Language, Discrimination and Employability: Employers’ Othering and Racist Representations of Domestic Migrant Workers on Social Media

Discursive othering deals with the many ways in which language is used to express prejudice against minorities, and it outlines the processes and conditions that promote group-based inequality and marginalization. This article focuses on online othering, and it analyzes a corpus of 615 comments posted by Hong Kong employers of domestic migrant workers (DMWs) on social media. First, a quantitative analysis of the corpus outlines the content categories found in the posts, and second, a discourse analysis of representative excerpts illustrates the claims made about DMWs. Employers engage in othering of their helpers, and the analysis shows how demeaning racist comments function to publicly shame them and warn others not to employ them. The article uses Language and Social Psychology frameworks to analyze the posts, and it discusses the functions of using racist derogatory language. The paper concludes by discussing how research may be used to address pressing social issues.

Teaching in a Polarized Islamic Society: A Phenomenological Study of the Christian School Teachers in the Gujrat City

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan is also home to other religious minorities. Since Independence, these minorities have played a significant role in serving the nation through different professions, and teaching is one of them. Yet, there is a growing concern regarding how well and respectfully they are accommodated in a Muslim majority society. This phenomenological research study explores the perspectives of Christian teachers concerning their difficulties in dealing with students and parents of different religions and their support needs. Ten teachers were purposively selected for semi-structured interviews. Content analysis revealed that although most teachers were satisfied with working conditions and the behaviors of students and parents with them, few of them highlighted the issues of forced conversion to Islam and usage of derogatory language. Teachers also suggested that there is a need to change the mindset of the people through education, and the government should provide more opportunities to minorities.

Hate Speech in Social Media and Its Effects on the LGBT Community: A Review of the Current Research

Hate speech on social media is a real problem with real consequences. Despite the constant efforts of social media platforms to moderate, flag, and ban hate posts, there is still a vast amount of hateful content flooding them. Hate speech, in general, and offensive material online, in particular, are not easy to define and may include a wide spectre of expression. To thoroughly account for the nature and intensity of the effects of hate speech in social media requires to distinguish between various shades of hate speech targeting different groups and their subsequent effects. This paper seeks to review the literature on the psychological effects of online hate speech on the LGBT community and to highlight the strong negative impact of this phenomenon. The paper aims to contribute to the field by examining the propagation and the effects of derogatory language and hate speech based on sexual orientation.

Language evolution: examining the link between cross-modality and aggression through the lens of disorders

We demonstrate how two linguistic phenomena, figurative language (implicating cross-modality) and derogatory language (implicating aggression), both demand a precise degree of (dis)inhibition in the same cortico-subcortical brain circuits, in particular cortico-striatal networks, whose connectivity has been significantly enhanced in recent evolution. We examine four cognitive disorders/conditions that exhibit abnormal patterns of (dis)inhibition in these networks: schizophrenia (SZ), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), synaesthesia and Tourette's syndrome (TS), with the goal of understanding why the two phenomena altered reactive aggression and altered cross-modality cluster together in these disorders. Our proposal is that enhanced cross-modality (necessary to support language, in particular metaphoricity) was a result, partly a side-effect, of self-domestication (SD). SD targeted the taming of reactive aggression, but reactive impulses are controlled by the same cortico-subcortical networks that are implicated in cross-modality. We further add that this biological process of SD did not act alone, but was engaged in an intense feedback loop with the cultural emergence of early forms of language/grammar, whose high degree of raw metaphoricity and verbal aggression also contributed to increased brain connectivity and cortical control. Consequently, in conjunction with linguistic expressions serving as approximations/‘fossils’ of the earliest stages of language, these cognitive disorders/conditions serve as confident proxies of brain changes in language evolution, helping us reconstruct certain crucial aspects of early prehistoric languages and cognition, as well as shed new light on the nature of the disorders. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

Derogatory Language in Charting: The Domino Effect

No matter your background and expertise in healthcare, it is still possible for you to be impacted by stigmatizing language through reviewing a chart. Medical documentation is used to coordinate and communicate care plans from provider to provider and with members of a patient’s care team. In reality, a patient’s history and plan of care is not the only thing that can be passed through. An important theme of this article is exposing the fact that bias can be passed from provider to provider through stigmatizing language in clinical documentation.

Experience and Construction of Mental Health Among English Female Football Match Officials

Research into the mental health of female sport match officials is scarce, despite verbal and physical abuse being commonplace. Twelve female match officials officiating male and female matches took part in semistructured interviews, investigating their experiences and understanding of their mental health. Deductive thematic analysis identified four overarching themes: male and female football environments; abuse, sexism, and homophobia in football; formal and informal support networks; and mental health knowledge and experience—accessing services. The results revealed toxic, abusive, male-dominated environments that included sexist and derogatory language, negatively affecting their mental health. The female match officials struggled to ascertain mechanisms for support and identified that the educational courses and local organizations did not provide mental health information or training, and match officials often experienced poor mental health during and after matches. Increased engagement with mental health literacy and policy change from governing bodies is required, given the unique challenges female match officials face.

A Narrative Analysis of Political Satire on Pakistani Electronic Media

This paper aims to investigate how the Satire programs Hasb-e-Haal (Statusquo, 2009), and KhabarDar (vigilant, 2017) produced and aired on private Pakistan Television channels influenced and formed a perception of the viewers about political issues persisted at that historical moment of time. With the comedic revelations of politicians' immoral behavior and corruption, this paper unfolds the unethical attitude of the journalists and the TV channels that lean towards political parties for their personal interests. It was found that the Express-News' Khabardar has friendly coverage towards PTI and its personalities and antagonistic towards PML-N and its political figures. Dunya News' Hasb-e-Hall coverage is opposite to the former. The performers posed as politicians use derogatory language to the opponents. A cynical comedy about political personalities plays a major role in opinion building and changing the political attitude of the masses and thus influence their voting behavior.

The Language of Derogation and Hate: Functions, Consequences, and Reappropriation

Over the last decades, the use of explicit derogatory language (e.g., hate speech, slurs, micro-insults) has risen in many countries. We provide an overview on blatant language discrimination, including its psychological antecedents and consequences. After presenting a working definition of derogatory language and describing its prevalence, we discuss the social functions it serves and the role it plays in identity protection, in legitimizing group hierarchies, and in establishing and enforcing group norms. Drawing from both the socio-cognitive and discursive traditions in social psychology, it is argued that the language people are exposed to and the language they employ, shape the way they think and construct reality. We also consider two ways in which targeted groups may respond to derogatory language, specifically confrontation and reappropriation. Finally, we address challenges for future research, in particular the need for more cross disciplinary research to ebb the growing proliferation of hate speech on digital media which has become a global international concern.