Un projet de recherche scientifique cristallise plusieurs tensions temporelles. Étudié en tant que dispositif, il transforme les pratiques de recherche et particulièrement les pratiques de communication. Dans le cas de la recherche en écologie, l’expérimentation en milieu naturel, emblème de la modernisation de la discipline, introduit la temporalité de phénomènes naturels difficilement maîtrisables. L’étude du projet Inbioprocess permet de suivre les pratiques communicationnelles de gestion du temps afin de concilier le travail expérimental en milieu naturel et le suivi d’un planning (...) de projet. Pour cela, matériaux ethnographiques et discursifs sont complétés par des entretiens. L’action B du projet est centrée sur le détournement d’un bras de rivière dont la réalisation se confronte à certaines difficultés. Cette contribution met en évidence le rôle des productions discursives comme trace du rapport au temps et comme prise sur les événements naturels. Si les chercheurs naturalisent des critères temporels pour l’évaluation, l’écriture permet de faire récit de l’imprévisibilité. De même, la circulation de documents est à l’origine d’une nécessaire complémentarité des temps. Nous montrons également l’importance des pratiques d’ajustement et les risques liés à une hiérarchisation du temps court du projet sur le temps long de l’équipe. La gestion communicationnelle des temporalités apparaît comme un élément central de la réalisation d’un projet scientifique. (shrink)

The recent publication of Michel Foucault’s 1974-75 and 1975-76 lectures at the Collège de France provides an opportunity to reconsider the potential contribution of Foucault’s “analytics” of power for understanding the contemporary operation of race. Unlike the deployment of gender, which, I argue here, is best understood as a function of “disciplinary” power, the deployment of race is primarily a function of “biopower,” an expression of power that is bound up with the state apparatus. The announcement of the federal Violence (...) Initiative in the 1990s provides an illuminating example of the operation of this power, and the chiasmic function of discourse that Foucault famously termed “power/knowledge.”. (shrink)

By examining an exemplar sample of mental health nursing educational policies and related legislation, in this article, we trace the discursive production of madness as an “othered” identity category. We engage in a critical discourse analysis of mental health nursing education in Canada, drawing on provincial and federal policies and legislation as the main sources of data. Theoretically framed by critical posthumanism and mad studies, this article outlines how the mad subjectivity becomes decontextualized out of its identity‐based understanding (...) and recontextualized as an inferior category of “the human,” circulating within discourses of pedagogy, economics, law, and psychiatry. The article maps the intertextual nexus of the discourse of mental health nursing education, making visible the complex, the arbitrary, and the sometimes‐contradictory nature of the discipline's grappling with identity‐based mental health concepts. We close with several implications for nursing policy, education, and practice. (shrink)

This article contributes to existing feminist technoscience analyses by proposing a new tool for examining how norms governing viable and unviable bodies are discursively constructed in an increasingly technologized world. This tool is the result of synthesizing two existing concepts: white noise from the field of media theory/information studies, and the abject from psychosemiotics/gender studies. Synthesizing these two concepts produces an enriched term for detecting interrelations between discursive disturbances and disturbances in bodily norms. In this article, the synthesized concept (...) is used as a tool to analyse material concerning the assignment of International Nonproprietary Names to biotechnological drugs. Biotech offers itself as a prime testing ground for this new tool, replete as it is with bodily anxieties, powerful discourses and innovative technologies. This article compares three versions of an INN guidance document showing how anxieties about bodily norms are reflected in, and managed through, these documents. (shrink)

This article reflects one scholar's attempt to locate herself within emerging ethical methodologies given a specific concern with cross-cultural women's moral praxis. The field of comparative ethics's debt to past debates over methodology is considered through a typology of three waves of methodological invention. The article goes on to describe a specific research focus on U.S. Catholic and Iranian Shii women that initiated a search for a distinct method. This method of comparative ethics, which focuses on the production of (...) ethical knowledge through the interaction of discursive logics of various moral agents, is described. The conclusion turns to how methodological invention can itself become a constructive project through the way it (1) locates the scholar in relation to her subject of study and (2) allows for isolation of tactics within specific moral discourses. (shrink)

American university globalization has increasingly targeted and been courted by authoritarian states. While the reasons for these partnerships are manifold—including the ease of top-down large-scale monetary investment, “knowledge economy” development strategies, social engineering programs, and other corporate and imperial entanglements—an overwhelming discourse has emerged around higher education initiatives in places like the Arabian Peninsula, China, Singapore, and Central Asia that juxtaposes liberalism with the illiberal, authoritarian contexts it is supposedly encountering within the framework of neoliberal globalization. Through a discussion of (...) American branch campuses in Qatar and the UAE, this article traces a more complex web of actors whose interests may include neoliberal and imperial inclinations but are not reducible to them. By focusing on the discursive framings of these branch campus initiatives, we show how the notion of “liberal education” operates as a global discourse of power through American branch campuses in the Arabian Peninsula and, by extension, other nondemocratic states around the world. Specifically, we argue that the very concept of “authoritarianism” is discursively produced in and through these university projects, and simultaneously builds an idealized narrative about the national self in the United States that erases existing and emerging inequalities—indeed, authoritarianisms—within the home spaces of American academia. (shrink)

