Saint Ashley

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia De Bres ◽  
Shelley Dawson

During Covid-19 lockdown in New Zealand from March to June 2020, gendered discourses appeared in artistic and commercial products featuring Ashley Bloomfield, New Zealand’s Director General of Health and ‘hero of quarantine’. Using an analytical framework combining Foucauldian discourse analysis with critical multimodality, we explore how Ashley is shaped into existence through discourses portraying him as a superhero, love interest/sex symbol, national treasure, saviour, saint and authority figure. These emergent discourses ride on the wave of longstanding dominant discourses relating to gender and sexuality, alongside nation, class and ethnicity. While dominant discourses may provide reassurance when established realities are under threat, they simultaneously cause harm by reproducing unequal power relations between social groups. We contend that, even in periods of crisis, we should consider what broader messages we are sending when we latch onto the latest discursive trend.

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 107
Author(s):  
Shakila Nur

Political speeches are not mere linguistic texts encoded in verbal or written form. They also carry covert ideologies which are embedded in a country’s social, political and cultural context. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) can be used to investigate such interaction between discourse (speech/text), its covert ideology and the context. This paper sets out to analyse the historic 7th March, 1971 speech of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, which has lately been recognised by UNESCO as part of the world’s documentary heritage. Based on the work of Fairclough (1989, 1992, 2001) and Halliday (1978, 1994), a shared, discursive analytical framework within the CDA paradigm was employed to carry out the investigation. The analysis of 94 clauses identified a mutual existence of multiple linguistic and ideological patterns and strategies including the personal pronouns, mood blocks, modality and tense, the reference of the then-socio-political situation as well as the depiction of power relations between the speaker and the audiences. These strategies were intertwined in a wholesome way, thus revealing the ingenuity of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s leadership and his rhetoric skill. The study, by analysing the selected speech, attempts to fill the gap in CDA-based linguistic studies of political texts in the Bangladeshi context. The author believes that this attempt, in tandem, will act as a motivation and centre of attention for further scholarly endeavor in this field.


2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Manathunga

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the diverse rendering of the idea of nation and the role of universities in nation-building in the 1950s Murray and Hughes Parry Reports in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. This paper provides trans-Tasman comparisons that reflect the different national and international interests, positioning of science and the humanities and desired academic and student subject positions and power relations. Design/methodology/approach – This paper adopts a Foucauldian genealogical approach that is informed by Wodak’s (2011) historical discourse analysis in order to analyse the reports’ discursive constructions of the national role of universities, the positioning of science and humanities and the development of desired academics and student subjectivities and power relations. Findings – The analysis reveals the different positioning of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand in relation to the Empire and the Cold War. It also demonstrates how Australian national interests were represented in these reports as largely economic and defence related, while Aotearoa/New Zealand national interests were about economic, social and cultural nation-building. These differences were also matched by diverse weightings attached to university science and the humanities education. There is also a hailing of traditional, enlightenment-inspired discourses about desired academic and student subjectivities and power relations in Australia that contrasts with the emergence of early traces of more contemporary discourses about equity and diversity in universities in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Originality/value – The paper demonstrates the value of transnational analysis in contributing to historiography about university education. The Foucauldian discourse analysis approach extends existing Australian historiography about universities during this period and represents a key contribution to Aotearoa/New Zealand historiography that has explored academic and student subjectivities to a lesser extent.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dang Thi Mai Nga

The paper is aimed at exploring ideological power relations of globalization discourse through the analysis of the speech ‘The Backlash against Globalization’ of WTO’ s Director-General Mike Moore based on one of the Discourse Analysis (DA) approaches - Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). At first, the paper sets out the theoretical framework of CDA and the concepts of power and ideology and examines the importance of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) in CDA. Then the paper provides readers with the social context of globalization and analyzes the speech in the light of CD.  The findings and the conclusion of the paper prove the assumption that the speech is a tool for Director-General Mike Moore to express his power and ideology in the sense that he is in higher position and confirms that globalization is inevitable and the establishment of WTO is a product of this process helping countries, communities and people face the problems and challenges.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Skreslet Hernandez

