Browsing by Subject "Discourse"
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Item Open Access Creating Clarity: Ethnic and Sexual Politics of United Kingdom's Human Trafficking Discourse(2011-05-06) Purohit, BhumiHuman trafficking has become a prominent political issue in the United Kingdom since 2001, with all major parties in the country agreeing on the importance of abolishing trafficking. However, the political discourse is riddled with two frameworks, with each party supporting one or the other at various times: trafficking as a border security issue versus trafficking as a human rights issue. In order to examine the relationship of this discursive political dichotomy with the journalistic understanding of the issue, the paper examines discourse on sex trafficking among four major newspapers, each with a different political affiliation: The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, and The Independent. The study finds that the nineteenth century perception of innocent, and usually white and virgin women being lured into trafficking by “evil” foreign traffickers is still implicitly present in modern-day journalistic discourse. The presence of these ethnic and sexual politics, which influence the border security and human rights frameworks, respectively, confound the reality of trafficking with a discursive myth. The journalistic discourse thus has a policy implication of victims needing to fit the discursive mold of a trafficked person in order to receive human rights protections. Though finding a factual account of trafficking is difficult, adding voices of trafficked persons to narratives may create a clearer picture of the issue, and lead to better protections for trafficked persons in U.K. policy.Item Embargo Knowledge and Conversion in the Making of Western History, a Philosophical Investigation(2023) Ali, Mohammed SyedIn academia in general, and in the humanistic social sciences in particular, there is a problem. The "cruel optimism" of concepts is a problem faced by every specialization, and every discipline (Berlant 2011). In the social sciences, and history especially, cruel optimism takes the form of an endless quest to prove that our concepts today are superior to the concepts of yesterday, that if we work hard enough and get our methods just right, we will finally find pure, objective, true concepts to express historical reality. I use this dissertation in order to reconfigure our relationship with our concepts, to try to grapple with and ultimately subdue the cruel optimism of concepts. I employ discourse analysis, a method of analyzing knowledge as the imprint of dynamic relations of force and friction between institutions and human beings. Rather than seeing our social scientific concepts as the result of methodical research applied to a critical mass of archival documents, I see them as the result of power relations that are used to control reality as much as they purport to describe it. My materials are documentary sources—published social science scholarship and declassified intelligence reports using social scientific analysis. My conclusion is that we can use our concepts in a way that releases us from the dread of cruel optimism, so long as we see them as "snapshots of processes" (Levins 2006) rather than things in themselves.
Item Open Access Show Me What Democracy Looks Like: Articulating political possibility in Durham, North Carolina(2018-04-27) Nuckols, AshlynAs in most U.S. cities, municipal voter turnout in Durham, North Carolina is stratified by race and income level. Local politicians win elections by catering to the predominately white and middle-class bloc categorized as "likely voters." In the face of this self-reinforcing, systematic political bias, a Durham coalition is attempting to construct a progressive voting bloc led by working-class people of color. Among other challenges, Justice For All members are consistently faced with the assumption that they are investing in the impossible. Drawing on participant observation conducted in the months preceding Durham’s 2017 municipal election, this thesis asks: 1) how does the construction of “reasonable,” and “radical” in political discourse work to privilege certain political formations while undermining others? 2) How do social actors articulate the legitimacy of political formations and strategies that have yet to be constructed? I analyze Justice For All’s formal communications strategies as well as countless conversations held in a variety of public and private spaces. I argue that, in each of these spaces, group members engage in a form of discursive theorizing that works to overcome the limits of hegemonic discourse and speak (as well as organize) new political formations into existence.Item Open Access The Geographies of Policy: Assembling National Marine Aquaculture Policy in the United States(2015) Fairbanks, Luke W.In the United States, marine aquaculture is increasingly viewed as way to offset stagnating wild fisheries production, help faltering coastal community economies, and address a growing national seafood trade deficit. The national government has outwardly supported the development of the sector through policies, plans, and other statements. However, many social and environmental questions surround prospective expansion, and actual policy development and implementation has been slow. This dissertation builds on recent work in human geography and policy studies to explore US national marine aquaculture policy processes, conceptualizing policy as a dynamic assemblage of actors, spaces, practices, and relations. It contributes to our understanding of oceans geography and policy processes by addressing three questions: (1) How do actors interact within the assemblage negotiate, construct, and develop national policies? (2) What practices are actors employing to shape aquaculture policymaking, and what views underlie them? (3) What are the practical, and often local, implications of these processes, and how do actors interact with and within policy development (or not)?
These questions are approached empirically by tracing the US national marine aquaculture policy assemblage across time, space, and scale. The dissertation draws on research conducted within and outside the US government, focusing on the internal practices of the state and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as well as a case of local and regional policy implementation and development in New England. It also focuses on offshore aquaculture policy, as well as marine aquaculture more generally. The dissertation uses discourse analysis, ethnography, and other approaches to conduct a geographic policy analysis that explores the processes and relationships producing national marine aquaculture policy in the United States.
Overall, this research shows that broad or monolithic conceptualization of the state, its motivations, its practices, and their implications are oversimplified. The federal government features a diversity of actors, discourses, and ideas about marine aquaculture and its policy development, which manifest in different paths to reform and conflicting efforts within the state itself. Further, national policy processes are not contained within the national government, but are co-produced by mobile and dynamic actors and policies across contexts. Actors deploy particular discourses about marine aquaculture’s risks and opportunities, government agencies and offices claim and reclaim authority over the sector, bureaucrats engage in diverse everyday policy practices and interactions, and policy ideas and policies themselves change as they are translated and deployed in new spaces and by different actors. Together, these processes suggest that rather than expecting a totalizing form of marine aquaculture development in the United State, it is important to consider the ruptures and opportunities within the assemblage that might allow for alternative forms of policy, coordination, and implementation at all scales.
