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Video games are the digital entertainment resource most in demand by young people, which has led an increasing number of education experts to study their possible benefits. In particular, in this research, we set out to identify the potential of 'Papers, Please' to promote moral learning. Thus, we have tried to identify those objectives that go beyond the success in the video game and could favor moral learning. For this purpose, we have investigated what types of moral discourses arise from playing 'Papers, Please', a video game where you adopt the role of a customs inspector in a totalitarian state who must obtain the necessary money to fund their family. To do this, we analyzed the moral content of 1,560 player reviews. Results showed that only 4.94% of the reviews presented Moral Intuitions (moral content), which occurred more in the players who had played longer and had declared more Negative Emotions. As for the analysis of the Moral Intuitions, results showed that the players mainly made references to Care for both Family and Immigrants and point out the Authority of the State. However, Fairness/Cheating is less represented, despite the many events related to Immigrant discrimination. Through Exploratory Factor Analysis, we identified three dimensions, one of them pragmatic, oriented to success in the video game, and the others aimed at epistemic aspects beyond the objectives of the video game and that delve into the moral aspects of the game events. Hence, although spontaneous video game use is oriented toward pragmatic goals, 'Papers, Please' can guide players to think about the morality of the video game. Nevertheless, if we want to favor moral learning with 'Papers, Please', it is necessary to promote epistemic goals aimed at the explicitation of the morality that underlies the video game. To this end, we propose the application of scaffolding that favors these objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on pattern generalisation as a way to introduce young students to early algebra. We build on research on patterning activities that feature, in their work with algebraic thinking, both looking for sameness recursively in a pattern (especially figural patterns, but also numerical ones) and conjecturing about function-based relationships that relate variables. We propose a new approach to pattern generalisation that seeks to help children (grades 2 and 3) work both recursively and functionally, and to see how these two modes are connected through the notion of variable. We argue that a crucial change must occur in order for young learners to develop a flexible algebraic discourse. We draw on Sfard's () communication approach and on Châtelet's () notion of the virtual in order to pursue this argument. We also root our analyses within a new materialist perspective that seeks to describe phenomena in terms of material entanglement, which include, in our classroom research context, not just the children and the teacher, but also words, gestures, physical objects and arrangements, as well as numbers, operations and variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates force shift, a phenomenon in which the canonical discourse conventions, or force, associated with a clause type can be overridden to yield polar questions with the help of additional force-indicating devices. Previous studies attribute force shift to the presence of a complex question force component operating on semantic content. Based on utterance particles and particle clusters in Cantonese, we analyze force shift as resulting from compositional operations on force-bearing expressions. We propose that a simplex force, such as assertion or question, denotes unanchored sentence acts, while a force-shifting particle like Cantonese ho2 is an anchoring function anchoring a sentence act to the speaker while querying whether or not the addressee can perform the sentence act. The proposed semantics makes predictions about ho2's interactions with addressee-changing operations and imperatives, as well as about a larger family of force shift phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modern media, the names of fairy-tale and mythological images are used to convey certain emotions and connotations. The aim of the study is to analyze the characteristic associative strategies presented with the mythological images of a dragon, a paper tiger and a chimera in news texts of European and Chinese mass media. In this article, the method of text analysis was used to identify patterns and the most possible interpretations of lexical units. 100 articles from Chinese and European publications were selected for the analysis (About People's Daily Online, China News Service, Guardian and France 24). The required lexemes were most widely used in articles on political topics. The most used was the image of a paper tiger (4001 and 3587 units). This is due to its well-known metaphorical meaning in both cultures, while dragon differs in Chinese and European ones. Further research may focus on the search and analysis of other fairy tale and mythological images in mass media. The present study results may also be applied for further research in the field of linguistics and journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the mechanisms of differentiated discursive disciplining for immigrants of different religious backgrounds in the French media. Based on a sample of 120 articles on immigration in the French mainstream media, textual analyses and comparisons were conducted. Results show that influenced by religious factors, the French media use secularism as a tool to portray completely different images of immigrants through different discursive logics. Muslim immigrants present a paradoxically biased negative image in the French media discourse as a collection of invaders and the disciplined. In contrast, the media image of Ukrainian immigrants of Orthodox Christian background is positive on the whole, with a certain degree of deliberateness in the details of its construction. The difference in the symbolic characterization between Catholicism and Islam enables the exclusionary media discourse against Muslim