Discursive dynamics play an important role in shaping the meanings of gender equality. The article discusses the relation between hegemonic discourses on gender equality policies and feminist taboos. It suggests that feminist scholars could paradoxically be trapped in hegemonic discourses on gender equality policies that may lead to taboos about particular approaches to and interpretations of such policies. Three main feminist hegemonic discourses are considered to act as taboos. They deal with the possibility to overcome patriarchy, the role of (...) elites and other groups of actors in processes of gender transformation and the merits of incremental change. The article further discusses the implications of the postulate about hegemonic discourses and taboos on gender equality for feminist knowledge production and reflects on the potential of Bacchi’s notion of ‘reflexivity’ to overcome them. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility is a complex discipline that not only demands responsible behavior in production processes but also includes the concepts of communicative transparency and dialogue. Stakeholder dialogue is therefore expected to be an integrated part of the CSR strategy :323–338, 2006). However, only few studies have addressed the practice of CSR stakeholder dialogue and the challenges related hereto. This article adopts a postmodern perspective on CSR stakeholder dialogue. Based on a comprehensive single case study on stakeholder dialogue in (...) a global dairy company, we focus on the complexity of CSR dialogue with multiple stakeholders. Drawing on a critical reflexive methodology :1265–1281, 2007), we develop the research question: How is CSR multi-stakeholder dialogue practiced, experienced, and articulated in an empirical context? The purpose is to understand the underlying assumptions, expectations, and principles guiding CSR multi-stakeholder dialogue in an empirical setting, as we focus on how key stakeholders articulate and anticipate the values of stakeholder dialogue and how the actual stakeholder dialogues are enacted. The findings of the study differ significantly from the ideals of transparent and agenda-free stakeholder dialogue. Rather, the study shows an overall tension between ideal and practice, supporting the progressive importance of the dialogue process in itself as an essential part of the end goal. The implication of this is a growing pressure on creating transparency about the positioning and negotiation of roles throughout the dialogue process. (shrink)

Using critical discourse analysis this study analyzes how ideologies and national identities are discursively constructed through editorial and opinion commentaries in two English-language newspapers from China and Japan on an international incident involving the two countries. The first four editorials/opinions on the East China Sea trawler collision incident from the China Daily and Daily Yomiuri are analyzed. Findings show that a variety of discursive strategies are adopted by the newspapers to construct national identity and intergroup relations, including: 1) the (...) discursive categorization of group identity, 2) the discursive re-categorization of intergroup relations, and 3) the discursive re-categorization of intragroup relations. Even though both newspapers are products of globalization, and purport to target international and cosmopolitan audiences, the reporting of the East China Sea incident closely adheres to official narratives and discourses of the respective governments. (shrink)

Modernization represents a political project of power and domination, marginalization and exclusion. The concepts that make up modernization-theory are deeply complicit with this and are implicated in legitimation strategies for the regimes and peoples who benefit. As with other power/knowledge projects, tropes of literality that reference materiality generate the discourses of certainty through which political persuasion takes place. These discourses are bounded by a constitutive “outside” of metaphor, and thus devalue other subjects of knowledge and knowing subjects. Said’s Orientalism presents (...) a remarkable catachresis through which an alternative understanding of knowledge-production becomes visible. This work challenges Euro-Americano-centric social science and intellectual life, because it undermines the binaries through which ideas themselves are understood as certain or not. Butler’s theory of materialization in turn conceptualizes materiality and certainty in a complementary way. (shrink)

Habermas' discourse theory stresses the autonomy of public deliberation transcending the spontaneous emergence of private networks of legal relationships between individuals. Only the public discourse which is detached from the inertia of overlapping practical forms of coordination can refer to the ideally designed social work of legitimated interpersonal relationships. The democratic constitution is regarded as a legal institutionalization of the priority of the public forum of discourse. Conceptions related to classical liberalism would question the cognitive potential of public deliberation, and (...) even deny its productivity as a normative frame of reference for (post‐)modern societies which are confronted with the challenge of uncertainty and the continuous process of self‐transformation. (shrink)

La contribution se propose de mettre en évidence les problèmes épistémologiques et méthodologiques posés par l’annotation discursive de productions écrites d’élèves et les choix techniques qu’implique sa mise en œuvre. Dans un premier temps, l’article montre l’intérêt scientifique de la constitution de « grands » corpus scolaires rassemblant plusieurs centaines de textes d’élèves d’école primaire et de collège de niveaux scolaires différents répondant à une même consigne. L’unicité de la consigne permet de comparer les productions en vue d’élaborer une (...) cartographie des moyens linguistiques choisis par les élèves et de mettre en évidence des indicateurs de progressivité. Dans un second temps, sont présentés les enseignements tirés de l’expérience d’annotation discursive qui a abouti à la création de la ressource ANNODIS, corpus de textes en français écrit standard annoté discursivement. Elle s’interroge sur les adaptations nécessaires pour traiter des textes d’élèves et définit des principes de travail généraux notamment sur le choix de la version de texte à annoter, la définition du modèle d’annotation et les guides d’annotation. Sont ensuite exposés deux chantiers d’annotation portant sur des textes d’élèves de fin d’école primaire en réponse à une consigne mettant en jeu la cohésion textuelle, qui demande d’insérer dans un texte narratif trois phrases comportant des pronoms et des syntagmes nominaux anaphoriques. Les notions sont illustrées par l’analyse de deux textes d’élèves de 5° Primaire. L’annotation des Relations de Discours procède successivement, dans une démarche proche de celle d’Annodis, par segmentation du texte en Unités de Discours Élémentaires, analyse de la cohérence temporelle et annotation des Relations de discours. L’annotation des chaînes de référence dans les textes d’élèves suppose des adaptations plus importantes du guide d’annotation antérieurement élaboré. Les premiers essais permettent ainsi de définir des principes de travail pour l’annotation des textes d’élèves. (shrink)

Productivity and exploitation theories of distribution are identified as alternative discursive systems. Both are shown to have analytic and interpretive strengths but also to be relative vis-á-vis the bases by which conclusions in terms of exploitation and productivity, respectively, are reached and stated. A third, nonideological (and therefore less emotionally satisfying) alternative mode of discourse is suggested: appropriation theory, focussing on power and inequality but without normative judgment. The work of Max Weber is used to illustrate appropriation theory.

