scholarly journals Opinion Discourse and Canadian Newspapers: The Case of the Chinese "Boat People"

Author(s):  
Joshua Greenberg

Abstract: "Opinion" discourse - editorials, op-ed articles, and guest columns - assumes an important communicative function by offering newsreaders a distinctive and authoritative voice that will speak to them directly, in the face of troubling or problematic circumstances. Opinion discourse addresses newsreaders embraced in a consensual relationship by taking a particular stance in relation to the persons and topics referred. Nevertheless, despite its communicative importance, opinion discourse has received less sustained theoretical and empirical attention from scholars than "hard" news. Where "hard" news purports to be balanced and fair, "opinion" discourse problematizes the world by taking up the normative dimension of issues and events as the justification and rationale for taking sides. Taking the arrivals to Canada of four boatloads of "illegal" Chinese migrants in 1999 as a case study, this article aims to contribute theoretical understanding about the import of opinion discourse to the critical study of news, whilst offering a contribution to scholarship on the social construction of the Other. Résumé: Le discours d'« opinion » - éditoriaux, chroniques, et rubriques d'invités - remplit une fonction importante dans la communication en offrant aux lecteurs une voix distincte et fiable qui leur parle directement, lors de circonstances troublantes ou problématiques. Le discours d'opinion adresse les lecteurs en les accueillant dans une relation consensuelle où l'on prend une position spécifique par rapport aux personnes et aux sujets discutés. Néanmoins, malgré son importance dans la communication, les chercheurs ont porté une attention théorique et empirique moins soutenue sur le discours d'opinion que sur les actualités. Alors que les actualités prétendent être justes et équilibrées, le discours d'« opinion » discute du monde en adhérant à la dimension normative de questions et d'événements, adhésion qui justifie et explique une prise de position particulière. En se rapportant comme étude de cas à l'arrivée au Canada de quatre bateaux transportant des émigrés chinois « illégaux » en 1999, cet article vise à contribuer une compréhension théorique de l'importance du discours d'opinion dans l'étude critique des nouvelles, tout en offrant une contribution au savoir relatif à la construction sociale de l'Autre.

Author(s):  
Melanie SARANTOU ◽  
Satu MIETTINEN

This paper addresses the fields of social and service design in development contexts, practice-based and constructive design research. A framework for social design for services will be explored through the survey of existing literature, specifically by drawing on eight doctoral theses that were produced by the World Design research group. The work of World Design researcher-designers was guided by a strong ethos of social and service design for development in marginalised communities. The paper also draws on a case study in Namibia and South Africa titled ‘My Dream World’. This case study presents a good example of how the social design for services framework functions in practice during experimentation and research in the field. The social design for services framework transfers the World Design group’s research results into practical action, providing a tool for the facilitation of design and research processes for sustainable development in marginal contexts.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 228-240
Author(s):  
Stefania Pontrandolfo ◽  
Marco Solimene

This article reflects on the conceptual debt that anthropology has developed towards the peoples it studies, by exploring the case-study of Gypsy/Roma anthropology. We argue that ethnographically-grounded research has enabled anthropologists to access and incorporate Gypsy/Roma visions and practices of the world. The flexible Gypsy epistemologies, which Gypsies/ Roma use in the social and cultural construction of particular forms of identity and mobility, have thus translated into a specific practice of theory, which has provided more adequate tools for grasping the complexity of reality and contributed to a decolonialisation of anthropological thought.


Film Studies ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-57
Author(s):  
Ora Gelley

Although Europa 51 (1952) was the most commercially successful of the films Roberto Rossellini made with the Hollywood star, Ingrid Bergman, the reception by the Italian press was largely negative. Many critics focussed on what they saw to be the ‘unreal’ or abstract quality of the films portrayal of the postwar urban milieu and on the Bergman character‘s isolation from the social world. This article looks at how certain structures of seeing that are associated in the classical style with the woman as star or spectacle - e.g., the repetitious return to her fixed image, the resistance to pulling back from the figure of the woman in order to situate her within a determinate location and set of relationships between characters and objects - are no longer restricted to her image but in fact bleed into or “contaminate” the depiction of the world she inhabits. In other words, whereas the compulsive return to the fixed image of the woman tends to be contained or neutralised by the narrative economy and editing patterns (ordered by sexual difference) of the classical style, in Rossellini‘s work this ‘insistent’ even aberrant framing in relation to the woman becomes a part of the (female) characters and the cameras vision of the ‘pathology’ of the urban landscape in the aftermath of the war.


