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In contemporary discourse, inclusion has evolved into a core value, with inclusive societies being lauded as progressive and inherently positive. Conversely, exclusion and excluding practices are typically deemed undesirable. However, this paper questions the prevailing assumption that inclusion is always synonymous with societal progress. Could it be that exclusion, in certain contexts, serves as a more effective tool for advancing societal development? Is there a more intricate interconnection between these phenomena than conventionally acknowledged? This paper advocates moving beyond a simplistic inclusion/exclusion dichotomy and puts forth two theses. First, it posits that exclusion can, at times, be a superior metric for gauging progress. Second, it contends that inclusion and exclusion are thoroughly entwined, challenging the notion of a clear demarcation between them. The underlying premise is that, much like inclusion, there can be meaningful value associated with exclusion. Furthermore, applying a rigid inclusion/exclusion dichotomy oversimplifies the discourse on societal progress, providing an artificial representation of what constitutes advancement. Such oversimplification hampers both contemporary research in the humanities and broader political discourse. The primary objective of this paper is to introduce a fresh perspective to the discourse surrounding societal progress. By challenging the fundamental conceptual framework, it seeks to add nuance to the ongoing debate, fostering a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities inherent in measuring progress within society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Yogācāra epistemology, the term prapañca refers to various dimensions of the cognitive process in aspects ranging from consciousness, language formation, the conceptualization of subject–object duality, mental defilements, and ignorance. Given that the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra conveys the richness of early tenets for both the Yogācāra and Madhyamaka traditions, an investigation of the meaning and discourse context of prapañca is a necessity. This paper conducts a contextual examination of the word prapañca, primarily addressing (1) a range of meanings, (2) possible characteristics, (3) conditions and consequences, especially the associations with the conceptualization (vikalpa) process, and (4) the significance of the elimination of prapañca that the corresponding dialogue implies. This paper finds that prapañca is associated with dualistic conceptualization and the evolution of consciousness within saṃsāra. It shows some qualities of the beginningless conceptual structure of saṃsāric conditioned negativity and is related to language formation. As the discourse in Laṅka adduces it as the root of suffering, liberation from it is a prerequisite for reaching enlightenment and achieving the state of Buddhahood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multilingual speakers' languaging practices are undervalued and problematised in formal teaching and learning spaces in higher education. The environment has legitimised monolingualism as the only acceptable practice, hence students often lack the confidence to recruit their full linguistic repertoires. In the third and fourth years of their Occupational Therapy studies, many African students faced challenges due to socio-historic-political factors that put them at risk of failure. These challenges were addressed in academic support tutorial spaces using pedagogical translanguaging. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the use of translanguaging as a socially just strategy, its affordances, and its challenges. This paper utilises data from a case study within a larger project aiming to describe the use of translanguaging in multilingual teaching and learning settings at a historically White university in South Africa. The case study comprised of eight African students. Linguistic ethnography and Moment analysis were employed. Pedagogical translanguaging and humour were used to create a space conducive to collaborative learning and co-construction of knowledge that granted epistemic access to occupational therapy discourse. Respect and dignity were fundamental in fostering cohesion, improving confidence, enacting speaking rights, and creating a sense of belonging among students who often felt alienated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For several decades, Brazil's Grupo Globo, which controls radio, TV, and newspaper, served as the hegemonic voice controlling the audio, visual, and narrative dimensions of social phenomena that formed and informed social, political, and cultural attitudes among Brazilians. Of all their divisions, none has been more influential than the TV Globo network. Lately, with the popularization of free access to digital media, such as those offered by YouTube, TV Globo's viewership has substantially declined. This paper discusses the concept of controlling images to analyze examples of TV Globo's constructed visual image of the hypersexualized Afro-Brazilian female body in the network's soap operas. It also analyzes cases of TV Globo's constructed narrative over another subaltern Brazilian group: the LGBTQIA+ community. Recently, Afro-Brazilian and Queer-centric YouTube channels have attracted subscribers by emphasizing content centered on negritude, gender politics, and place of speech while deconstructing and de-normalizing Eurocentric and patriarchal controlling images. Against examples of TV Globo's normative discourse of the past decades, the YouTube channels discussed in this paper represent alternative mediums for agency, visibility, and unbiased representations of gender and racial identities in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the analysis of a specialised American police discourse genre and is based on a corpus of 115 probable cause affidavits. A probable cause affidavit is a sworn statement written by American police officers to state that there is probable cause to believe the defendant has committed (or is committing) a criminal offence and that legal action is required. After briefly presenting the methodological framework for this study, the paper intends to show how the police use specific linguistic, discursive and rhetorical strategies to serve a specialised purpose, which is to present the existence of probable cause to the relevant legal authorities. The findings indicate that officers use various discursive devices to inform but also—and perhaps more importantly—to convince their audience by means of a chronological and structured narrative of events that follows a prototypical three-fold internal organisation (exposition, investigation, resolution) signalled by specific linguistic markers. Finally, the paper intends to go beyond the objective description of events in order to highlight the assertive nature of this discourse genre and the additional rhetorical strategies used by PCA writers. It studies the emphasis placed on the expertise of the author, as well as the police classification of the offence and the progressive elaboration of the burden of proof. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the significant effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York was the politics of the US-led war on terror encompassing secularism and calls for Islamic reformation. The political discourse of war on terror was not limited to the Americas but was witnessed in other Western nations, such as Australia. The discourse of "Islam needs reforming" by the Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, in response to the Lindt Café siege (labelled as "Islamic terrorism") tacitly associates Islam with terrorism and represents Muslims negatively to the wider Australian society. This paper with the research question of "How does 'Islam needs reforming' discourse perpetuate Islamophobia?" carried out critical discourse analysis on the selected speeches of Tony Abbott in response to the Lindt Café siege in 2014 to find out the context and implications of Abbott's discourse in relation to calls for Islamic revolution. The study found that Abbott through the example of al-Sisi's (Egypt's president) calls for Islamic reformation forwarded his stance of the need for change in Islam to counter terrorism. Therefore, the present paper argues that the calls for Islamic reformation in response to terrorism can associate Islam with terrorism, thus, perpetuating Islamophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the ubiquity of conventional implicatures in language