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Previous research has indicated that healthcare support for sexuality after spinal cord injury appears to be neglected or inadequately provided. The perspectives of people living with spinal cord injuries regarding what is lacking and what support they would like to be provided, and why, has yet to be explored. This paper uses critical theory to explore how societal constructs of sexuality and disability shape how sexuality is supported after a spinal cord injury. To do this, we conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 11 people with a spinal cord injury from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We drew from the works of various critical disability theorists to analyze what discourses underpinned the experiences people with spinal cord injuries had when receiving sexuality support. Analysis suggested that the following discourses were apparent: (1) broken bodies require repair, (2) sex is penetration, ejaculation then reproduction, and (3) sexual autonomy is required. Findings indicated healthcare professionals need to recognize people with spinal cord injuries as sexual beings with a diverse range of desires, lives, relations, and bodies. Provision of individualized comprehensive high-quality sexuality support is therefore warranted. To achieve this, healthcare professionals should aim to be aware of, and mitigate, ableist and normative assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than six and half million people have died as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic till Dec 2022. Vaccination is the most effective means to prevent mortality and infection attributed to COVID-19. Identifying public attitudes and perceptions on COVID-19 vaccination is essential to strengthening the vaccination programmes. This study aims to identify attitudes and perceptions of twitter users towards COVID-19 vaccinations in four different countries. A sentiment analysis of 663,377 tweets from October 2020 to September 2022 from four different countries (i.e., India, South Africa, UK, and Australia) was conducted. Text mining using roBERTA (Robustly Optimized Bert Pretraining approach) python library was used to identify the polarity of people's attitude as "negative", "positive" or "neutral" based on tweets. A sample of 2000 tweets (500 from each country) were thematically analysed to explore the people's perception concerning COVID-19 vaccines across the countries. The attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines varied by countries. Negative attitudes were observed to be highest in India (58.48%), followed by United Kingdom (33.22%), Australia (31.42%) and South Africa (28.88%). Positive attitudes towards vaccines were highest in the United Kingdom (21.09%). The qualitative analysis yielded eight themes namely (i) vaccine shortages, (ii) vaccine side-effects, (iii) distrust on COVID-19 vaccines, (iv) voices for vaccine equity, (v) awareness about vaccines, (vi) myth busters, (vii) vaccines work and (viii) vaccines are safe. The twitter discourse reflected the evolving situation of COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination strategies, lacunae and positives in the respective countries studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the esteemed chambers of Westminster, the United Kingdom's members of Parliament engage in rigorous discourse regarding economic policies that have far-reaching consequences. The discourse analysis of their speeches helps us understand the formulation of financial regulations that align with the nation's evolving needs and priorities. Nevertheless, discourse analysis has been criticised for being overtly biased in as much as it cherry-picks the linguistic features it seeks to examine within a data set. Hence, the present study aims to integrate corpus linguistic tools with discourse analysis methods to prepare representative data and to construct an objective pathway for analysis, thereby establishing an impartial avenue for scrutiny while mitigating the critiques often levelled against these two distinct approaches when employed in isolation. To realise these objectives, a corpus-assisted discourse study approach is applied, focusing on the procedural obstacles in the back-and-forth journey between quantitative and qualitative analysis of the discursive representations of the British economy. The study revealed that the integration of corpus tools and discourse methods helped prepare representative data for objective analysis. The integration, also, backed the triangulation of findings and showed that the parliamentarians concentrated on two main discourses of the British economy, namely finance and hardship. The analysis of the linguistic and collocational behaviour of these discourses uncovered that alleviation, scale and source were the three semantic categories of the discursive representation of the British economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pacific Islands often exemplify climate change vulnerability, yet little scholarship has probed how these representations translate to the media. This study examines newspaper articles about Pacific Islands and climate change in American, British, and Australian newspapers from 1999 to 2018, analyzing volume, content, and dominant narratives. These quantitative results are complemented by semi-structured interviews with journalists as well as Pacific stakeholders who engage with the media. Reporting on Pacific Islands and climate change focuses heavily on who and what are at risk from climate impacts; reporting on solutions is less frequent and dominated by discussions of migration. This overemphasis on vulnerability potentially downplays the importance of the resiliency and action of Pacific Island communities and positions the Pacific as a site for climate catastrophe, rather than climate justice. However, recent reporting may be moving away from overarching narratives of vulnerability, motivating continued research into these depictions and how they promote or discourage climate action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By bringing together the theoretical lenses of homonationalism and orientalism, this paper is intended to help the understanding of how tensions were negotiated between representations of the UK as a protector of LGBTI rights and its policies on (queer) asylum. Through a discourse analysis of the Supreme Court decision on HJ (Iran) and HT (Cameroon) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department (2010) and subsequent sexuality-based asylum tribunal decisions, I unveil the discursive work performed by these interventions. I argue that the judgment put forward homonationalist/orientalist discourses representing non-Western societies as homophobic, fundamentalist, traditional and backwards, while Western countries were repositioned as their mirror: secular, progressive and modern—founded on the principles of