immigrants. The paper also discusses French media discourse flaws and policy dilemmas. The logic of French media discourse is paradoxical in its inability to maintain an intact secularist identification and to effectively influence political issues to the detriment of promoting immigrant integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between characterization frames and argumentation in activists' discourse about the public controversy surrounding fashion sustainability. While previous studies proposing an argumentative approach to frames have acknowledged that frames are related to underlying implicit premises, how frames select certain implicit premises still needs to be systematically explained. Therefore, drawing on a theoretical framework combining Pragma dialectics (van Eemeren 2010) with the Argumentum Model of Topics an empirical analysis of a social media corpus has been performed in order to examine the connection between characterization frames and underlying implicit premises. This paper offers both a methodological and a theoretical contribution. From a methodological point of view, it offers linguistic-discursive tools for the analysis of characterization frames. From a theoretical perspective, it shows how characterization frames contribute to construct endoxa, i.e. underlying implicit premises, through argumentative patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the path from ecological discourse (ED) to ecological behaviour (EB) in environmental protection from the perspective of the ecolinguistic continuum. ED (i.e. beneficial and destructive discourse) is taken as a new indicator for improving individual EB in environmental protection. Based on the questionnaire survey data of 992 participants from 27 (79.4%) provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities in China, a tentative structural equation model (SEM) is established consisting of ED, ecological values (EV), ecological intention (EI), and EB. Through the path analysis (mediating and moderating effect test) by AMOS 23.0 software, the results show that ED cannot directly affect EB, which may be mediated by EV or EI, or both of the two, but the probability of an individual's ecological practice will be increased by the influence of beneficial ED as input. Furthermore, under the moderating of ED, the probability of transforming EI into EB is greater than that of EV, suggesting that ED has a bigger voice in EI→EB, and a positive and significant moderating effect of beneficial discourse is tested. Thus, ED as an indicator provides a new perspective on environmental protection and sustainable development. Potential applications for this indicator are also included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the discourse contrasts that arise in connection to direct evidentiality in Southern Aymara (henceforth, Aymara), an understudied Andean language. Aymara has two direct evidentials, the enclitic =wa and the covert morpheme -∅, which are used whenever the speaker has the best possible grounds for some proposition. I make the novel observation that a sentence with =wa can be felicitously uttered if the speaker attempts to update the common ground by addressing an issue on the table. In fact, the sentence with =wa that is uttered must be congruent with prior discourse; I tie this to the claim that =wa is a (presentational) focus marker (Proulx in Language Sciences 9(1):91–102, 1987). This paper thus claims that =wa is a marker that combines evidentiality and focus. In contrast, uttering a sentence with -∅ entails that the speaker's contribution is already in the common ground, which likens this evidential to common ground management operators—there is no congruence requirement in this case. I identify which construction can be used in different discourse settings (conversation openers and telling anecdotes). I implement a formal analysis based on Farkas and Bruce (Journal of Semantics 27:81–118, 2010) and Faller (Semantics and Pragmatics 12(8):1–53, 2019) that links evidentiality and discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's discursive combination of nationalism and international engagement with its maritime neighbours seems self-defeating. To explain why this narrative strategy has been deemed apt, previous studies have predominantly followed a realist approach and contended that China's international engagement is pure statecraft to help its national rejuvenation efforts. As the merits of Confucianism increasingly affect contemporary Chinese socialism, this paper interprets the internarrativity of left Confucian ethics, Chinese nationalism and international engagement in East China Sea geopolitics. It argues that China tends to identify itself as a contributor to common material interest in the international community. With the notion of graded love, the contribution to the people of the world does not undermine the self-interests. China's national defence is often allegedly conducted alongside the defence of the existing order enabling its contribution. China does not aim to challenge the order per se, but it challenges the US and its allies' collective interpretations of it. This situation leads to antagonistic peace when the US-led alliance is unstable. However, if the US's geopolitical alliance is strong enough to withstand the solipsistic interpretation of the order, the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation can be better realized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the notion of normalcy within the discourse of the European Union (EU), with a focus on its response to transformative dynamics and challenges, especially post-2008. I analyse how the EU, facing diminishing ideological supremacy, has reinforced its institutional power through the framework of normalcy. By emphasizing constitutionalisation and integration through legal means, bodies such as the European Court of Justice (ECJ) have expanded their roles, promoting "integration through law" to counter alternative political projects invariably labelled as populist, thereby giving rise to anti-populism as a discursive tool. Drawing on crisis discourse and diagnostic practice, this paper explores how normalcy