The increasing incidence of ‘trafficking’ has added an incontestably disturbing dimension to the contestable nature of a ‘non-trafficked’ UK sex industry. Men who buy sex remain under-researched, though some studies have indicated ambivalence within men's attitudes. This study combines a critical discursive psychology in support of dialogical self theory. Secondary data, from prominent UK media resources, were analysed using Edley's method of combining ‘interpretative repertoires’, ‘ideological dilemmas’ and ‘subject positions’. Contrasting discursive practices indicative of wider ideological conflict were (...) found. Discursive concepts were ‘mapped’ onto Hermans and Hermans-Konopka's ‘I-positions’ to explore how these potentially dilemmatic positions might be understood in terms of identity production. The function of ‘uncertainty’, particularly salient with the increasing complexity of globalisation, was considered a factor in how men's identities might be limited by the current discursive space. A ‘dialogical’ model of self is introduced as a framework for understanding how men who buy sex might take up new, inclusive, positions. A corollary is reflected upon; that researchers, activists and buyers alike, who remain ideologically inflexible, may be sustaining the conditions for coercion through their contribution to the discursive conflict. The synthesis of discursive and dialogical analytical tools is recommended for investigating the production of selves in contested spaces. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 101-134 [Access article in PDF] Getting Maimon's Goad:Discursivity, Skepticism, and Fichte's Idealism Peter Thielke The image of J. G. Fichte has of late displayed a rather substantial, and even remarkable, transformation. Where before Fichte was viewed—and most often dismissed—as advancing an unpalatable type of metaphysical idealism, in recent years several new perspectives on Fichte have emerged, each claiming to improve on (...) the old, standard picture. 1 The transformation of Fichte's image has been accompanied—or, more precisely, has been made possible—by a renewed interest in the relatively forgotten figures in the interregnum between Kant and Hegel. Fichte's thought is now understood in the context not only of Kant's transcendental idealism, but of, among others, Reinhold's Elementarphilosophie, Aenesidemus-Schulze's skepticism, Jacobi's intuitionism, and Beck's Standpunktslehre. By casting Fichte in this light, a more nuanced understanding of his project has been developed, one that does not simply follow the [End Page 101] traditional view of the Wissenschaftslehre as a full-blown metaphysical idealism in which the world of objects is understood as the product of an Absolute I.But while this 'contextual' approach has led to a renewed appreciation of the Wissenschaftslehre, I will suggest that the new focus on Fichte's historical milieu is incomplete. A lacuna in the current understanding of Fichte can be traced to a neglect of Salomon Maimon, an idiosyncratic and rather obscure critic of Kant. In this paper, I will argue that taking Maimon's skepticism into account when interpreting Fichte's idealism requires a rethinking of Fichte's project. In particular, in order to respond to Maimon's skepticism—an avowed project of the Wissenschaftslehre—Fichte's position must advance an idealist metaphysics, one in which the content of cognition is taken to be constituted by an act of the absolute I. This claim, of course, might seem rash, since it threatens to saddle Fichte with a gratuitous form of absolute idealism. It thus seems to run counter to recent attempts to make Fichte into a figure appealing to modern eyes. Such a concern, however, is I think misplaced. Instead, I will argue that Fichte's idealism, although perhaps ultimately unsuccessful, nevertheless should be of great interest precisely because it stands as an important attempt to provide an answer to a question—the nature of 'givenness'—that remains central to epistemology. 2The paper is divided into five parts. The first presents the historical evidence for Maimon's influence on Fichte. Part 2 offers a discussion of what I call 'Maimon's challenge' to the Kantian notion of 'discursive' cognition, as well as the ways in which this served as a goad to the development of the Wissenschaftslehre. In Part 3 I turn to a close reading of §1 of the Grundlage of 1794, where I try to show how a recognition of Maimon's challenge can help make sense of the foundations of the Wissenschaftslehre's project, and in particular the 'category of reality,' an otherwise highly obscure step in Fichte's argument. Part 4 offers a short discussion of the ways in which a Maimonian-minded account of §1 contributes to the understanding of the Grundlage as a whole. Finally, I conclude in Part 5 with some brief remarks about the broader philosophical implications of Fichte's response to Maimon's challenge: Fichte, I will argue, offers the first (but not the last) attempt at answering a type of Maimonian skepticism that remains viable even today. [End Page 102] 1. The Skeptical Goad Salomon Maimon, perhaps more than any other figure in German philosophy, embodied the Enlightenment notion of a Selbstdenker. He was born in Lithuania in 1753, to a rural Jewish family. 3 After marrying at eleven and becoming a father at fourteen, in his early twenties he fled from his family, after which he wandered the German countryside, until he was finally was able to establish himself in Berlin in 1779. Here he was taken in by Moses... (shrink)

An essay on non-discursive forms of knowledge that inhabit art photography. A version of this essay appeared in Gavin Keeney, "Else-where": Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011 (CSP, 2011), pp. 209-26.

This article draws on the qualitative research component of a mixed-methods project exploring the Australian news media’s representation of violence against women. This critical discourse analysis is on print and online news reporting of the case of ‘Kings Cross Nightclub Rapist Luke Lazarus’, who in March 2015 was tried and convicted of raping a female club-goer in a laneway behind his father’s nightclub in Sydney, Australia. We explore the journalism discursive practices employed in the production of the news (...) reports about the Lazarus trial. Our analysis shows how some lexical features, quoting strategies and structuring elements serve to minimise the victim’s experience while emphasising the adverse effects of the trial on the accused. Furthermore, we demonstrate how such practices allow for the graphic representation of the attack in a salacious manner while minimising the impact of the crime on the victim by selectively referencing her victim impact statement. We found some differences between print and online news stories about this case, some of which may be attributable to the greater space available to the telling of news stories online. We conclude that in news reporting of the Lazarus case, routine journalism discursive practices, such as the inverted pyramid news-writing structure and decisions about who and what to quote, serve simultaneously to diminish the victim’s experience while objectifying her. These results build on international findings about media reporting practices in relation to violence against women and add substantially to what we know about these practices in Australia. (shrink)

