“Wipe them out”! The Social Construction of Children’s Centres

The future for Children’s Centres in England looks bleak.. A change in government in the UK in 2010 saw a change in political perspective that was manifested in one way as austerity. The effects of austerity impacted on a range of public services including Children’s Centres. Children’s Centres also came under government scrutiny resulting in a change of focus in their activities from a core offer of providing services to having a core purpose. The study used a flexible qualitative design to produce a critical discourse analysis about the social construction of Children’s Centres. A range of publicly available documents were gathered to provide naturalistic data relating to Children’s Centres. In addition, six Children’s Centre workers were purposefully selected to take part in a semi structured focus group interview. The subsequent analysis of the document and interview data revealed a range of rhetorical devices used by speakers to construct their perceptions of Children’s Centres. These constructions were organised under four dominant discourses; a discourse of recognition, a discourse of pragmatism, a discourse of pessimism and a discourse of change. One common factor in these four discourses was the role of the UK government. Children’s Centres did not appear to get recognition for some the work they did with families but there was a pragmatism about what Children’s Centres could provide during a period of austerity. There was pessimism about what was happening to Children’s Centres especially in relation to vulnerable families but what seemed inevitable was Children’s Centres were changing.

Stakeholders’ Attitudes about the Transplantations of the Mediterranean Seagrass Posidonia oceanica as a Habitat Restoration Measure after Anthropogenic Impacts: A Q Methodology Approach

Anthropogenic impacts on Posidonia oceanica meadows have led to a decline of this ecosystem throughout the Mediterranean. Transplantations have often been prescribed as a compensation measure to mitigate the impacts caused by coastal maritime works. Here a Q methodology approach was used to investigate the stakeholders’ attitudes in four case studies of P. oceanica transplants realized in Italian waters. Twenty-two respondents were asked to score 37 statements, and the resultant Q-sorting was analyzed via an inverse PCA using the KADE software. Four discourses, corresponding to the significant axes in the factorial analysis were identified: science and conservation (F1), oriented at a rigorous scientific approach; engineering and industry (F2), oriented at the economic development; environmentalism and participation (F3), oriented at the conservation of seagrass meadows; and transplantation-oriented (F4), oriented at the realization of transplants as compensation measures. The main conflicts and agreements between discourses are assessed and discussed, based on the analysis of the distinguishing statements that contributed to consensus or disagreement among discourses. The benefits of the Q methodology in the identification and mediation of conflicts in the four case studies are discussed, and its potential as a powerful aid in the development of a good environmental governance is acknowledged.

Radical Islam in the Western Academy

Scholarly interest in radical Islam is long-standing and crosses multiple disciplines. Yet, while the labelling of Islam and Muslim actors as ‘radical’ is extensive, this has not been interrogated as a particular scholarly practice. And while studies of non-Western radicalism have grown in recent years, cross-cultural analysis of radicalism as a particular concept in political thought has been neglected. This article aims to begin to address this question, with reference to radical Islam. By treating radicalism as a meta-concept, it identifies radical Islam as a malleable and composite category that is constituted by, and made legible through, conceptual properties associated with four discourses in the study of radicalism with origins in the Western academy: Euro-radicalism, identified with the European left and critical theory; fundamentalism; radicalisation; and liberalism. I argue that radical Islam is under-theorised and over-determined as a scholarly category. This can be explained by how concepts originating in the Western academy to address Western contexts and phenomena function as master frameworks, narratives, or pivots against or around which radical Islam is defined. This is the case even when Eurocentrism is contested by critical theorists who tend to reproduce it because they do not abandon Western conceptions of radicalism but rather draw on them. Academic accounts of radical Islam also authenticate Islam by advancing selective, strategic or apologetic descriptions of what constitutes radicalism. In these ways, critical scholarship, including within IR, can also be insufficiently attentive to marginal and heterodox voices that fall outside hegemonic conceptions of Islamic normativity.

Hi-Tech-Oriented National Service: The Free Choice of Religious Women Recruits and the De-Monopolization of the Israeli Military

In recent years, Israel has witnessed two significant processes that challenge the dominant republican discourse that prioritizes military over national-civic service (known as The Israeli national-civilian service—NCS)in terms of contributing the constitution of citizenship and of the material and symbolic convertibility offered to service candidates. The first is related to the expanding range of roles offered in the NCS. The second, related process, which is our current focus, occurs among young religious women from the urban upper-middle class who respond to this expansion by seeking to serve in technological roles, given their high qualifications. Combined, these processes transform the status of the NCS and accelerate the de-monopolization of military service. To examine the contribution of religious young women to the change in the status of service in Israel, we conducted a narrative analysis of interviews with service candidates. Our analysis revealed their strategic use of four different discourses: the neo-liberal economic discourse, the liberal rights and self-realization discourse, the ethnonational discourse, and the religious gender discourse. The way the participants negotiated the four discourses to justify their selection of either military or national-civic service structured their agency as actors transforming the power equation between the two types of service.

