scholarly journals Covid-19 as a Generator of Pending Narratives: Developing an Empirical Tool to Analyze Narrative Practices in Constructing Futures

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 160940692199685
Author(s):  
Jukka Törrönen

The article describes the basic elements of the pending narrative and develops them into a tool of qualitative analysis by taking examples from Covid-19-related reports, opinions and editorials in the news. The pending narrative is a powerful story form, persuading the responsible actors in public to take action by stirring up compelling passion for a specific goal. It has a cogency that comes from the threat that if we do not act in the right way now, the continuity of life will be jeopardized. Crises are fertile breeding grounds for pending narratives, and the arrival of the Covid-19 virus is an expressive example of a situation threatening the continuity of human life around the globe. These circumstances feed on the emergence of pending narratives, which translate the unknown, uncertain and frightening future from open, multiple and unpredictable trajectories into more closed, predictable and controllable pathways. In the development of the pending narrative into a tool of qualitative analysis, the article takes influences from narratology, Bamberg’s theory on positioning analysis, Greimas’ narrative semiotics and critical discourse analysis. It proposes that in the analysis of pending narratives we benefit from the separation of three levels. On the first level, pending narratives highlight disorder and the menacing trajectory of the anti-subject, and outline a qualifying trajectory for the subject to overcome the threat. On the second level they persuade the responsible actors and the audience to identify with the qualifying trajectory and to take action or support it. And on the third level they articulate the kind of values, identities and moral order in aid of which the required action is taken.

2021 ◽  
pp. 59-74
Author(s):  
Justyna Dobrołowicz

The aim of the research presented in this article is to identify the ways in which theopinion-forming press presents teachers and their remote work with students. I assume thatby constructing press statements: mentioning or concealing certain topics, using specificlinguistic forms – journalists influence what readers think about Polish teachers, how theyevaluate their attitude to work and its effects. The problems raised in the research fall withinthe field of pedeutology – a pedagogical subdiscipline examining the teaching profession.Pedeutology helps to understand the specificity of a teacher’s work, analyses its determinants,creates models of professional competences. I have made the subject of my research thepress discourse understood as a communication activity, as a result of which we learn tothink about the world in a certain way. Although the concept of discourse is currently a usefuland popular research category, it still causes many definition difficulties. I am closest tothe sociological perspective of understanding discourse, according to which discourse hasa specific power to create the world, because it provides its participants with ways ofunderstanding reality. Getting to know the press discourse about teachers is thereforea very important matter, the way of writing about this professional group determines howpeople perceive it and how to behave towards it. The method of analysing the 18 presstexts selected for the study is a critical discourse analysis, which was used to answer thefollowing research question: what linguistic means were used in the discourse on teacher’sremote work and what the effects of this discourse may be. In the analysed texts about distance education, mainly expressions with a clearly negative semantic character are used,which in turn leads to discrediting teachers and shapes the belief about the crisis situationin education.


2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-112
Author(s):  
V. N. Ostapenko ◽  
I. V. Lantukh ◽  
A. P. Lantukh

Annotation. The problem of suicide and euthanasia has been particularly updated with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a strong explosion of suicide, because medicine was not ready for it, and the man was too weak in front of its pressure. The article considers the issue of euthanasia and suicide based on philosophical messages from the position of a doctor, which today goes beyond medicine and medical ethics and becomes one of the important aspects of society. Medicine has achieved success in the continuation of human life, but it is unable to ensure the quality of life of those who are forced to continue it. In these circumstances, the admission of suicide or euthanasia pursues the refusal of the subject to achieve an adequate quality of life; an end to suffering for those who find their lives unacceptable. The reasoning that banned suicide: no one should harm or destroy the basic virtues of human nature; deliberate suicide is an attempt to harm a person or destroy human life; no one should kill himself. The criterion may be that suicide should not take place when it is committed at the request of the subject when he devalues his own life. According to supporters of euthanasia, in the conditions of the progress of modern science, many come to the erroneous opinion that medicine can have total control over human life and death. But people have the right to determine the end of their lives while using the achievements of medicine, as well as the right to demand an extension of life with the help of the same medicine. They believe that in the era of a civilized state, the right to die with medical help should be as natural as the right to receive medical care. At the same time, the patient cannot demand death as a solution to the problem, even if all means of relieving him from suffering have been exhausted. In defense of his claims, he turns to the principle of beneficence. The task of medicine is to alleviate the suffering of the patient. But if physician-assisted suicide and active euthanasia become part of health care, theoretical and practical medicine will be deprived of advances in palliative and supportive therapies. Lack of adequate palliative care is a medical, ethical, psychological, and social problem that needs to be addressed before resorting to such radical methods as legalizing euthanasia.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (I) ◽  
pp. 78-90

People use language for different social practices in different contexts and perspectives, and discourse analysts examine these social practices for a better understanding of the discourse. The language used by a poet is different from the language used by common people; the poetic diction helps to understand a poet’s literary style, his ideology, and the use of descriptive language. This article focuses on exposing the socio-psychological factors through examining the use of language in a free verse poem ‘Wedding in the Flood’ by Taufiq Rafat who tried to present different aspects of Pakistani culture in the poem. The socio-psychological factors combine the social (family, society, wealth, religion) and the psychological factors (feelings, thoughts, actions, beliefs) that play an important role in shaping the personality of an individual, and the characters in the poem are the best examples of it. This analysis is based on Fairclough’s conceptions in CDA that claims of an inter-link between ideologies and texts, and this link cannot be separated because there are many ways to interpret texts, and the Socio-Psychological Theory (20121) also combines many social and psychological factors of human life. Many researchers did the stylistic analysis of the poem, but nothing has been done to highlight its socio-psychological factors through CDA.


