Resumen La globalización genera espacios multilingües de interacción donde existen conflictos en la interpretación de prácticas discursivas aceptables a nivel local, provocando una re-escalarización de lo local, nacional, regional y global. Este trabajo explora cómo en el fútbol internacional – en que interactúan jugadores, fanáticos y medios deportivos internacionales – se disputan estas prácticas discursivas y su significado. En un corpus de artículos periodísticos investigamos dos incidentes en los que enunciados en español fueron interpretados por hablantes de otras lenguas ­como (...) actos discriminatorios. Usando herramientas de análisis del discurso mostramos cómo se construyen comunidades axiológicas y posicionamientos ideológicos que legitiman marcos interpretativos regionales, relegando a un segundo plano la discusión sobre las prácticas discursivas discriminatorias a nivel local. Esta pugna por el derecho a la interpretación produce reflexiones metapragmáticas sobre la inestabilidad del significado a través de las diferentes escalas. Mostramos cómo lo que en una escala resulta inocuo, en otra es un índice de significados ideológicamente cargados que define a un individuo o grupo como racista u homofóbico. (shrink)

The activities of Fulani nomads in Ghana have gained considerable media attention and engendered continuing public debate. In this paper, we analyze the prejudiced portrayals of the nomads in the Ghanaian news media, and how these contribute to an exclusionist and a discriminatory discourse that puts the nomads at the margins of Ghanaian society. The study employs a critical discourse analysis framework and draws on a dataset of 160 articles, including news stories, editorials and op-ed pieces. The (...) analysis reveals that the nomads are discursively constructed as undesirables through an othering process that centers on three discourses: a discourse of dangerousness/criminalization, a discourse of alienization, and a discourse of stigmatization. This anti-nomad/fulani rhetoric is evident in the choice of sensational headlines, alarmist news content, organization of arguments, and use of quotations. The paper concludes with a call for more balanced and critical news reporting on the nomads, especially since issues surrounding them border on national cohesion and security. (shrink)

This article examines resistance discourses created and disseminated by a religious minority in Indonesia called Gerakan Ahmadiyah Indonesia (GAI) to counter any negative portrayals and religious-based discriminations. Ahmadiyah is a self-defined sect of Islam that has been the target of physical attacks and discursive discrimination in Indonesia. This analysis focuses on identifying discourse topics raised and strategies employed by one of the Ahmadiyya groups in the country called GAI to reveal their resistance and defend their ‘Islamic’ faith. Various texts (...) produced in different genres namely statements and comments published in media, books, speeches and various articles published online in GAI’s official websites are used as the data which were collected during field research in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The analysis found that, in order to counter discriminatory discourses, the GAI Ahmadis present various resistance discourse themes such as distinguishing themselves from Jemaat Ahmadiyah Indonesia, justifying their Islamic understanding by highlighting religious freedom discourse, including themselves as Muslims and presenting themselves as peaceful movement. (shrink)

This article shows how Arab students at an Arab college in Israel, majoring in teaching of mathematics, English, and science, rely on metaphor as an important rhetorical tool for the advancement of their ideological positions and for criticism of the policies of the Israeli government, which discriminates against and disenfranchises Arab Israelis. The underlying hypothesis of the article is that the way Arab students in Israel use metaphor in their writing has unique rhetorical aspects that help to sharpen their message (...) in pursuit of the broader goal of emphasizing Arab Israelis’ suffering and changing for the better the Israeli government’s discriminatory patterns of action against them. (shrink)

Critical discursive analyses offer possibilities for equity‐oriented research, and are a resource for addressing resistant social problems, such as child neglect and abuse (CN&A). A key challenge for discourse analysts in health disciplines is the tensions between materiality and social constructions, particularly at the site of the body. This paper describes how Donna Haraway's ideas of figuration and technobiopower can augment critical discourse analysis to address this tension. Technobiopower, an intensification of biopower in the context of technoscience, is (...) seen as underpinning the melding of material and semiotic practices. The subject is no longer a material body, but a hybrid body that exists in tropic figuration between the real and unreal. This paper uses an analysis of the figuration of The Monstrous Perpetrator from a study of nursing responses to CN&A to illustrate how Haraway's figuration aligns with and provides an analytical tool to extend critical discursive analyses. Specifically, this methodology offers new ways to identify the discursive qualities of bodies, and how material aspects of bodies are exaggerated, concealing their hegemonic ideologies and discriminatory effects. By identifying discourses within or inscribed upon the body, they can be disrupted, opening new possibilities for social change. (shrink)