The Role of Urban Green Space in Promoting Inclusion: Experiences From the Netherlands

Urban Green Space (UGS) is considered to be beneficial for health and wellbeing of urban residents. But there is growing evidence that benefits are not equally distributed. In this article we aim to understand the role that UGS plays in the process of social exclusion and the role urban greening strategies can play in enhancing social equity for specific groups that are excluded: elderly people with dementia, people with mental issues and people from an underprivileged neighborhood. The concepts of inclusion and exclusion and their relation to UGS are discussed. Four exclusion mechanisms are distinguished based on the role of the physical and societal environment and on the role of actors involved (public or private). Further, we identify four discourses behind possible strategies and measures to promote inclusion. These mechanisms and discourses are confronted with an analysis of three cases promoting inclusion of elderly with dementia, people with mental health issues and people from an underprivileged neighborhood. Succesful inclusion strategies in these cases are based on alignment between private actors initiatives and public actions. The cases indicate that public and private actors need to cooperate better in order to make UGS part of inclusion strategies.

Discourses on sustainable forest management and their integration into climate policies in South Africa

In South Africa, forests can play an important role in achieving the broader goals of climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, national policies on climate change mitigation and adaptation seem to narrow the potential contributions of the forest sector to climate protection targets. This is largely because of the divergence between the management goals of forests for climate protection, and products for both industries and livelihoods. This article uses discourse analysis as a methodological tool to analyze South Africa's climate and forest policies to identify the discourses shaping forest policy goals and mandates, and their integration into climate policy targets for forest-based climate change interventions. Four discourses, namely, preservation of forest integrity, social inclusiveness, equitable benefit sharing, and inclusive development of forests and forest-based communities, were identified as the dominant discourses influencing forest policy goals in South Africa. Their influence on forest management programmes has a mix of costs and benefits outcomes. For example, policy responses to the discourse on the preservation of forest integrity have resulted in ecologically sustainable forests in some cases and in other cases restricted the participation of local people in forest enterprise development. Additionally, climate policies recognized six possible interventions with respect to forest-based climate change mitigation and adaptation in South Africa but were silent about the four discourses shaping forest policy goals. Consequently, existing climate policies do not contain regulations to guide forest management for climate change mitigation and adaptation. We therefore recommend that forest-related goals in climate policy be grounded in the past experiences and lessons of forest policy implementations in order to take advantage of the synergies and reduce the trade-offs with respect to multipurpose management of forests for livelihoods, enterprise development, and climate change mitigation and adaptation.

How to have fun with sticks, bowls, and colored water: insights into multimodal signifier operations through Lacan’s four discourses

In this manuscript, I present a signifier-based, multimodal discourse analysis of a focal event involving four children (ages 4–5) as they interacted with materials and with one another in their preschool classroom. I draw upon Jacques Lacan’s theory of the four discourses, applying the mathemes, or formulas that he developed, in order to map the multimodal signifier operations as they occurred in the moment-to-moment interactions during the event. My purpose was to use the signifier as a conceptual tool for multimodal discourse analysis, which revealed the highly particular discursive agencies that are characteristic aspects of signifier operations. Further, I examined the movement and operations of the signifiers as they were drawn from across modes and combined to create opportunities for the subjects to participate in the discourse. These signifier operations occurred according to discursive agencies of an educational discourse that both reduced and delimited subjectivities, as well as agencies that the focal subjects introduced to challenge and re-signify toward new ways to participate in the discourse.

Empire—A World History

This chapter attempts a synthesis of the imperial experience in world history. Setting out from an in-depth comparison of two incidents, one from the US occupation of Iraq, the other from the Jewish uprising against Nero (66–70 CE), cooperation with local elites is identified as the key to imperial government. The chapter proceeds to discuss current definitions of empire, followed by a wide-ranging survey of modern theories of empire. Most of these can be grouped within four discourses that originate in societal debates from the early 1900s: about monopoly, capitalism and empire; about empire as predatory networks of aristocratic elites; about empire and national identity; and about geopolitics and the balance of power. These four theoretical discourses provide the four dimensions of an analytical matrix that, finally, structure an attempt at synthesizing the imperial experience in world history, from the third millennium BCE Levantine Bronze Age until the present.