians also make sense of what it means to be Brazilian and what it means to be human. As the data show, Brazilians frame their reactions by drawing on larger understandings of the social world. The two most dominant stances come from Brazilians adopting what can be called Arielist and cosmopolitan stances. In addition, a small group of Brazilian expatriates join the fray as self-proclaimed Americanophiles. In examining these dynamics, we see that identities result from the process of identity construction best framed from a social constructionist perspective. In these three cases, identities emerge from interaction, engagement, and reaction to competing identity frames. Through the ongoing dialogue interactions, Brazilian participants implicitly make statements about their self-conceptions and visions of Brazil’s place in the world during this historic event. Significantly, the complementary and oppositional stances in reaction to 9/11/01 continue to persist almost twenty years after the attacks in the ideological frameworks around national identities circulating in both Brazil and the U.S. at present. In this way, the discourse from 2001 foreshadows the impending political chasm between right and left in both Brazil and the United States and provides an impetus for future research.

Hunters who will not report illegal wolf killing: Self-policing or resistance with political overtones?

Illegal killing of wildlife is challenging conservation efforts worldwide. Ecological research has shown that illegal killing is severely affecting the transboundary Swedish-Norwegian wolf population. A previous study indicated that unwillingness to report illegal killing of wolves among Swedish hunters contains an element of protest against perceived unjust treatment of hunting and hunters but that it could also simply be a reflection of ineffective law enforcement in the backcountry, driving hunters to effect forms of self-policing. Based on a survey of Norwegian hunters, the present research goes one step further. One in five hunters decline to report illegal wolf killings, and unwillingness to report is predicted by lack of trust in environmental institutions and a general anti-elite sentiment. Hunting-related issues and other factors also affect outcomes, but to a lesser degree. We conclude that unwillingness to report is often part of an oppositional stance related not only to wildlife management and conservation, but to contemporary social change in rural areas and perceived societal power relations. It is unlikely that reluctance to report is driven by frustration over inefficient official enforcement. While a political dimension is not always articulated, overlooking it may stoke conflicts and fortify a perception of unjust power relations.

Conflict between the Individual and Society in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Jeanette Winterson’s novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) illustrates the story of a young girl, Jeanette, who experiences suppressive upbringing at the hands of her mother and her surroundings. Through the portrayal of her transition into adulthood, the novel touches on numerous challenging issues such as gender, identity, and the reliability of the mainstream patriarchal discourse. The main character’s gradual transformation reveals the controversial aspects of her society juxtaposed with her sexual orientation as a lesbian and her oppositional stance against the ingrained doctrine of the Church. This study will, in this respect, discuss Jeanette’s rebellion as an individual against her oppressive society in Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit through specific references from the primary source and relevant secondary sources in an ultimate attempt to reveal how identity, gender roles, and truth are all discursive practices.

Movements, embodiment and the emergence of decisions. Insights from insect navigation

We readily infer that animals make decisions, but what this implies is usually not clearly defined. The notion of 'decision-making' ultimately stems from human introspection, and is thus loaded with anthropomorphic assumptions. Notably, the decision is made internally, is based on information, and precedes the goal directed behaviour. Also, making a decision implies that ‘something’ did it, thus hints at the presence of a cognitive mind, whose existence is independent of the decision itself. This view may convey some truth, but here I take the opposite stance. Using examples from research in insect navigation, this essay highlights how apparent decisions can emerge without a brain, how actions can precede information or how sophisticated goal directed behaviours can be implemented without neural decisions. This perspective requires us to shake off the idea that behaviour is a consequence of the brain; and embrace the concept that movements arise from – as much as participate in – distributed interactions between various computational centres – including the body – that reverberate in closed-loop with the environment. From this perspective we may start to picture how a cognitive mind can be the consequence, rather than the cause, of such neural and body movements.

We All Need Philosophy Of Science: Analyticism As A Vehicle For Explanatory Understanding In Multi-method Research

Abstract Explaining and Understanding are considered mutually exclusive in political research. In this view, Explaining involves making observations as an outsider, with emphasis on causal laws, generalizations, and predictions. Conversely, Understanding occurs from the inside, with emphasis on meaning-making. This research note addresses Explaining, Understanding, and the related concept of reflexivity in multi-method/mixed-method research involving fieldwork. Rather than taking for granted the dichotomy between Explaining and Understanding that stems from Cartesian anxiety, I argue for the non-mutually exclusive alternative of ‘explanatory understanding’ and propose analyticism as the appropriate methodological path. An analyticist methodology involves creating a model that is a general account of a phenomenon, which is then used in case-specific analytical narratives to reveal departures from the model. Since understanding requires adequate explanation, explanatory understanding helps us better make sense of the world. Therefore, Explaining and Understanding are not merely oppositional stances between identifying causes and making sense. We cannot identify causes without making sense, and making sense involves a degree of causal inference. Explanatory understanding also necessitates reflexivity, which I conceptualize as methodological and personal positionality. I apply these arguments to my study of post-election violence in West Africa, drawing on fieldwork experience in Ghana, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire.

JOHN FISKE AND POPULAR CULTURE: A CRITICAL READING OF MARGARET TYLER’S “EPISTLE TO THE READER”

This paper examines how Margaret Tyler overcomes literary inferiority in the “Epistle to the Reader” that precedes her translation The Mirrour of Princely Deeds and Knighthood. Tyler, as a woman and an author, is in a secondary position in the patriarchal Elizabethan society and print culture. Notwithstanding her disadvantaged status, she circumvents it through various tactics, and she defends both her act and women’s right to write. Tyler does not overtly challenge the assumptions prevalent in print culture but manipulates them to her own end. The fact that she employs several strategies to earn a place in the system renders it possible to evaluate the preface within the framework of John Fiske’s popular culture theory. As is evident from the “Epistle,” Tyler resists the dominant culture, and she produces her oppositional stance out of the resources of the dominant. Thus, Tyler’s preface functions as an element of popular culture.