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In 2006, the committee that developed the National Health Policy for the Black Population (NHPBP) chose sickle cell disease as their “flag to demand health rights.” The drafting of this policy was official recognition from the Ministry of Health for racial differences of its citizens in order to address certain inequalities in the form of racial health reparations. Through an ethnographic study which consisted of participant observation, life-story and semi-structured interviews, and surveys in the urban centers of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Salvador, Belo Horizonte, and Brasília between November 2013 and November 2014, I introduce a new conceptual approach called biocultural citizenship. It is a flexible mode of enacting belonging that varies depending on disease status, skin color, social class, recognition of African lineage, and other identifiers. Using empirical evidence, this article explores how people living with sickle cell disease (SCD), civil society, and the Brazilian government—at state and federal levels—have contributed to the discourse on SCD as a “black” disease, despite a prevailing cultural ideology of racial mixture. Specifically, I demonstrate that the SCD movement strategically uses Blackness to make claims for health rights. Biocultural citizenship is dependent on the idea of biological and cultural difference that is coproduced by the State and Afro-Brazilian citizens. The use of biology to help legitimate cultural claims, especially in the Black Atlantic, contributes a new and distinct way to think about how race and skin color are used as tools of agency for diasporic communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper analyses the emergence and characteristics of Israeli Medical Association (IMA) discourse on health inequality in Israel during the years 1977–2010. The IMA addressed the issue of health inequality at a relatively late stage in time (2000), as compared to other OECD countries such as the UK, and did so in a relatively limited way, focusing primarily on professional or economic interests. The dominant discourses on health inequalities within the IMA are biomedical and behavioral, characterized by a focus on medical and/or cultural and behavioral differences, the predominant use of medical terminology, and an individualistic rather than a structural conceptualization of the social characteristics of health differences. Additionally, IMA discourses emphasize certain aspects of health inequality such as the geographical and material inequities, and in doing so overlook the role played by class, nationality and the unequal structure of citizenship. Paradoxically, by disregarding the latter, the IMA's discourse on health inequality has the potential to reinforce the structural causes of these inequities. Our research is based on a textual critical discourse analysis (CDA) of hundreds of documents from the IMA's scientific medical journal, the IMA's members journal and public IMA documents such as press-releases, Knesset protocols, publications, and public surveys. By providing knowledge on the different ways in which the IMA, a key stakeholder in the health field, de-codifies, understands, explains, and attempts to deal with health inequality, the article illuminates possible implications on health policy and seeks to evaluate the direct interventions carried out by the IMA, or by other actors influenced by it, pertaining to health inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizenship as institutional participation includes marriage and weddings, and the lack of rights to legal marriage constructs dis-citizenship. Not only are hierarchies reproduced through language, but individuals who are affected by such processes negotiate (dis)citizen-identities through talk. Through sociolinguistic interviews with couples about their weddings, this research examines that negotiation as two same-sex couples construct identities that produce authenticity and legitimacy for their participation in officially recognized couplehood. Mark and Javier (married in 2010) index social, financial, and legal constraints surrounding their legally-recognized wedding, and Barb and Heidi (married in 2000) index tradition, thus constructing legitimacy despite their ceremony that was not legally recognized. Both couples navigate constraints and possibilities in the ways they linguistically construct their coupled identities in these conversations about their weddings, thus producing (dis)citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the meaning of pledging state and national allegiance at a multiethnic public school in Texas. An analysis of students’ metapragmatic discourses about various ‘styles of citizenship’ illustrates how female ‘preps’ typically viewed the Pledge as a seamless part of their white, middle-class, neoliberal lifestyles, thus positioning themselves, in accordance with institutional definition, as lawful and patriotic citizens. Yet institutional conflations of patriotic , lawful , and neoliberal citizenship styles were challenged by non-preps, who valued alternative transnational , dissenting , and cool styles of political membership. At the same time, hegemonic modes of belonging were not wholly dismantled; alternative citizenship styles sometimes