In the midst of the global financial crisis and in the ‘anti-race era’, Europe has witnessed a revival of deeply racialized discourses targeting the Roma, leading to new discriminatory practices and legitimating existing ones in many social domains. While westward Roma immigration has spurred these discourses, it has also favored the emergence of invisible grassroots reactions against them that need to be further analyzed. Drawing on interviews with migrant Romani women, this article aims to shed light on these unknown (...) processes, as experienced by women in Romani women-based solidarity networks. Data show that these networks help the women to access basic social facilities, while also challenging the abovementioned racialized discourses. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Lauren Kapalka Richerme, "The Diversity Bargain and the Discourse Dance of Equitable and Best," Philosophy of Music Education Review 27, no. 2 (Fall, 2019)Nasim NiknafsI was asked to write a response to Lauren Richerme's convincing research on why and how one should distinguish between "equitable educational practices"1 and what she calls following Ellen Berry the "diversity bargain" where equity as the second-best option has always taken (...) a hit from the more dashing diversity. If I may metaphorically put this conversation into a romantic comedy, equity is always the wingperson of color to diversity as the main protagonist; by the end of the show it is the main protagonist who survives the hardship and reaches salvation, be it a long-lost love, an oasis of sorts, or making it to the finish line. The rest of the cast have the function of complementing and highlighting the main actor but never substituting for it; or they are as Homi Bhabha would say, "almost the same but not quite."2 For the sake of filling in the blank of let's-add-more-color-into-it, the genuine conversation over the nuances of equitable practices gets undermined and diffused of its poignancy. And this is what Richerme is arguing against: let us not forget that a more significant challenge than a mere technicolor presence is at play. In that, my response to Richerme's essay would [End Page 215] not be so much of a response but a grand nod, a body gesture, an embedded signal of approval between two human beings born and raised in two different parts of planet earth who after years of diverse and perhaps un-equitable educational access ended up in the same room at the same time. Thus, my nod to Richerme also originated from personal experiences and intimate familiarities with unequitable educational access. Yes, people of color can be assets to their institutions and their corresponding fields who add to the diversity of knowledge creation practices, but it is not people of color's project or responsibility to act as the trophy to alleviate the unhappy conscience of educational malpractice or give a helping hand to the main protagonists for whom the scenario has already been written. Undoubtedly, they can take on that role if they want to, but it is only contingent upon where their desires lie not where they should lie.I strongly agree with Richerme's claim that music classrooms and I would add any classroom and learning environment should be a place and space for "sharing stories and insights"3 to not only learn about the content material whatever it may be but to learn to empathize with one another, understand positive and negative human behaviors toward humans and their environment, and act against discriminatory practices, racial, ethnic, religious, and gender prejudices, and to the point of Richerme's essay, unequitable practices that are insistent in today's political climate on a global scale.At this very juncture I diverge not from Richerme's fine thesis and argumentation, but from the larger issue of the premise of her arguments grounded on Thomas Green's educational framework.4 Green argues that the "rank order of political arguments that can be mustered in support of the [educational] system … [is] roughly as follows": (1) the fundamental or compelling interests of the state; (2) the aggregate of individual or parental interests; (3) societal interests; and (4) educational goods for their own sake."5 Following Green's framework Richerme analyzes contemporary music education initiatives in relation to the differing political strengths of each group of stakeholders: the state, parents, society, and educational goods for their own sake.There is a sense of mistrust in the local and national government implied by Green's framework, reminding one of the cumulative mistrust of the elite by U.S. citizens. Years of neglect, condescension, and lack of attention to the real and tangible needs of people amalgamated into what today one sees as white nationalism, plutocracy, and protectionism across borders. Green wrote his book, Predicting the Behavior of the Educational System, in 1980; historically the world order was increasingly metamorphosing and establishing itself... (shrink)

This paper explores the gendered discourses of the – seemingly favourable – media coverage that certain Heads of State received for their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking at media reports published in different English-speaking outlets in the US, the UK, India, Bangladesh, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, and Ireland, and using multimodal feminist critical discourse analysis, we identify and describe strategies that on the surface appear to challenge hegemonic – and largely masculine – discourses of leadership. Upon closer scrutiny, (...) these superficially complimentary reports rather reinforce and naturalise discriminatory gender ideologies, and, as we demonstrate, they do so to different degrees along a continuum of essentialising, contextualising, and problematising. We critically discuss the discursive and visual processes involved and show that complimenting these leaders on their performance compares them against a masculine norm to construct their leadership as ‘alternative’, exceptional, and hence marked. This gendered portrayal of political leadership in times of crisis illustrates how the discursive construction of identities, responsibilities, and relationships during COVID-19 largely hinges on power relations and political ideologies that systematically disadvantage and undermine women. The purportedly positive form in which this occurs makes it particularly difficult to challenge and subvert these discriminatory discourses and their underlying gendered ideologies. (shrink)