This introduction sets out the scope of the book’s argument and explains why Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī is such an interesting figure in the history of Islamic legal thought. It describes the reception of al-Suyūṭī’s work at home in Cairo and abroad as well as his lasting legacy. It outlines the analytical framework and the importance of interdisciplinary methods, including discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, anthropology, history, religious studies, and literary criticism to the argument of the book. An explanation of how al-Suyūṭī’s life can inform our understanding of the current situation in modern Egypt is followed by a review of the secondary literature and a full outline of each chapter.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147309522110389
Author(s):  
Chuan Wang

Numerous novel planning concepts have been developed in pursuit of better urban environments, while many are notoriously difficult to define. Lacan’s master signifier is widely employed to criticise these vague, fashionable concepts but lacks a specific examination tool. To fill this gap, this article develops an analytical framework based on Lacanian discourse analysis (LDA) to decipher the complex social relations in the process of applying new concepts to planning policymaking and practice. A comprehensive review of the UK urban village movement is used to demonstrate how this framework provides a deeper analysis, arguing that urban villages are understood differently depending on individual social positions, which, to some extent, determine their actions towards planning practice.


Author(s):  
Jill Wilkens

This chapter examines the intersection of ageing, gender, class and sexual identity, and highlights the significance of same-sexuality social groups for older lesbians and bisexual women. Interviews with 35 women aged between 57 and 73, discussed ‘coming out’ in the 1950s and 1960s, loneliness and isolation and the experience of attending affinity groups. Many participants were rendered ‘out of place’ by aspects of their social mobility, generation, gender and sexuality. The chapter draws on Bourdieu’s concept of ‘cleft habitus’ to consider the contradictions of these mobilities, suggesting that these women faced unprecedented and unique disjuncture between their original habitus and the new classed, sexual and gendered locations in which they finally ‘arrived’. The chapter looks at the potential of social groups to alleviate loneliness and isolation; for many, they are sites of resilience, helping to promote positive ageing for those who have faced marginalisation across their life course.


1948 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-352

A special session of the FAO Conference was convened in Washington in April 1948, in conjunction with the second session of the FAO Council, under the chairmanship of Sir Carl Berendsen (New Zealand). The session, which lasted only two days, was called to name a successor to Sir John Boyd Orr as Director-General of the Organization, and to act on membership applications submitted by Ceylon and Turkey.


2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 392-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Donoghue

The work of Antonio Gramsci is important for the theoretical underpinnings of critical discourse analysis. However, many scholars’ engagement with Gramsci’s work within critical discourse analysis remains surprisingly thin. This article seeks to highlight the detriment to critical discourse analysis of having only a surface engagement with Gramsci. It critically assesses how Gramscian concepts such as hegemony and ‘common sense’ are currently employed within critical discourse analysis and provides more detailed discussion on the import of these concepts for critical discourse analysis. The article also argues that introducing the Gramscian concepts of the war of position and spontaneous and normative grammars enables the further realisation of critical discourse analysis’ ambition to be an emancipatory tool in political and social science. In so doing, the article contributes to work on critical discourse analysis as a method in political studies, particularly concerning the role of discourse in reproducing and maintaining asymmetrical power relations between classes and social groups, and potential challenges to this.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Peng Xu

 Positioning young children as citizens, now rather than as citizens in waiting, is an emerging discourse in early childhood education internationally. Differing discourses related to young children and early childhood reveal various ideas of children as citizens, and what their citizenship status, practice and education can be. This paper analyses the national early childhood education (ECE) curricula of China and Aotearoa New Zealand for the purpose of understanding how children are constructed as citizens within such policy discourses. Discourse analysis is employed in this study as a methodological approach for understanding the subjectivities of young children and exploring the meanings of young children’s citizenship in both countries. Based on Foucault’s theory of governmentality, this paper ultimately argues that young children’s citizenship in contemporary ECE curricula in China and New Zealand is a largely neoliberal construction. However, emerging positionings shape differing possibilities for citizenship education for young children in each of these countries.


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