and the critical role they play in argumentation, they have heretofore been almost entirely absent from theories of argument and the linguistic expression of reasoning. In this paper, we discuss conventional implicatures (cis) as an interesting phenomenon at the interface of semantics, pragmatics and argumentation by harnessing research in semantics and pragmatics and extending an existing account for argument diagramming with this type of implicit meaning. In particular, we show that cis are unlike enthymemes, which are extremely challenging to conceptualise and to specify precisely. Instead, cis are anchored on the linguistic surface, trigger a largely predictable discourse contribution and are therefore more apt for argument analysis. By surfacing conventionally implicated material, we can unpack a wider variety of ways in which arguments are triggered by, composed of, and demolished by implicit discourse material, in particular inferential structures, conflicts and references to ethos. This also allows us to model the complex interplay between conventional implicature and argumentation, which in turn sheds new light on the interplay of meaning and argumentation in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes incorporating linguistic semantic information into discourse relation recognition and constructing a Semantic Augmented Chinese Discourse Corpus (SACA) comprising 9546 adversative complex sentences. In adversative complex sentences, we suggest a quadruple (P, Q, R, Q β ) representing internal semantic elements, where the semantic opposition between Q and Q β forms the basis of the adversative relationship. P denotes the premise, and R represents the adversative reason. The overall annotation approach of this corpus follows the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), except for the classification of senses. We combined insights from the Chinese Discourse Treebank (CDTB) and obtained eight sense categories for Chinese adversative complex sentences. Based on this corpus, we explore the relationship between sense classification and internal semantic elements within our newly proposed Chinese Adversative Discourse Relation Recognition (CADRR) task. Leveraging deep learning techniques, we constructed various classification models and the model that utilizes internal semantic element features, demonstrating their effectiveness and the applicability of our SACA corpus. Compared with pre-trained models, our model incorporates internal semantic element information to achieve state-of-the-art performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While extensive research has documented the cognitive changes associated with Parkinson's disease (PD), a relatively small portion of the empirical literature investigated the language abilities of individuals with PD. Recently, artificial intelligence applied to linguistic data has shown promising results in predicting the clinical diagnosis of neurodegenerative disorders, but a deeper investigation of the current literature available on PD is lacking. This systematic review investigates the nature of language disorders in PD by assessing the contribution of machine learning (ML) to the classification of patients with PD. A total of 10 studies published between 2016 and 2023 were included in this review. Tasks used to elicit language were mainly structured or unstructured narrative discourse. Transcriptions were mostly analyzed using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. The classification accuracy (%) ranged from 43 to 94, sensitivity (%) ranged from 8 to 95, specificity (%) ranged from 3 to 100, AUC (%) ranged from 32 to 97. The most frequent optimal linguistic measures were lexico-semantic (40%), followed by NLP-extracted features (26%) and morphological consistency features (20%). Artificial intelligence applied to linguistic markers provides valuable insights into PD. However, analyzing measures derived from narrative discourse can be time-consuming, and utilizing ML requires specialized expertise. Moving forward, it is important to focus on facilitating the integration of both narrative discourse analysis and artificial intelligence into clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues how the study of religion in Japan influenced the nation's conduct during the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945). Specifically, the paper addresses the wartime national indoctrination texts of Katō Totsudō 加藤咄堂 (a.k.a. Katō Yūichirō 加藤熊一郎, 1870–1949). Although Katō was not strictly a religious scholar, analyzing Katō's texts is significant in understanding the influence of religious theory and religious studies discourse on Japanese society during the war. To illustrate this point, this paper introduces previous studies that have discussed the movements of religious scholars during the war. It then clarifies the significance of discussing Katō's texts, followed by an introduction to what has been revealed about Katō so far. The paper then examines Katō's wartime texts that discuss the relationship between war, faith and the readiness to die. The East–West comparison of views of life and death used by Katō was characterized as a wartime application of comparative religion. It was intended to emphasize Japan's superiority over other countries. Such features agitated Japanese readers to proactively enter the fight to the death through spiritual mobilization in a total war system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical appraisal of the methodological capacity of Discourse Studies (DS) in conducting urban research. Based on an extensive literature search, 125 publications that explicitly claim to utilise DS were reviewed. The results show that DS has been utilised for its methodological value, critical lens, interdisciplinary approach, ability to reveal the undiscovered, and presentation of new insights to urban questions. This paper identifies and discusses major sources of inspiration and main trends in utilising DS in urban research. Theoretical diversity, the scarcity of analytical framework, and the lack of required expertise and skills are presented as three main methodological challenges for urban researchers. This paper concludes with suggestions for advancing the use of DS in urban research: obtaining an in-depth knowledge about its theoretical foundations, gaining an analytical overview of the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, developing innovative frameworks that better explain urban questions, and gaining required linguistic knowledge for the application of DS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on installation art and its potential to employ and elaborate psychological concepts. As Claire Bishop argues, installation art has a psychologically absorptive character because it activates and immerses the viewing subject. To analyze this immersive experience, she refers to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the premise that subject and object are intertwined and reciprocally interdependent. In this paper I refer to these registers of artistic perception in order to explore the concept of 'excursive object', which was introduced by the contemporary artist and theorist Peter Tzanev in a site-specific installation (Credo Bonum Gallery, Sofia, 2018). It refers to both Elizabeth Helsinger's term 'excursive sight' and to Michel Foucault's notion of 'discursive object'. Whereas the latter is a discursive textual formation, which consists of apparent internal relations inside a statement, the excursive object of art emerges as a less perceivable configuration of elements. It does not result in a clear perceptual experience and reflects the unstable phenomenological interdependence of subject and object. Thus, Tzanev's novel excursive objects depart from the usual modes of perception. His concept reveals the viewer's particular experience of unstable configurations of elements in installation art. Furthermore, it could be explored as a resourceful term to describe perceptive situations in the psychology of contemporary art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2015, religious freedom has become a heated and divisive political and public policy issue in Australia. While rarely defined or interrogated, 'religious freedom' does not exist as a value-neutral principle with a single meaning. Rather, its discursive constructions are varied and serve to promote certain interests at the expense of others. Offering a new perspective on the politics of religious freedom, this paper draws together four separate studies of the public discourse of religious freedom in Australia (spanning 35 years from 1984 to 2019) to chart how its framing has changed over time and to explore the implications of these changes. This analysis reveals three major discourses of religious freedom emerging over three phases: 'religious diversity'; 'balancing rights'; and 'freedom of belief'. This paper demonstrates how, once used to promote a progressive social agenda, religious freedom has become weaponised by the Christian Right and culture warriors in their battle to entrench in law the ongoing acceptability of discrimination against LGBTIQ+ people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Each practical action in rural areas should be based on a comprehensive, new, and innovative theoretical paradigm. For nearly three decades, the global economic system has embraced rural entrepreneurship as a "productive" and innovative strategy in rural development in many countries, including both underdeveloped and developed countries. At present, we have large companies, which due to government development interventions, are replaced with small- and medium-sized businesses under inflexible and extreme entrepreneurialism. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to shed light on the prevailing entrepreneurship practice and discourse, criticize them, and finally introduce a new paradigm known as "paradigm of rural prosperity" (PRP). In this work, Aram Ziai's theory of skeptical post-development was used, along with Campbell Jones and André Spicer's critical theory of entrepreneurship and Rosenqvist's theory of the conceptualization of rurality and rural environment called "hermeneutical realism". The present paper attempts to base the paradigm of rural prosperity on three pillars of analysis and explanation: (a) rural embodiment, (b) neoliberalism, and (c) concept of sustainability. Although some case studies in Iran have been used as empirical evidence, this paper argues that the paradigm of rural prosperity is universal in nature and can be used in any geographical and cultural context to provide new rural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the discourse concerning Islam and Muslims by assessing the extreme right-wing party, Vox, on Twitter. In addition, this paper examines the incidence (impact and reactions) of this party on the users of this social network. The objectives of this study are as follows: to identify themes and topics concerning this discourse; to analyze how the discourse is articulated and represented; and to understand the impact of this discourse by measuring the engagement of the most viral publications. To do so, we observed the publications posted by the party via its official account throughout 2022. The research methodology was based on qualitative and quantitative content analysis, and the publications themselves were monitored to ascertain the level of engagement. The results of this study clearly show that Vox created Islamophobic narratives; thus, Islam and Muslims are explicit targets of Vox's hate speech. Their rhetoric referred to security threats and threats to national identity, with the recurrent use of the idea that there is a "danger of Islamization" in Spain. The party uses disinformation and hoaxes, and users respond in a polarized way. The results of this study alert us to the worrying levels of radicalization and the normalization of Islamophobic racist discourse in the examined context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines multiple sluicing constructions in Mandarin Chinese (henceforth, MC) experimentally. The acceptability status of such constructions in MC is controversial, and the judgments reported in the previous literature vary. Obtaining experimental evidence on the acceptability status is, therefore, important to advance the research on multiple sluicing in MC. Consequently, the present study conducts two sets of experiments to investigate factors affecting the acceptability of multiple sluicing sentences and the influence of the distribution of shi preceding wh-remnants on acceptability ratings. The results show that multiple sluicing in MC is generally a marked construction. Nevertheless, factors including prepositionhood and specificity have ameliorating effects on the acceptability of such constructions. Moreover, the influence of the distribution of shi on the acceptability ratings is related to the nature of wh-remnants; that is, its presence significantly improves the acceptability of cases of multiple sluicing when it precedes bare wh-arguments. We argue that the observed ameliorating effects on multiple sluicing can be explained by a cue-based retrieval approach to cross-linguistic elliptical constructions. Compared to bare wh-arguments, prepositional and discourse-linked wh-phrases provide cues to facilitate the retrieval of information from antecedent clauses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an influx of misinformation surrounding the virus and its origins. This paper examines the negative consequences of neoliberal self-care discourses related to COVID-19 that contributed to the disinfodemic, focusing on the wellness industry. Some health gurus and wellness instructors promoted lifestyle adjustments and self-care to prevent contracting the virus and sometimes blamed COVID-19 patients for contracting it. These claims contributed to vaccine hesitancy and pseudo-scientific beliefs. The misinformation was attractive partly because it promised individual control and independence from mainstream (scientific) advice. These discourses existed before the pandemic but were amplified within the wellness community after the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper concludes by exploring the feminist notions of care and solidarity as a counter to the neoliberal notion of self-care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: Animal welfare is a public good that is extremely important to stakeholders, who can hold conflicting values and viewpoints, on what animal welfare is, and how a good life is achieved. Various stakeholder groups tend to signal different problems, or problematize specific aspects of farm animal welfare, and propose different actions or interventions within food supply chains. In the paper we explore the contribution of narrative and argumentative discourse to the social construction and framing of animal welfare and its implications. Our findings demonstrate the contestation within the stakeholder discourse around animal welfare and farm animals. We demonstrate how performance-related perspectives are rooted in value-laden language within narratives that shape the discourse regarding notions of good and bad welfare; or positive or negative welfare. We suggest that future research should examine in more depth the socially constructed language, dialogues and discourses expressed among and between stakeholders in order to embody the breadth, depth, and understanding of the multiple meanings of farm animal welfare, and the emergent positioning of positive welfare for farm animals as well as how to achieve a good life in practice. The novel contribution of this review is the application of an explanatory word-language-discourse-person-situation-environment framework in this specific context to inform future research on animal welfare discourse analysis. Stakeholders can hold conflicting values and viewpoints, on what animal welfare is and how a good life is achieved and can signal different problems, or problematize specific aspects of farm animal welfare, and propose different actions or interventions within food supply chains. The aim of the study is to explore the contribution of narrative and argumentative discourse to the social construction and framing of animal welfare and its implications. The methodological approach in this research is composed of two phases with phase 1 being the foundational structured literature search in both academic and grey literature. Phase 2 was the analysis of the secondary data from the literature review to develop a synthesized iterative paper and in doing so develop a typology of five narratives: the 'farming as a business' narrative, the 'religion-based' narrative, the 'research, legislative and political based narrative', the 'higher welfare' narrative, and the "animal rights/power-based" narrative. Our findings demonstrate the contestation within the stakeholder discourse of the articulation of why farm animals should have a good life. Performance-related perspectives are rooted in the value-laden language and narratives that shape the arguments regarding notions of good and bad welfare; the emergent positioning of positive welfare for farm animals as well