Analyzing equivalences in discourse

Pragmatics ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sigurd D’hondt
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Discourse Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Membership Categorization Analysis ◽  
Dance Class ◽  
Membership Categorization ◽  
Political Talk ◽  
Explanatory Concept

Facing a crucial leap from political philosophy to empirical analysis, the approach to discourse analysis that arose in the aftermath of Laclau and Mouffe (1985), and that is currently known as the Essex school of discourse theory (DT), has in recent years repeatedly been accused of suffering from a methodological deficit. This paper examines to what extent membership categorization analysis (MCA), a branch of ethnomethodology that investigates lay actors’ situated descriptions-in-context as practical activity, can play a part in rendering poststructuralist DT notions such as articulation and equivalence analytically tangible in empirically observable discourse. Based on a review of Laclau and Mouffe’s foundational text as well as on Glynos and Howarth’s recent exposition of the framework (2007), it is argued that MCA empirically substantiates many poststructuralist claims about the indeterminacy of signification. However, MCA consistently falters - and willingly so - at the point where DT would articulate emerging equivalences between identity categories as part of a second-order explanatory concept, such as Glynos and Howarth’s notion of political logic. Nevertheless, MCA also contains the kernel of an “endogenous” notion of the political that comes fairly close to DT’s all-pervasive understanding of the concept. To support these arguments, a variety of empirical sources are mobilized, ranging from the transcript of a political talk show, a newspaper report regarding a discrimination case in a dance class, to data drawn from earlier research on the way that minority members are treated by the Belgian criminal justice system.

Instrumental and Symbolic Politics in Policing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Allsop
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Police Legitimacy ◽  
Symbolic Politics ◽  
Political Background ◽  
Cold Case ◽  
Police Practices

This chapter considers the development of, and growing interest in, cold case reviews, distinguishing between the instrumental and symbolic politics which surround their development. What becomes clear in this chapter is that the rise in interest can be attributed to a number of individual and interlocking events, including changes in police legitimacy, the introduction of a number of police reforms, and initiatives resulting in changes to police practices, pressure from victims’ rights groups for more attention from the criminal justice system, and advances in scientific techniques and technologies with increasing uses found for them. The chapter briefly considers the political background to cold case reviews, and how this connects with the broader politics of policing along with the instrumental politics of maintaining major crime review teams and the symbolic politics which helps to justify expenditure in cold case reviews.

Mass-Market Paperbacks and Integration Politics

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-46
Author(s):  
Johanna Schuster-Craig
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Youth Of Color ◽  
Mass Market ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
Migration Politics

“Integration” refers to multiple arenas in German migration politics, including journalistic discourse, public policy, and cultural logics about incorporating immigrants and refugees into the nation. This article examines two non-fiction narratives, Das Ende der Geduld by Kirsten Heisig and Muslim Girls by Sineb El Masrar, to explore how each author characterizes integration from opposite sides of the political spectrum. In integration politics, adolescence is often construed as a problem, which—when improperly managed—leads to the criminalization or radicalization of youth of color. Comparative analysis of these two texts shows that institutions such as the school and the criminal justice system produce adolescence as a problem for integration and as a way to avoid acknowledging institutionalized inequity. These two examples exist as part of a longer genealogy of authors using mass-market paperbacks to comment on integration politics.

West Belfast

The Hoods ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Hamill
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Irish Republican Army

This chapter argues that, from the early days of the political conflict in the 1970s the conditions were such that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) adopted some of the functions of the state, namely the provision of policing and punishment of ordinary crime. The hostility of the statutory criminal justice system, particularly the police, toward the working-class Catholic community dramatically increased the costs of using state services. The high levels of disaffection and aggression among working-class Catholics toward the police meant that the state could no longer fulfill its function and police the community in any “normal” way. A demand for policing therefore existed. Simultaneously, this demand was met and fostered by the IRA, which had the motivation, the manpower, and the monopoly on the use of violence necessary to carry out this role.

The Political Theology of Mass Incarceration

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-104
Author(s):  
Joshua Dubler ◽  
Vincent W. Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Religious Imagination

Chapter 2 tracks the way American political elites talked about justice and punishment before and during the rise of mass incarceration. The authors show how these concepts were once closely connected with the religious imagination. When that link was severed, justice was reduced to the proper functioning of the law, to a criminal justice system, and a new set of ideas and institutions promoting law and order and victims’ rights took over. The chapter demonstrates how, at the level of political rhetoric, religion—along with economics and race—was essential for promoting incarceration as the sole mechanism for effecting justice.