The discussion follows the logic of Western modern metaphysics (mathematical) and ontology (atomistic materialism) in order to demonstrate how scientific discourses assumed a power to construct the environment. A discourse of any discipline is constructed on the basis of its value to be applied on the material, homogeneous environment, to yield desired technical products, including genetic, chemical, electronic, physiological, etc. Thus, each discourse contains the ‘power’ to remake the environment in accordance with its rules. The result is the following: environment (...) is a discursive construct. Such constructivism is accepted by post-modern writers who claim that all discourses are a power which determines how we understand and treat the environment. (shrink)

Much has been written on Michel Foucault's reluctance to clearly delineate a research method, particularly with respect to genealogy (Harwood, 2000; Meadmore, Hatcher & McWilliam, 2000; Tamboukou, 1999). Foucault (1994, p. 288) himself disliked prescription stating, ‘I take care not to dictate how things should be’ and wrote provocatively to disrupt equilibrium and certainty, so that ‘all those who speak for others or to others’ no longer know what to do. It is doubtful, however, that Foucault ever intended for researchers (...) to be stricken by that malaise to the point of being unwilling to make an intellectual commitment to methodological possibilities. Taking criticism of ‘Foucauldian’ discourse analysis as a convenient point of departure to discuss the objectives of poststructural analyses of language, this paper develops what might be called a discursive analytic; a methodological plan to approach the analysis of discourses through the location of statements that function with constitutive effects. (shrink)

Drawing from literature in the social studies of science, this paper historicizes two pivotal concepts in science literacy: the definition of life and the assumption of objectivity. In this paper we suggest that an understanding of the historical, discursive production of scientific knowledge affects the meaning of scientific literacy in at least three ways. First, a discursive study of scientific knowledge has the epistemological consequence of avoiding the selective perception that occurs when facts are abstracted from the (...) historical conditions of their emergence. Second, a discursive approach to scientific knowledge can also be an example of science‐as‐exploration. Third, literacy and discourse studies contribute insights that alter assumptions about pedagogical appropriateness in science education. The paper concludes by suggesting that when science literacy includes the historical production of scientific knowledge, it can thereby extend the possibilities for what can be thought, studied and imagined in the name of science education. (shrink)

Drawing from literature in the social studies of science, this paper historicizes two pivotal concepts in science literacy: the definition of life and the assumption of objectivity. In this paper we suggest that an understanding of the historical, discursive production of scientific knowledge affects the meaning of scientific literacy in at least three ways. First, a discursive study of scientific knowledge has the epistemological consequence of avoiding the selective perception that occurs when facts are abstracted from the (...) historical conditions of their emergence. Second, a discursive approach to scientific knowledge can also be an example of science‐as‐exploration. Third, literacy and discourse studies contribute insights that alter assumptions about pedagogical appropriateness in science education. The paper concludes by suggesting that when science literacy includes the historical production of scientific knowledge, it can thereby extend the possibilities for what can be thought, studied and imagined in the name of science education. (shrink)

In recognition of the central place that the concept of tragedy holds in the historical understanding of culture and society, this paper features an analysis of its presence, current state, and value in the digital environments of the postmodern era, with special attention to videogames. Thus, the overcoming of a classic model of tragedy in the cybertextual condition is first determined, along with the discursive dimension underlying said overcoming. To this end a theoretical statement to the issue of tragedy (...) is proposed, from the perspective of the cybertext as procedural rhetoric. This will establish the formulation of a semiotic analytical model that problematizes Greimas’ actantial system under the light of the digital and interactive reality of videogames. To avoid this constraint, we propose to attach a new variable to the base of the generative trajectory: the “configurative synthesis,” product of the so-called “gaming/playing function.” This addition will integrate the figures of the game and the player in the dynamic distinction of the “quasi-Actant.” Finally, a sample of 79 cases will be observed in regards to the implications of the cybertextual notion of tragedy to the narrative and discourse of videogames. (shrink)

Kant's account of the way in which our faculty of discursive understanding acts on what is given in our sensible intuition to produce experience lies at the heart of his critical philosophy. The present study is devoted to explicating this account. Kant distinguishes the operation of discursive understanding in sensible intuition, its operation in the guise of the productive imagination, from its operation in forming clear concepts of the objects of the productive imagination. The former brings about the (...) relations of the contents of sensible intuition in space and time by representing these relations. The latter produces clear concepts in a process of comparison, abstraction, and reflection. ;In elaborating this account, I proceed first by examining Kant's contrast between intuition and concept, in order to clarify the contrast between cognition in intuition and cognition through clear concepts. I then examine Kant's reception and development of the Leibnizian account of the clarity and obscurity of representations. This examination in turn prepares the way for my reading of Kant's account of concept formation as an analytic process by which we produce the logical form of our concepts. All this serves to sharpen our understanding, not only of the relation between the two levels at which discursive understanding operates in bringing about experience, but also of Kant's central notions of consciousness and the form of cognition. Finally, I turn to examining Kant's account of the origin of the categories. I show that, on this account, the real sensible content of the categories--form of our cognition of objects--is represented obscurely in the synthesis of the productive imagination, and is brought to clarity in a process analogous to that whereby we acquire all our concepts by giving them their logical form. (shrink)

Due to the complexity of aesthetic ideas and the lack of a determinate concept that is adequate to the experience, we search for the words to describe our encounters with art. Sometimes, that search is in vain, and we have difficulty expressing ourselves. In such cases, we are so taken aback by the sheer amount of cognitive activity spurred by our aesthetic experience that we are silenced by art. Instead of viewing what happens in judgments of taste as “discursively mute,” (...) as does Joseph Cannon in his essay, “The Intentionality of Judgments of Taste in Kant’s Critique of Judgment,” I will show how the excess of aesthetic experience has the potential to foster sociability, communication, and ultimately, community. .. (shrink)