legitimises and perpetuates existing power structures within EU governance, subtly coercing member states and citizens into accepting its norms and values, thus shaping perceptions of normalcy and also inevitability. At the core of this framework lies the rule of law (RoL), which establishes legal boundaries in the first place, but in the same move shapes political contexts. My paper argues that the exclusive focus on legalistic interpretations obscures the underlying structural factors perpetuating power dynamics and economic disparities among member states, constraining adaptive responses. I examine the narrative of "growing up to democracy" and its impact on the European project discourse, particularly in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. I then scrutinise the roles of experts and the "juristocracy" in reinforcing this narrative while simultaneously masking underlying inequalities and power differentials. Furthermore, the paper explores the strategic deployment of language and discourse by EU institutions during crises, highlighting their implications for public understanding, political action, and outcomes. Finally, it investigates the EU's strategic use of crisis discourse and diagnostic practices, focusing particularly on the ascendancy of the judiciary, but also highlighting how this trajectory may also have negative influence of legislative and executive bodies as their role diminishes in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse and ideology are interrelated concepts in social sciences and the humanities and are even occasionally employed interchangeably. This paper sheds light on their relationship in academic discourse and examines the role of sociology as a scientific field in its conceptualization. Using bibliometric analysis, we examined 15,716 academic publications mentioning "discourse" or "ideology" in their title and written in English by American and British scholars between 1966 and 2015. The investigation focused on the two terms' conceptual environment, areas of usage, journals, and the organizations to which the authors were affiliated. First, we conclude that although some sociology researchers have attempted to create a sociological definition for the concept of discourse, sociologists are not its most active users. The same is true for ideology. These concepts have established niches in other disciplines (political science and history for "ideology," and educational science and linguistics for "discourse"). Second, throughout the years, the field of discourse studies has become more diversified and fragmented than that of ideology. Third, the leading organizations in both fields are prestigious American and British universities, which indicates that discourse and ideology are elements of the intellectual elites' language. Fourth, the concept of discourse was more frequently applied than that of ideology in the years 2010–2015, and we expect that it will remain popular among scholars in the next decade. As for ideology, we believe that new social challenges could foster the rediscovery of this concept in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response to commentaries by Ali Sammel, Jhumki Basu and Alberto Rodriguez, I present my perspective on three important issues raised by the commentators. These issues relate to the role of a researcher in her field settings and society, the critique of science and science education as oppressive dominant discourses, and co-opting participants as researchers. I argue that researchers should work actively for progressive change in discursive fields such as educational research, in which they are firmly embedded rather than playing an interventionist role in field settings where their discursive positionality maybe temporary and not that rooted. Regarding the critique of science and science education, my response favors a perspective wherein an understanding of the marginalization and oppression of non-western communities caused by western science and science education is counterbalanced by an appreciation of the ways in which marginalized communities can use science and science education for affecting progressive change. Lastly, I recognize the value of co-opting participants in writing and communication of research. [Figure not available: see fulltext.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for an account of fictional force, the central characteristic of the kind of non-assertoric speech act that authors of fictions are engaged in. A distinction is drawn between what is true in a fiction and the fictional record comprising what the audience has been told. The papers argues that to utter a sentence with fictional force is to intend that its content be added to a fictional record. It is shown that this view accounts for phenomena such as conversational implicatures in fictional discourse. Moreover, the view is seen to provide an attractive way of distinguishing fictional utterances from assertoric utterances. As a consequence, this account of fictional force offers a satisfactory way of distinguishing fiction from lying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early studies on discourse rhetorical structure parsing mainly adopt bottom-up approaches, limiting the parsing process to local information. Although current top-down parsers can better capture global information and have achieved particular success, the importance of local and global information at various levels of discourse parsing is different. This paper argues that combining local and global information for discourse parsing is more sensible. To prove this, we introduce a top-down discourse parser with bidirectional representation learning capabilities. Existing corpora on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) are known to be much limited in size, which makes discourse parsing very challenging. To alleviate this problem, we leverage some boundary features and a data augmentation strategy to tap the potential of our parser. We use two methods for evaluation, and the experiments on the RST-DT corpus show that our parser can primarily improve the performance due to the effective combination of local and global information. The