Author(s):  
Muhammad Sibtain Chohan ◽  
Muhammad Nadeem Anwar

The aim of the study is to analyze Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s speech at United Nations’ Security Council on September 22, 1965. The study attempts to uncover the meanings of the words employed to show the core tension of 1965 war between Pakistan and India. There have been different models of CDA presented by scholars like Fairclough, Wodak and Van Dijk, but the most suitable CDA framework for this study case is of Van Dijk. His (1997) framework for critical discourse analysis provides the clear picture of the ideologies expressed in various kinds of structures. Qualitative methodology has been employed for this study and the content of the speech was analyzed qualitatively. The findings of the study elaborate that Bhutto was determined to have a permanent peace in the region. It can also be observed that he was quite confident in buying peace for Pakistani and the neighboring countries. He reinforced the subject matter with multiple instances of the countries that faced the same war-like circumstances and rose again with new zeal and zest. The study has its theoretical as well as practical scope.


2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer

AbstractThis study focuses on the tensions around Portugal's language policies and citizens’ perceptions of their linguistic rights in the context of the current orthographic reform. Unlike other linguistic rights studies, this enquiry does not focus on endangered languages or linguistic minorities. Instead, there are three major ingredients that embody linguistic-rights claims by European Portuguese speakers: the right to be heard on orthographic reform in a democratic society, ownership and authenticity of the Portuguese language, and the need for protection against external (or, more specifically, Brazilian) hegemony. A critical discourse analysis approach to the arguments put forward by European Portuguese opponents of the orthographic reform shows that the ongoing discussion: (i) is neither about language nor about rights, but about competition; (ii) is based on linguistic dichotomies and recategorization of speakers and languages; (iii) manipulates the rhetoric of threat, endangerment, linguistic rights, and democracy; and (iv) opens up intra-linguistic and inter-variety spaces for conceptualizing linguistic rights claims. (Language ideological debate, public understanding, language planning, linguistic rights, orthographic reform)


2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052110523
Author(s):  
Eunjung Lee ◽  
Marjorie Johnstone

The contemporary discourse around historical trauma and healing is site for debate and resistance in public spheres. Guided by critical scholars in language and power as well as post-and settler colonialism, this study analyzes texts and contexts of two public apologies in Canada – Chinese head tax, and residential schools for Indigenous children – to examine how historical trauma and healing were understood, and by doing so how the subject and object were re/constructed to maintain or resist social (dis)orders – postcolonial racial orders – in the past and the present of Canada. Findings included: (1) a split and temporal distance between the wrong past and the benevolent present with governments constructing themselves as the good subject reifying a sincere fiction of a liberal, benevolent, and just white-nation; (2) no acknowledgement of the cause of historical trauma, namely colonial governing; (3) ongoing construction of the other racialized population as victims/burdens/lesser citizens to current Canada; and (4) the explicit demand to collective forgetting of the past/historical trauma as current healing and inclusion. We discuss social responsibilities when historical wounds continue to leave injuries and the risk of perpetuating systemic violence to people with whom we currently share the nation all of us call home.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 185
Author(s):  
Sadok Abcha

The present paper critically analyses the ideological uses of the adjectives used to describe multiculturalism in opinion articles published by two British quality newspapers, The Telegraph and The Times, which politically lean to The Right. Methodologically, the sample on which this study is based has been retrieved from the websites of the two dailies by means of the Key Word In Context (KWIC) technique, which has been used to look for comment articles published between July 2005 and December 2015, and in which the search word, multiculturalism used with an adjective featured. Using Fairclough’s theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the study pinpoints the ideological underpinnings of the adjectives used with the word multiculturalism in the editorials. The study found out that all the adjectives are used in a derogative way to describe multiculturalism as being unreasonable, harmful and unsuccessful. Significantly, this paper provides critical insight into the peculiar uses of derogative adjectives in comment articles dealing with multiculturalism and avers that negative adjectives are not simply linguistic elements, but most importantly, ideological tools.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-126
Author(s):  
Stephen Turton

Abstract This paper furthers the goal of “queering lexicography” (Nossem 2018) by proposing a theoretical approach to analysing dictionary definitions that replaces the traditional descriptive/prescriptive binary with a model of normativity influenced by performativity theory. This is demonstrated by a critical discourse analysis of how entries for lesbian, gay, and homosexual in four contemporary English dictionaries tacitly position homosexual as a neutral term against which lesbian and gay are sociolinguistically marked. The paper also stresses the need for researchers not only to analyse how normativity is embedded in dictionaries, but to recognize the extent to which lay dictionary-users are already aware of the normative potential of lexicography, whether they embrace it or condemn it. This is explored through an incident in which Merriam-Webster’s addition of the word genderqueer to its online dictionary in 2016 became the subject of public scrutiny and contestation on social media.


2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 104-118
Author(s):  
Katie Baker Jones

Discursive practices employed by American Vogue to recontextualize sustainable fashion between 1990 and 2015 were explored through the lens of a discourse-historical approach and multimodal critical discourse analysis. References to sustainably minded values and actions were found throughout the 26 years studied with notable peaks and valleys in coverage that, at times, contradicted changing social interest in the subject. Over time, Vogue recontextualized sustainable fashion discourses and encouraged a passive revolution by moving from a contentious positioning of either/or sustainable fashion to one that embraced a both/and positionality by narrowing focus to lifestyle and product features. Additionally, Vogue celebrated social actors engaged in sustainable behaviors though these were increasingly positioned as lifestyle choices rather than revolutionary collective action. Vogue continuously recontextualized the sustainable fashion discourse as “new” and desirable while neutralizing most negative considerations of fashion consumption through a variety of articulations and by drawing on well-established semiotic resources.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document