Despite the acknowledged importance of strategic planning in business and other organizations, there are few studies focusing on strategy texts and the related processes of their production and consumption. In this article, we attempt to partially fill this research gap by examining the institutionalized aspects of strategy discourse: what strategy is as genre. Combining textual analysis and analysis of conversation, the article focuses on the official strategy of the City of Lahti in Finland. Our analysis shows how specific communicative (...) purposes and lexico-grammatical features characterize the genre of strategy and how the actual negotiations over strategy text involve particular kinds of intersubjectivity and intertextuality. (shrink)

Increasing pharmaceutical industry presence in health care research and practice has evoked critical social, political, economic, and ethical questions and concern among health care providers, ethicists, economists, and the general citizenry. The case example presented of the ‘marketization’ of nursing practice not only reveals the magnitude of the purview of the pharmaceutical industry, it demonstrates how that industry imparts effect upon the organization of nursing work, an area of health care professional practice where the ethical polemic of pharmaceutical industry involvement (...) and influence has been largely ignored, and the profession of nursing conspicuously silent. Drawing on a Foucauldian dispositive analysis that troubled the complex apparatus responsible for the production of knowledge and action in the neurology subspecialty of multiple sclerosis (MS), the case discloses how the pharmaceutical industry has created compliance and adherence as clinical imperatives in the practice of MS nursing. The case makes explicit the conscious transformative self‐action undertaken by MS nurses as a result of their subjectivation (marketization) and demonstrates how MS nurses have become pawns in pharmaceutical industry strategic games of power, truth, identity, and wealth creation by turning their clinical practice settings into heterodiscursive spaces of surveillance and persuasion. MS nurses have become instruments of the pharmaceutical industry, and their clinical practices ordered, organized, limited, constrained, and marketized as a result. (shrink)

This volume focuses on the role language plays at all levels of the argumentation process. It explores the effects that specific linguistic choices may have in the production and the reception of arguments and in doing so, it moves beyond the first, necessary, descriptive stance provided by current literature on the topic. Each chapter provides an original take illuminating one or more of the following three issues: the range of linguistic resources language users draw on as they argue; how (...) cognitive processes of meaning construction may influence argumentative practices; and which discursive devices can be used to fulfil a number of argumentative goals. The volume includes theoretical and empirical or applied stances, providing the reader both with state-of-the-art reflections on the relationship between argumentation and language, and with concrete examples of how this relationship plays out in naturally occurring argumentative practices, such as classroom interaction, and political, parliamentary or journalistic discourse. This is a very original, timely and welcome contribution to the study of argumentation conducted with the tools of the language sciences. The collection of papers relevantly tackles key linguistic, discursive and cognitive aspects of argumentative practices whose treatment is underrepresented in mainstream argumentation studies by offering new and exciting linguistically-grounded theoretical accounts. As such, the volume testifies both to the vigour of the linguistic current within the discipline and to the high standards of scholarly commitment and quality that the younger generation is pushing forward. Without question, this book marks an important milestone in the relationships between linguistics and argumentation theory. Christian Plantin, Professor Emeritus. (shrink)

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME)/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is a highly contested illness. This paper analyzes the discursive production of knowledge about, and recognition of ME/CFS. By mobilizing insights from social epistemology and epistemic injustice studies, this paper reveals how actors, through their social-discursive practices, attribute to establishing, sustaining, and disregarding their own and others’ epistemological position. In focusing on the case of the Dutch newspaper reporting about ME/CFS, this paper shows that the debate about this condition predominantly revolves (...) around the ways in which people who make truth claims are represented. In being portrayed as gendered, affectatious, formerly very able, fanatical, or benevolent, people with ME/CFS are constructed as non-/credible. In the debate about what causes ME/CFS, by contrast, the production of non-/credible knowledge focuses more on the content of epistemic positions. Actors in this debate argue that they know the (clear) causes for the illness, something which functions as a discursive strategy to establish and enhance their credibility. This paper contends, however, that since this discursive demarcation of causes is consistently infused with uncertainty – with multi-interpretability, with diffuse explanations, and absence of current knowledge – the credibility of these actors’ epistemic position is undercut rather than established. (shrink)

This article utilises the concept of ‘race trouble’ as an overarching framework for examining an interview between Ms Vanessa Nakate and a South African news broadcaster. The interview describes an incident involving Ms Nakate’s attendance at a global climate change conference and her exclusion from a media report about a press briefing that she held along with four other youth activists at the conference. The analysis focuses on the collaborative and interactional production of Ms Nakate’s claim that her exclusion (...) was racially motivated and the discursive mechanisms by which race is mobilised as a common-sense explanation for the incident that occurred. My analysis demonstrates the sanctionability of producing an accusation of racism and identifies the rhetorical functions of stake and facticity in its production, and concludes with a discussion of the relevance of these findings in the context of studies on race and racism in interaction. (shrink)

This study is based on the argument that globalism is a product of nationalism. I argue that globalism, understood as the imagination of the world as a single place, was made possible by and accompanies the emergence of nationalism, defined as the formation of an imagined community in a given discursive space. Focusing on the specific ways in which globalism is understood and experienced locally in Turkey, this study examines how the world-at-large is seen from Turkey as part and (...) product of the founding national ideology during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly as expressed in cartoons, and how these visions and images of the globe are produced, mobilized and disseminated locally as part of ongoing nation-building efforts. I argue that during these years the global was invariably imagined as the West, referring mainly to Western Europe, and this imagining was mobilized toward the creation and projection of Turkey as a modern, Western, secular country. I argue that the founding national ideology projected an image of the West as the global-other to be taken as a model and imitated, setting norms for the creation of a new national identity and new norms of citizenship around the principles of secularism, modernity and civilization, which could only be attained by the erasure of the local. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore some of the ways in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) is mediated discursively. I assume that AI is informed by an “ancestral dream” to reproduce nature by artificial means. This dream drives the production of “cyborg discourse”, which hinges on the belief that human nature (especially intelligence) can be reduced to symbol manipulation and hence replicated in a machine. Cyborg discourse, I suggest, produces AI systems by rhetorical means; it does not merely describe AI systems (...) or reflect a set of prevailing attitudes about technology. To support this argument, I analyse a set of research articles about an “embodied conversational agent” called the Real Estate Agent (REA). The articles about REA mobilise a set of rhetorical strategies that systematically downplay the system’s artificiality and bolster its humanlike qualities. Within the context of the dream of AI to produce humanlike machines, and given our strong bias for human-human interaction, the designers’ claim to REA’s humanness in their research articles, as I argue in the final section of this paper, needs little justification. (shrink)

