The possibilities and limits of contestation in times of 'urban austerity'

This paper seeks to provide a conceptual framework in which to examine the social practices of contemporary austerity programmes in urban areas, including how these relate to different conceptions of crisis. Of current theoretical interest is the apparent ease with which these austerity measures have been accepted by urban governing agents. In order to advance these understandings we follow the recent post-structuralist discourse theory ‘logics’ approach of Glynos and Howarth (2007), focusing on the relationship between hegemony, political and social logics, and the subject whose identificatory practices are key to understanding the form, nature and stability of discursive settlements. In such thinking it is not only the formation of discourses and the mobilisation of rhetoric that are of interest, but also the manner in which the subjects of austerity identify with these. Through such an approach we examine the case of the regeneration/economic development and planning policy area in the city government of Birmingham (UK). In conclusion, we argue that the logics approach is a useful framework through which to examine how austerity has been uncontested in a city government, and the dynamics of acquiescence in relation to broader hegemonic discursive formations.

Arte después de la inundación : Dos casos de procesamiento de la dislocación después de la catástrofe

Se analiza una inundación en Argentina y las respuestas desde colectivos artísticos. Se tomaron dos casos comparativamente, "La marca del agua" y "Volver a habitar", ;para observar las diferencias de las intervenciones poscatástrofe. La hermenéutica de la teoría del discurso permitió ajustar la metodología, indagando sobre las formas de procesamiento de la dislocación desde las prácticas, textos lingüísticos y obras de arte. Las intervenciones de carácter antagónico variaron su significación producto del ;contexto en el que se insertaron, mientras las que se orientaron a la reconstrucción de la catástrofe potenciaron relaciones de solidaridad y amistad

Arte después de la inundación : Dos casos de procesamiento de la dislocación después de la catástrofe

Se analiza una inundación en Argentina y las respuestas desde colectivos artísticos. Se tomaron dos casos comparativamente, "La marca del agua" y "Volver a habitar", ;para observar las diferencias de las intervenciones poscatástrofe. La hermenéutica de la teoría del discurso permitió ajustar la metodología, indagando sobre las formas de procesamiento de la dislocación desde las prácticas, textos lingüísticos y obras de arte. Las intervenciones de carácter antagónico variaron su significación producto del ;contexto en el que se insertaron, mientras las que se orientaron a la reconstrucción de la catástrofe potenciaron relaciones de solidaridad y amistad

Arte después de la inundación : Dos casos de procesamiento de la dislocación después de la catástrofe

Se analiza una inundación en Argentina y las respuestas desde colectivos artísticos. Se tomaron dos casos comparativamente, "La marca del agua" y "Volver a habitar", ;para observar las diferencias de las intervenciones poscatástrofe. La hermenéutica de la teoría del discurso permitió ajustar la metodología, indagando sobre las formas de procesamiento de la dislocación desde las prácticas, textos lingüísticos y obras de arte. Las intervenciones de carácter antagónico variaron su significación producto del ;contexto en el que se insertaron, mientras las que se orientaron a la reconstrucción de la catástrofe potenciaron relaciones de solidaridad y amistad

El género epistolar en la prensa como visión ciudadana de la esfera pública en Colombia

A partir de un análisis temático inductivo, este artículo explora la visión ciudadana sobre la esfera pública expresada en las cartas de los lectores de los diarios El Tiempo y El Heraldo de Colombia. Los resultados muestran cómo la identidad colectiva de los lectores apareció en forma transversal en las cartas, para dar cuenta de una comunidad de adultos que se autodefine como “colombianos de bien”. El análisis reveló dos unidades de significado: posturas sobre la administración de lo público y antagonismos en la esfera pública, centrada en el conflicto político con las guerrillas. A través de estas se pudieron hacer visibles los llamamientos vívidos de los lectores al gobierno, funcionarios públicos, actores al margen de la ley y a sus compatriotas, para movilizarse para exigir cambios sociales largamente esperados.

