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There are growing numbers of non-binary youth in the U.K. with increasing representation, whilst simultaneously forms of gender diversity are being heavily regulated. Non-binary youth face unique challenges regarding their gender development due to age-based expectations for single and stable identities, and the gender binary. This article explores the regulation of gender identity borders and how non-binary youth navigate these. Ten non-binary youth living in the U.K. aged 16–21 years old took part in semi-structured individual interviews. Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis was used to explore forms of regulation through discourse analysis whilst also tracing the personal experiences through the discursive realms by constructing I poems. The analysis highlights how a non-binary gender provides freedom from the gender binary for identity development and understanding of oneself in context. However, the freedom provided by non-binary identities is precarious and risks being regulated by individualism and attempts to shame, which cause youth to censor their gender diversities. The research contributes to non-binary theory by focusing on the intersection of age to highlight the discursive realms and voiced experiences of non-binary identity development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of words to label concepts is a weak point in CMT but one which is little discussed. This article considers the relative merits of image and writing as semiotic modes for identifying conceptual metaphor domains and whether image can offer an alternative to target is source formulae. It reports on an experiment in which MA translation students draw composite drawings to represent orientational metaphoric aspects of a UK government press release. Conventional metaphoric language deriving from the orientational metaphors, especially good is up/bad is down, plays a significant role across this text, forming a "metaphor chain" pattern. The drawings and post-task interviews with the participants reveal details of the internal structure of the source domain up and how it is conceptualized. Particularly of note is the strong horizontal forward aspect of orientation which emerges when the written text is represented pictorially. The article demonstrates how drawing can be used as a tool in metaphor-led discourse analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do governments visually communicate policies, and what does this reveal about actors' political objectives? Governments strategically narrate their priorities, yet few studies examine this process through visual modes. We contribute to theoretical and empirical understanding in policy studies by focusing on the UK government's COVID-19 response through its daily press briefings during the first wave of 2020. Combining quantitative changepoint and content analysis with qualitative discourse analysis, we examine all 79 sets of slides when briefings occurred. We identify a reactive phase focused on communicating knowledge about the pandemic in a boundedly rational manner, and a proactive phase that created new policy-based narratives of the pandemic. Besides contributing to emerging pandemic-related policy scholarship, we argue that conceiving these visualizations as visual narrative assemblages is relevant more broadly because it shifts attention to the interaction and interdependence of multiple visualizations as they enable policymakers to perform their authority to govern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined how four hunting organizations in Finland and in the UK (The Finnish Wildlife Agency, Finnish Hunters' Association, The British Association for Shooting and Conservation, and Countryside Alliance) describe wild animals on their web pages and what the moral implications of these descriptions are. How do these hunting organizations define animals, and how does this impact the moral regard given to these animals? Using discourse analysis together with philosophical analysis, our examination revealed that the descriptions focus mainly on physical attributes, leaving out the minds of animals. Therefore, hunting organizations take part in dementalization (underestimation or denial of minds) of nonhuman animals, which interlinks with mechanomorphism (the depiction of animals as biological machines). We argue that dementalization and mechanomorphism in the descriptions serve a strategic purpose, as they hinder the possibility of recognizing animal experiences and individuality and keep animal ethical questions out of view. Further, the organizations tend to approach the ethics of hunting through the perspective of human interests only, whilst the interests and inherent value of animals are sidelined. In sum, the way in which hunting organizations depict animals is prone to sidelining ethical issues concerning the killing of animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores the experiences of Beth, a university student in the UK, as she comes to be labelled as 'dyslexic', and as she has her diagnosis taken away. Through use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and discourse analysis, the research seeks to understand how Beth made sense of these experiences, and to explore the discursive 'life' of dyslexia within this sense-making. The discussion in this paper proceeds chronologically through Beth's story, from 'struggle', to 'legitimation' to 'derogation', and concludes with a call to recognise the role of diagnosis in the field of special educational needs (SEN) from a social constructionist and relational perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, an increasing 'emotionality' in Britain's