as how to achieve a good life in practice. The novel contribution of this review is the application of an explanatory word-language-discourse-person-situation-environment framework in this specific context to inform future research on animal welfare discourse analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The attention to sustainability transformations and related processes of learning, innovation, and adaptation has inspired a growing interest in theories that help to grasp the processes of change in governance. This perspective paper and the Special Issue of which it is part explore how evolutionary perspectives on environmental governance can enrich our understanding of the possibilities and limits of environmental policy and planning. The aim of this paper is to highlight some key notions for an evolutionary understanding of governance theory and to show how such an evolutionary perspective can help to develop a more integrated perspective on environmental governance in which the temporal dimension and the effects of steering attempts play a pivotal role. It is argued that the effects of environmental governance on the material environment, community, and governance itself must be considered in their interrelation. Such insight in couplings and co-evolutions can be of great value in the everyday practice of environmental policy and governance and even more so when attempting to transform the governance system towards more ambitious and coordinated goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reported speech, or relata refero, although not always part of the argumentation tout court, can be an important element of argumentative discourse. It might, for instance, provide information on the position of another party in the discussion or function as part of the premise of an argument from authority. Whereas existing methods of representing argumentative discourse focus on arguments and their interrelations, this paper develops a method that enables the analyst to also include informative elements in the representation, focusing on reported speech. It does so by incorporating the notion of 'voice' into the representation framework of Adpositional Argumentation (AdArg). In particular, the paper explains how to formalize the constituents of this notion and illustrates its use in representing (1) an author's report of the position of another party (including the supporting argumentation); (2) an author's own position (including the supporting argumentation); and (3) source-based arguments such as the argument from authority, with an indication of the distance of the source from the author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that discourse representations can be mapped to networks and analyzed by tools provided in network theory so that deep properties of discourse structure are revealed. Two discourse-annotated corpora, C58 and STAC, that belong to different discourse types and languages were compared and analyzed. Various key network indices were used for the discourse representations of both corpora and show the different network profiles of the two discourse types. Moreover, both network motifs and antimotifs were discovered for the discourse networks in the two corpora that shed light on strong tendencies in building or avoiding to build discourse relations between utterances for permissible three-node discourse subgraphs. These results may lead to new types of discourse structure rules that draw on the properties of the networks that lie behind discourse representation. Another important aspect is that the second version of the STAC corpus, which includes nonlinguistic discourse units and their relations, exhibits similar trends in terms of network subgraphs compared to its first version. This suggests that the nonlinguistic context has a significant impact on discourse structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As is the case elsewhere in the world, water governance in Ethiopia is a by-product of a complex set of various global and local socio-political, economic, and ecological discourses and narratives. However, the many competitive and often conflicting discourses on shaping water governance in the Ethiopian Central Rift Valley (CRV) have not been examined and chronicled. This paper investigates the different discourses, narratives, and debates of water governance and their implications for satisfying the growing demand for water. The study was grounded in political economy and political ecology theoretical frameworks. Data were collected through literature surveys and intensive fieldwork, and were analyzed following a discourse analysis and using narrative analysis techniques. The study found that the dominant competing discourses that have greatly influenced water governance in the CRV focus on decentralization, water-centered development, marketization, land/water degradation, climate change, water scarcity, and weak water governance. We suggest that the analysis and documentation of the diverse narratives and discourses from multiple perspectives could help to unravel the complex nature of water governance in the CRV and lay the foundation for attempts to implement sustainable water resource management in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the production of vocative calls in (Northern) Metropolitan French (MF) and Cameroonian French (CF) as it is spoken by native speakers of a tone language, Basaá. While the results of our Discourse Completion Task confirm previous descriptions of MF, they also further our understanding of the relationship between pragmatics and prosody across different groups of French speakers. MF favors the vocative chant in routine contexts and a rising-falling contour in urgent contexts. In contrast, context has little influence on the choice of contour in CF. A melody consisting of the surface realization of lexical tones is produced in both contexts. Regarding acoustic parameters, context only exerts a significant effect on the loudness of vocative calls (RMS amplitude) and has little effect on their F0 height, F0 range and duration. A target-use of vocative calls in CF thus does not amount to target-like use of the original standard target language, MF. Our results provide novel evidence for the transfer of lexical tones onto the contact variety of an intonation language. They also corroborate previous studies involving the pragmatics-prosody interface: the more marked a prosodic pattern is (here, the vocative chant), the more difficult it is to acquire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to reflect upon personal experiences with a Foucauldian-inspired academic leadership approach to implementing digital education at the University of Bristol. Higher Education Institutions across the UK often invest in digital infrastructure and central support teams (technical and educational) and expect these investments alone to be the main vehicles to achieve digital education. While clearly, having technologies and support play a key role in digital education, according to my experience the implementation of digital education is complex and requires focused and scholarly leadership to drive it. This is because I argue that digital education can be considered a 'discourse', in the Foucauldian sense, of our era whose implementation involves considerable social change. Through my work as the academic person first responsible for digital education in the School of Modern Languages and then across the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bristol, I will unpack how having someone with the appropriate practical and theoretical expertise leading the digital education agenda brought positive impacts before and during the pandemic. Drawing on reflections from years of academic leadership, I will consider questions such as: What practices can lead the digital education discourse to advance in HE settings? And, which agents in HE can develop these practices? This theoretical-oriented discussion grounded on personal experience can be useful for institutions making decisions about how to take digital education forward. Indeed, as we emerge from the pandemic, universities are in the process of choosing whether to go back to a pre-COVID time characterised by a power struggle between different educational discourses, which often meant that the digital education discourse remained marginal, or whether to embrace and invest more in digital education and associated academic leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the theory of knowledge based on the idea of dynamical space. The goal of this effort is to comprehend the knowledge that