This study delves into the manifestation and characteristics of hate speech in the Greek online public sphere, specifically exploring its most prominent forms, namely racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, nationalism, sexism, and homophobia/transphobia. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the research analyzes popular Greek online news media. It aims to uncover the visibility and operational patterns of hate speech, addressing key questions about its prevalence and presentation on these platforms. Findings reveal the normalization of discriminatory speech, particularly sexism and nationalism, in the (...) digital landscape. Moreover, distinct themes and linguistic elements associated with different forms of hate speech highlight the intertwined nature of these discriminatory expressions. This research sheds light on the pervasive nature of hate speech in Greece’s online realm, emphasizing its implications for democratic principles. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article considers how five single mothers, who used adoption or donor conception to bring children into their lives, negotiate a persistent and pervasive discourse of ‘problematic single motherhood’ in their interview talk. Tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz & Hall [2005]. Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614.), especially the overlapping strategies of distinction, authorisation and illegitimation, are shown to be particularly salient for these parents, as they work to legitimise their routes to motherhood (...) by distancing themselves from widely stigmatised positions such as young motherhood, working-class motherhood and unplanned motherhood. I argue that these single women’s intersubjective positioning serves to protect them against stigma and discrimination, but often relies on the reproduction of other polarising and discriminatory discourses, which feed into idealised constructions of mothers as responsible, middle-class, and appropriately aged citizens. Overall, the analysis suggests that it is difficult for these single mothers to challenge the multiple and intersecting discriminatory discourses, ideals and stereotypes that converge in exclusionary and limiting constructions of single motherhood, whilst maintaining a recognisably legitimate social position for themselves. (shrink)

The lifting of work restrictions for Romanian and Bulgarian citizens in the EU, in January 2014, encountered much resistance both in European political discourse and the media, as these migrants became demonised and presented as social and economic threats. In this article, we show how the Romanian press dealt with such discriminatory discourses against the Romanian migrants. We conduct a thorough Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of news items published in Romanian press, prior to the lifting of work (...) restrictions, and we argue that the Roma emerged as the perfect scapegoats that could explain the deviant and unruly behaviours ascribed by some western media to ‘Romanians’. We also show how racism toward the Roma, referred here as Romaphobia, invokes non-racial practices and instead builds on a reverse victimhood narrative. Such discourses relate in a broader sense to well-established discursive practices in Romanian context but also to the political climate across Europe which is marked by increased intolerance toward the Roma. It is the mixture of stereotypical discourses and populist rhetoric that makes racism towards the Roma appear naturalised and increasingly more difficult to challenge. (shrink)

Healthcare environments continue to prove discriminatory and marginalizing towards patients and healthcare workers themselves, which contributes to inequitable health outcomes across lines of socially constructed difference. This content and discourse analysis of nursing identity scholarship asks whether there is a connection between nursing identity and oppressive behaviour by examining the construction of nursing identity and the foundational discourses, sometimes in absentia, that support such a construction. Bourdieu's concepts of social fields and Audre Lorde's concept of the master's house (...) are applied as a framework towards understanding the constructs of power and status in healthcare. The analysis identifies a gap in nursing identity literature where social constructs of difference are not considered. In the reviewed literature, nursing identity has been co‐opted by the professionalization project in effort to stabilize a conceptualization of nursing's contribution to healthcare towards gaining professional and societal status. This leads to a monolithic, apolitical representation of nursing identity that erases difference, denies historical influence, universalizes nursing work and further marginalizes marginalized identities. The oppressive and hegemonic nature of a universal nursing identity may contribute to a lack of disciplinary reflexivity about the ongoing influences of foundational discursive constructs of gender, epistemology, power and professional status. (shrink)

This article analyses how the new type of worker is constructed in respect to gender in current management literature. It contributes to the increasing body of work in organisational theory and business ethics which interrogates management texts by analysing textual representations of gender. A discourse analysis of six texts reveals three inter-connected yet distinct ways in which gender is talked about. First, the awareness discourse attempts to be inclusive of gender yet reiterates stereotypes in its portrayal of women. (...) Second, within the individualisation discourse, formerly discriminatory elements of gender lose their importance but a gender dimension reappears within the idea of ‹Brand You’. Third, in the new ideal discourse, women are constructed as ideal workers of the future. The article argues that there is little space within this web of discourses for an awareness of the continued inequalities experienced by women in relation to men to be voiced and that this rhetorical aporia contributes to a ‹post-feminist’ climate. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the following conclusions. First, quotas are not normative goals in themselves but only a means to reach non-discriminatory selection procedures. Second, in a democracy quotas are most plausibly used as a means to fill offices in those bodies which have a major impact on how well interests or discourses are translated into policy. Third, quotas for the young can be justified since, due to demographic development, their discourses tend to be marginalized. Fourth, youth (...) quotas cannot be a means to ensure long-term policy-making, but they can enhance legitimacy of long-term impacts from policy decisions taken today. (shrink)

