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The main objective of this article is to analyse the sceptical movement's discourse on complementary therapies in Spain, as well as comprehend its mobilisation against these therapies. Over the past 2 years, the Spanish sceptical movement, constituted by citizen's associations against unconventional therapies and in favour of evidence-based medicine, has increased its activism which, as a result, is now more familiar to the public. To perform this study, three sources of information were selected: (a) the #StopPseudociencias campaign, with a corpus of 6252 tweets; (b) 153 news articles published during the study timeline and (c) 7 interviews with members of the sceptical movement, journalists and politicians. The results of the content and discourse analyses have shown that the sceptical movement occupies a dominant discursive position on Twitter, while the perspective is more balanced in digital dailies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence of child abduction for intercountry adoption challenges our notions of altruism. The history of illicit adoptions and child abduction is presented with specific emphasis on Guatemala as a case example. Drawing on data produced in an ethnographic research, the analysis searches to elucidate how those involved in intercountry adoption in Spain (mainly adoptive and prospective adoptive parents) deal with signs of fraud and corruption. The results point out how these discourses usually dismiss the failures of the system and revolve around the idea of rescue. The rights of birth families – and even their mere existence – are usually absent in the discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the analysis of gossip that is done in a playful key, including laughter as a salient feature, drawing on extracts taken from two naturally occurring conversations among Galician female undergraduate students. The analysis indicates that gossip emerges as a form of indirect mockery in the data, which are commonly based on dramatized reported speech of the ‘victim’, including parodic stylization devices that are orientated to elicit laughter by making fun or through ridicule. The evaluation component also reveals important differences in relation to serious gossip, as it is not necessarily negative and is not always explicitly established or developed. For this reason, this component can be ambiguous in some cases. From a functional perspective, the article emphasizes that sociability and entertainment are not the only functions that playful and humorous gossip can play; at a fundamental level, this discourse practice has other benefits for the participants: as a way of constructing group identity and getting group comfort for a feeling of envy; of increasing self-esteem from the problems of another party; and of degrading other people’s success. The common element behind these underlying functions is a comparative competition of the gossipers with the person who is the subject of their talk. Thus, gossip as mockery is not free of maliciousness and competitiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]