Discursive Positioning of Intimate Partners: A Structural-Relational Approach to Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)

Purpose: This study is about the discursive positioning of intimate partners: A structural-relational approach to intimate partner violence. The study attempts to uncover the story lines of the IPV narratives, the social force of the discursive acts of the narratives, the enacted positions, and the (de) legitimization of rights and duties of the positions of the referents in the narratives. Method: the study adopts the random sampling method in which two IPV narrative were randomly selected from one pseudo named male and female victims. The narratives were in the form of documented transcripts which is in line with Harre and Van lagenhoove (1999) accounting positioning that allows a retrospect study of social actors positioning of this kind. The study also adopted the Halliday’s transitivity process to substantiate the positioning works in the narrative and the mechanism with which these acts are tied to the social structure. Results: The findings of the study revealed that the declarations of the narratives indicates the evaluative and normative underlying judgment on the deontic powers to say and do something in the moral space of intimate partner relations. Conclusion: a socio-constructionist study of this nature reveals the relationship between the narrative referents point of view about actions, point of actions and line of life as regards the moralities of social behaviour in the moral space of intimate partner relationship and how it triggers tendencies for IPV.

VISUALIZATION OF CULTURE: EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS

The authors of the article focus on changes related to education. Education is considered as a communicative construct arising from the process of symbolic interaction between individuals who establish meanings when coordinating their statements. The communicative generation of situations and orders of knowledge is interpreted as educational semiosis. Analyzed is the discourse of modern humanities which are competing with each other in determining the current socio-cultural situation. Highlighted is the research tendency, asserting the point of changing the cultural morphogenesis by means of its visualization processes. Based on this, the hypothesis of a gap between culture and education is put forward. According to this hypothesis, cultural relations are increasingly mediated by figurative participation, while educational practices appeal to verbal and textual forms of the situational mediation. Within the relations between actors in education, this is reflected in the dominance of legitimate (metanarrative) samples, the transmission model of educational knowledge, the communicative preference for orderliness, the desire for unambiguity, the clarity and completeness of logocentric forms of thinking, and so on. The change of the mediation form in the organization of educational interaction and the transition from the verbocentric order to the ocular-centric one, is suggested as a step in the development of modern education. It must affect the way educational relations (educational communication) function, the way words (speech) and images (vision) are inter-related, the principles of students’ orientation in their attitudes to the sign-symbolic world, their partners in interaction, and to themselves. In the first case, the point is to organize educational communication based on the principles of paradoxicality, paralogicality, and disproportionality of statements and images of the situation. Here the most important educational objective is to make the participants of the educational interaction consider their differences in their interpretations of the world, their styles of utterance, and their discursive positioning. In the second case, the educational objective is the liberalization of vision, which emerges in the course of perceptual work emancipated from the primary procedures of interpretation and comprehension of the visible and relying on the action of the image as the context of the statement. The third case is about worldview constants, radical changes in the position of the educational subject, acquiring the experience of self-detachment in learning. In the final analysis, this provides an opportunity for differentiation and diversification of the worlds of human presence.

An Artist and a Writer: YA Literature by Anna Höglund

This article highlights the interpictorality in two YA books by the Swedish writer and illustrator Anna Höglund, Om detta talar man endast med kaniner [This Is Something You Only Talk About with Rabbits] (2013) and Att vara jag [To Be Me] (2015). The analysis of the visual intertextuality between pieces of artwork by Peter Tillberg, Frida Kahlo, Lena Cronqvist, Richard Bergh and René Magritte and five pictures from Höglund’s books thematises school, body and identity. The discursive positioning in the artworks and in Höglund’s pictures directs the readers in their decoding of Höglund’s text, offers possibilities in their interpretations and challenges the adolescent readers to make connections across different formats, such as text and image, and between different images.

Right-wing populist media events in schengen Europe

Leaders of European right-wing populism (RWP) have developed speeches about the state border control required to protect the “people” electing them. Nevertheless, are these RWP narratives necessarily circulated during populist media events that take place in the symbolic locations of European integration? It is argued that border control discourse in these EU places can be mitigated by RWP actors, but also emphasized by the media depending on the separated predispositions of politicians and reporters to address the border issue in a given context. Bourdieusian “field theory” is used in this article to grasp the potential differentiated discursive positioning. Based on a comparative analysis of RWP media events organized in the town of Schengen in Luxembourg, the investigation allows us to shed new light on the specificities of populism in the media.

Power and knowledge negotiations in a collectivity of practice: From peripheralization to epistemological suspicion

Knowledge co-creation at the boundaries of communities of practice (CoPs) can lead to heightened tensions and power struggles. This study examines how power struggles among CoPs can begin to structure knowledge creation processes. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a new medical research project, the study shows how power and knowledge negotiations became manifested through conflicting discursive positioning and coercive power affecting knowledge co-creation efforts. One CoP adopted an authoritative leader role, prioritized their own problem definition and knowledge creation process, and engaged in the peripheralization of other CoPs. The power and discursive moves prevented the development of shared problems and interconnected practices contributing to epistemological suspicion among the participating CoPs. The study offers new insights to research on power dynamics in situated learning and knowing by problematizing the relationship between localized practices and emerging interconnected practices, by shedding light on how discursive positioning and coercive power operate together, and by developing peripheralization and epistemological suspicion as potential explanations for how and why knowledge workers struggle to act on opportunities for knowledge co-creation.

Responsibility inoculation: Constructing ‘good parent’ accounts when accessing child mental health services

With the prevalence of child mental health conditions rising, the role of the initial mental health assessment is crucial in determining need. Utilising a critical discursive analytic framework, we explored the ways in which parents during these mental health assessments constructed the child’s difficulties as medicalised and doctorable as opposed to systemic and familial. Through this discursive positioning, we examined the ways in which parents mitigated blame and accounted for the child’s behaviours and emotions. Parents engaged in three accounting practices to construct the child’s problems as dispositional and to mitigate against an alternative familial system interpretation. First, they drew upon normative cultural repertoires of parenting. Second, they mediated ways whereby normative practices were deviated from in the best interest of the child. Third, they rhetorically positioned overcoming systemic difficulties by illustrating cooperative parenting in separated families. Our findings have implications for how parents build a case for the need for medical intervention in assessment settings.

Proximity of Borders

Defining nonreligion has raised conceptual uncertainties about its substantive ontology and its relational distinctions from religion, secularity, secularization, and the secular. The field’s early development has deployed the religious/secular binary as a methodological tool, rendering secularity and nonreligion visible through its discursive positioning of being in-relation to religion. Although this has proven productive in substantiating such concepts, it has also constrained the field by identifying its objects of study indirectly. This paper argues for a proximal distinction between secularity and nonreligion using the development of secular Alcoholics Anonymous groups in Toronto, Canada, as an example, locating them between borders that constitute a third space. Within this space, secularity and nonreligion operate, identifying locations of proximity, border phenomena, and religious/secular entanglements that have otherwise remained interstitial and have precluded analysis. In turn, borders are retained for methodological utility, while the third space opens new analytical possibilities to advance the field forward.