This essay addresses the relationships between prescription and description in legal rules. The analysis will focus on the culture-laden connotations of factual categories implied in all legal sentences and/or provisions. This investigation is spurred by the need to assess the impact of cultural difference in people’s understanding of legal imperatives and, symmetrically, how that impact is to be considered in the application of law. Differences in ways of categorizing the world could position the cultural pre-understanding required by law, and the (...) pluralism recognized and protected by constitutional principles and human/fundamental rights discourse, at a crossroads. Hence, even when we find an illegitimacy or an ignorance about what legal rules do not explicitly state but instead implicitly presuppose, this does not exclude that behind that ignorance there may be something worthy of legal protection. A question emerges: is it legitimate and reasonable to consider the ignorantia facti resulting from differing ways of categorizing the factual world as automatically and uncritically subject to the principle ignoratia legis non excusat? The essay continues with an assessment of the possible consequences of ignorantia facti in the administration of justice in multicultural societies and migration contexts. For this purpose, the opportunity for an intercultural use of law—including within national law—will be considered as a means of avoiding the discriminatory application of ignorantia facti. This topic will be addressed by leveraging both semiotic and cultural-anthropological analytical tools, including the well-known greimasien “contrat de véridiction”. (shrink)

I argue that the often-heard claim that all serious present-day political philosophers subscribe to the principle of equal respect and concern or to the doctrine of equal moral status or are in some other fundamental sense egalitarians is wrong. Also wrong is the further claim that the usual methods currently used in political philosophy presuppose basic equality. I further argue that liberal egalitarianism itself is wrong. There is no universal duty “of equal respect and concern” towards every person, for one (...) does not owe one’s nice sister and a serial rapist equal respect and concern. There is also no duty of the state to respect all citizens equally, for a state need not be equally concerned about murderous criminals on the one hand and their innocent victims on the other. The potential maneuver of saving liberal egalitarianism by claiming that people have equal rights is unsuccessful. Human beings clearly do not have equal rights, nor are they born with equal rights; and merely having an equality of some rights, for example of “basic” or human ones, would not suffice for egalitarianism. Appeals to “recognition respect” and related concepts are also to no avail. Trying to go back still a step further and to claim that certain rights inequalities or justified discriminatory rules are themselves “grounded” in equal respect and concern at some deeper, norm-generating level (like, for example, the original position or a discourse-ethical principle of justification) is also futile. Finally, I argue that the “This is not what we mean”-strategy of escaping the above arguments reduces egalitarianism to triviality and empty rhetoric. Liberal egalitarianism should be abandoned. (shrink)

In the last few years, we have witnessed a surge in scholarly interest and scientific evidence of how algorithms can produce discriminatory outcomes, especially with regard to gender and race. However, the analysis of fairness and bias in AI, important for the debate of AI for social good, has paid insufficient attention to the category of age and older people. Ageing populations have been largely neglected during the turn to digitality and AI. In this article, the concept of AI (...) ageism is presented to make a theoretical contribution to how the understanding of inclusion and exclusion within the field of AI can be expanded to include the category of age. AI ageism can be defined as practices and ideologies operating within the field of AI, which exclude, discriminate, or neglect the interests, experiences, and needs of older population and can be manifested in five interconnected forms: (1) age biases in algorithms and datasets (technical level), (2) age stereotypes, prejudices and ideologies of actors in AI (individual level), (3) invisibility of old age in discourses on AI (discourse level), (4) discriminatory effects of use of AI technology on different age groups (group level), (5) exclusion as users of AI technology, services and products (user level). Additionally, the paper provides empirical illustrations of the way ageism operates in these five forms. (shrink)

This work studies manipulative use of language that can be called “deliberate failure of communication”; I characterize this kind of manipulation and show that it can be found in the discourse of marketing experts and legal professionals. Relying on relevance theory, I show that manipulation of this kind takes advantage of what van Dijk calls the “context model” of the addressees. I exemplify two ways in which the context models of some of the discourse’s participants might be misused (...) in order to manipulate them. One way is exemplified by a text from an advertisement, the other by a text from a criminal court file. I propose, finally, that the analysis supports van Dijk’s view that social, discursive, and epistemic inequalities reproduce one another in a kind of vicious circle. It suggests, in van Dijk’s terms, that manipulation by deliberate failure of communication is a discriminatory use of language employed by elite groups in order to reproduce their social power. (shrink)

The present paper analyses discursive representations and standpoint-arguments pairs, realized in articles of four mainstream Italian newspapers that report on migrants’ and refugees’ mobilization at the perceived peak of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’. We draw on the scholarly agenda of Critical Discourse Studies, employing tools from corpus linguistic perspectives, which allow us to generalize over the way in which the relevant minorities are represented in our corpus. Then, focusing on a smaller sample of negative representations, we outline a methodological (...) synthesis in order to scrutinize instances of representational meaning in newspapers articles and trace what is argumentatively inferred in discursive representations. To that end we exploit tools from systemic functional and cognitive linguistics as well as the Argumentum Model of Topics for the analysis of inference. In this sense, we demonstrate how discriminatory representations do not only portray migrants and refugees in a negative light but also justify discrimination through the argumentative dynamic they develop. (shrink)

