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National identities have been challenged by European integration, globalisation, migration and regionalisation. More recently, there has been a resurgence of nationhood and national identity which begs the question how education systems, and curricula in particular, are responding to this. This article explores how national identity is reflected in history, geography and civic education curricula in France and Ireland. More specifically, it examines how national, European and international aspects are intertwined in these state curricula. This question is explored through a case study of curriculum units and subunits as well as discourses of how identity is being promoted in the curriculum. Our analysis highlights that French curricula privilege national topics, especially in history and civic education, whereas Irish curricula veer between national, European and international (global) notions. Our analysis explores the extent to which macro-political discourses around national identity are reflected in the shaping of the subject curricula in two countries. While the article focuses on France and Ireland, the discussions are also of interest to other jurisdictions regarding the civic expectations and role of schools in promoting national (or other) identities.

Implementation of any inclusive policy is dependent on longstanding conceptions, beliefs, and public discourses on schooling, learning, and including children in mainstream schooling. The adoption of inclusive education in education policies in France and the United Kingdom requires discursive support to reshape the meaning and content of teachers' work, duties and practices. Although inclusive education is widely debated, analyses of the variations in policy narratives promoting inclusive teaching in Europe are lacking. This article reports on comparative and international analysis of discourses and policies for empowering teachers for continuous professional development and inclusive school practices. The analysis focuses on an exploration of varieties of articulations, resources, and conceptual dynamics in the UK and France. These elements are discussed within the broader scheme of the teaching profession, with reference to the inclusive education paradigm.

The doctoral defence is the oral examination of the doctoral thesis. While it is a major milestone for doctoral candidates, this event is often shrouded in mystery. In this article, I explore the doctoral defence from an international perspective. I have studied the format of the defence based on written testimonies as well as the literature on this topic. From this analysis, I distinguish four main elements of the defence format: (1) timing of the defence with respect to thesis publication, (2) number of steps in the defence, (3) public or private defence, and (4) the timeline of the defence itself. I then use these building blocks of the doctoral defence format to discuss differences and similarities between the formats, and finally to categorize defence formats used internationally by analysing the format of 26 countries, 24 of which use an oral defence format. The result is a deeper understanding of the defence format, which is valuable for candidates, committee members, supervisors, and administrators, and which can also serve the current discussions within the European Union on a standard format for the doctoral defence. Ultimately, understanding the defence format removes the mystery surrounding the defence.

This article examines the integration of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in the French educational system and more especially in primary schooling. The research question concerns the purposes, the form of integration and the definition of the content of ESD. To answer these questions, I present and analyse the main features of these three questions as presented in the official texts of the Ministry of Education. I also draw on a case study focusing on the integration of ESD at primary level. Thirty-four semi-directive interviews were carried out with local ESD actors working in two communes in southern France. In this study, the interviews were subjected to thematic analysis using NVivo 12 software. The results show that, both in the official texts and in the discourse of the interviewees, the purposes of ESD tend to be civic and emancipatory. Furthermore, while the choice of content is left to the actors on the ground, the incoherence and lack of clarity of the official texts complicates their task. They thus have difficulty in setting ESD projects within an interdisciplinary approach.

In this study, we draw data from a tripartite telecollaborative project that involved 112 teacher candidates (TCs) from university-based teacher education programmes in France, Turkey, and the USA. Theoretically, we rely on Pantic's (2015. A model for study of teacher agency for social justice. "Teachers and Teaching" 21, no. 6: 759-778) model of teacher agency for social justice and use discourse analytic methods (Gee. 2018. "Introducing Discourse Analysis"; from Grammar to Society. Routledge) to examine how TCs negotiated their agency for social justice in small group discussions around the topics of social justice (e.g. conditions of refugees and immigrants, gender inequities, and LGBTQ+ rights) in their educational contexts. We found that when TCs used agentive positionings in their discussions, their discourse involved first person pronouns coupled with will + infinitive structure (e.g. I will teach …) followed by specific plans of action, as opposed to when agentive positioning was lacking with the use of generic pronouns and hypothetical structures (e.g. teachers/everyone would/could …). We also found that TCs used the discursive space of telecollaboration to negotiate their agencies and had variable success as they navigated tensions in their beliefs and positioned themselves as future social justice teachers in relation to the discussion topics. Their positionings demonstrated their level of engagement and their individual/collective efficacy. Our findings suggest that future research should continue to investigate the micro-level discourse involved in telecollaborative spaces.