political discourse has been attested by many researchers and public commentators alike, regularly accusing alleged modern-day 'populists' of having caused this emotionalization with their unusual conduct and rhetoric. In these analyses, however, emotional speech is too often conflated with 'populist' speech, without offering substantial historical proof to support such claims. To scrutinize this alleged novel emotionalization of the general political discourse in Britain and to historically contextualize the influence that alleged 'populists' have had on it, I conducted a comparative, sequential mixed methods study of political speeches from British Labour and Conservative Party leaders (quant → QUAL), performing a manual neopragmatist discourse analysis as well as an automated dictionary analysis. With this approach, I was able to determine the distinct argumentative characteristics of the speeches and explore the discourses' emotional quality, reporting a multitude of qualitative and quantitative differences as well as similarities between the two parties. Thus, the paper offers a (historical) overview of the general employment of emotion within political speech and consequently, argumentation used by British politicians. These findings are then used to contextualize claims about the influence that alleged 'populists' have had on the emotionality of recent politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses discursive approaches to examine the utility and functions of language in public health, focusing on social constructions of e-cigarettes. Due to the ambiguity surrounding the use of e-cigarettes, understanding may be negotiated collaboratively through co-construction in talk. Ten participants, three men and seven women aged 26–47 years, took part in two focus groups in Manchester, UK, where they discussed e-cigarettes. Data were analysed using blended discourse analysis, with a view to identifying dominant repertoires used by speakers. Participants drew from two discursive frameworks to communicate perceptions of e-cigarettes: (1) uncertainty and risk and (2) the social acceptability and stigma spectrum. The ambiguity surrounding e-cigarettes was reflected in the linguistic devices used in talk. This article demonstrates the value of drawing on discourse analysis to better understand the impact of health-related communication by providing insight into how existing messages are interpreted, co-constructed, and assigned meaning through shared interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent UK study found that 28% of autistic children were diagnosed with autism after starting secondary school, a stage where self-concept and social identity are the main developmental tasks. This study uses Foucauldian Discourse Analysis to explore the discourses ten girls with a diagnosis of autism use in their constructions of self-concept and social identity in interviews and written journals. The actions that are made possible through the discourses employed are considered. Three discourses which participants draw upon are: a diagnostic discourse; an individualistic discourse; and a normativity discourse. These discourses were used to construct the self as a "legitimised autistic", as "a person with support needs", as "uniquely individual", as a person "in the process of becoming" and as a "self in hiding from a hostile world". Social identities based around constructs of "fitting in" and "sticking out" were identified. Implications for practice are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is often characterised as a 'crisis', requiring action by public, private, and third-sector stakeholders to achieve strategic change. Crisis narratives are powerful and may be co-opted to privilege solutions promoted by influential groups. In relation to AMR, this applies particularly to the pharmaceutical and medical diagnostics industries. Given the associated risk of inefficient use of public funds, critical attention must be paid to how the promoted 'solutions' to the AMR crisis are constructed, and their symbolic and material effects on health policy. We conducted a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the seventy-one written submissions to the UK House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee's 2018 inquiry into AMR. Two researchers collaboratively coded the findings and categorised the submissions. We applied the Policy Dystopia Model to further analyse the proposed solutions and ascertain the discursive and instrumental arguments in the industry submissions to the Committee. We found that industry submissions deployed economic and governance discursive strategies, articulating three main 'market paradoxical' arguments: (i) interference but non-interference; (ii) power but powerlessness; and (iii) for-profit but not-for-profit. The industry submissions also drew upon instrumental strategies including: coalition management, information management, and direct involvement and influence in policymaking. Our analysis suggests that commercial interests deploy crisis narratives to advocate for solutions involving market deregulation and industry subsidies. Thus, the solutions presented to the Committee were heavily shaped by a technocratic-industrial complex. This contributes to influencing what is seen as possible and acceptable in the global AMR policy landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the rationing of medical care for older people by frailty score was justified and operationalised in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 was expected to overwhelm the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. In March 2020, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published the 'COVID-19 rapid