The State of the Nation Debate as part of the democratic parliamentary ritual: Rajoy and Rubalcaba discourse analysis, 2014

In this article we analyze the Debate on the State of the Nation 2014. The methodology consists in coding the speeches of the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy (PP) and the then opposition leader Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba (PSOE) through extracting word clouds, branched maps and word trees that have shown the most common concepts and premises. This preliminary analysis of two dimensions, quantitative and qualitative, makes it much easier and viable subsequent discourse analysis where we focus on the different types of arguments in the communicative act: claim/solution, circumstantial premises, goal premises, value premises, meansgoal premises, alternative options/addressing alternative options.

El concepto de ciudadanía en la obra de Dominique Schnapper: entre el tipo ideal sociológico y el ideal de sociedad democrática

Este artículo analiza la evolución del concepto de ciudadanía en la obra de Dominique Schnapper como uno de los ejemplos más destacados en la sociología contemporánea de una aproximación completa a la cuestión. A través de un recorrido exhaustivo por su obra, el objetivo es profundizar en la comprensión de la tensión entre la dinámica democrática y la idea de ciudadanía en cuanto que tipo ideal del vínculo social y como principio regulador de las sociedades democráticas. La autora propone en sus primeros trabajos una noción de ciudadanía vinculada al proceso político de construcción de la nación que no distingue entre la definición de un tipo ideal sociológico y la construcción de un ideal de sociedad. Esta confusión se corrige al introducir posteriormente en el análisis la incidencia de la democracia sobre las experiencias individuales de la ciudadanía, aportando una perspectiva de análisis de gran utilidad tanto para la comprensión de la dinámica contemporánea de las sociedades democráticas como para la necesaria defensa de la ciudadanía como vínculo social fundamental y como principio fundador de la legitimidad política.

Programas de tertulia política en Twitter: un modelo neurocomunicativo de análisis del discurso

En este trabajo aplicamos a la red social Twitter un modelo de análisis del discurso político y mediático desarrollado en publicaciones previas, que permite hacer compatible el estudio de los datos discursivos con propuestas explicativas surgidas a propósito de la comunicación política (neurocomunicación) y de la comunicación digital (la red como quinto estado, convergencia, inteligencia colectiva). Asumimos que hay categorías del encuadre discursivo (frame) que pueden ser tratadas como indicadores de habilidades cognitivas y comunicativas. Analizamos estas categorías agrupándolas en tres dimensiones fundamentales: la intencional (ilocutividad del tuit, encuadre interpretativo de las etiquetas), referencial (temas, protagonistas), e interactiva (alineamiento estructural, predictibilidad; marcas de intertextualidad y dialogismo; afiliación partidista). El corpus consta de 4116 tuits: 3000 tuits pertenecientes a los programas Al Rojo Vivo (La Sexta: A3 Media), Las Mañanas Cuatro (Cuatro: Mediaset) y Los Desayunos de TVE (RTVE), 1116 tuits de seguidores de los programas, que corresponden a 45 tuits de cada programa. Los resultados confirman que el modelo permite establecer diferentes perfiles de subjetividad política en las cuentas de Twitter.

Being impolite while pretending to be polite. The rupture of politeness conventions in electoral debates

This paper is a part of a larger research that pursues a global understanding of impoliteness in face-to-face electoral debates. That research distinguishes three essential axes, three complementary analytical perspectives: functional strategies of impoliteness, linguistic-discursive mechanisms to implement them and social impacts of impolite acts. In this frame, the present work develops an in-depth analysis of a special category of mechanisms, namely the rupture of politeness conventions, a subgroup within postliteral implicit mechanisms. This subgroup acquires its identity by the fact of carrying out a linguistic action that is conventionally associated with a polite attitude, but doing it in a rhetorically insincere way: the consequence is that apparent politeness becomes impoliteness. Relevant aspects in the characterization of ruptures are isolated and, on this basis, it is developed a detailed analysis of three specific kinds of mechanisms in which ruptures take shape: using ironic statements, developing different forms of overpoliteness and adopting a falsely collaborative attitude toward the interlocutor. The analysis of that group of mechanisms takes into account, simultaneously, the other two axes of the main research, strategies and social impacts.