Our study draws from discussion board data from a telecollaboration including three teacher education courses in France, Turkey, and the USA. Our data analysis of three groups' conversations (n = 21) addressed this research question: How do participants use translingual negotiation strategies in online contact zones as they construct their cultural, linguistic, and professional identities? The findings indicate that preservice teachers employed: Envoicing and interactional strategies to create a caring teacher identity and resolve conflicts; recontextualizing strategies to maintain the frame of culturally-responsive instruction through their linguistic choices; and entextualizing strategies to locate self in time and space when discussing future teaching and diverse students.

Football stadiums have traditionally been named after local sites (e.g. "Goodison Park," Everton FC) or regions ("Ruhrstadion," VfL Bochum). As big business takes increasing precedence in decision making in football at large (e.g. associations and leagues, regarding fixtures, media coverage, kick-off times, player transfers, etc.) and within individual football clubs (e.g. regarding kits and sponsorship), such toponyms are more and more being replaced by company or product names (e.g. "bet365 Stadium," Stoke City). In this paper, we will consider corporate renamings from the German Bundesliga, the English Premier League and the French Ligue 1 and particularly fan reactions to controversial, badly received corporate renamings. As revealed by earlier studies, in our data here we also find the discourse and practices of the fans celebrating local identification with their city or region, often with the stadiums constituting the homestead of a tradition. Where corporate stadium renamings are badly received, this discourse clashes with the discourse of big business and thus a number of tensions are revealed. More specifically, in fans' reactions to controversial corporate stadium renamings, we find a number of recurrent themes -- for example, concerning consequences to fans' identity to the club; in managing (anticipated) humorous retorts from rivals consequent from the stadium renaming; in resisting, but also feeling resigned to, financial pressures in selling the stadium name; etc. -- some of them across our three national contexts and others specific to one national context.