Recent philosophical accounts of discrimination face challenges in accommodating robust intuitions about the particular way in which it is wrongful—most prominently, the intuition that discriminatory actions intrinsically violate equality irrespective of their contingent consequences. The paper suggests that we understand the normative structure of discrimination in a way that is different from the one implicitly assumed by these accounts. It argues that core discriminatory wrongs—such as segregation in Apartheid South Africa—divide into two types, corresponding to violations of relational (...) and distributive equality; and that a pluralistic view of the internal structure of each type should be adopted. This normative structure serves to appropriately vindicate the mentioned intuitions; it also contributes to clarifying the normative underpinnings of legal concepts associated with discrimination (including the distinctions between direct and indirect, or ‘disparate treatment/impact’ discrimination, and intentional vs. unintentional discrimination), and developing a more productive public discourse around allegations of discrimination. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework for understanding women leaders in working life. Our starting point is in statistics and earlier women-in-management literature, which show that women leaders represent a minority of the managerial population. We assume such underlying mechanisms causing discriminatory practices towards women leaders to exist which have become naturalized and invisible. Our concern is that everyone irrespective of gender should have a fair chance in career progression. This is both a moral and also an (...) economic challenge. The framework we develop in this paper is an alternative approach to studying women leaders compared to traditional women-in-management literature. It aims at revealing the "natural and taken-for-granted" cultural mechanisms behind discriminatory practices. Our framework is based on a critical discursive approach, which draws on ideas of how women''s leadership becomes symbolically represented and constructed in discursive practices. These symbolic constructions, which are mediated through language, often have an ideological loading which positions women leaders and builds their identities in ways that can help to legitimize unequal relations between the genders. However, our framework emphasizes the possibility of multiple discourses and a dynamic view of culture. The cultural constructions of women leaders are, thus, open to change. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article advances a critical approach to the analysis of social policy texts drawing on the philosophical perspectives of hyperrealism, surrealism, ethics, and Critical Discourse Analysis. Drawing on official government texts and speeches on the continuing development of Singapore’s education policy, the paper examines the way metaphors of flexibility, diversity, choice, and opportunity are used within an evolving ideological context that work to continually produce truth conditions as justifications for inequality. In doing this, the analysis foregrounds a functional (...) aspect of policy metaphors as divisive mechanisms of neo-liberalism through associating individuals with the appearance of discriminatory forms of economic materiality which does not in fact exist in reality. (shrink)

One of the characteristics of what has been called “dogwhistle politics” is the presence of a rhetoric that targets minority groups implicitly. For example, terms like ‘illegals’ and ‘illegal immigrants’, used to target Latin-Americans, have come to permeate the American political discourse as well as everyday conversations. Here I focus on how such expressions, which I call illegality frame code words (IFCW, for short), can be countered by recalcitrant hearers. I begin with the assumption that IFCWs are racial code (...) words, conversational devices that convey implicit racial appeals while allowing for deniability. I then discuss how the existence of an Illegality Frame in the American Immigration debate supports their deniability. Lastly, I discuss how recalcitrant hearers can counter utterances that contain them. In particular, I propose reframing as an adequate strategy. In reframing, agents take control of the goals or the QUD (question under discussion) of the conversation to exclude certain topics from the common ground and include others. The idea is to “change the conversation” to neutralize problematic moves. This maneuver is advantageous not only because it helps to hinder veiled discriminatory practices, but also because it affords control over “the terms of the conversation”. (shrink)

This article argues that there has been a significant turn in the discourse of feminist politics in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The author suggests that the rise of a new feminism – rooted in Islamic discourse, non-confrontational, privatized and personalized, whose objective is to ‘empower’ women within Islam – is not a post-9/11 development but rather a result of unresolved debates on the issue of religion within the progressive women's movement. It has been due to the accommodation (...) of religion-based feminist arguments by the stronger secular feminist movement of the 1980s that paved the way for its own marginalization by giving feminist legitimacy to such voices. The author argues that the second wave of feminism may have become diluted in its effectiveness and support due to discriminatory religious laws, dictatorship, NGO-ization, fragmentation, co-option by the state and political parties in the same way as the global women's movement has. Yet it has been the internal inconsistency of the political strategies as well as the personal, Muslim identities of secular feminists that have allowed Islamic feminists to redefine the feminist agenda in Pakistan. This article voices the larger concern over the rise of a new generation of Islamic revivalist feminists who seek to rationalize all women's rights within the religious framework and render secular feminism irrelevant while framing the debate on women's rights exclusively around Islamic history, culture and tradition. The danger is that a debate such as this will be premised on a polarized ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ Muslim woman, such that women who abide by the liberal interpretation of theology will be pitted against those who follow a strict and literal interpretist mode and associate themselves with male religio-political discourse. This is only likely to produce a new, radicalized, religio-political feminism dominating Pakistan's political future. (shrink)

