Shaping the ‘inexplicable’: A social constructionist analysis of news reporting of familicide-suicide

Media framing helps to shape our understanding of the meaning of news events, often problematically. This study examines how this process interacts with the phenomenon of familicide-suicide, where a person kills one or more family members before taking their own life. A social constructionist analysis of the print media coverage of three high-profile cases in Ireland highlights framing and discursive patterns, contributing to an explanatory framework that is misleading and lacking in an evidence base. As well as a tendency towards broad and poorly supported claims-making, several primary causal frames are prevalent: mental health; financial debt; fall from grace; and ‘out of the blue’, whilst a domestic violence frame is notable in its absence. Coverage is found to be episodic in character, linked to dramatisation and more simplistic explanatory frames, rather than evidence-based analysis of potential causal factors for these incidents. Findings raise important questions for journalistic practice, regarding processes of selection and salience of sources contributing to overall coverage that is partial and biased, rather than an ‘objective’ representation of the social world.

Organized memory and popular remembering: The encounter of Yugonostalgia theories with socialism

The article first examines the contrast between popular remembering and the official presentation of Yugoslav socialist past in Slovenia. We examine the discursive patterns in political dignitaries’ declarations and reconstruct popular remembering as it emerges from the existing research. We focus on theories that conceptualize positive popular attitudes towards socialist past with the notion of ‘nostalgia’. Following the ways how researchers overcome the difficulties of the ‘Yugonostalgia’ approach, we note that they do not take into account the embeddedness of the positive achievements of socialism into the overall fabric of socialist system. According to our hypothesis, this omission induces the researchers to overestimate the present social and political impact of positive attitudes to socialist past. Furthermore, social struggles in which researchers are engaged seem to raise barriers to scientific practice. This study attempts to contribute to the project of Yugoslav memory studies.

Regional Ideas in International Education Organizations: The Case of SEAMEO

In Chap. 10.1007/978-3-030-78885-8_8, on SEAMEO, David Krogman focuses the attention on regional identities in international education organizations. This IO has been a major player in education policy in Southeast Asia for decades. The chapter explores the underlying themes and ideas which inform discursive patterns produced and reproduced by SEAMEO. How does SEAMEO conceive of education? Did SEAMEO’s image of education evolve over time? The analysis by Krogmann finds that SEAMEO mostly follows the UN’s global sustainable development agenda in education policy, stressing both the social as well as the economic purposes of education. However, it does so with a distinct emphasis on the education purpose of reinforcing the collectively shared values and traditions of its member states, which it deems unique to Southeast Asia.

CAUGHT IN A CROSSFIRE: CAMPAIGN SPEECHES OF PRESIDENT RODRIGO ROA DUTERTE (PRRD)

Through the use of critical discourse analysis, this study aimed to analyze PRRD’s campaign speeches with the purpose of establishing its discursive patterns. The study employed the descriptive-qualitative design which utilized Critical Discourse Analysis, anchored with Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) by Halliday. Results show the highest frequency of the following lexico-grammatical features: modals will, would, should, and shall; pronoun I (me); and verb tense present simple. Results also reveal that verbal process constitutes the highest in terms of transitivity, while it is positive median politeness for modality. Also, the analysis reveals that the informative, regulatory, and instrumental are the dominant functions of language used by PRRD. Based on the findings, PRRD stressed his campaign speeches with willingness, determination, certainty, and fortitude, with greater involvement of himself; PRRD had gone extra-mile to attack the personalities of the other parties for self-projection and self-promotion, along with the expression of enthusiasm, optimism, and determination to elicit support from the populace; and PRRD focused on neutralizing the asymmetrical power relations that existed between him and the electorate, but with the emphasis of control, and needs of his countrymen. KEYWORDS—Critical Discourse Analysis, Campaign Speeches, Language Functions, Discourse Features, Transitivity, Modality

BEWARE ASIAN SERVERS: RACIALIZED PERCEPTIONS OF CHEATING AND SKILL AMONG VIDEO GAME PLAYERS

The resurgent interest in cyberpunk in video game cultures centers the genre's historical and racially problematic themes. Moreover, competitive/online play and the attending toxicity, along with recent Covid-19 based anti-Asian sentiments center the need to theorize the discursive patterns in which these phenomena appear. Taking the recurring talk on various video game forums of isolating Asian servers because "Asians cheat" as a site of inquiry, this project argues that the sentiment of isolating Asian players to region locked servers relies on three entangled discourses: the on-again, off-again collapsing of various Asian identities to a monolithic Pan-Asia (Duara, 2001), Korean and Japanese "expertise" through acquired skill viz. their assumed video game "obsessiveness" (Groen, 2013), and the cheating technological Other seeking to supplant Whiteness at the privileged center of video games (see Nakamura, 2002, 2009). By highlighting these discourses and how they function, this project hopes to lend theoretical nuance to understanding racism in contemporary video game cultures.