France’s reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was initially conciliatory. However, the current French President’ statements, Macron, gradually changed, suggesting a potential shift in France's stance. The French president recently suggested troops could be sent to Ukraine to fight the Russians, a move that could significantly impact the course of the war. Our paper aims to address this possibility. How feasible would this be from a military perspective? Second, are there any other relevant political actors that will support it? Third, why has Paris changed its position to such a radical stance? We start from the theoretical design of realist constructivism. Postcolonial theories and the concept of locked-in path dependence supported this research. The methods follow the path of historical synthesis, discourse analysis of key political actors, and text analysis of defense white papers. Quantitative military variables are used to understand France’s and the EU’s military-industrial complex capabilities and assess its potential. The collapse of France’s neocolonial empire in Africa and Russia’s growing influence in the region partially explains Macron’s discourse change. This is correlated with the need to follow a more independent European security policy and the worsening military situation in Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The closing of the aging nuclear power plant of Fessenheim was eventually concretized in June 2020 after many years of controversy, reflecting the sensibility of closing nuclear power plants in France, the world's second largest producer of nuclear power. This paper provides insight into how this highly policy vexed issue was discussed on the local level during 2017, a period when the decision regarding the shutdown was still at stake. Here, I examine the discursive strategies mobilized by key actors lobbying for the shutdown or maintenance of the nuclear power plant to enhance their argumentations. Using political discourse analyses combined with the logics approach, the article shows that the argumentation of proponents and advocates of a shutdown is structured around the same concept of sustainability. However, economic growth, social prosperity, and environmental "cautiousness" are not articulated with the same chain of equivalence and do not activate the same fantasmatic logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to describe the regional security challenges and major threats for India in South Asia. Since 1947, India has been suffering from external security threats such as, a form of proxy warfare and terrorism from its neighbouring countries. To this purpose, the article also examines recurring issues where India has major border issues with China, in the Himalayan terrain to the eastern region of India. This article looks at the defence cooperation between India and France through the prism of India's security threats in the South Asian region. India's soft power policy reflected in a neo-realist approach and expanded its long-standing defence cooperation with France. Therefore, India has been receiving support from the French government whenever the country needs defence equipment and other assistance. The article uses empirical and discourse analysis methods to answer the questions, and to draw a proper conclusion to the study. Finally, as a result of the study, we can see that India's serious security threats in the South Asian region are pushing the country to purchase defence equipment from France. The relationship between India and France is strengthening the bilateral cooperation at a broader level and shaping a strong strategic partnership by uniting South Asia and the Indo-Pacific as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although French courtly models spread to Europe, little research has compared the development of politeness in France with more remote European linguacultures. To fill this gap, I examine folk understandings of historical politeness in Finnish and French linguacultures. Concentrating on cultural outsiders' own understandings – that is, French people living in Finland and Finns who live or have lived in France – my study lies within the framework of a discursive approach, and draws upon data from five focus-group discussions and their dialogical discourse analysis. My study shows that the different forms of government, levels of urbanisation and branches of Christianity reportedly influenced differences in Finnish and French politeness. Yet, during participants' stays in these respective countries, an affinity towards politeness was described as stemming from globalisation. Future research should examine if the frames of expectations of politeness in Europe are generally moving closer towards one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The construction industry is one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. In view of resource scarcity, climate change, and rapid global population growth, the industry faces the urgent challenge of a sustainable transition. The renaissance of timber as a renewable, carbon-neutral construction material could pave the way for more sustainable modes of building. Taking France and Germany as examples, and based on a sociological discourse analysis, this paper reveals four different and conflicting sociotechnical imaginaries of the future built environment. The four imaginaries show specific characteristics depending on the respective national, political, and cultural contexts. Moreover, they include partially incompatible objectives and compete for discursive hegemony, and thus implementation. Scrutinizing the four competing visions and their approach to conflicts and scarcities raises profound questions about their political, technological, ecological, and social implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In France, the fosterage of children arriving from war zones is rather marginal and does require the consideration of two major issues: emotions and commitment, both at stake among the foster carers. These issues can be apprehended through the way in which professionals conceive their work, their relationship with the child, but also the singular and specific nature of these children's situation. We, therefore, conducted a qualitative study in the field of Educational Sciences using semi‐structured interviews to gather the experience of 11 foster carers preparing to welcome French children coming from war zones. The analysis of their discourses shows that this exceptional situation reinforces their involvement and their emotional bond. The time devoted to the preparation of the child's reception is precious as it gives meaning to the work, arouses ambivalent emotions and builds an imaginary child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates how the complex intertwining of multiple assessments influences the way in which scientific consensus and health policy are perceived. We identified an extreme case in France, with its divided political views on glyphosate, which enabled us to highlight unusual variations and develop a richer, more thorough understanding of cognitive biases and complex collective assessments related to health policy. Our sample comprised 51 articles from four major French online media outlets, 2944 user-generated comments (84,386 words), and 52,023 social audience metrics collected during the heated period following the glyphosate renewal decision made by the European Commission, from November 27, 2017, to December 04, 2017. Through a discourse analysis, we uncovered the media articles' discursive strategies. We also explored the embedded user-generated comments and analyzed collective assessments of glyphosate policy. Our primary contribution lies in developing an understanding of the mechanisms involved in collective assessments of health policy and research consensus. We explored the role played by emotional and moral assessments as antecedents to online polarization. We argue that the complex intertwining of rational, emotional and moral assessments influences how academic consensus is perceived. This research answers the call for more research on the health policy communication process and on the logic of controversy at the interface between politics and science. • Complex intertwining of rational, emotional and moral assessments influences the way academic consensus is perceived. • We analyze 2,944 user-generated comments, related to 51 media articles and their social audience (n=52,023). • We explore how individuals reason in online groups and how they assess health policy. • A reasoning paradox: we evaluate cognitive biases involved in the construction of distorted online reasoning. • Emotional and moral assessments are antecedents to polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]