guideline: critical care in adults', which advised that clinicians use the Clinical Frailty Score (CFS) to inform decisions about which patients over the age of 65 should be offered ventilatory support. We present a Foucauldian Critical Discourse Analysis of this guidance and the supporting online resources. Analysis shows how the guidance merchandises the CFS as a quick and easy-to-use technology that reduces social and physical complexity into a clinical score. This stratifies older people by frailty score and permits the allocation of resources along these lines. We show how this is justified through epidemiological discourses of risk, which are merged with the language of individual mortality prediction. We discuss the proceduralisation of the CFS alongside a growing body of research that problematises its application in resource allocation. We argue that the pandemic has increased the use of the concept of frailty and that this effectively obfuscates the concept's limitations and ambiguities; the ageism implicit in the response to COVID-19 in the UK; and the relative resource scarcity facing the UK's NHS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors explore the relationship between language and interpersonal dynamics within supervision groups for psychoanalytically oriented child and adolescent psychotherapists working at a charitable clinical service in a large metropolitan city in the UK. Using discourse analysis, the authors identified key interpersonal functions of language in a professional supervisory setting. Results revealed linguistic processes through which power identities and dynamics were enacted and multiple opinions and perspectives negotiated during group supervision. The authors then make practical suggestions regarding the management of power differentials and interpersonal relationships to facilitate more constructive group supervision and promote better therapeutic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'inclusion health' agenda aims to draw attention to health disadvantages accompanying experiences putatively characterised by social exclusion, such as homelessness, problem substance use, or imprisonment. However, its increasing prominence has surfaced conceptual uncertainties and potential tensions with other understandings of health inequalities. We undertook a discourse analysis of how recent health inequalities policy documents describe, explain, and make recommendations relating to inclusion health. Using the UK as a case study, and with reference to public health accounts of multi-level governance theory, we selected five recent health inequalities policy reviews covering Scotland, UK, European Union, and the World Health Organisation. All documents referred to some inclusion health concerns, though their relative emphasis differed between documents. Terms like inclusion, exclusion, and vulnerability were commonly used, but ill-defined and often ambiguous. Explanatory discourses were diverse, with a particular focus on intergenerational cycles and disproportionate exposure to risk, with a varying emphasis on individual versus structural factors. Few documents provided coherent explanatory accounts for the relationship between the issues of interest to inclusion health, their associations with poor health, and other axes of inequality. Our results suggest that health inequalities policymaking in a multi-level context may benefit from comprehensive conceptual frameworks which encompass diverse forms of social stratification, advantage, and disadvantage, and acknowledge potential tensions and trade-offs between different understandings. This may necessitate further theoretical and empirical work for inclusion health on its definitions, bounds, and how its scope of interest interacts with other forms of social and health inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Involving participants/intended audiences in discourse analysis may help to avoid overemphasising the structural effects of discourse and silencing participant voice. Yet, involving participants in complex analytic processes effectively can prove difficult. In this study, the authors undertook a Foucauldian discourse analysis of sexual consent material within eight (predominantly UK) wide-ranging, youth-focused campaigns to identify the discourses relevant to sexual consent and produce a collage for each discourse. Then, 43 young people from West Yorkshire, UK, helped to identify the underlying messages in the collages (i.e. the discourses), and consider who was constructed as powerful, and who benefited and 'lost out' from these messages. This paper explores the benefits and challenges of involving young people in a discourse analysis in this way, and concludes that, a 'both/and' approach should be employed to acknowledge both young people's perspectives and the academic researcher's desire to retain a critical stance toward problematic discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Definitions of drinker 'categories' (e.g., 'light drinkers') typically ignore the role of self-identification involved in drinking practices. To explore this, we presented self-identified 'non' or 'light' drinkers with official formal definitions of 'light' and 'binge' drinking as found in public health and academic research. A qualitative design was adopted. Semi-structured interviews with ten 18–27-year-old UK University students self-identifying as non-/light-drinkers were analysed using critical discourse analysis. A first data pattern saw participants working to defend and maintain self-identified 'light drinker' status in the face of contradictions to such claims. A second pattern involved participant challenges to the rigidity and legitimacy of formal