The Vulnerable Dynamics of Discourse

In this paper, we offer some compelling reasons to think that issues relating to vulnerability play a significant – albeit thus far underacknowledged – role in Jürgen Habermas’s notions of communicative action and discourse. We shall argue that the basic notions of discourse and communicative action presuppose a robust conception of vulnerability and that recognising vulnerability is essential for (i) making sense of the social character of knowledge, on the epistemic side of things, and for (ii) making sense of the possibility of deliberative democracy, on the political side of things. Our paper is divided into four principal sections. In Section 1, we provide a basic outline of Habermas on communicative action and discourse. In Section 2, we develop an account of vulnerability and communication in the context of speaker/hearer relations. We specifically focus on distorted communication, vulnerability and speech. In Section 3, we focus on elaborating epistemic pathologies in the context of epistemic oppression and testimonial injustice. In Section 4, we focus on explaining how Habermasian resources contribute to vulnerability theory, and how introducing vulnerability theory to Habermas broadens or deepens his theory of communication action and his discourse ethics theory.

Culture-Sensitive Communication in Applied Developmental Research

Communication about child development between persons with different cultural preoccupations requires that author and audience agree without coercion on how to connect their perspectives. Western cultural hegemony persists in many international fora under the guise of “globalization,” giving rise to systematically distorted communication in ways that do epistemological violence to indigenous cultural models in Africa. The dominant paradigm of public basic schooling is sustained by institutionalized path dependency and construes educational success as extracting the learner from her community of origin. Consensus-building within a framework of mutually respectful communication involves bridging, coordination or fusion. Societal progress is a different kind of “development” than ontogenesis. A given cultural group’s developmental niche for its children is part of a chronosystem that changes over the course of history. An individual’s transactions with significant others are embedded in a complex and dynamic sociocultural system, to which programming of early childhood education should respond.

Extremist behavior as an “act of communication”: A theological and psychological analysis

This article attempts to interpret extremist behavior in the adolescent and youth environment as a kind of “act of distorted communication”. At the same time, if such interpretations have been made within the materialistic (in particular, psychoanalytic) paradigm for a long time, then the interpretation of the factors of extremist activity at the junction of Orthodox theology and deep psychology is quite an innovative approach. This approach allows us to correctly “decipher” the message “embedded” in extremist behavior, and directly address the originally natural and healthy needs of the soul distorted by this conduct. The article notes that theology, especially practical theology, is able to actualize the spiritual needs sometimes hidden in the subconscious of young people. As shown by the research conducted by the team of the Laboratory of Religious Studies of the Herzen State Pedagogical University, this is a result of young people conducting a persistent spiritual search at the unconscious level. This search is largely conducted in a dimension that relates to one of the commandments given to people by Jesus Christ: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself ”. The article also concludes that the prevention of extremist behavior in the modern Russian youth environment must necessarily include an appeal to the immanent domestic culture of the need for participation and transcendence, as opposed to both the cult of consumption and destructive ideologies of an extremist nature.

From Gentrification to Regeneration: A Grounded Theory Study of Community Leadership in Southwest Atlanta

Urban neighborhoods have undergone property disinvestment, a decreasing population, and a general economic decline. Atlanta, the fourth-fastest gentrifying city in the United States exemplifies this trend. The purpose of this grounded theory study is to understand how discourse about gentrification helps a community address its goal of regeneration. We used Habermas’ critical hermeneutic lens to investigate the perceptions of 20 resident leaders and stakeholders in a community that was undergoing the process of gentrification. Our findings illustrate that this community is fraught with systematically distorted communication that used communicative action for emancipation. The four theoretical codes: gentrification (a collision between politics and economics), systematically distorted communication, regeneration, and strategies (communicative action as emancipatory), were used to represent how power and language intersected within economic and political discourse. Through an identification of elements of communicative action for neighborhoods that are undergoing gentrification, this study provides guidance for development of stakeholder community action plans.

Pseudoscientific Treatments in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Flattening the "Infodemic" Curve Also Saves Lives

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) recognized COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as a pandemic. 1 This pandemic has claimed 640,016 lives worldwide, as officially reported to the WHO. 2 In parallel, an epidemic equally dangerous for human health; the "infodemic" spread. Infodemic is a term coined to define information excess, some accurate and some not, during an epidemic, which could damage public health. 3 Infodemic spreads rapidly, influencing the behavior of the population, avoiding their adherence to preventive health measures. The amplifying factor of the infodemic is mainly social media, whose users increased globally by 20-87%, during the pandemic. 4 Infodemic has been prejudicial due to: 1) distorted communication of facts with a weak scientific basis; and 2) diffusion of pseudoscientific theories. 5 In the context of a pandemic threatening our lives, in the absence of an effective vaccine or treatment, amid the constant updating of scientific information, as we learn more about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19; a favorable scenario has been generated for infodemic.

Open for change but closed for transformation: A communicative analysis of managerial corporate social responsibility discourse on the issue of labor

Why do some researchers observe that managerial corporate social responsibility discourse contributes to increased awareness of and commitment to solving global environmental and social issues, while others reveal that the same discourse works to obfuscate and sidetrack positive social transformation? This article tries to bring together these procedural and structural perspectives on corporate social responsibility discourse by introducing a communicative approach, which embeds the critical study of corporate social responsibility discourse in a complex and emerging discursive field. The discursive strategies of managerial corporate social responsibility are therefore as shifting as the discourses it competes with are varied. This article, grounded in Deetz’s theoretical framework of systematically distorted communication and discursive closure, explores the US garment industry’s corporate social responsibility communication on labor-related issues in the global supply chain. I position garment industry corporate social responsibility discourse within broad labor policy debates at the operational, institutional, and structural levels. I find that corporate-initiated corporate social responsibility communication operates through several internally coherent frames: establishing ethical standards, providing essential services, and innovating labor management systems. Each frame responds to alternative discourses about supply chain labor with discursive closure and non-closure strategies, that is, corporations choose to acknowledge, engage, or agree with some alternative discourses, while ignoring, suppressing, or eliding over others. I argue that the pattern of choosing discursive strategies for different types of alternative discourses is important in understanding systematically distorted communication in the context of a complex, fragmented discursive field.

Propaganda

Propaganda is the term for a variety of communication phenomena developed in the 20th century. As such, its meaning has changed over time from a largely neutral description of public relations and political communication towards an account of systematically distorted communication. The earliest major American proponent of the term, Edward Bernays (1891–1995), claimed that the ‘conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society’ (Bernays, 1928: 1). Bernays believed that ‘propaganda’, for him, a political variation on public relations work, was a tool used by political organizations and eventually businesses to organize and manipulate the desires, actions and will of the masses.