On Some Regularities of the Transformation of the Civilizational Idea in Modern Russia

The paper analyzes the changes in the content of the civilizational idea in modern Russia. It is shown that the substantive changes concern both the traditional fluctuations between the orientation to the European and Eurasian development path, and the emergence of new features, in particular related to environmental and economic issues. At the same time, there is a reconfiguration of the civilizational idea regarding economic and political discourses. There is a fusion of civilizational identity with political identity, which manifests itself in the form of active use of national-state resources for the formation of national-civilizational identity. It is concluded that at the state level, civilizational identity is supported by political and economic discourses, and the Russian-Eurasian discourse itself is being transformed, turning from a discourse about the integration of cultures into a discourse about the integration of economies based on the integration of cultures.

The positioning of dual qualification studies in Finnish upper secondary education and government policy since the 1980s

This article explores the positioning of dual qualifications (DQs) in the Finnish education policy and the education system since the late 1980s. The analysis is carried out in the context of academic-vocational divide. At the end of the 1980s, Finland questioned the functionality of the strict academic-vocational divide in post-compulsory education, and a unified upper secondary education was initiated. DQ was the result of two contradictory political discourses: the aim to make education system more equal and the 1990s’ market oriented education policy. In the 2000s, although segregation at the upper secondary level was strengthened, the DQ simultaneously became an established study route. However, in 2007 due to changes in political power, the DQ was repositioned on the periphery of education policy and academic-vocational divide became stronger. The main focus as regards the functions of DQs until the end of the 2010s was on efforts to enhance the use of educational resources and improve the possibilities for individual and flexible education choices. The aim of the current government, elected in 2019, is to strengthen cooperation at upper secondary level, which is also expected to include DQs. However, the actualisation might be mitigated by the educational reforms of the previous government.

Citizens' Political Discourses on Climate Change and Vaccines

The main objective of this chapter is to compare the political discourses of Polish and Spanish citizens on science issues such as vaccines and climate change expressed by the citizens participating in the public consultations held in València (Spain) and Łódź (Poland) during the autumn of 2019. As the general elections were held very close to the public consultations in both countries, it was expected that there would be references to election campaigns, political parties, or public policymaking during the debates. Then, those statements explicitly expressing political views on climate change and vaccines were selected from the debate transcripts before applying five specific frames and variables for analysis and interpretation. The results show that more political opinions were expressed in the debates on climate change than on vaccines. Moreover, the citizens' views on the science-politics dichotomy mainly were negative, with the men mixing science with politics more than the women.

Multilingual Autofiction: Mobilizing Language(s)?

This chapter argues that in postmigrant literature published since the 1990s, a new mode has emerged that traverses different countries and cultures: multilingual autofiction. The chapter explores the aesthetic scope and political potential of this autofictional mode for the negotiation of an author’s multilingual identities, with reference to case studies from Germany, Sweden, and Denmark: Feridun Zaimoğlu’s Kanak Sprak: 24 Misstöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Kanak Sprak: 24 Discordant Notes from the Margin of Society) (1995) Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Ett öga rött (One Eye Red) (2005), and Yahya Hassan’s YahyaHassan (2013). It investigates the ways in which the flexibility that autofictional strategies afford is mobilized in these texts to penetrate political discourses on migration, transculturality, and racism.

Features of Discursive Structures in Political Communication

This article is devoted to the study of the discursive structures of political texts published on Twitter of the President of the United States. The material of the study was the statements of Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the period from November 1, 2019 to August 31, 2021. Its multimillion audience of subscribers makes Twitter a powerful political tool with the ability to influence public opinion. The purpose of this article is to identify the discursive structures arising in political communication as a result of the actualization of the category of discursive heterogeneity, which includes elements of interdiscursiveness and polydiscursiveness. The authors use various methods: descriptive, contextual analysis, comparative, methods of observation, content analysis and discourse analysis. Using the linguistic concept of the American scientist D. Himes S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G, the analysis of the situation components Setting and scene, Participants, Ends, Act Sequence, Key, Instrumentalities, Norms, Genre is carried out. Being a part of the media discourse and demonstrating the features of the Internet genre, the written messages of politicians are laconic, expressive, and tend to economize on linguistic means. The same communicants, depending on the context of utterances, become participants in different types of discourses. The study analyzes the foreign and domestic political discourses, the security discourse, as well as a number of accompanying special discourses that constitute political communication. The choice of the subject matter of the messages is due to the high degree of importance of issues of foreign and domestic policy, as well as stability and security.

