Search results for "Course"
showing 10 items of 1744 documents
'The sisters did her every imaginable injury': Power and violence in Cinderella
2012
The main aim of this article is to discuss the results achieved after investigating the presence of violence in the Grimm brothers’ <em>Cinderella</em> with the intention of finding out what kind of processes predominate in this tale and whether they can be related to violent actions. The analysis involved firstly, a study of the frequency and concordances of some words belonging to the semantic field ‘violence’, surveying in detail the context in which they appear and secondly, the analysis of transitivity processes. The method proved to be a good strategy to check whether each character’s identity and social position (power) were somehow related to the infliction of violence w…
Heterogeneous knowledge: Trends in German discourse analysis against an international background
2011
This contribution maps the complex field of discourse analysis in Germany by situating its major currents and putting them in historical perspective. In a first step, it presents the major intellectual sources, such as (post-)structuralism, pragmatism/interactionism as well as hermeneutics, which have served as a backdrop for the establishment of discourse analysis as an interdisciplinary field since the 1980s. In a second step, it takes a closer look at the intellectual conjunctures in the social sciences such as Critical Theory and systems theory before turning to the discourse analytical tendencies that have emerged since the 1980s in the light of Foucault's reception in Germany. Finally…
Semiotics of pride and profit: interrogating commodification in indigenous handicraft production
2014
This study investigates the shifting terrain of pride, profit and power relations in minority language communities under contemporary globalisation. While “pride” associates linguistic-cultural heritage with identity and preservation, “profit” views these as sources of economic gain. In contemporary late capitalism, “pride” seems to be increasingly giving way to “profit”. Arguing that this transformation needs to be interrogated in terms of complexity and that a detailed, multilayered semiotic analysis can open a privileged window for such an inquiry, this study combines critical multimodal discourse analysis and an ethnographic approach to analyse processes of semiotic commodification in h…
‘Culture’ as a discursive resource in newspaper articles from Le Monde about secularism : constructing ‘us’ through strategic oppositions with religi…
2017
Building on research highlighting the complex webs of relations between secularism, culture, and religion, this study investigates how the concept of culture was utilized in discourses of laïcité from the newspaper le Monde. Articles (N = 76) published between 2011 and 2014 were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Results revealed the agency associated with the use of culture as it was strategically – rather than systematically – used in opposition to religion. Overall, culture – and the practices it defined – tended to be represented as normal and invisible. On the other hand, religion tended to be constructed as a disruption to secularism and the corresponding cultural reality. T…
“I look with deep gratitude and admiration ...” – praising and complimenting in papal speeches
2022
Abstract Recently, communicating admiration and appreciation in public discourse has become a subject of study since these acts play a very important role in shaping positive social relations not only on a micro scale, but also on a macro one. My goal in this study is to understand how public officials implement their intention to please addressees in an international arena, in contacts between different religious and national communities. In order to do this, 120 papal speeches delivered to representatives of different churches, religions and societies were analysed, identifying individual topics, functions and patterns of these speech acts, as well as their dependence on such parameters a…
Theresa May’s Representation of Reality in her Brexit Speeches
2020
This study analyses Theresa May’s three seminal Brexit speeches. These describe the kind of desirable post-Brexit EU-UK relationship that she envisioned, and together constitute a corpus of 18,532 words. The speeches can be considered as landmarks on a timeline that was initially meant to lead to the delivery of Brexit. It is hypothesized that there may be meaningful differences between the speeches, and that these affect the representation of reality. These in turn would have a bearing on May’s discursive self-representation as either an individualized or a collectivized social actor. To account for such representational values, the study draws on Halliday’s Transitivity System (1994), sta…
The dialogics of metaphor and simile in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September
2013
Metaphors and similes characterise Elizabeth Bowen’s writing. Despite frequent claims that this contributes to the lexical, grammatical and syntactic irregularities of her style and hence makes her writing difficult to understand, I show that her metaphors, similes and literal descriptions in a selected passage from The Last September function within conventional linguistic structures. While my analysis of metaphors and similes is conducted with reference to Bakhtin’s essay “Discourse in the Novel”, I use Martin and Rose’s model of Discourse Analysis (2007) and Steen’s study of metaphor in literature (1999) as practical tools for my analysis of the text. I discuss how ‘dialogic’ linguistic …
“Stop whining and be a badass”: a postfeminist analysis of university students' responses to gender themes
2021
PurposeThis paper critically examines how female students at a Finnish business school understand gender in management.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis is based on female students' learning diaries from a basic management course.FindingsThe findings show how students respond to the topic of gender inequality through a neoliberal postfeminist discourse. The students' discourse is structured around three discursive moves: (1) rejecting “excessive” feminism, (2) articulating self-reliant professional futures and (3) producing idealized role models through successfully integrating masculinity and femininity.Originality/valueThis article contributes to current understanding of the role of…
UNESCO and cultural diversity: democratisation, commodification or governmentalisation of culture?
2012
The Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) was first adopted by its member states in October 2005. The document defines UNESCO's general principles and conceptualisations regarding culture, cultural diversity and expressions. In order to better manage culture, cultural expressions refer above all to goods and services of the markets, but another, more universally humanitarian and participatory aspect is also present. For the United Nations member states and especially countries that ratified it, the Convention offers policy and legal guidelines to support all forms o…
Cosmopolitan internationalism: UNESCO’s ideological ambiguity and the difference/diversity problematic
2022
This article addresses the ways in which UNESCO’s ideological engagements are negotiated in the difference/diversity discourse as they are transferred from the international standard-setting level to the national and local contexts. It proposes the discursive construction of cosmopolitan internationalism as a framework for analysing the intersections of difference, located in the practicalities of internationalism, and diversity, tied to the ideals of cosmopolitanism, as they are manifested at the level of both the implementation of UNESCO’s Diversity Convention and urban policy making in the city of Sydney. The analysis suggests that ruptures challenging the homogenising diversity discours…