Author(s):  
Juliane Fürst

Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland does what the title promises. It takes readers on a journey into a world few knew existed: the lives and thoughts of Soviet hippies, who in the face of disapproval and repression created a version of Western counterculture, skilfully adapting, manipulating, and shaping it to their late socialist environment. This book is a quasi-guide into the underground hippieland, situating the world of hippies firmly in late Soviet reality and offering an unusual history of the last Soviet decades as well as a case study in the power of transnational youth cultures. It tells the almost forgotten story of how in the late sixties hippie communities sprang up across the Soviet Union, often under the tutelage of a few rebellious youngsters coming from privileged households at the heart of the Soviet establishment. Flowers through Concrete recounts not only a compelling story of survival against the odds—hippies were harassed by police, shorn of their hair by civilian guards, and confined in psychiatric hospitals by doctors who believed nonconformism was a symptom of schizophrenia. It also advances a surprising argument: despite obvious antagonism the land of Soviet hippies and the world of late socialism were not incompatible. Indeed, Soviet hippies and late socialist reality meshed so well that the hostile, yet stable, relationship that emerged was in many ways symbiotic. Ultimately, it was not the KGB but the arrival of capitalism in the 1990s that ended the Soviet hippie sistema.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 90-109
Author(s):  
Mirosław Wylon ◽  
Agnieszka Kempa ◽  
Alicja Słowy ◽  
Justyna Chodkowska-Miszczuk

Summary Subject and purpose of work: Urban transport is a key element of the functioning of urban agglomerations around the world. As it is of strategic importance, the needs of its users have to be diagnosed. Due to the fact that students are the most numerous social group using public transport, particular attention should be paid to students as the real creators of the needs of urban transport. The paper aims to diagnose the challenges in urban transport shaped by the process of studentification based on the case study of Toruń. Materials and methods: The multi-stage research approach was adopted, among others a survey among students. The choice of the research area was determined by the fact that Toruń is one of the largest academic centres in Poland. Results: Toruń is experiencing the effects of the studentification process in different dimensions, including the spatial and transport facets. Conclusions: The majority of students use public transport, daily or several times a week. The most preferred means of transport is the tram owing to its relative speed and punctuality.


Author(s):  
Alessandra Camargo Godoi ◽  
Sandra Zita Silva Tiné

Financial education has gradually been extending its reach, upported through the efforts of the Brazilian government and organized civil society, in the face of the social and economic challenges besetting the world. Like any educational process, financial education requires planning, engagement and mobilization, even considering that the results do not necessarily have a short- or medium-term effect. Considering the trajectory of financial education in Brazil, this text aims to discuss it within an educational context and describe its trajectory up to incorporation into the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC), highlighting its recognition in this important and most current curricular document in Brazilian education.


Author(s):  
Michael Willoughby ◽  
José Millet-Roig ◽  
José Pedro García-Sabater ◽  
Aida Saez-Mas

This chapter is about a successful energy co-operative in Spain. With rising poverty and energy prices among the most expensive in Europe and, the cooperative not only provides a reliable source of clean energy to consumers, but also forms a central part of the community in which it is situated. The case study points to a need for private enterprises to collaborate with local authorities and social services to provide solutions to drastic situations of poverty that are still prevalent, particularly in areas of Southern and Eastern Europe. The Spanish energy cooperative demonstrates one way in which the social economy can help to shape the future of the welfare state in the absence of state funding and in the face of national policies that are not well aligned.


1986 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-322
Author(s):  
David Sturdy

Consider this statement: the practice of science influences and is influenced by the civilization within which it occurs. Or again: scientists do not pursue their activities in a political or social void; like other people, they aspire to make their way in the world by responding to the values and social mechanisms of their day. Set in such simple terms, each statement probably would receive the assent of most scholars interested in the history of science. But there is need for debate on the nature and extent of the interaction between scientific activity and the civilization which incorporates it, as there is on the relations of scientists to the society within which they live. This essay seeks to make a contribution mainly to the second of these topics by taking a French scientist and academician of the eighteenth century and studying him and his family in the light of certain questions. At the end there will be a discussion relating those questions or themes to the wider debate. There is an associated purpose to the exercise: to present an account of the social origins and formation of Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chomel (botanist, physician and member of the Academic des Sciences) which will augment our knowledge of this particular savant.


2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW LANG

AbstractIn this article, I suggest that one of the central characteristics of New Legal Realism is the productive tension between empiricist and pragmatist theories of knowledge which lies at its core. On one side, new realist work in its empiricist posture seeks to use empirical knowledge of the world as the basis on which to design, interpret, apply, and criticize the law. On the other, in its pragmatist moments, it explicitly draws attention to the social and political contingency of any claims to empirical knowledge of the world, including its own. As a consequence, it is distinctive of much scholarship in the New Legal Realist vein that it continually enacts creative syntheses of different philosophies of truth in an attempt to be, in Shaffer's words, ‘positivist . . . interpretivist, and legal realist all at once’. The first part of this article draws on existing historical accounts of legal realism briefly to trace the problematic and ambiguous place of scientism in the legal realist tradition. Then, in the second and more important part of the article, I argue that the ambivalence of the legal realists’ vision has left us, in certain contexts, with a complicated form of mixed legal-scientific governance which has proved remarkably and surprisingly resilient in the face of late twentieth century critiques of scientific objectivity. This may be one of the most enduring legacies of the ‘old’ legal realists for those today who work in the New Legal Realist vein.


1968 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. W. Coats

Few scholars would nowadays question the importance of the United States in the world of learning; but the process whereby that nation attained its present eminence still remains obscure. Among the cognoscenti, it is generally acknowledged that American scholarship had come of age by the early 1900s, whereas fifty years earlier there had been only a handful of American scholars and scientists of international repute, and the country's higher education lagged far behind its European counterpart. Yet despite the recent popularity of intellectual history and research in higher education, which has produced a veritable flood of publications touching on various aspects of this theme, the heart of the process—the emergence of the academic profession—is still inadequately documented and imperfectly understood.


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