Recent events have put the acceptability of the risks of nuclear energy production technologies under the spotlight. A focus on risks, however, could lead to the neglect of other aspects of NEPT, such as their irreversibility. I argue that awareness of the socio-historical development of NEPT is helpful for understanding their irreversibility. To this end, I conceptualize NEPT development as a process of structuration in which material, institutional and discursive elements are produced and/or reproduced by purposive social actors. (...) This conceptualization is used to structure an analysis of how irreversibility arose in the first decades of NEPT development in India, France and the USA, and how some NEPT have been reversed or partially reversed. Lastly, two general conditions for reversible NEPT are formulated based on this analysis. (shrink)

Global ignorance about Africa continues to sustain inappropriate global interventions to resolve public health crises, often with disastrous consequences. To explain why this continues to happen, I marshal two theorems that predict basic statistical properties, called ‘the doctrinal paradox’ and ‘the discursive dilemma’, which underlie scientific consensus formation and evidence-based decision making on a global scale. These mathematical results illuminate the epistemic and material injustices committed by the protocols of medical research conducted at the highest level of global knowledge (...) production in the service of international humanitarian aid for Africans. These social choice theorems reveal that a global scientific consensus projecting claims and proposing policies about Africa’s disease burden is likely to yield a low degree of reliability, in that the probability of its accuracy is less than chance. The solution to this anomaly is to remove from the global scientific agenda the statistically unrealisable demand of satisfying too many multinational corporate and foreign governments’ priorities as equally entitled to benefit from the knowledge produced to improve Africa’s public health sector. Instead, foreign funding targeted to support medical science and policy in Africa should be directed by those specialists in situ who are most familiar with their own national health challenges and potential solutions, rather than relying upon foreign decision makers to interpret Africa’s emergency public health care needs. Keywords Doctrinal paradox, discursive dilemma, scientific consensus, epistemic trust, global health ethics, group agency. (shrink)

This essay addresses the increasing prominence of ‘performance’ as an analytical frame in recent studies of science. Building on the insights of existing feminist criticism, it identifies two largely unacknowledged features of such performance-oriented studies: first, an implicit recuperation of a pre-discursively real body; and second, a persistent emphasis on the productive character of performances. The essay considers the limitations of these two themes, and concludes by exploring pathways suggested by other theoretical traditions.

This volume focuses on the role language plays at all levels of the argumentation process. It explores the effects that specific linguistic choices may have in the production and the reception of arguments and in doing so, it moves beyond the first, necessary, descriptive stance provided by current literature on the topic. Each chapter provides an original take illuminating one or more of the following three issues: the range of linguistic resources language users draw on as they argue; how (...) cognitive processes of meaning construction may influence argumentative practices; and which discursive devices can be used to fulfil a number of argumentative goals. The volume includes theoretical and empirical or applied stances, providing the reader both with state-of-the-art reflections on the relationship between argumentation and language, and with concrete examples of how this relationship plays out in naturally occurring argumentative practices, such as classroom interaction, and political, parliamentary or journalistic discourse. This is a very original, timely and welcome contribution to the study of argumentation conducted with the tools of the language sciences. The collection of papers relevantly tackles key linguistic, discursive and cognitive aspects of argumentative practices whose treatment is underrepresented in mainstream argumentation studies by offering new and exciting linguistically-grounded theoretical accounts. As such, the volume testifies both to the vigour of the linguistic current within the discipline and to the high standards of scholarly commitment and quality that the younger generation is pushing forward. Without question, this book marks an important milestone in the relationships between linguistics and argumentation theory. Christian Plantin, Professor Emeritus. (shrink)

This paper examines the contextual constraints and requirements of discursive action in question-answer-sequences based discourse genres (interviews, Prime Minister’s Questions, People’s Prime Minister’s Questions) in mediated political discourse. It considers the multilayeredness of participation and pluralism of discursive action on the one hand, and the delimiting frame of the dialogic discourse genres on the other. It shows that both have a decisive impact on the participants’ meaning-making processes in context: the inherently unbounded participation framework contributes to pluralism of (...) discursive action, while genre- and media constraints narrow down the scope of production and interpretation. This does not only hold for the stage at which a discursive action occurs in the discourse, but also for its degree of explicitness with regard to presuppositions and felicity conditions. (shrink)

According to recent literature in the sociology of expectations, expectations about the future are “performative” in that they provide guidance for activities, attract attention, mobilize political and economic resources, coordinate between groups, link technical and social concerns, create visions, and enroll supporters. While this framework has blossomed over the past decade in science and technology studies, it has yet to be applied towards a more refined understanding of how the future of the modern agrofood system is being actively contested and (...) understood. I seek to redress this gap by using the sociology of expectations to explain the discursive topography surrounding in vitro meat, a nascent agrofood technology whereby processed meat products are developed from stem cells as opposed to live animals. In discussing the obstacles and challenges which confront the proponents of this technology, I utilize three key concepts from the sociology of expectations: (1) hype, (2) retrospective prospects, and (3) the role of myth, metaphor, and ideology. I find that despite sluggish results and financial setbacks, the controversial legacy of previous agrofood technologies, and persistent cultural skepticism, the core ideological justifications for in vitro meat have proven to be resilient in buoying the technology through rough discursive waters. (shrink)