boundary features and the data augmentation strategy also play a role. Based on gold standard elementary discourse units (EDUs), our parser significantly advances the baseline systems in nuclearity detection, with the results on the other three indicators (span, relation, and full) being competitive. Based on automatically segmented EDUs, our parser still outperforms previous state-of-the-art work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conditional constructions (if–then) enable us to express our thoughts about possible states of the world, and they form an important ingredient for our reasoning and argumentative capabilities. Different types and argumentative uses have been distinguished in the literature, but their applicability to actual language use is rarely evaluated. This paper focuses on the reliability of applying classifications of connections between antecedents and consequents of conditionals to discourse, and three issues are identified. First, different accounts produce incompatible results when applied to language data. Second, a discrepancy between theory and data was observed in previous studies, which sometimes discard existing classifications for being detached from actual language use. Finally, language users construct various cognitive relations between clauses of conditionals without being able to rely on overt linguistic features, which poses problems for the annotation of conditionals in argumentation and discourse. This paper addresses these issues by means of comparing theoretical types and actual uses of conditionals, by inspecting the dispersion of types in natural-language corpora, and by conducting an experiment in which the inter-rater reliability of classifications was assessed. The results show that the reliability of classifications of conditionals when applied to language data is low. With respect to the aforementioned issues, different classifications produced incompatible results, a discrepancy between theory and data was indeed observed, and low reliability scores indicated a largely interpretative nature of types of conditionals. Given these results, suggestions for the enhancement of reliability in corpus studies of conditionals and beyond are provided to enhance future classification design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper utilizes Rapaille's (2006) concept of culture codes and Hall's (2001) encoding and decoding model of communication to identify the culture codes of scientific concepts in global scientific online discourse. As an example, we attempted to identify the culture codes of the concept of "image", because this concept can be interpreted in different ways in Russian and international scientific discourse. To identify these codes, we analyzed the interpretations of the concept of "image" in scientific online discourse in Russia and abroad. We studied the titles, key words, and abstracts of papers published in 2014–2018 that appeared in the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) and the Scopus abstract and citation database. As a result, we identified the culture codes of the concept of "image" in Russian and international scientific online discourse and compared the culture codes of RSCI-indexed and Scopus-indexed papers. The method we utilized may be used for revealing the culture codes of any scientific concept (using any citation database), which can contribute to revealing and understanding the interpretations of these concepts by researchers from different countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the dynamics of stability and change is key to accelerate sustainability transitions. This paper aims to advance and inspire sustainability transition research on this matter by collecting insights from interpretative environmental discourse literature. We develop a heuristic that identifies and describes core discursive elements and dynamics in a socio-technical system. In doing so, we show how the interplay of meta-, institutionalized, and alternative discourses, dominant, marginal, and radical narratives, as well as weak and strong discursive agency influence the socio-technical configuration. The heuristic suggests three discursive lock-ins reinforcing the stabilization of socio-technical systems: unchallenged values and assumptions, incumbents' discursive agency, and narrative co-optation. Furthermore, it explores three pathways of discursive change: disruptive, dynamic and cross-sectoral. Overall, this paper puts forward a discursive perspective on sustainability transitions. It offers additional analytical approaches and concepts for discursive transition studies, elaborated insights on the dynamics within and between the analytical dimensions of a socio-technical system, as well as a theoretical baseline for analyzing discursive lock-in mechanisms and pathways of discursive change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining the concepts of securitization with a discourse analytic approach, the study presents an attempt to investigate how the audience's perception toward an unconventional security issue has been shaped in media context. As a case study, this paper delves into the portrayal of the Confucius Institute in the U.S. media discourse. By analyzing the coverage of the Confucius Institute in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal from 2004 to 2022, it aims to unpack the narratives and representations surrounding this institution. With a particular focus on how the use of language shapes the audience's perception and subsequently influences their cognition in the context of the securitization of Confucius Institutes, a select sample of texts from the corpus was collected for coded qualitative analysis to allow for a deeper understanding of how the media constructs and disseminates information about the Confucius Institute. The findings turn out that American media actors deliver a bottom-up securitizing move by interacting with socio-political value positions on Confucius Institutes in the United States, grounding a cognitive construction of security threat into shaping public emotive perceptual experience with dialogically patterned linguistic configurations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper, Pickel