sexual liberation and tolerance. Whilst such representations are not a novelty, I contend that this homonationalist/orientalist framing was instrumental in performing a double work of simultaneous inclusion/exclusion, whereby the narrative of the UK as a homonational benevolent state could be regenerated. It addressed a long-standing controversial element of the UK asylum policy on sexuality-based claims by asserting that the UK would no longer require queer asylum seekers to go back to their countries and 'repress' their sexuality. However, whilst the decision presumably includes sexual others who fit into a predetermined Western homonormative narrative, at the same time, it projects 'repression' onto racialised queer bodies, thus effectively recreating a reasoning to legitimately exclude them from the refugee entitlement. Although nearly a decade has passed since this seminal ruling, its Othering effects have endured and continue to embed asylum decisions in dangerously harmful ways. This is illustrated by the ways in which some queer asylum seekers have their cases overturned based on arguments that depict them as sexually repressed, discreet and family oriented, as opposed to Western 'liberated gays'—marked by specific norms of visibility, individualism and consumption practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adapting and providing quality services for people as they age is a common challenge across Europe. The perspective of older people is fundamental in a person-centred care approach. Expanding research at the European level that explicitly includes their views can offer a relevant contribution to the development of evidence-based guidelines that can be shared in education and training across health and social care professions. This study aimed to identify common meaningful dimensions of professional competence in health and social care emphasised by older people from six countries in different regions of Europe according to their experiences. A qualitative approach was chosen with a total of 95 semi-structured interviews conducted in Austria, Finland, Lithuania, Portugal, Turkey and UK, following a common topic guide. Participants in this study were aged 60 and above, and recruitment considered age, gender, level of education and living arrangements. Results identified a set of universal skills and practices that according to older people, health and social care professionals should meet. Competences at the interpersonal level were central in older people's discourses, and its core dimensions are anchored in relational, communication and socio-emotional skills of professionals. These findings reinforce the aspiration of establishing best practices in care that relies on the harmonisation of a competence framework that can be shared in the training and education of health and social care professionals across Europe and that voices older people's preferences, expectations and needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite repeated calls for change, the problem of widening access (WA) to medicine persists globally. One factor which may be operating to maintain social exclusion is the language used in representing WA applicants and students by the gatekeepers and representatives of medical schools, Admissions Deans. We therefore examined the institutional discourse of UK Medical Admissions Deans in order to determine how values regarding WA are communicated and presented in this context. We conducted a linguistic analysis of qualitative interviews with Admissions Deans and/or Staff from 24 of 32 UK medical schools. Corpus Linguistics data analysis determined broad patterns of frequency and word lists. This informed a critical discourse analysis of the data using an "othering" lens to explore and understand the judgements made of WA students by Admissions Deans, and the practices to which these judgments give rise. Representations of WA students highlighted existing divides and preconceptions in relation to WA programmes and students. Through using discourse that can be considered othering and divisive, issues of social divide and lack of integration in medicine were highlighted. Language served to reinforce pre-existing stereotypes and a significant 'us' and 'them' rhetoric exists in medical education. Even with drivers to achieve diversity and equality in medical education, existing social structures and preconceptions still influence the representations of applicants and students from outside the 'traditional' medical education model in the UK. Acknowledging this is a crucial step for medical schools wishing to address barriers to the perceived challenges to diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are successive UK governments so staunchly committed to the 'special relationship' with the US? One common answer - a part of an answer at least - evokes the role of identity and identification. The UK supports the US because the UK's ruling elite believe that the Americans and the British are birds of a feather. This article examines this hypothesis from a 'national identity as a variable' framework developed in constructivist International Relations theory. The main argument presented is that UK support for the special relationship is rooted not simply in elite beliefs but rather in a wider societal acceptance of the global hegemony of 'American' democratic neoliberalism. Multiple national identity discourses exist, but none of them calls on Westminster and Whitehall to chart a path that would be at odds with a world centred on Washington, DC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of a qualitative frame and discourse analysis of an electronic support group or blog site where parents (usually mothers) discuss managing their children with either medically or mother diagnosed oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). This is a particularly important topic in an era of e-scaped medicine characterized by powerful circulating discourses around medicalization, children's mental health issues, mother blame and intensive mothering. The findings document that the mothers adopt a medicalized understanding of ODD, on the one hand, in that they use the terminology, and borrow from, discourses regarding other mental and developmental issues such as depression and ADHD. For example, they focus on biological causation and brain chemistry as causative. On the other hand, their understanding of ODD does not reflect the symptoms necessary for a medical diagnosis. They support one another in this paradoxically medicalized conception of ODD through particular social support strategies in which they reinforce to one another that they are not to blame, that others don't understand and that (with blog support) they are not alone. The implications of this for theories of medicalization, mother blame and intensive mothering are discussed. Some practical and clinical consequences are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]