remains beyond the human domain, e.g., of the artificial cognitive systems. This theory occurs in two versions, weak and strong. The weak version is limited to knowledge in which retention and articulation are performed through the discourse. The strong version is general and is not limited in any way. In the weak version, knowledge is represented by the trajectories of discourses in time, in a dynamical space called the discursive space, which has an arbitrary number of dimensions. Given space is used to represent a given part of knowledge. A manifold is introduced to represent knowledge with a wider scope (all knowledge). The strong version is an extrapolation of the weak version to cover all forms of knowledge, not necessarily human or manifesting in language. The use of dynamical space construction allows one to formalize knowledge as such. Such an effort requires us to initially consider knowledge as mainly a social and linguistic phenomenon, which also could be presented as a result of the evolution of the understanding of knowledge that took place in the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Xuanzang (602–664) is famous for his legendary life, his important translation works, and also his Discourse on the Realisation of Consciousness-Only (Vijñapti-mātratā-siddhi, 成唯識論). This text, which is considered as a synthesis of Yogācāra thought, has been diversely interpreted by modern scholars and is still discussed, in particular about the status of external things. Nevertheless, this issue seems to be of little interest for Yogācāra thinkers compared to other topics such as the Noble Path, or else the three types of wisdom (trividhā prajñā, 三慧): learning (śruta, 聞), reasoning (cintā, 思), and cultivating (bhāvanā, 修). As emphasized in recent research, this topic represents a major issue for Buddhist practitioners. In an attempt to analyse it in Xuanzang's Discourse, and more generally in Yogācāra thought, this paper will first discuss Asaṅga's and Vasubandhu's thought on the three types of wisdom. Secondly, since it is important to replace the three types of wisdom in the general argumentation of Xuanzang's Discourse, we will present the structure of his text which is modelled on a "path" leading progressively to Supreme Awakening. Then, we will present the main elements of the Noble Path and situate the three types of wisdom into it. Finally, we will explain that Xuanzang follows Asaṅga's and Vasubandhu's conceptions and eventually confirm the importance of the three types of wisdom in Yogācāra thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Management practices of nonhuman animals in nature ("wildlife") are globally controversial. In some places, individuals believe it should be up to individual landowners to "manage" wildlife. In others, wildlife is seen as belonging to everyone and should be respected, or least hunted ethically. Wildlife killing contests are legal in most U.S. states. Coyote killing contests take place in many of them and several states have enacted legislation to ban them. In Oregon, efforts have failed three times. This paper is a critical discourse analysis of testimonies in the 2021 Oregon hearings. Opposition to the bill is analyzed according to five psychological rationalizations to unpack the pro-contest arguments as an example of rural resistance. The findings suggest unpacking these as more productive for activist groups when creating strategies to counter pro-killing beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women from working class and some ethnic minority backgrounds continue to be underrepresented in science, particularly in areas such as physical sciences and engineering. Many find it difficult to see science as something that is "for them", which then has implications for their learning and participation in science. In this paper, I discuss findings from a U.K.-based qualitative study with 15 working-class girls, aged 11 to 13, from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Data were collected over the course of one academic year, through interviews and discussion groups with the girls and interviews with their science teachers, and analysed through a post-structural gender lens. The paper foregrounds five science-identifying girls, who negotiated their identification and engagement with science through the following discursive strategies: (i) rendering gender invisible, (ii) drawing attention to the presence of women in science, (iii) reframing "science people" as caring and nurturing, and (iv) cultural discourses of desirability of science. The findings contribute to the understanding of how working class girls--who are often "othered" and constructed as "unintelligible" within the dominant discursive regime of prototypical science--find identification with science possible. The paper discusses the affordances and challenges of each discursive strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to present a new way of understanding and elaborating the current state of reality which has a substantial dependency on technology. An example of such a relatively mature technology is the Internet. The discursive space (DS) is a proposed new cognitive tool, which can be used for this purpose. DS is constructed based on the idea of the discourse and the idea of the configuration space, state space, phase space, and space-time, etc. Discourse is understood as the representation/creation of reality, which means that it can also be understood as a carrier of knowledge. The configuration space, etc., is a tool elaborated in the field of physics for describing complex phenomena. DS is a tool for acquiring knowledge analogous to formal information processes, but is based on another interpretation of the existence of knowledge. This interpretation sees knowledge as a social construction and not as an independent entity, which can be described by rigorous formal procedure. The necessity of such tools comes inter alia from management, particularly from humanistic management, where it can describe the Internet as a dynamic and complex environment for organizations that understand it as a basic unit of the social space of reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this theoretical article we construct an argument for a pedagogical perspective based on the notion of epistemological profiles for scientific literacy for primary and secondary education. Concurrently, we offer a discussion of the implications of this proposal to the preparation of teachers and the development of their pedagogical skills. Underlining cultural practices in the construction, communication and validation of knowledge--called epistemic practices which are informed by an ideological perspective on science, are implied in the notion of epistemological profiles in the context of science teaching, particularly physics. Using the concept of mass in the context of science education, we discuss how different ideological perspectives on science reflect distinct aspects of reality. Thus, in this paper we propose an 'order' and 'direction' to scientific literacy and education in science, emphasizing the construction of a clear empirical perspective for primary school and a rationalistic ideological perspective for secondary school. We complement our argument with resources from activity theory and discourse studies, alongside a discussion of issues and challenges. In concluding this paper, we point out that such proposal requires a change in the classroom teaching culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple studies highlight the crucial role of management of a positive organisational climate, which in turn contributes to employee well-being and healthy workplace relationships and mitigates the occurrence of negative behaviour, including harassment at the workplace. Furthermore, contemporary scholars emphasise the importance of open and transparent communication channels in reducing workplace tensions and improving employee mental health. However, the interrelationship between organisational climate, open communication, employee well-being, and negative behaviours in the workplace is a complex phenomenon. Despite the relevance and interest in organisational climate on employee well-being, limited efforts have been devoted to the area of relationships and causality, and straightforward answers about the objective links between these phenomena and their general nature remain complex. Therefore, this study aims to strengthen the understanding of the impact of the organisational climate on employee well-being and negative behaviours in the workplace. This is the first study that applied causality