Exploring the Impact of a Difficult Breastfeeding Experience on Maternal Identity: A Narrative Analysis

Introduction: Due to the implied health benefits for mother and baby, breastfeeding has become a key public health issue. Literature reviewed highlighted the ‘medical’ and ‘natural’ mother discourse which surrounds motherhood and impacts on women’s decisions to breastfeed. Whilst the emotional and physical strains of a difficult experience have been explored, it is unclear how these experiences impact on women’s identities as mothers and in what ways women are able to narrate and share their embodied experiences. Methods: Seven first time mothers who described themselves as having had a difficult breastfeeding experience were interviewed to gather data pertaining to how mothers construct narratives of breastfeeding and the impact of these narratives on their identity as mothers. An interest in both socio-political discourse and embodiment theory derived from the literature review led to the use of visual methods in eliciting narratives and the employment of a critical narrative analysis in exploring the data gathered. Findings: The participants’ narratives drew from ‘medical’ and ‘natural’ mother discourses and were found to constrain subjective experience and leave participants with feelings of guilt, frustration and loss. A prevailing assumption that unruly, excessive bodies must be controlled by a rational ‘mind’ led to the body becoming a site for control and resistance for participants as they attempted to conform to norms of motherhood and breastfeeding. Discussion: Results identified the ways in which women as mothers can see their subjective experiences diminished and their voices silenced due to a lack of available discourse and entrenched ideologies surrounding the ‘good’ mother. It is suggested that adopting a social justice agenda within therapeutic practice might prevent the internalisation of oppressive discourse which can lead to mothers’ psychological distress. Moreover, it is suggested that exploring the body in therapy might resist a mind/body dualism and lead to increasingly compassionate and accepting relationships with our bodies; in turn increasing awareness of subjective experience.

A "Greater Britain": colonial kin in fictions of settlement, 1850-1890

This dissertation traces the ways in which nineteenth-century fictional narratives of white settlement represent “family” as, on the one hand, an abstract theoretical model for a unified and relatively homogenous British settler empire and on the other, a fundamental challenge to ideas about imperial integrity and transnational Anglo-Saxon racial identification. I argue that representations of transoceanic white families in nineteenth-century fictions about Australian settler colonialism negotiate the tension between the bounded domesticity of an insular English nation and the kind of kinship that spans oceans and continents as a result of mass emigration from the British isles to the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and the Australian colonies. As such, these fictions construct productive analogies between the familial metaphors and affective language in the political discourse of “Greater Britain”—-a transoceanic imagined community of British settler colonies and their “mother country” united by race and language—-and ideas of family, gender, and domesticity as they operate within specific bourgeois families. Concerns over the disruption of transoceanic families bear testament to contradictions between the idea of a unified imperial identity (both British and Anglo-Saxon), the proliferation of fractured local identities (such as settlers’ English, Irish Catholic, and Australian nationalisms), and the conspicuous absence of indigenous families from narratives of settlement. I intervene at the intersection of postcolonial literary criticism and gender theory by examining the strategic deployments of heteronormative kinship metaphors and metonymies in the rhetorical consolidation of settler colonial space. Settler colonialism was distinct from the “civilizing” domination of subject peoples in South Asia in that it depended on the rhetorical construction of colonial territory as empty space or as land occupied by nearly extinct “primitive” races. This dissertation argues that political rhetoric, travel narratives, and fiction used the image of white female bourgeois reproductive power and sentimental attachment as a technology for settler colonial success, embodying this technology both in the benevolent figure of the metropolitan “mother country” (the paternalistic female counter to the material realities of patriarchal and violent settler colonial practices) and in fictional juxtapositions of happy white settler fecund families with the solitary self-extinguishing figure of the black aboriginal “savage.” Yet even in the narratives where the continuity and coherence of families across imperial space is questioned—-and “Greater Britain” itself—-domesticity and heteronormative familial relations effectively rewrite settler space as white, Anglo-Saxon and bourgeois, and the sentimentalism of troubled European families masks the presence and genocide of indigenous aboriginal peoples. I analyze a range of novels and political texts, canonical and non-canonical, metropolitan and colonial. My introductory first chapter examines the discourse on a “Greater Britain” in the travel narratives of J.A. Froude, Charles Wentworth Dilke, and Anthony Trollope and in the Oxbridge lectures of Herman Merivale and J.R. Seeley. These writers make arguments for an imperial economy of affect circulating between Britain and the settler colonies that reinforces political connections, and at times surpasses the limits of political possibility by relying on the language of sentiment and feeling to build a transoceanic “Greater British” community. Subsequent chapters show how metropolitan and colonial fiction writers, including Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Marcus Clarke, Henry Kingsley, and Catherine Helen Spence, test the viability of this “Greater British” economy of affect by presenting transoceanic family connections and structures straining under the weight of forces including the vast distances between colonies and the “mother country,” settler violence, and the transportation system.