drinking categories. A third pattern reflected participants' rhetorical work to hold at bay or reject disavowed and stigmatised drinking categories (e.g., 'alcoholic'). Interviews suggested how formal definitions could create ideological dilemmas for participants, partly through investment in how formally defined drinker categories connected with recent personal drinking practices. Our data helps explain why units-based drinking guidelines may be poorly understood. More nuanced use of 'drinker categories' in units-based drinking guidelines could strengthen the visibility and credibility of alcohol health messages or could be drawn on in digital interventions designed to encourage moderate consumption behaviour by delivering personalised feedback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an analysis of narratives that emerged from a recent interdisciplinary design thinking careers intervention exploring how employability is represented within one UK University. We conducted a critical discourse analysis using a policy analysis framework that revealed four emergent problem representations. These exposed tacit assumptions about students' lack of employability skills and the responsibilisation of 'employability', amplified silences around opportunity structures and highlighted unquestioned expectations about employability in the neoliberalist paradigm. The need for critical discourse is foregrounded, as is the importance of collective engagement in reframing these narratives. Design Thinking shows promise as a novel intervention for future career education practice, enabling practitioners and individuals to begin to co-create a new critical consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With animals as the primary and intermediary vectors of COVID-19, we sought to understand the ways in which animals were represented in UK news media during the emergence of the global pandemic and how these portrayals impact the lives of humans and animals. Using the Lexis-Nexis online media archive, we searched for news media reports featuring animals during the emergence of COVID-19 in the UK from the period January–October 2020. We analyzed a total of 452 news articles from three UK newspapers: Daily Mail, The Sun (both tabloids), and The Guardian (a broadsheet). Newspaper articles were thematically coded and qualitatively analyzed for emergent themes. Using a trans-species lens, whereby we view the shared commonalities between species as a challenge to anthropocentric hierarchies of human dominance, we explore three main themes: "It's their fault," "It's not their fault," and "It's our fault." Each theme illustrates how animals are represented by news media in the attribution of blame and victimhood of those impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. Our results show that animals are utilized by today's polarized media as tools to promote the political and social ideals of the press and their respective readership. The tabloids used animals for the promotion of bigotry, xenophobia, and racism. In comparison, The Guardian held a pro-environmental stance by framing the zoonotic disease as a platform to challenge the human–animal dichotomy and advocate for environmental, human, and animal equality. Domestic companion animals received the greatest positive media coverage across the newspapers, particularly in relation to the value of the human–animal bond for human health during the lockdown. In comparison, across the broadsheet and tabloid press, animals in research received limited coverage. Research animals were neither recognized for their contribution to human health nor as vulnerable others impacted by COVID-19. The specific impacts of these themes upon animals are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many countries, official guidance promotes alcohol abstinence to women during, and also before, pregnancy, on the basis of concern about Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). Guidance has moved away from reference to a 'choice to drink', claiming absence of evidence about safety of even 'low level' drinking as a justification. Scholarship drawing on sociologies of risk and uncertainty has drawn attention to problems with precautionary thinking in this area of policy making, including for women's autonomy. We build on these insights to assess a more recent type of UK guidance. This is directed not to women advising them to abstain, but instead it is about women, and tasks health professionals with managing the risk pregnant women's behaviour is deemed to present. Using qualitative discourse analysis, we assess one such example, developed in Scotland, called SIGN 156. We contextualise SIGN 156 first through discussion of the relevant literature, making particular use of Ruhl's considerations of the meaning of risk and the social conditioning of choice, and second through an account of developments in UK Government advice in recent years. We show that SIGN 156 builds on a policy context where a precautionary approach is explicit, but we furthermore detail how this approach innovates the guidance and practice field. SIGN 156 expands the meaning of risk and uncertainty and so justifies 'routine' monitoring and screening, generating the case for an expanded form of surveillance of pregnant women. We conclude with a critical commentary on the implications of this case for analyses of risk and uncertainty, and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Complexity' is theorised as a characteristic of modern food systems that poses a challenge to improving population diets. This paper seeks to explore the discursive deployment of 'complexity' in the context of public health. Doing so helps inform a more critical assessment of commercial and political determinants of health, and of 'complexity' as a prevailing frame for public health issues. Qualitative methods were used to explore 'responsibility' for healthy eating in the food system in the United Kingdom. Discourse analysis was conducted on corporate and government documents, and interviews with industry and government stakeholders. The aim was to examine the implications of 'complexity' within discourses of dietary public health. 