and Rabern (2016) argue that a dynamic Tarskian semantics resolves Fine's antinomy of the variable without the radical consequences for semantics proposed by Fine (2003, 2007). While Pickel and Rabern's basic insight—a parameter of discourse context that tracks occurrences of variable-binding expressions—is important, I will argue that their own Tarskian theory faces a destructive dilemma: either their theory does not resolve Fine's antinomy as they propose, or their theory does not reflect the intuitive motivation for what they call structured meanings. I suggest that in response to this dilemma we should reject one of the principles that generates Pickel and Rabern's version of the antinomy. Here Pickel and Rabern's insight has surprising, but salutary, foundational consequences for semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A prominent media topic in the UK in the early 2020s is the energy crisis affecting the UK and most of Europe. It brings into a single public debate issues of energy dependency and sustainability, fair distribution of economic burdens and cost of living, as well as climate change, risk, and sustainability. In this paper, we investigate the public discourse around the energy crisis and cost of living to identify how these pivotal and contradictory issues are reconciled in this debate and to identify which social actors are involved and the role they play. We analyse a document corpus retrieved from UK newspapers from January 2014 to March 2023. We apply a variety of natural language processing and data visualisation techniques to identify key topics, novel trends, critical social actors, and the role they play in the debate, along with the sentiment associated with those actors and topics. We combine automated techniques with manual discourse analysis to explore and validate the insights revealed in this study. The findings verify the utility of these techniques by providing a flexible and scalable pipeline for discourse analysis and providing critical insights for cost of living—energy crisis nexus research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern agriculture is underpinned by a colonial, industrial and productivist discourse. Agricultural practices inspired by this discourse have fed billions but degraded socio-ecological systems. Regenerative agriculture (RA) is a prominent alternative seeking to transform food production and repair ecosystems. This paper proposes that RA discourse is supported by a shared storyline binding diverse actors and discourses together—a discourse coalition. Consequently, multiple discourses contribute to the over-arching discourse of RA. A discourse analysis was conducted on texts from ninety-six organisations and complimented by twenty-two interviews in Australia and the USA. This analysis identified nine discourses contributing to RA discourse: Restoration for Profit; Big Picture Holism; Regenerative Organic; Regrarian Permaculture; Regenerative Cultures; Deep Holism; First Nations; Agroecology and Food Sovereignty; and Subtle Energies. This paper describes and examines these component discourses and discusses tensions that may make RA vulnerable to co-optation and greenwashing, diluting its transformative potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper stems from calls for methodological advancement in two areas of research: primary mathematics education and dialogical education. We respond to these calls from the commognitive standpoint by introducing the Grove of Realizations as a tool for capturing and visualizing individual students' learning through collaborative work in small groups. We focus on a group of four students from a New Zealand Year 4 class (aged 8 and 9 years old), as they classified odd and even numbers and reasoned about their sums. This data is used to present the analytical affordances of the tool for (i) visualizing gaps in communication between group members, (ii) mapping their discursive development, and (iii) showing whether and how gaps are bridged within a group. The paper concludes with the discussion of the tool's affordances and directions for further development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will focus on the discussion of Tolstoy's ideas in the late 1920s, right after the 100th anniversary of the writer's birth, by the State Academy for the Study of Arts (GAKhN) (in a collective volume entitled Leo Tolstoy's Aesthetics, 1929) and by Mikhail Bakhtin (in his two articles written specially for Tolstoy's Collected Works). These interpretations were notably influenced by the official commemoration of Tolstoy during the anniversary year and by changes in the prevailing Marxist discourse regarding the creative legacy and ideology of the author of War and Peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iran is one of the countries with the highest number of the cases of capital relocation throughout its history. During the past four centuries, at least, six different cities have played the role of the capital for the country. This paper examines the most recent push for the capital relocation in Iran. By examining the public debate over the topic in the major periodicals of the country, the paper analyzes the underlying discourse that gives political impetus for the capital relocation. It shows that while the majority of the academics opposes such a move, politicians eagerly pursue such a massive project. More importantly the analysis suggests that in the twenty-first century, an old-established discourse on the role of the capital still plays a significant role in forming the public debate and political decisions on the capital relocation in Iran. Based on this discourse, the political system observes the capital relocation as a vital way for encouraging decentralization and decreasing the population of Tehran. The paper suggests that the underlying discourse for the capital relocation in Iran is in bold contrast to the common themes of capital relocation in other countries, particularly newly formed nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lexicon of religion has been widely used in the context of the social and cultural transformations