Institutional logic of corruption

Our aim was to verify the ‘institutional logics’ of corruption through the discursive patterns of managers. We conducted an exploratory survey using a qualitative-quantitative method. The interviews were submitted to content analysis, using the Atlas.TI software and the questionnaire was applied by SurveyMonkey. As a methodological contribution, four categories and levels for analyzing the logic of corruption were constructed: Individual, Organization, Networks, and Interinstitutional System. We infer that understanding the institutional logic of corruption can promote a transformation of corrupt behavior and an institutional change by individual cognition that can lead to practical change in society.

Cosmopolitanism and the Roman Empire.

My article explores the tension between idealized cosmopolitan ideas, of a single citizenry for all people in the world, and imperial Roman nationalism between the late Roman Republic and the Italian Renaissance. In the form of three case studies (and without any claim that those are representative for the development) it focusses on three important thinkers whose work shows affinity with cosmopolitan discourse, but who at the same time also explicitly reflected on the political realities they were living in: Cicero, Augustine, and Lorenzo Valla. All three favour cosmopolitan ideals over political egoism, and all three reflect on whether and how the historical reign under which they are living can live up to the philosophical or theological ideals they advocate. Finally, all three authors do not only share similar discursive patterns, but also react to each other intertextually (links will be mentioned especially between Cicero and Augustine and between Augustine and Valla). Thus, while all three are distinct in their argument and use cosmopolitan concepts for hugely different aims, the comparison can share light both on the boundaries and the discursive power of the concept in Latin literature.

S/words versus S/words: A Bidirectional Reading of the Post/colonial Fictions

The article explicates the polemical schema of the novels produced by the British and the Indian writers apropos the historical event of the anticolonial rebellion/ revolution (1857). Grounded in the idea of creating a dialogue between the colonial and counter discursive texts, the research invokes Richard Lane’s bidirectional approach to explain how conflictual political visions trigger the skewed versions of the great defiance. The novelists of both nations have produced prolific fictional yields to represent the epic event. However, keeping in mind the scope of the study, the researchers have delimited their focus upon two of the representative novels, one for each nation: Louis Tracy’s The Red Year: A Story of the Indian Mutiny (1907) for the English version and Basavaraj Naikar’s The Sun behind the Cloud (2001) for the Indian one. Each of the novels voices the sloganized rhetoric of the respective nation while narrating the colossal clash, that is, Tracy portrays the mutiny as nefarious recalcitrance of the Indian rebels to disrupt the civilizational program and Naikar presents it as an auspicious act of defiance against the exploitative encroachment of the usurpers. A comparison has been drawn between the ideology-ridden discursive patterns of both the belligerent narratives and an intriguing concatenation of the diametric contrasts has been identified. The essential argument of the article is entrenched in the postcolonial and the new historicist notions vis-à-vis the chequered nature of the textual narratives and politicized parlance of the discursive records of the historical happenings.

Twitter and abortion

This paper explores the misogynistic abuse against female Chilean politicians who openly supported a pro-choice bill that allowed the access to abortion in limited circumstances. We analysed the verbal abuse targeted at these politicians during the legislation of the abortion bill (2015–2017) and the linguistic and discursive patterns of online abuse. To that end, we collected tweets from this legislation period and created a subset with specific milestones of the parliamentary debate. Further, we undertook a corpus-assisted analysis of the data, focusing on collocations and keywords, which were then analysed in the light of van Leeuwen’s framework on the representation of social actors and legitimation strategies (2008). Results evidence that violence against women in power can take forms other than the explicit sexual, physical, and psychological threats that are commonly identified. Violence turns to these women’s alleged unsuitability to legislate for abiding and protecting crime, which delegitimizes them as legislators and women. Therefore, the corrective function of abuse takes the form of legal actions against their crimes.