to the investigated problem to identify statistical relationships between the variables. This study was conducted in Lithuanian social service centres and schools, focussing on professionals with a high psychological risk at work due to their nature. This study offers valuable contributions and provides a comprehensive and profound insight into the management field, focussing on the impact of the organisational climate. The values of harassment in the workplace are explained by the values of organisational climate and employee well-being. This study demonstrates that improving the organisational climate contributes to employee well-being and healthy relationships and reduces the prevalence of negative behaviours in the workplace. This study introduces the academic and practical implications and suggests the pathways for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, a massive migration of Syrian nationals to Türkiye has been a significant phenomenon. This situation has become a problematic issue, as the massive presence of Syrian refugees in Türkiye has become an important part of the domestic political agenda. The politicization of the refugee issue has long since presented a duality of conflicting opinions among the Turkish society, whereas it has led to political debates between pro-government and opposition groups. In light of these developments, Turkish government elites have produced discourses of religious solidarity with the aim of providing tolerance and social acceptance for Syrian refugees and thus legitimizing the open door policy of the government toward these refugees. The aim of this study is to analyze and categorize the themes that constitute the basis of the discourses of religious solidarity regarding Syrian refugees in Türkiye. In this context, a second aim is to demonstrate how these themes have been welcomed in a positive manner by their adoption and recognition by Turkish society. To these aims, governmental discourses of religious solidarity and a sample consisting of 980 posts on the digital platform X have been analyzed by using the critical discourse analysis technique and have been categorized under two discursive themes, namely the ensar–muhacir analogy and the emphases on the Ottoman legacy. The conformity between these discourses and the government's ideological orientation and the degree to which these discourses have been welcomed and adopted by the Turkish society have been discussed in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study critically examines the public's perception of Florence Nightingale's legacy through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of digital media, specifically podcasts and YouTube. Nightingale, who is often remembered as "The Lady with the Lamp", holds a complex identity within modern narratives that is celebrated for her pioneering contributions to nursing and public health, even if there are some disagreements about her, given the colonialist setting that may have shaped some of her opinions and decisions. This research employed CDA to analyze 25 podcasts and 18 YouTube videos, which were systematically included according to a priori inclusion criteria. The study synthesized how these media products portray Nightingale and, by extension, shape public discourse about the nursing profession. The findings reveal five thematic representations of Nightingale: as a legendary figure, a modern feminist, a dedicated statistician, a pioneer in public health, and a pivotal STEM contributor. These portrayals challenge traditional nursing stereotypes by emphasizing Nightingale's role as a rigorous scientist and reformer, suggesting broader perceptions of nurses that encompass leadership, analytical skills, and strategic thinking. The study supports the hypothesis that digital narratives significantly influence the public's understanding and appreciation of nursing, advocating for a more nuanced professional identity that integrates traditional caregiving roles with critical and analytical capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wenshi Ziliao (Cultural and Historical Materials) are spaces where contemporary Chinese official discourse and local self-expression are coordinated. But these spaces are extremely limited on religious issues. The Pingli missionary case in the Shaanxi Wenshi Ziliao is seen as an anti-imperialist patriotic movement. However, by re-examining this conflict through the analysis of other materials, this article finds that the outbreak of the Pingli case is closely related to local power structures, the conditions of missionaries and Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (P.I.M.E.), and the socio-cultural atmosphere. These hidden stories, although overlooked by the compilers of Wenshi Ziliao, are re-emphasized by priests of the local church, revealing attempts by Christians to continually adjust their self-expression in response to official discourse under the contemporary Chinese church–state relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the Japanese Nichiren Buddhist organization, Soka Gakkai (SG), whose members have supported the political party known as Kōmeitō, or Clean Government Party, in Japan for over half a century. SG members have often been criticized as 'impure' political actors, undergoing frequent public questioning of their motivations for engaging in electoral politics in light of their 'religious' status. The paper shows how the SG members' support for Kōmeitō at a qualitative level indeed transcends the typical demarcations of the 'secular-religious' binary system. However, they also simultaneously challenge the term 'religion' that has functioned as an ideology in the creation of statecraft and in their competition for legitimacy. The current paper is based on long-term fieldwork, extensive interviews, and doctrinal analyses that highlight how socially productive this discourse on religion has been. It also shows how a counter-episteme, rooted in Nichiren's theory of the Risshō Ankoku Ron and the idea of kōsen-rufu, sought to bring a 'Buddha' consciousness to bear on individual and collective action as a model for alternative 'politics'. Contrary to many claims, this did not entail contesting the modern institutional separation of 'church' and 'state', but is rather an attempt to find legitimacy for participating in 'Japan-making' in ways that cannot easily be understood or confined to explanations framed within the 'religious-secular' binary system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information theory can be used to analyze the cost–benefit of visualization processes. However, the current measure of benefit contains an unbounded term that is neither easy to estimate nor intuitive to interpret. In this work, we propose to revise the existing cost–benefit measure by replacing the unbounded term with a bounded one. We examine a number of bounded measures that include the Jenson–Shannon divergence, its square root, and a new divergence measure formulated as part of this work. We describe the rationale for proposing a new divergence measure. In the first part of this paper, we focus on the conceptual analysis of the mathematical properties of these candidate measures. We use visualization to support the multi-criteria comparison, narrowing the search down to several options with better mathematical properties. The theoretical discourse and conceptual evaluation in this part provides the basis for further data-driven evaluation based on synthetic and experimental case studies that are reported in the second part of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shipbreaking in the Chittagong region of Bangladesh supplies metal to meet the needs of the nation's construction sector. The shipbreaking industry has received international attention for environmental contamination and workers' insecurity. However, these issues have been framed without considering the actors that produce them and their associated motives. This paper illuminates the conflicting discourses regarding the industry between two divergent groups of actors. On the one hand, national and international NGOs collaborate to enforce a discourse focused on negative localized impacts. On the other hand, yard owners, yard workers, and local community members forge a counter discourse, focused on positive localized impacts and raising doubts about the origin of the environmental pollutants and occupational standards setting. National and international actors have so far missed the conflicting perspective of workers, yard owners, locals and NGOs. We contend that these divergent discourses involve scalar politics, with one