Punishment and Political Philosophy

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesper Ryberg
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Corporal Punishment ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Criminal Offenders ◽  
Legal Punishment ◽  
Utilitarian Approach

The punishment of criminal offenders constitutes a topic that has for many years received comprehensive attention, both in narrower academic circles and in broader public debate. This is not surprising. State-mandated infliction of death, suffering, or deprivation of freedom on citizens should from the outset be met with hesitation, and constitutes a practice which clearly calls for more profound considerations. Though the theoretical discussion of punishment has dealt with many conceptual and ethical issues, from an overall point of view, it is dominated by two questions. The first question, as indicated, concerns the justification of legal punishment. Why and under what conditions is it justified for the state to impose punishment on perpetrators? The traditional answers have been split between the utilitarian approach, according to which punishment can be justified in terms of its future desirable consequences, mainly crime prevention, and the retrospectively oriented retributivist approach, which justifies punishment in terms of just deserts. In the modern discussion, the picture has become more diverse. Consequentialist and retributivist justifications have been developed in many different versions and several attempts have been made to combine forward- and backward-looking considerations into coherent schemes. Moreover, genuinely new accounts of penal theories have also been presented. The second question concerns the issue of how different crimes should be punitively responded to. Though this question is obviously theoretically closely related to the first, it is also clear that the question of how individual offenders should be punished for their respective misdeeds prompts a plethora of more detailed challenges such as: What should determine the gravity of a crime? How should one determine the severity of a punishment? Are there types of punishment that should never be used in the criminal justice system (e.g., capital or corporal punishment)? Much of the contemporary discussion within penal theory is devoted to the task of providing principled solutions to these detailed challenges.

True crime podcasting: Journalism, justice or entertainment?

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-178
Author(s):  
Kelli S. Boling
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
The Political ◽  
Audience Engagement ◽  
Emerging Media ◽  
True Crime ◽  
Practical Implications ◽  
Insight Into

This study examines true crime podcasts with a critical/cultural lens to explore how podcasts are impacting the true crime genre, public opinion and the criminal justice system. Four in-depth qualitative interviews with true crime podcast producers offer insight into both the political economy of podcasts and effective audience engagement. Ultimately, this study argues that true crime podcasts are impacting the criminal justice system in unprecedented ways and that the future of this emerging media could challenge both criminal justice and media reform. Practical implications for genre-specific media are also discussed.

scholarly journals Racialized policing

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Tia Dafnos
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Federal Prison ◽  
Police Custody ◽  
The Public ◽  
Government Documents ◽  
Aboriginal Title

Recent months of 2013 have seen the public release of official reports on the ongoing exclusion and marginalisation of Indigenous peoples vis-à-vis the Canadian criminal justice system. The Iacobucci review (2013), commissioned by the Ontario Government, documents systemic racism throughout the courts, prisons and jury systems that disadvantages Indigenous peoples. The review emerged from the lack of Indigenous jurors in coroner’s inquests into the death of Jacy Pierre in police custody, and the drowning of Reggie Bushie in 2007. Another report from the Correctional Investigator documents the over-representation of Indigenous people in the federal prison system, which has increased by 43 per cent in five years (Saper 2012). These observations are set against the political backdrop of the conservative government’s ‘tough on crime’ agenda and ongoing policies of Aboriginal title and rights extinguishment (Diabo 2012).

Demonising the Other

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Question ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
And Function

The ethical question confronting all of us is how to live alongside each other where the other person is our neighbour, not our disposable enemy. This monograph refines thinking on the subject of the other and rejects that othering, the imposition of a pejorative status, is an inevitable feature of human life. If the conditions of existence under which we live is a contingent creation, the political and economic, the ethical and cultural, can be reconstructed to reduce pejorative othering. There is the scope to refine and develop thinking on the other by incorporating a longer-term stream of history perspective that reaches back to antiquity; acknowledge troubling transformations imposed upon the criminal justice system by a succession of ‘modernising’ governments; foreground moral responses to contest the production of the relegated and demonised other; and to forge a new agreement on ethical priorities to establish the conditions of existence that benefit all of us. These four themes represent the four substantive chapters of this monograph. It is imperative to think about the other in relation to macro (historical, political, material conditions, and ideological commitments); mezzo (organisational transformations); and micro (human subjectivity) that feature in this monograph. Importantly, the scope exists to contest othering; to proceed from the construction and function of othering through new political and ethical commitments to change the way we organise ourselves. Therefore, it is possible to reframe the contours of the debate and to move things on from where they reside at present.

The Political Responsiveness of Violent Crime Prosecution

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 936-948
Author(s):  
Ethan D. Boldt ◽  
Christina L. Boyd
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Violent Crime ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Operational Constraints ◽  
Insight Into

Is a federal prosecutor’s decision whether to pursue violent crime charges political? While prosecutors frequently assert their decision-making independence, their selection and operational constraints suggest a very different story. We assess whether political factors related to the prosecution priorities of the president, Congress, and the local public affect federal prosecutors’ decisions to pursue or decline charges in violent crime matters. To empirically examine this, we utilize data from 89 U.S. Attorneys offices from 1996 to 2011. The results provide rich new insight into when and why federal prosecutors’ decisions to pursue or decline prosecutions are driven by the preferences of the president, Congress, and the local public. The findings also have important broader implications for the role of political factors in a U.S. criminal justice system believed by many to be in crisis.

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