'Complexity' was used not only to characterise dietary public health problems but also as a rhetorical device in public health narratives. It performed two main discursive functions: firstly, to represent diet-health problems as so multi-layered and difficult that they are intractable. Secondly, and despite this acknowledged complexity, to deflect from food system actions for improving diet to 'simpler' and non-food interventions, by industry and government. These uses of 'complexity' serve to attribute primary responsibility to individuals for dietary choice and to obscure inaction by government and industry, who have most control over the determinants of those choices. In short, 'complexity' can be used discursively to generate a smokescreen masking policy inaction in addressing public health problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularization of wine drinking was one of the most significant changes in British drinking culture in the twentieth century, in terms of the increase in both the availability and acceptability of wine for the general population. Based on a discourse analysis of 35 years of Jane MacQuitty's Saturday Times Wine Column (1982–2017), this paper argues that while wine has been discursively constructed as a drink of the many, the distinction traditionally associated with wine drinking in Britain remains. The data demonstrate how MacQuitty constructs wine through the media stylistically as everybody's drink, while also constructing and maintaining a distinction between "us" as an in-group whose wine knowledge and taste are distinct from "them." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) is an evaluation of teaching quality at UK universities. The aim of the TEF is to raise esteem for teaching in line with research and recognise teaching excellence. In 2017 all universities who took part in the TEF exercise were awarded ratings of gold, silver or bronze for teaching quality. These awards were based on a set of quantitative measures and a 15-page provider submission from each university to describe teaching at their institution. In this paper, we analyse the provider submissions that played a crucial role in universities' TEF rating. We conducted a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of all of the provider statements (232 statements; 1,742,438 words) submitted by participating institutions in order to un-earth the discourse of the TEF. We found that the themes driving success in the TEF are (1) employment, (2) employability (3) student outcomes and (4) research. Recognising what discourse is rewarded in the TEF has important implications for the accepted discourse of teaching excellence in UK higher education. It is anticipated that, in future, university discourse around teaching quality will continue to be dominated by employability discourse (rather than discourse around, for instance, social goods, personal development or equity). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Kingdom (UK) and Japan have conducted unprecedented military exercises as each other's closest security partners in Asia and Europe, respectively. Despite publicly avowed closeness, these military exercises were not predicated on formal alliance commitments or deterrence of common adversaries underpinned by shared threat perceptions. Addressing this puzzle, a hitherto-overlooked perspective of mutual strategic reassurance for trusted partners is proposed here. This paper derives hypotheses from existing – but relatively under-developed – literatures on military exercises and reassurances that locate the drivers of reassurance in the needs and weaknesses of the other. What stems from this starting premise is an importance placed on high-level diplomacy and adjusting military deployments to allay each other's strategic concerns. These hypotheses are tested by presenting original interview data supplemented with discourse analysis of both primary and secondary sources. The findings suggest that effusive diplomatic language vowing politico-strategic support for each other, reinforced by ground-breaking military exercises mutually reassured UK concerns about retaining post-Brexit global standing and Japan's apprehension over its dire geo-strategic context. While not quite deterrence or alliance, these military exercises enabled the UK and Japan to transform their predominantly trade-based relationship into a more defence-oriented one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research explores Caribbean-born women's constructions of retirement. Eight participants (self-identified as retired) were recruited using purposive and snowball sampling. Data were obtained using individual semi-structured interviews and analyzed using discursive psychology. Findings center around a discussion of the negotiating difference discourses. This construction consists of two sub-creations: work and retirement, and home. Both creations present participants engaging in a process of negotiation to merge the life they once knew with their retirement experience. Implications for participants and the construction of retirement are considered, and suggestions put forward for future research and for clinicians working with the studied population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]