discursive frame focused on localized impacts in order to leverage global resources, while the other situates local communities in the global world system; this confounding of scale leads to ineffective policy formulation. This shipbreaking case study provides a valuable lesson on the importance of listening to and including stakeholders at multiple scales when seeking policies to address localized impacts of a globalized industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent emergence of academic discourse within organisation and management scholarship is encouraging organisations to embrace the performative power of aspirational talk within corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication. However, there has been no empirical study to date to investigate the appropriateness of such encouragement. This paper analyses CSR reporting and underlying sensemaking processes to trace how far this academic departure from the dominant discourse of verification and standardisation is reflected and accepted within this practice. The process-focused, longitudinal study is based on a discursive analysis of Nestlé CSR reports, revealing the struggles between forward and backward facing statements, and tracing the discursive management of tensions between talk and action over a period between 2002 and 2016. The discursive analysis is complemented with findings from seven in-depth interviews with Nestlé senior managers and external non-governmental organisation (NGO) stakeholders to provide insights into the underlying organisational sensemaking. Three tension management phases are detected in the reporting shifting from ignoring aspiration to allowing for a dialectic interplay between aspiration and performance. The interview findings support the detection of the three phases, highlight the dialectic interplay between retrospective and prospective sensemaking as part of the iterative reporting, and underscore the importance of stakeholder involvement in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we document the coordination of eye gaze and manual signing in a local sign language from Nebaj, Guatemala. We analyze gaze patterns in two conversations in which signers described the book Frog Where Are You to an interlocutor. The signers include a deaf child who narrated the book to a hearing interlocutor and her grandfather, who is also deaf, as he described the same book to his hearing grandson during a separate conversation. We code the two narratives for gaze target and sign type, analyzing the relationship between eye gaze and sign type as well as describing patterns in the sequencing of eye gaze targets. Both signers show a strong correlation between sign type and the direction of their eye gaze. As in previous literature, signers looked to a specialized medial space while producing signs that enact the action of characters in discourse in contrast to eye gaze patterns for non-enacting signs. Our analysis highlights both pragmatic–interactional and discursive–narrative functions of gaze. The pragmatic–interactional use of gaze primarily relates to the management of visual attention and turn-taking, while the discursive–narrative use of gaze marks the distinction between narrator and character perspective within stretches of narration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The zero-sum nature of mega-event hosting encourages cities to escalate investment with an eye towards convincing event rights holders that a positive outcome will result. The discursive frameworks of "legacy" and "sustainability", the global competition to attract events and the compressed event horizon make for mega-event preparation regimes that may seriously compromise long-term urban planning agendas in mega-event hosts. By examining the sustainable urban planning literature, the discursive frameworks of sustainability in the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the discursive framing of the Rio 2016 bid, this paper will examine the Olympic Golf project being implemented in Rio de Janeiro. Through this case study the paper argues that unless mega-event rights holders change their candidacy and selection processes, these events will inevitably be detrimental to their hosts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Particles such as German auch ('also') establish an additive relation between expressions in their scope (added constituent, AC) and context alternatives against the background of shared information (common denominator). In spoken interaction, however, explicit alternatives are not necessarily present and expressions can be construed as alternatives against different variants of a common denominator. It is the aim of the present paper to investigate to what extent the presence of alternatives influences the construction of utterances containing an additive particle. This is particularly relevant for German, where speakers can choose between an unstressed and stressed version of auch. We ask whether properties of the alternatives and their common denominators influence the choice to use stressed or unstressed auch. In a corpus study on spoken language, we classified the versions of auch, the particles AC, the alternatives in the preceding context and their common denominator. The results show that the speaker's choice is influenced by the relation of the utterance to context alternatives. Specifically, the degree of explicitness of alternatives, the number of alternatives, and the degree of abstractness of the common denominator influence the continuation of the discourse, measured by the preference for one of the two variants of the particle auch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Places affected by urban shrinkage are widely depicted as left behind places characterized by decline and decay. Refugees are generally constructed as victims or 'dangerous other'. Hence, place-making and negotiations of belonging in shrinking cities are accompanied by multiple layers of stigmatization. Despite this contextual factor and even though many questions related to inter-group relations in shrinking cities are still unanswered, refugee-centered revitalization of shrinking cities is being discussed among city officials, planners and in the scientific community. This paper investigates local discourses on urban shrinkage and refugee arrival as contextual factors for negotiations of place and belonging, and connects to previous studies on the stigmatization of declining cities and the othering of refugees. It uses Nayak's (2019) concept of re-scripting narratives to analyze whether acts of re-writing apply not only to stigmatizations of place, but marginalized groups as well. The paper finds that while dominant discourses on place are contested and at times re-scripted by local actors, discourses which construct refugees as other are reaffirmed. Confirming previous findings according to which stigma was passed on to other marginalized groups, it concludes that there is a need to consider dominant discourses and their negative impact on social cohesion in debates around refugee-centered revitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an exploration of public discourse surrounding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in agriculture, specifically related to precision agriculture techniques. (1) Advancements in the use of AI have increased its implementation in the agricultural sector, often framed as a sustainable solution for feeding a growing global population. However, lessons learned from previous agricultural innovations indicate that new technologies may face public scrutiny and suspicion, limiting the dissemination of the innovation. Using systems thinking approaches can help to improve the development and dissemination of agricultural innovations and limit the unintended consequences of innovations within society. (2) To analyze the current discourse surrounding AI in agriculture, a content analysis was conducted on Twitter using Meltwater to select tweets with specific reach and engagement. (3) Seven themes resulted from the analysis: precision agriculture and digital technology innovation; transformation and the future of agriculture; accelerate solutions, solve challenges; data management and accessibility; transforming crop management, prioritizing adoption; and AI and sustainability. (4) The discourse on AI in agriculture on Twitter was overwhelmingly positive, failing to account for the potential drawbacks or limits of the innovation. This paper examines the limits of the current communication and outreach across environmental, economic, social, cultural, political, and behavioral contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language both represents and constructs our reality. Soil Security is a proposed new frame for encouraging the systematic and interdisciplinary approaches to soil research needed to address complex needs. This bold attempt at reframing may, however, have numerous consequences in addition to its central intent. This review paper explores words and discourses related to 'Soil Security'. Current understanding of how language frames reality is presented, emphasising the roles of metaphor and entailments. Soil Security is then situated in relation to the broader construct of Environmental Security, with references to security of water, food and energy. Against this background, aspects of Soil Security are explored, and some cautions issued to users of the term. The soil science community is urged to actively consider the implications and nuances of any discourse, including that of Soil Security, with which it engages, or risk being led to operate in unintended or unwelcome ways. To guide this engagement, the review paper concludes with suggestions on how to reflect on the practice of soil science and its role in the future of humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Misinformation and disinformation are prevalent across society today, their rise to prominence developed mainly through the expansion of social media. Communication has always been recognised in health and care settings as the most important element between people who are receiving care and those delivering, managing, and evaluating care. This paper, through a discourse approach, will explore communication through the perception of information formed following personal selection of influencers and try to determine how such affects patient care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a discourse approach, this study examines online news and opinion pieces about calls for the British Museum to return Chinese artefacts. We examine the interpersonal meanings conveyed by the linguistic choices made in these texts. This study uses the appraisal system in the systemic functional linguistic (SFL) framework to examine how news discourse addresses the issue and constructs interpersonal meanings. Graduation resources, as a subcategory of appraisal system, can underpin the degree of meanings and perspectives, allowing writers to adjust the gradability of attitudinal meanings conveyed to readers. This research first examines how the writer's voice is embedded in graduation resources, and later, how these graduation resources are used in online news articles calling for the return of the artefacts. This study also examines how online newspapers covered a short film by vloggers called "Escape from the British Museum", which sparked massive social media reactions, offering new perspectives on how social media and traditional news organisations interact to construct meanings through language. The results show that quantification and fulfilment (completion) resources are the two most common subcategories of graduation resources. The findings shed light on the language strategies used in news and social media discourse, as well as the interpersonal meanings behind such requests for cultural heritage repatriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we propose a multifactorial approach to salience analysis, examining the influence of five factors on the salience of referential entities in discourse. Significance tests and Cramer's V tests were conducted to analyze textual data obtained through manual annotation of four text excerpts in French and in Chinese. The results show that almost all the factors have a significant influence on referents' salience (except the animacy factor in one of the excerpts). While it seems difficult to predict a fixed ranking of salience factors, which depends more on textual characteristics than on differences between the two languages, the different values of each factor under investigation show an identical behavior in terms of the positive/negative contribution to salience. The results also suggest that some factors (syntactic function and syntactic parallelism) may have a more stable influence on referents' salience than other factors (animacy, mobility, and main character), potentially constrained by textual properties such as the main character's nature, its number of occurrences, and the possible existence of competing protagonists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse (a unit of language longer than a single sentence) is fundamental to everyday communication. People with aphasia (a language impairment occurring most frequently after stroke, or other brain damage) have communication difficulties which lead to less complete, less coherent, and less complex discourse. Although there are multiple reviews of discourse assessment and an emerging evidence base for discourse intervention, there is no unified theoretical framework to underpin this research. Instead, disparate theories are recruited to explain different aspects of discourse impairment, or symptoms are reported without a hypothesis about the cause. What is needed is a theoretical framework that would clarify the specific linguistic skills that create completeness, coherence, and complexity (i.e., richness) in discourse, and illuminate both the processes involved in discourse production and the reasons for breakdown. This paper reports a review and synthesis of the theoretical literature relevant to spoken discourse in aphasia discourse, and we propose a novel theoretical framework which unites these disparate sources. This framework is currently being tested as the foundation for Linguistic Underpinnings of Narrative in Aphasia (LUNA) treatment research. In this paper, we outline the novel framework and exemplify how it might be used to guide clinical practice and research. Future collaborative research is needed to develop this framework into a processing model for spoken discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the European Union, the concern for sustainability has been legitimized by its politically and ecologically motivated discourse disseminated through recent policies of the European Com- mission and the local as well as international media. In the article, we question the very meaning of sustainability and examine the European Green Deal, the major political document issued by the EC in 2019. The main question pursued in the study is whether expectations verbalized in the Green Deal's plans, programs, strategies, and developments hold up to the scrutiny of critical discourse analysis. We compare the Green Deal's treatment of sustainability to how sustainability is presented in environmental and social science scholarship and point out that research, on the one hand, and the politically motivated discourse, on the other, do not correlate and often actually contradict each other. We conclude that sustainability discourse and its keywords, lexicon, and phraseology have become a channel through which political institutions in the EU such as the European Commission sideline crucial environmental issues and endorse their own presence. The Green Deal discourse shapes political and institutional power of the Commission and the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic appeared in the midst of developing the European Green Deal, the most ambitious project to decarbonise the EU's economy to date. Among other issues, the project highlighted the challenges connected to the long-term role of natural gas as a fossil fuel in the European economy. Moreover, the changes to the gas architecture caused by the development of new import infrastructure (especially Nord Stream and its extension, which is currently under construction) put additional pressure on the transit countries, mainly of which are linked to the Brotherhood pipeline. These have been strong supporters of natural gas utilisation and harsh critics of new pipelines that circumvent their territories, as they consider energy transit to be an important part of their energy sectors. This research examines the political discourse on gas transit in Slovakia and Ukraine in order to identify the main arguments connected to these positions. The paper examines a total of 233 textual units from both countries for the period 2014–2018. It concludes that, while Ukraine sees transit predominantly through the lens of cooperation with the EU and other actors, the Slovak political discourse considers gas transit in terms of energy security and the availability of gas for the national economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]