The distinction between intentional and unintentional discrimination is a prominent one in the literature and public discourse; intentional discriminatory actions are commonly considered particularly morally objectionable relative to unintentional discriminatory actions. Nevertheless, it remains unclear what the two types amount to, and what generates the moral difference between them. The paper develops philosophically-informed conceptualizations of the two types based on which the moral difference between them may be accounted for. On the suggested account, intentional discrimination is characterized (...) by the agent viewing the content of an underlying discriminatory belief as a consideration that counts in favor of her action. This, it is argued, amounts to endorsing the discriminatory belief, which generates the particular moral severity of intentional discrimination. (shrink)

Taking into account the fact that, in trying to define secularism, the question of the border separating state and religon is intractable, Cecile Laborde proposes to bypass this difficulty by defining only what the liberal state must abstain from when it justifies the constraints it imposes : ideas which are inaccessible, and representations which are exclusive, discriminatory or referring to conceptions of the good life. So, if ideas and representations are free from those caracteristics, they may – whther they (...) are religious or not – be used in public discourse. If they are not, they are prohibited, whether they be religious or not. The paper puts fort some doubts on the viability of this analysis. Is it really possible that there be ideas which are accessible without being exclusive while being also non shared in the relevant sense of that term? Is it really possible to dispense with any definition of the nature of religion in order to set the limits of the liberal state? (shrink)

The liberation of Africa and its peoples from centuries of racially discriminatory colonial rule and domination has far-reaching implications for educational thought and practice. The transformation of educational discourse in Africa requires a philosophical framework that respects diversity, acknowledges lived experience and challenges the hegemony of Western forms of universal knowledge. In this article I reflect critically on whether African philosophy, as a system of African knowledge(s), can provide a useful philosophical framework for the construction of empowering knowledge (...) that will enable communities in Africa to participate in their own educational development. (shrink)

This paper discusses the announcement by a team of researchers that they identified a genetic influence for a range of “antisocial” behaviours in the New Zealand Māori population (dubbed the “warrior gene”). The behaviours included criminality, violence, gambling and alcoholism. The reported link between genetics and behaviour met with much controversy. The scientists were described as hiding behind a veneer of supposedly “objective” western science, using it to perpetuate “racist and oppressive discourses”. In this paper we examine what went wrong (...) in the dissemination of the research. We chose as our framework the debate around the “internal/external” responsibilities of scientists. Using this discourse we argue that when the researchers ventured to explain their research in terms of social phenomena, they assumed a duty to ensure that their findings were placed “in context”. By “in context”, we argue that evidence of any genetic influence on behavioural characteristics should not be reported in isolation, but instead presented alongside other environmental, cultural and socio-economic influences that may also contribute to the studied behaviour. Rather than imposing a new obligation on scientists, we find this duty to contextualise results is in keeping with the spirit of codes of ethics already in place. Lessons from the “warrior gene” controversy may assist researchers elsewhere to identify potential areas of conflict before they jeopardise research relationships, or disseminate findings in a manner that fuels misleading and/or potentially discriminatory attitudes in society. (shrink)

Disability theology has been a small but growing field over the past thirty years. This paper reviews the current methods used in the discipline and proposes ways to move the field forward. Two intersections between disability studies and Christian theological ethics are explored in particular: bioethics and critical theory. Bioethics helps to address the material health and wellbeing concerns of people with disabilities and the discriminatory attitudes about disability that stem from the medical field. Critical theory on the other (...) hand, examines disability through cultural productions that shape our ableist imaginary. Critical theory offers resources for countering or “disciplining” our imaginations. Both bioethics and critical theory offer unique entry points into disability, but each also contains limitations that reveal why disability theology must continue to engage multiple methods and discourses. (shrink)

Defining a nurse as literate is disciplinary and contextual, linked to professional identity formation, and an issue impacting patient safety. Literacy and language proficiency are concepts assessed through examining skills in four pillars: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. This article explores how literacy is not only a practice issue but inextricably intertwined with issues of race, equity, diversity, and inclusiveness in our profession—both in regulatory policy and classroom pedagogy. In making the argument that language is a proxy for race, three (...) cases of language and literacy will be presented. First, the deficit discourse of multilingual student struggle is stereotyped to the presence or absence of an accent, with multilingual student needs often treated homogeneously in disregard of population heterogenous abilities. Second, regulatory policies for language testing internationally educated nurses are discriminatory with testing context bearing little relationship to the language needs of nursing practice. Third, that the myth of “one standard English” results in racist evaluation practices of student academic performance. Recommendations are made for reframing how language and literacy are viewed in nursing education and regulation of practice with a focus on acknowledgment of one's personal relationship to racial issues and emphasizing the need for a change in mindset toward racialized multilingual students and writers. (shrink)

