scholarly journals In search of identity: Adult education in Bosnia and Herzegovina between the socialist legacy and neoliberal tendencies

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 37-52
Author(s):  
Amina Isanović Hadziomerović

The paper presents an analysis of the key processes in the field of adult education in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) referring to its socialist past and current tendencies dominantly motivated by the country’s aspiration towards accession to the European Union (EU). Any effort to offer a systematic overview of the history of adult education in BiH faces ambiguity and a lack of systematic data. Unlike other parts of the education system where historical accounts are to a certain extent preserved and subject to scholarly studies and investigations, adult education in BiH seems to be a field without a documented past. Based on critical discourse analysis, the paper intends to unravel the intricate socio-political texture that has shaped the key themes in adult education both in the country’s socialist past and its democratic present. The results of the analysis indicate several quite clear patterns: (a) the ambiguous treatment of the socialist past, from romanticising to annihilating its achievements and arrangements; (b) the rise of private institutions in adult education in the post-socialist period and the diversification of the education on offer; and (c) tensions between aspirations towards global and European trends on the one hand and insistence on localisation in terms of shaping adult education policy on the other.  

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-36
Author(s):  
Saroj G.C.

This paper examines a saga of the brave history of Nepal which has often been part and parcel of school education in Nepal. The brave history in the textbooks has been treated as a means of enlightenment and a catalyst to cultivate national character. On close inspection, however, teaching history embarks a political enterprise – an articulation of interest to shape the idea of the citizenry. Using the method of critical discourse analysis and post-historicist ideas, this paper takes historical accounts attributed to three pillars of the national narrative of brave history – Bhimsen Thapa, Balbhadra Kunwar, and Prithvi Narayan Shah, as depicted in the government school textbooks for analysis. The paper examines how the history of bravery has been negotiated and maintained as a comfortable and simplistic narrative at the cost of teaching history more critically in order to inform students and examine emerging questions about the national heroes by excluding the other side of historical narratives. Finally, this paper proposes education at any level cannot be taken as value-neutral, and history should be studied historically.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 294-305
Author(s):  
Stefanny Lauwren ◽  

Greta Thunberg delivered a speech entitled “You’re Acting Like Spoiled, Irresponsible Children” to influential figures in Europe through the “Civil Society for renaissance” event, in which she was personally invited by the president of the organizer, Luca Jahier. Through her speech, she managed to convince the European Union to pledge to spend billions of euros to combat the climate crisis. This study aims to discover how interpersonal metafunction is used in the speech and what functions are revealed through Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis and Hallidayan Systemic Functional Grammar. The data, consisting of seventy-one independent clauses, were taken from Thunberg’s book which consists of her speech transcription, titled “No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference”. The research discovers that through the use of mood, modality, and pronouns, Thunberg conveys her view on her relationship with the audience as victim and perpetrator, and the one who holds responsibility and takes the blame.


Author(s):  
Alexandra-Niculina Babii

The digital era has determined a very easy creation and propagation of fake news. As a consequence, it has become harder for people to fight this malicious phenomenon. However, the only weapon that can have results in this informational war is critical thinking. But who should use it? The creators of fake news that do this for different reasons? The social platforms that allow the circulation of fake news with ease? Mass media which does not always verify with much attention and rigour the information they spread? The Governments that should apply legal sanctions? Or the consumer that receives all the fake news, him being the final target? Even if critical thinking would be useful for every actor on fake news’ stage, the one who needs it the most is the consumer. This comes together with the big responsibility placed on his shoulders. Even if others are creating and spreading disinformation, the consumer must be aware and be careful with the information he encounters on a daily basis. He should use his reasoning and he should not believe everything just because it is on the Internet. How can he do that? Critical thinking seems to be a quite difficult tool to use, especially for non-specialized individuals. This paper’s aim is to propose a simplified model of critical thinking that can contribute to detecting fake news with the help of people’s self judgement. The model is based on theories from Informal Logic considering the structure of arguments and on Critical Discourse Analysis theories concerning the patterns found in the content of the information.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 80
Author(s):  
Eva Eckert ◽  
Oleksandra Kovalevska

In the European Union, the concern for sustainability has been legitimized by its politically and ecologically motivated discourse disseminated through recent policies of the European Commission and the local as well as international media. In the article, we question the very meaning of sustainability and examine the European Green Deal, the major political document issued by the EC in 2019. The main question pursued in the study is whether expectations verbalized in the Green Deal’s plans, programs, strategies, and developments hold up to the scrutiny of critical discourse analysis. We compare the Green Deal’s treatment of sustainability to how sustainability is presented in environmental and social science scholarship and point out that research, on the one hand, and the politically motivated discourse, on the other, do not correlate and often actually contradict each other. We conclude that sustainability discourse and its keywords, lexicon, and phraseology have become a channel through which political institutions in the EU such as the European Commission sideline crucial environmental issues and endorse their own presence. The Green Deal discourse shapes political and institutional power of the Commission and the EU.