Item Open Access ‘The Secret is the Power, not the Knowledge’: Reconfiguring the Discourse of HIV/AIDS-related Stigma in Durham, NC(2014-04-28) Cheung, AngelaWhat are the conditions in which stigma is held to be a common sense factor of HIV/AIDS, yet is mutable in the ways people experience stigma? My research analyzes the terrain in which this question is precipitated, and I will evaluate stigma as a lens for understanding broader questions of politics and care that are embedded with American notions of self-hood. The national history of HIV/AIDS, Goffman’s work on stigma, and neoliberal policies, laws, and education measures have converged to create certain imaginations of attribution and individuality for those who live with the disease. People who are HIV-positive are feared, seen as immoral and tainted, and they are blamed for contracting the virus and failing to receive the proper care. The dominant discourse creates feelings of isolation and has led to beliefs that stigma is permanent and universally affects HIV/AIDS patients, so one must remain confidential about a diagnosis for protection from stigma. From policies that move towards privatized healthcare to the rationale that stigma can be localized to a body, these aspects of life rely on ideals of self-help and have precipitated perceptions of HIV/AIDS as solely individual experiences. Instead of seeking ways to confront these perceptions, society ultimately advocates for concealing diagnoses to mitigate stigma. The localization of stigma ignores the social construction of stigma that is informed by history, culture, and power, and in this very context, my participants have demonstrated agency by disclosing their stories. By illuminating social ties through dialogue, they have contested the dominant discourse that they are secluded from the rest due to their mark of stigma. In this ethnography, then, I will explore how stigma functions and is maintained in a space where discursive practices, neoliberalism, and medical intervention intersect.Item Open Access The Speaking Text: Leviticus as Generative Discourse(2020) Hamm, Allison KThe book of Leviticus literarily portrays an encounter between YHWH and Israel that is mediated through discourse. In keeping with the priestly creation account, the book of Leviticus shows the divine discourse at Sinai to be a world- and people-shaping constitutive force: new forms of life are generated that take shape in the daily rhythms of Israel’s cultic and communal life in the wilderness. Although the divine instructions are not directly addressed to the twenty-first century reader, an unconventional use of literary techniques destabilizes a clear sense of grammatical tense or narrative time so that the reader is included in the discourse mediated through the text. This suggests the intriguing notion that the experience of reading Leviticus, maximally understood as the various stages of reading and study that are involved in the process of interpretation, may be analogous to Israel’s experience of encountering the divine discourse at Sinai. This study thus examines the notion of discourse as a way to open up a new understanding of the kind of text that Leviticus is and how it may communicate in the text-reader relationship.
Although recent scholarship has seen a resurgence of interest in Leviticus, the book’s basic character as discourse has largely been overlooked. Scholarly treatments have overwhelmingly focused on what Leviticus may have “said” in its historical context rather than what it may “say” in the contemporary discourse between text and reader. In conversation with Paul Ricoeur and George Steiner, this study argues that the literary presentation of Leviticus asks us to approach the text as a potential conversation partner. It articulates a notion of interpretation as a process of coming to recognize the life-possibilities on offer in the vision of life that a text portrays. This construal of the task and aim of interpretation enables the discourse of Leviticus to generate new ways of thinking and being for contemporary reading communities, as demonstrated through three exegetical probes that seek to connect the function of speech in the priestly writers’ portrayal of life in the wilderness community to the ways that speech is enacted in contemporary discourse. The study concludes that the vision of life that the priestly writers project in the book of Leviticus opens up a number of promising directions of thought that can generate new life-possibilities in and for contemporary reading communities.
Item Open Access The Speaking Text: Leviticus as Generative Discourse(2020) Hamm, Allison KThe book of Leviticus literarily portrays an encounter between YHWH and Israel that is mediated through discourse. In keeping with the priestly creation account, the book of Leviticus shows the divine discourse at Sinai to be a world- and people-shaping constitutive force: new forms of life are generated that take shape in the daily rhythms of Israel’s cultic and communal life in the wilderness. Although the divine instructions are not directly addressed to the twenty-first century reader, an unconventional use of literary techniques destabilizes a clear sense of grammatical tense or narrative time so that the reader is included in the discourse mediated through the text. This suggests the intriguing notion that the experience of reading Leviticus, maximally understood as the various stages of reading and study that are involved in the process of interpretation, may be analogous to Israel’s experience of encountering the divine discourse at Sinai. This study thus examines the notion of discourse as a way to open up a new understanding of the kind of text that Leviticus is and how it may communicate in the text-reader relationship.
Although recent scholarship has seen a resurgence of interest in Leviticus, the book’s basic character as discourse has largely been overlooked. Scholarly treatments have overwhelmingly focused on what Leviticus may have “said” in its historical context rather than what it may “say” in the contemporary discourse between text and reader. In conversation with Paul Ricoeur and George Steiner, this study argues that the literary presentation of Leviticus asks us to approach the text as a potential conversation partner. It articulates a notion of interpretation as a process of coming to recognize the life-possibilities on offer in the vision of life that a text portrays. This construal of the task and aim of interpretation enables the discourse of Leviticus to generate new ways of thinking and being for contemporary reading communities, as demonstrated through three exegetical probes that seek to connect the function of speech in the priestly writers’ portrayal of life in the wilderness community to the ways that speech is enacted in contemporary discourse. The study concludes that the vision of life that the priestly writers project in the book of Leviticus opens up a number of promising directions of thought that can generate new life-possibilities in and for contemporary reading communities.