In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco essentially presents an educative vision of some basic semiotic principles that infuse the textual form of a popular fictional genre—the detective story. In effect, it characterizes the postmodernization of the traditional “whodunnit” moving the genre from the realm of “the real” or the plausible into the realm of “the metaphysical” or the unthinkable. The Name of the Rose is a practical application in semiotics. Or, how the aesthetics of textual production as (...) generated through the lexical signs and codes manifest the discursive text of a novel work. The semiotic twists and turns of the detective story facilitate this educational function and the purposeful transformation of the reader into an individual capable of appreciating and grasping the conflicting ideological viewpoints expressed through its dialogical structure. The detective genre enables the Umberto Eco to produce an educational narrative via the intricacies of plot in the detective story while teaching main aspects of semiotic theory. (shrink)

We examine 575 randomly selected articles on Zimbabwean immigrants from the South African Media database to expose discourses of exclusion and the production of the psycho-social condition – moral panic. We use critical discourse analysis, notions of remediation and immediacy to scrutinize discourse structures and other discursive strategies designed to conceal mediation and authorial prejudices, and to make the reader ‘experience’ the actual content. In addition to making the anti-immigrant rhetoric appear legitimate, and the danger immediate and real, (...) we argue that the apparent seamless content is often biased by selection and structured in such a way as to deny voice to immigrants and their advocates. Among other things, we conclude that since the readers’ interpretations are filtered through lenses of subjectivities defined by communicative contexts characterized by job scarcity, poverty, crime and wanting healthcare, the news content heightens anxiety and miseducates more than it enlightens readers on migration issues. Hence there is a danger of SAM becoming unwitting conveyors of the same vices they preach against. (shrink)

The enigmatic relation between religion and science still presents a challenge to European societies and to ideas about what it means to be modern. This book argues that secularism, rather than pushing back religious truth claims, in fact has been religiously productive itself. A historical analysis demonstrates that religious discourses have been reconfigured in the secular sciences, thus prolonging the relevance of religion in new constellations.".

Despite increasing interest in shared intentionality in both philosophy and the sciences over the last three decades, there has been little comparison of philosophical with empirical accounts of the phenomenon. At the same time, both philosophical and scientific investigations into shared intentionality as a ground of our cognition have developed into widespread research programs during this period. This has laid the groundwork for a productive conversation, across the sciences and humanities, about the nature of human cognition qua discursive or (...) rational. In this essay, I map some of the conceptual terrain such a conversation would cover, and I consider some of the extant efforts to build explanatory bridges across research and conversational contexts—using the resources of one domain of understanding to help structure our understanding of another—to the benefit of both philosophical and scientific approaches to the study of human cognition. (shrink)

Between Multiculturalism and Nationalism - A Discursive Construction of Britishness in the Spectator in the Wake of the London Bombings In his interdisciplinary work Ideology, Teun A. van Dijk proposes to study ideology as a cognitive, social and linguistic enterprise. Such an integrative approach is assumed to model interfaces between social structure and cognition through discourse. The notion of ideology it presupposes may be described as shared social representations, which become a group's defining attributes, and govern its ideological expression (...) in discourse. It seems that this approach can be productively applied to a study of ideological relations in the discourses of multicultural societies, such as Britain.In the wake of the London bombings in July 2005, the British rightwing quality weekly the Spectator published a series of articles raising alarming questions about the misguided ideological priorities of modern Britain, and envisioning a deepening crisis of national identity. According to the magazine, the heritage and values of mainstream British society are being endangered by the political promotion of multiculturalism. This in turn has instigated terrorist threats from Islamic extremists, who have been nurtured by the British welfare state and emboldened by its permissive policies. Thus the increasing ideological split between the militancy of the non-integrated Muslim minority in Britain and the decadence of national culture has become the subject of a number of articles. As a result, one of the pervasive discursive mechanisms emerging in the publication has been an ideological confrontation between "us" and "them"The aim of the present study is to survey the pragmatic and rhetorical devices used to construct the image of British society tied in a discursive struggle to define its modern identity-oscillating between the ideals of multiculturalism and the ideology of nationalism. The material for the study is taken from over fifteen articles that come from three subsequent issues of the Spectator published on 16, 23, and 30 July 2005. The methodological framework of the study draws on the research procedures of Critical Discourse Analysis accommodated to the analysis of ideological discourse in the press. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Among Eduardo Coutinho’s vast production, the documentary Jogo de cena stands out and is celebrated as being the centerpiece of the filmmaker's filmography, in which the interviews occupy a central place. The purpose of this article is to reflect upon these interviews, discursively, based on: speech scenes put in perspective and in relation to the aesthetic choices and materiality of the documentary; nature of the interviewer-interviewee relationship, marked by the refusal of an “alleged neutrality” and the production (...) of settings, scenographies, and ethical worlds. For this, we articulated basic concepts of Discourse Analysis, as theorized by Dominique Maingueneau, such as interdiscourse, scenography, setting and discursive ethos. The results demonstrate that it is possible to establish a dialogue between Coutinho’s methodological apparatus and concepts of Discourse Analysis. From a mystical aura of his welcoming silence, the interviewer’s respectful and considerate ethos in relation to the characters' speeches can be inferred. RESUMO Entre a vasta produção de Eduardo Coutinho, destaca-se o documentário Jogo de cena, celebrado como “objeto solar” da filmografia do cineasta, no qual a entrevista ocupa um lugar central. O objetivo deste artigo é refletir discursivamente sobre ela a partir de cenas de fala postas a circular em relação às escolhas estéticas e à materialidade do documentário; natureza da relação entrevistador-entrevistadas, marcada pela recusa a uma “suposta neutralidade” e produção de agenciamentos, cenografias e mundo ético. Para isso, são acionados conceitos basilares da Análise do Discurso, como interdiscurso, cenografia, agenciamento e ethos discursivo, conforme formulados por Dominique Maingueneau. Os resultados mostram que é possível estabelecer diálogos profícuos com os dispositivos metodológicos de Coutinho e conceitos da Análise do Discurso. A partir de uma aura mística do seu silêncio acolhedor, pode-se depreender um ethos respeitoso e atencioso do entrevistador em relação às falas das personagens. (shrink)