Postmodern neoliberal discourses vs postfeminist theories and practices

The aim of the article is considered the conceptual reconstruction of the relationship between postmodern feminism and the notional field of contemporary neoliberalism. The analytical methods used were based on the assertion that the complexity of textual interventions requires interdisciplinary approaches. The findings and results of the research carried out accentuate that COVID-19 has contributed greatly to the contradictions of the current global landscape in the contexts of neoliberalism and feminism. Feminism asserts as a discourse that the conceptual apparatus of neoliberalism has not served its goals; in fact, postfeminism has not yet chosen its route in the neoliberal context. The assumption that women cannot win their “vindication battle” in the world where "the game is fixed" continues to be taken as an axiom, even though the coronavirus pandemic causes some observers to proclaim the return of influential governments and social contracts. The latter accentuates the role of female representation in neoliberal social, cultural, and political discourses at the global level.

Wordsworth’s Lucy poems as the Reflections of the French Revolution: A New Historicist Study

The current study takes a New Historic outlook toward William Wordsworth’s the “Lucy Poems” and believes that by a minute scrutiny of these poems we can expose the power structure and the dominant discourses that according to New Historicism have shaped the poet’s character, society and world. Accordingly, the paper suggests that the poet through symbolic and non-symbolic ways has embedded historical and political facts in these poems. To do so, the research will reveal some controversial correspondences among these poems, William Wordsworth’s life and historical facts of the French Revolution. To support this idea, the study will bring quotations not only from modern conspicuous literary critics but also from the poets and Romantic contemporaries to show how the historical and political discourses of the period have greatly influenced both William Wordsworth and even the literature of the whole era, i.e., Romanticism. As a matter of fact, this research intends to connect the “Lucy Poems” to the contemporary historical context and the poet’s ideals of the Revolution in France. The findings, however, reveal that William Wordsworth has been submissive to the historical events of his time.

Political Communication and the Nigerian Democratic Experiment: Critical Insights from Yorùbá Philosophy

Nigeria’s political sphere is fraught with violence, electoral frauds, unfulfilled promises and negligence on the part of the ruling class, hence political communication in Nigeria have been faced with hostility from electorates spurred by public distrust of the mass media. This essay philosophically argues for a culture-bound understanding of political communication in a way that enables a strategic decolonization of communication concepts and ideologies. This cultural understanding advocates the need for the domestication of information prior to their application in a way that enable us to properly reflect on and engage with the existential complexities of Africa’s political landscapes. The central claim of the Yorùbá political communication is that local and national communicative principles in political discourses should be subsumed under epistemic, ontological, and ethical dimensions drawn from Yorùbá histories, cultures, and values. This essay therefore deploys Yorùbá philosophical insights underlying the creation, distribution, use and control of information as a political resource that could be adopted by governments, organizations, the media, and individuals in Nigeria.

Stone Scissors Paper. A Trilogy of Papers

This is a trilogy of papers about land and people and the ecology they create together. Leah lives on the coast in South Wales. Lisen lives on the island of Gotland in Sweden. Gail lives in Yorkshire in the north of England. What connects us and our writings is the land, its history, its place in industry and what we do and don’t see. The cuts in the land reflect the cuts in our minds, unnegotiated edits in our stories, and disconnects in political discourses. This trilogy of papers documents some of these cuts and joins. We speak about the land we walk on and the stories told about it. We point to scars in the landscape and ask how they connect with those in the lungs and on the wrist. The landscape of the present holds clues about its past and its future. And the timescapes in the writings evoke a necessity to connect time and place, human and non-human colonising and liberatory methods and live with a maddening, flickering lenticularity (Pillow, 2019).

Beyond Overcoming: A Woman Writer’s Articulation of Pain in Socialist China

Feminist inquiries into the status of women in Mao-era China have shed light on the challenges women experienced in their double role as producers and reproducers in the nascent socialist state. Less is known about how women lived up to expectations of (re)productivity while struggling with illness. Drawing on gender studies, literary studies, history, and the history of medicine, this article examines articulations of pain in the diaries that writer Yang Mo (1914-95) kept between 1945 and 1982, and published in 1985, to explore intersections among normative configurations of pain, gender politics, and identity construction in socialist China. Yang’s diaries show that the narrative of pain is fundamentally shaped by cultural and political discourses of “overcoming” physical and ideological shortcomings – discourses that the party-state upheld to transform the Chinese people into physically-fit, ideologically-correct socialist citizens. Within this context, this study focuses on Yang’s embodied experience to reveal both the empowering potential of these discourses and their inherent limits.