In a recent article, the writer has broached the topic of indentifying distinctions in the modes of commentarial discourse within the exegetical works of the the Korean scholiast Wonhyo (617-686), taking note of (1) a rational/logical form of discourse that attempts to elucidate the point of a passage — and especially to resolve any doctrinal problems contained therein — using clear rational argumentation, and (2) an intuitive, poetic, form of discourse that tends to emphasize the fact that (...) the ultimate Buddhist truth is inapprehensible through discriminatory thought. In that paper, attention was paid primarily to the second mode, which tends to be seen itself in the opening and closing portions of his commentaries — or in works, or portions of works — that deal primarily with issues of faith. In that paper, examples were drawn primarily from his commentaries on the Awakening of Mahāyāna Faith and the Sutra of Immeasurable Life . This paper advances that discussion by paying attention to the rational/logical strain of his work, which is clearly of equal, and possibly even greater importance. Here we look at passages from two of his works that both make use of logic, yet which also subject logic itself to a critique in terms of testing the limitations of its applicability in resolving the most fundamental of religious truths. (shrink)

In the modern culture, the phenomenon of the 'disabled' body is a intersection place of its ableist ideology, power relations and pseudoscientific explanations, and they are urged by the neo-eugenic project of the perfect world creating. As the prisoner of the biomedical discourse, such a body, deprived of any agensy, loaded with the culture-historicaly constituated non-power, is a particularly suitable field of the mainstream culture for spreading almost archetypically powerful apocaliptic visions of confronting with the enemy's otherness. For that (...) reason, the underlying supposition of the article is that the 'disabled' body, by means of the uniqueness of its morphology and anatomical-physiological structure, says nothing about itself, the basis of that it which would qualify to be a cult victim of the discriminatory gaze, but it is a reflection the culture frustrated by its own failure to produce an apsolutelly controlable order of things. Our ideas of demonic figure of the 'disabled' body conceal the century-old negentropic struggle of the Western civilization, conceptualy supplied with the criteria, norms and standards of health, normalcy, beauty and the truth, instrumentally supplied with the preventive and rehabilitative provisions of medicine, cosmetology and fashion and institutionally supplied with asylums, to provide itself with kingdom of peace and serenity through pouring out any otherness, first of all the cultural one, intentionally reduced to the pure biological. Fenomen 'ometenog' tela predstavlja u savremenoj kulturi tacku ukrstanja njene 'neometenisticke' ideologije, odnosa moci i pseudonaucnih objasnjenja motivisanih skrivenim neoeugenickim projektom stvaranja savrsenog sveta. Kao zarobljenik biomedicinskog diskursa, takvo telo, liseno ma kakve agensnosti, obremenjeno kulturno-istorijski konstruisanom ne-moci, jeste narocito podesan poligon mejnstrim kulture za sirenje skoro arhetipski snaznih apokaliptickih vizija suocavanja sa neprijateljskom drugoscu. Zato je osnovna teza koju clanak nastoji da dokaze, da 'ometeno' telo specificnoscu svoje morfologije i anatomsko-fizioloske strukture ne govori nista o sebi sto bi ga kvalifikovalo da bude kultna zrtva diskriminisuceg pogleda, vec da je refleksija kulture frustrirane vlastitim neuspehom u proizvodnji apsolutno kontrolabilnog poretka stvari. Iza nase predstave demonskog lika 'ometenog' tela skriva se vekovna negentropijska borba zapadne civilizacije, konceptualno opremljene kriterijumima, normama i standardima zdravlja, normalnosti, lepote i istine, instrumentalno prevencijskim i rehabilitacijskim merama medicine, kozmetike i mode a institucionalno azilima, da obezbedi sebi vecno carstvo mira i spokoja u rastakanju svake drugosti, a ponajpre one kulturne koju namerno redukuje na cisto biolosko. (shrink)