Drawing on the scholarship of Critical Religion, this article shows how the modern category “religion” operates through a gender code which upholds its discursive power and enables the production of religious—and therefore racial—hierarchies. Specifically, it argues that mentioning religion automatically makes gender present in discourse. Acknowledging religion as an inherently gendered category in this way gives further insight into the discursive power and functioning of the religious label. With the example of the Westphalian production of the (...) “myth of religious violence” and the employment of “religion” in colonial contexts, I demonstrate how a gender code upholds and enables the discursive power of religion. Religion is both gendered and gendering. Acknowledging the multiple ways in which religion is gendered and gendering, then, has important bearings on the analysis of religion’s racializing function which is upheld and aided by the gender code through which religion is spoken. (shrink)

The main goal of critical social justice is to ensure the agency of citizens, which enables them to take part, not only in public discussions about how resources are distributed, but also about matters such as what should be produced, how to do it and through what kind of production, among others. Critical social justice can be best formulated within the foundation programme of discursive ethics, in particular within Apel's version specified in his principle of co-responsibility. This principle (...) establishes a telos that operates as a normative guide to formulate the constructive question about which the necessary conditions are for someone to be able to become a subject of dialogue. Answering this question leads, on the one hand, to the development of some constitutive elements of critical social justice and, on the other hand, to the identification of the social relations and structures that undermine the possibilities of a person to effectively participate in the discussion of the topics they consider relevant. As its constitutive elements, I propose reciprocal recognition autonomy, the metric of capabilities and a sufficientarian principle of justice, which work together with the well-known difference principle. These elements constitute a normative net that allows contemporary societies to be criticized from the perspective of justice. (shrink)

This study combines quantitative content and qualitative production analysis of two television news programs in Flanders to investigate the impact of a Charter of Diversity on the portrayal of ethnic minorities. Findings of interviews with news production and ethnic minority experts show the ineffectiveness of a Diversity Charter not implemented at the heart of the newsroom. It seems unable to have an impact on journalists' media literacy and social capital, on the discursive structure of the news or (...) characteristics of the production process itself – all more decisive factors in minority reporting. These findings are confirmed by the results of content analysis showing no gradual improvement of ethnic minority portrayal in a newscast produced under a Diversity Charter compared to news produced under no such Charter – both showing little changes in ethnic minority reporting. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se analiza la forma en que las elites del régimen cívico-militar, en Declaración de Principios del Gobierno de Chile, generaron un dispositivo de poder discursivo para la producción e instrumentalización de miedo y angustia, en función de sus elementos trascendentes. Por medio del análisis historiográfico y crítico del discurso, y de teorías sobre el miedo y la angustia y sociología de las religiones, se vinculan sus componentes textuales con el contexto de poder en que se produjeron, (...) incluyendo las ideologías, percepciones teológicas y míticas existentes, para establecer cómo se activa discursivamente la “concepción cristiana” y el “nacionalismo” para determinar sociopolíticamente los ritmos del miedo y angustia. This article analyses how the civic-military regime’s elite, in the Declaration of Declaration of the Government of Chile, generated a mechanism of discursive power to create and instill fear and anguish. Through an analysis of historical writings and a critical analysis of discourse and theories of fear and anguish and the sociology of religions, we link quotes with the context of power of that historical moment, including the ideologies and existing theological perceptions, to establish how discourse activates “christian ideology” and “nationalism” to bring about, sociopolitically, fear and anguish. (shrink)

The large-scale and intensive collection and analysis of digital data (commonly called “Big Data”) has become a common, popular, and consensual research method for the social sciences, as the automation of data collection, mathematization of analysis, and digital objectification reinforce both its efficiency and truth-value. This article opens with a critical review of the literature on data collection and analysis, and summarizes current ethical discussions focusing on these technologies. A semiotic model of data production and circulation is then introduced (...) to problematize the view that digital data has ceased to stand for a formalization method (a possible kind of representation among others), and effectively “becomes the world itself” (a direct presentation of the world outperforming all other modes of representation). Following Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics and pragmaticist philosophy, we characterize digitalization as a hypersymbolic semiotic process, and we highlight the naturalization of meaning, the illusion of iconicity, and rhetorical efficiency on which data’s truth value relies within the context of its large-scale, profit-driven, and results-oriented research uses. This outlines some epistemological and ethical implications of data’s visualization, use, and authority, and indicates avenues for critical semiotics of contemporary data science and analysis. (shrink)

Cet article synthétise les acquis et développements issus de projets de recherche menés depuis 2013 à propos de l’analyse d’un type particulier de données CMC (Computer-mediated communication) : les tweets politiques. Après une caractérisation de ce genre de discours, et des problématiques soulevées, l’article développe les enjeux de l’exploration des corpus de ce genre ; l’appréhension et la constitution de ces données sociales en corpus ; la production de résultats scientifiques, et la mise en place de différents types d’exploration (...) de corpus. Les méthodes de constitution de corpus, la standardisation et la mise au format TEI, l’utilisation d’outils d’analyse des données textuelles, et le développement de plateformes, sont ainsi présentés, comme différents points d’une même recherche qui vise à caractériser et comprendre une pratique sociale avec une méthode scientifique et une portée citoyenne. L’exploration de corpus peut ainsi passer par des nouvelles productions de ressources, outils, interfaces, dont l’interactivité, l’hypertextualité, et l’ouverture, garantissent la validité des corpus, et la possibilité d’y accéder de manière contextuelle, et outillée. (shrink)