2021 ◽  
pp. 026732312199951
Author(s):  
Ayça Demet Atay

Turkey’s membership process to the European Union has been a ‘long, narrow and uphill road’, as former Turkish Prime Minister, and later President, Turgut Özal once stated. This study analyses the representation of the European Union–Turkey negotiation process in the Turkish newspapers Cumhuriyet and Hürriyet from 1959 to 2019 with the aim of understanding the changing meaning of ‘Europe’ and the ‘European Union’ in Turkish news discourse. There is comprehensive literature on the representation of Turkey’s membership process in the European press. This article aims to contribute to the field by assessing the representation of the same process from a different angle. For this purpose, Cumhuriyet and Hürriyet newspapers’ front page coverage of selected 10 key dates in the European Union–Turkey relations is analysed through critical discourse analysis.


Res Publica ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 36 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 361-380
Author(s):  
Paul Magnette

This paper examines the evolving ideological content of the concept of citizenship and particularly the challenges it faces as a consequence of the building of the European Union. From an epistemological point of view it is first argued that citizenship may be described as a dual concept: it is both a legal institution composed of the rights of the citizen as they are fixed at a certain moment of its history, and a normative ideal which embodies their political aspirations. As a result of this dual nature, citizenship is an essentially dynamicnotion, which is permanently evolving between a state of balance and change.  The history of this concept in contemporary political thought shows that, from the end of the second World War it had raised a synthesis of democratic, liberal and socialist values on the one hand, and that it was historically and logically bound to the Nation-State on the other hand. This double synthesis now seems to be contested, as the themes of the "crisis of the Nation State" and"crisis of the Welfare state" do indicate. The last part of this paper grapples with recent theoretical proposals of new forms of european citizenship, and argues that the concept of citizenship could be renovated and take its challenges into consideration by insisting on the duties and the procedures it contains.


2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 117-131
Author(s):  
Vandana Lunyal

In the world that promotes consumerism, companies are in a competition to produce a variety of commodities and to convert people into consumers of their products whether they need them or not. The abundance of consumer products is promoted through advertisements. These advertisements persuade the common people to become consumers for which they use a variety of strategies, the most common being the use of problem-solution format in language and an effective use of the verbal and the non-verbal. This paper focuses on investigating the verbal and the non-verbal aspects of the text to examine how ideological constructs function in the discourse of advertisingthrough the use of hegemony. A perfume advertisement has been selected for a detailed analysis of the verbal and the visual elements to illustrate how advertisers commonly attempt to transmit some underlying, yet unasserted, meanings to unsuspecting readers who may understand the intentions of the advertisers i.e. to promote consumption but may not understand that the aim is achieved by generally promoting cultural stereotypes which work towards the disadvantage of one social group vis-à-vis the other especially the one that the advertisement is addressed to. The tool for the analysis of the advertisement is Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis (CDA) that uses the analysis of the verbal and the visual to reveal ideological underpinnings. CDA also has pedagogical implications for instance the language used for describing products, if analysed critically by language learners, helps them to unfold the hidden meanings as is illustrated through the analysis. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/nelta.v19i1-2.12085 Journal of NELTA, Vol 19 No. 1-2, December 2014: 117-131


2014 ◽  
pp. 143-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianne Robin Russo

It should be understood that the importance of adult education is to illuminate the current context in which the adult functions. This adult frames directly linked with the construct of social justice. Adult education is examined under two frames: (a) Merriam and Brockett (1997) who define adult education as “…activities intentionally designed for the purpose of bringing about learning among those whose age, social roles, or self-perception define them as adults” and, (b) Horton's philosophy developed under the Highlander Folk School. Understanding this correlation of adult education within a social-political phenomena, the nature of adult education may belong to a wide-ranging spectrum of teaching and learning in terms of: (a) media messaging and the rhetoric that may be inculcating adults, ultimately swaying public opinion; (b) adult messaging and totalitarian implications; (c) adult education and the state; (d) knowledge of history; (e) the history of adult education and how it has been instrumental in social justice; and (f) what adult education, inclusive of adult educators, must do to mitigate class hegemony.


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