complemented, rather than conflicted with, students’ patriotic stances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses discourse among French teenagers of pan-immigrant, peripheral, and specifically southern descent that evokes the widely circulating spatial concept called le bled, a French word of Arabic origin. Drawing upon theories of cultural citizenship, this paper explores the connections that teens broker through le bled in two, divergent discourses that link French citizenship with modernity and race. The first discourse is one that conceptualizes le bled as less modern than France, which is ultimately a racially exclusive model of French citizenship because it typically treats le bled as a racialized and inferior place. The second discourse involves the conceptualization of France as a modern and racially inclusive place, seeking to assimilate people from various places (even though in reality, many of these policies that claim inclusiveness are exclusive). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: For decades, Haitians have immigrated to the Dominican Republic in search of a better life, yet such hopes have been elusive for many. Since the 1980s, in the midst of shifting economic and political conditions, changing interpretations of the Constitution have increasingly denied Dominican citizenship to children born to Haitians in the Dominican Republic. Drawing on qualitative interviews with people of Haitian descent, the article demonstrates how citizenship claims are textually mediated, and it examines how agents of the Dominican state exert authority over Haitian- and Dominican-born people of Haitian descent through literacy events and literacy practices. Specifically, we consider not only how the withholding of documents shaped immigrants’ lives but also how state agents selectively and arbitrarily interpreted documents, such as passports, visas, birth certificates, and national identity cards, based upon various factors, including witnesses to the social interaction, whether bribes were forthcoming, and the state agent''s determination of the social and economic value of the document bearer. While dominant development discourses routinely suggest that literacy skills provide a protective factor and potentially redress inequality, we demonstrate that literacy events are yet another social interaction in which authorities with power easily impose their interpretations on vulnerable populations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Background: Between 2002 and 2005 fresh or unprepared psilocin-based ‘magic’ mushrooms were legal to possess and traffic in the UK, and commercial sales demonstrated a significant market for this hallucinogenic drug. During and after this time there has been relatively little analysis concerning how magic mushroom users accounted for their drug use, nor on the wider political and cultural discourses that might have shaped this sense making. Method: In this paper we present a critical analysis of contemporary discourses around magic mushroom use in the UK through a multi-level discourse analysis of focus group data from 20 magic mushroom users (13 male and 7 female, mean age 25 years), taken at a time when magic mushrooms were being legally sold in the UK. Results: Locating participants’ use of magic mushrooms within the context of a culture of intoxication, neo-liberalism and the legacy of 1960s psychedelic philosophy, we identify six interpretative repertoires in their talk, which were subsumed within two overarching discourses. The first discourse drew on neo-liberal rhetoric, constructing participants as rational risk managing subjects engaged in a form of calculated hedonism that was legitimated as an act of personal freedom and consumer choice. The second discourse, identified as ‘post-psychedelic’, both celebrated and problematised a collective, connected ‘hippy’ form of spirituality. Conclusion: The paper analyses the relationships between identity, consumption and citizenship by arguing that people''s ability to imagine collectivist, spiritual or interconnected social worlds has been contained within neo-liberalism rhetoric. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study focuses upon the effect of social policy upon a particular area of service provision. It is influenced by the Foucauldian concept of governmentality and the proposition by Lewis et al. (2000) that social policy needs to be understood in local contexts. Only through understanding the partial and fragmented impact of policy can we gain a clear insight into the outcomes for users. The study is undertaken through an exploration of the micro politics of organisations providing health and welfare services for people with learning disabilities. It involves an approach to discourse analysis that focuses upon text developed from interviews with service providers, which is brought into contact with published literature in an iterative process. The interpretation of the text produces four themes: power, trust, citizenship and managerialism. The development of these themes and a further holistic interpretation of the text suggest an emerging organisational typology. A typology based upon different articulations of the themes noted that work to produce particular outcomes for service users. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]