The democratic surprises of 2016—Brexit and the Trump phenomenon—fueled by “fake news”, both real and imagined, have come to constitute a centrifugal, nationalistic, even tribal moment in politics. Running counter to the shared postwar narrative of increasing internationalism, these events reignited embers of cultural and moral relativism in academia and public discourse dormant since the culture wars of the 1990s and ‘60s. This counternarrative casts doubt on the value of belief in universal human rights, which many in the humanities (...) and social sciences argue have of late been used as instruments of postcolonial oppression. This book essay introduces three texts written before the dawn of the latest “post-truth” era—The Sociology of Human Rights by Mark Frezzo, The Political Sociology of Human Rights by Kate Nash, and Keeping Faith with Human Rights by Linda Hogan—that address moral skepticism of human rights. Along with these authors, the essay briefly treats human rights’ past and prospects, analogizing it to the waves of feminist thought: in international politics, developing nations first desired a seat at the table and repeal of discriminatory laws and practices; when one-nation-one-vote did not result in equal treatment, the persistence of hierarchy helped developing nations awaken to their own evolving national identities and they wished to be recognized as not only equal, but different and unique. The essay recapitulates and amplifies these authors’ argument that the contemporary challenge for all nations, their citizens, and for the human rights community is to deliberatively decide what values unite these identities beyond simple self-determination and extend them toward the goal of a just global whole. The essay also makes an original contribution in summarizing the initial post-war debate in the United Nations that birthed the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, which has been subject to revisionism and perspectivism typical of cultural and moral relativism. It provides some social scientific, historical, and philosophic grounding for serious conversation of the ideas of truths in politics, and universal, transcultural goods and rights that underpin the authority of the international human rights regime in theory and practice. It does so while recognizing the serious epistemological challenges to this universalist conception, chiefly: how a social construct can be both time-bound human creation and continue to be morally binding across space, time, and the accelerated change global citizens of all corners are experiencing, simultaneously yet in their own way. (shrink)

The need for increased civility has been a recurring theme in conversations about lawyer professionalism in the United States and Canada over the last several decades. In addition to having many advocates, however, the civility movement has also been subject to criticism. In large part, the critiques made to date have focused on the problems or risks created when civility rules or guidelines are enforced against lawyers. This article takes a different focus to provide a complementary, yet distinct critique. The (...) object of analysis is the discourse of the civility movement. More specifically, the assumptions and concepts of lawyer professionalism embedded in our conversations about civility are explored. Upon review, the discourse of the civility movement reveals a dominant narrative framed in terms of competing masculinities: the aggressive, testosterone fuelled Rambo-lawyer is cast as the anti-hero to be vanquished against renewed calls for the return of the gentlemanly Atticus Finch. I argue that this 'Rambo-Finch narrative' is hostile to inclusive understandings of lawyer professionalism in three inter-related ways: (1) it renders women and other 'outsider' lawyers largely invisible; (2) it romanticizes past discriminatory concepts of lawyer professionalism; and (3) it reflects anxieties about the destabilization of traditional, exclusionary claims or modes of authority in the legal profession. The exclusionary understandings of lawyer professionalism contained in the Rambo-Finch narrative should be of concern to those interested with improving gender equity and diversity in the legal profession as there is good reason to believe that this discourse translates into 'real world' consequences in how 'outsider' lawyers are viewed and treated within the legal profession. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article examines right-leaning press representations of people living in the UK who can’t speak English, or at least speak English well, following the 2011 Census, which was the first to ask respondents about their main language and proficiency in English. The analysis takes a corpus-assisted approach to critical discourse analysis, based on a 1.8 million-word corpus of right-leaning newspaper articles about ‘speak English’ in the years following this historic Census. The analysis reveals the tendency for the press to (...) focus on immigrants – particularly in the contexts of education and health – who are represented with recourse to a series of argumentation strategies, or ‘topoi’. Over the course of this paper, we argue that these topoi are problematic, as they present paradoxes, obscure the role of the Government in ensuring integration, overlook the difficulties of language learning and cultural assimilation, and generally contribute to a broader anti-immigrant UK media narrative which serves to legitimise exclusionary and discriminatory practices against people from minority linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. (shrink)

Agitation for women's rights in Iran is entwined with broader movements for freedom and reform that critique the Islamic Republic's shari'a law as discriminatory. Despite the foundation of these reform efforts in the social realities of contemporary Iran, anyone who critiques laws governing the rights of women is prone to the charge of insulting the sanctity and foundation of Islam and subject to harsh penalties. Reform efforts will be hamstrung until there is a foundation for open discourse and (...) debate in Iran. Thus, human rights such as the right to freedom of expression and related rights must be seen as the fundamental basis for successful political and legal reform in Iran – whether that reform is based in liberal Islam or secularism. (shrink)

This paper examines the link between the regulation of marriage migration and national boundary-making processes in South Korea through the analysis of “fraudulent marriage” discourses. Corresponding to the goals of the Korean government based on the gendered and racialized construction of the Korean nation, populations of marriage migrants are hierarchized according to various intersecting axes of gender, age, class, and “race.” Based on a critical race and intersectional feminist framework and critical security studies, I examine multiple intersections of the social (...) relations, which hierarchize marriage migrants. While certain marriage migrants are constructed as desirable because they embody particular sets of characteristics, other marriage migrants outside these parameters are actively constructed as undesirable and suspected of fraudulent marriage. The discriminatory distinctions drawn among differentially racialized and gendered marriage migrants raise significant social justice concerns. The article concludes with a brief discussion of strategies pursued by marriage migrants and their Korean spouses to undermine discourses of fraudulent marriages. (shrink)