Europeanization beyond the EU: The case of Georgia.

320 p.

El discurso político en el contexto multicultural de las instituciones de la Unión Europea. El discurso político en español y en polaco

The comparative analysis of Polish and Spanish political discourse in the multilingual context of European institutions is challenging not only due to linguistic, cultural, geopolitical and social differences, but also because of a relatively short history of such contacts in the EU framework. Intercultural communication, as a dynamic social practice is a fascinating object of investigation. Bidirectional comparative analysis of Polish and Spanish oral texts allows define the barriers of such communication. It encompasses the discursive act together with its objectives, strategies and consequences, and also its raison d’être. It explains why different strategies reflected through discursive categories were used. Consequently it describes both, conditions and outcomes of identity negotiation. The latter is a political competence perceived and evaluated by the direct interlocutors, the participants of the political debate, and indirectly, by a public opinion of the European Union. That proves it is two-level communication. The negotiation of political identity through discourse, according to the Ting-Toomey theory, can lead to maintaining, loosing, recovering or reinforcing it282. The Identity Negotiation Theory includes the construction and development of personal, relational, role and desired identity and is one of the methodological axes of this investigation. Political identity consists of exhibiting necessary competences to efficiently participate in the legislation process, for example, in order to present amendments, promote a given ideology, participate in controversial discussions and manage conflicts, and, finally, gain the support of public opinion. The analysis of creation, negotiation, maintenance, recovery and promotion of the political identity is performed through the identification and description of discursive categories proposed by Van Dijk283 and adapted to the needs of this study. This is the second methodological axe of the investigation. The following questions arise: which discursive strategies, used by Polish and Spanish politicians, will be communication facilitators and which will be barriers hampering communication? Which strategies show political competencies of the speaker, his or her influence in the legal EU reality through discourse?...

Entre a teoria social e a teoria da justiça : intersubjetividade, normatividade e vulnerabilidade

Este artigo pretende apresentar os motivos por trás de algumas propostas intersubjetivistas na teoria social e na teoria da justiça. Primeiramente, tentarei desenvolver alguns temas da filosofia de Hegel no sentido de formular a tese de que se estabelece aí uma relação fundamental entre teoria social e teoria da justiça (1). Em seguida, pretendo especificar o conteúdo desta relação num argumento duplo: mostrando (a) que ela consiste, do ponto de vista da teoria social, em uma dialética entre socialização e individualização; e (b) que esta dialética se vincula ao problema da normatividade, tornando-se relevante para a teoria da justiça (2). Em terceiro lugar, desejo mostrar que a ética do discurso projetou uma ampliação filosófico-jurídica não apenas para estabilizar a tensão entre validade e facticidade, mas que também, não sendo apenas especializada em questões de justiça, assume a tarefa de pensar a vulnerabilidade daquela dialética (3). Finalmente, procuro mostrar como uma teoria da justiça fundada no conceito intersubjetivo de liberdade é capaz de preencher mais adequadamente esta lacuna, criando condições para uma crítica terapêutica da modernidade (4). ______________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT

A teoria e a prática: a questão da diferençano discurso sobre e da sala de aula

The main purpose of this paper is to question the relationship between theory and practice or basic and applied research in the domain of Applied Linguistics and classroom discourse. In order to achieve our aim, some theoretical texts, some recorded and transcribed classes as well as some teachers and students opinions about reading and writing were analysed. Results have shown that 1) practice is not the direct application of theoretical data: the relationship between them is not as simple as some applied linguists seem to believe because of the action of the unconscious in the constitution of subjectivity; 2) the conceptualization of the theoretical issues takes place in a confused and disorderly manner mixed up with personal experiences and previous knowledge (practice). We intend to question the fact that practice comes as secondary to theory.