associated with the 'digital revolution', whether in metaphoric (digital as religion) or in realistic terms (digital and religion or digitalised religions). The study of digital magic/magic in digital times, the other side of the coin of the Sacred 2.0, is still in its infancy. Yet, references to magic (in a loose and broad sense of the term) are made frequently in reflections about the rapid development of the digitalisation of society and culture, and they deserve more in-depth study. This paper tackles the issue of magic in and of new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) devices. After a broad outline of the presence of magic in the digital ecosystem (websites, apps and other devices offering 'supernatural' services), this paper will focus on the lexical surface and semantic references to 'magical thinking', explore the underlying reasons for such references (apologetically or critically addressed) and unveil the regimes of existence for magic ('real', 'fictional', 'analogical'). Finally, the paper questions the role of language in the construction of a 'digital magic' and the transformations of the semantic category of magic as seen through the prism of a cultural revolution, that of the digitalisation of societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Jennifer Saul ("Racial Figleaves, the Shifting Boundaries of the Permissible, and the Rise of Donald Trump", 2017; "Racist and Sexist Figleaves", 2021) has explored the use of what she calls "figleaves" in the discourse on race and gender. Following Saul, a figleaf is an utterance that, for some portion of the audience, blocks the conclusion that some other utterance, R, or the person who uttered R is racist or sexist. Such racial and gender figleaves are pernicious, says Saul, because, among other things, they can shift the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable to think or say. This paper expands on Saul's picture in a threefold way: It is first argued that appeals to statistics can function as figleaves. It is then argued that—as far as figleaves go—there is reason to believe that statistics-as-figleaves are especially pernicious. Finally, the paper explores some strategies for counterspeech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes the case that love, in particular a lover's discourse, is regularly excluded from the work we do in higher education. As educators, we are seldom empowered to reach for a discourse of love, nor are we taught to embody love explicitly in our work. This doesn't mean that love doesn't exist in education, but rather something more sinister: that the structural and affective aspects of our work as educators are meant to exclude (and therefore abuse) love. The emptying out of love and love's discourses from education arguably has severe spiritual, sociopolitical, and ethical consequences for the daily lives of millions. While educators always have the potential to be loving, we are seldom encouraged to take the time to examine and speak about this love. This article is an attempt to speak about what Roland Barthes calls a Lover's Discourse. Its goal is to affirm that this discourse does exist in disparate forms. As this paper is part of a special issue on Paulo Freire and science education, I have also used some of the papers in this issue as inspiration. This paper should be seen as a departure point. A slow farewell to a loveless academy and an affirmation of something different on the horizon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, Ontario and Canada at large have seen the rise of the neoliberal state with a concurrent punitive turn in public policy. While academic inquiry has attempted to understand the evolution of penality, the functional linkages that exist between the social assistance and penal apparatus have been largely overlooked. This paper seeks to bridge this gap through examining the way in which community housing is increasingly being envisaged as a mechanism of social control and an exclusionary tactic. Drawing on 150 newsprint media items, reports produced by non-governmental organizations, and Hansard transcripts, the hegemonic discourses surrounding Ontario's Community Housing Renewal Strategy are explored. Particular attention is given to the proposed amendment which denies individuals criminalized for a 'serious criminal offence' from accessing community housing. In conceptualizing criminalized individuals as 'non-deserving' citizens, exclusionary tactics are legitimized as 'crime reduction' strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on studies of the ideas of A. N. Prior on time, discourse and metaphysics. It mentions the letter sent by New Zealander Jonathan Bennett to Prior on January 21, 1955 regarding the paper "The Logic of Obligation and the Obligations of the Logician," by Prior, which Bennett suggested to have a book entitled "From a Logical Angle." It says that Prior never followed the suggestion of Bennett and focus instead on the publication of other books and papers.

Compulsory sexuality refers to the ways that social institutions both assume and privilege sexualities while marginalizing asexuality—the relative lack of sexual attraction. However, experiences of compulsory sexuality are not uniform. This paper documents how the institutions of compulsory sexuality can variously impede or facilitate the development of asexual citizenship, sometimes simultaneously. Data come from exploratory, semi-structured interviews with young adults who identify as asexual in the central U.S. Informants talk about their experiences with intimate relationships, religion, media, and LGBTQIA + groups in contradictory ways: each institution figures into discourses of both citizenship and alienation. We argue that there are multiple pathways to sexual citizenship for aces, which depend not only on how compulsory sexuality intersects with other structures, like race and gender, but also according to one's experiences with the institutions of compulsory sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interdisciplinary team communication in eHealth development is challenging because all disciplines have unique, intrinsic discursive practices, theories and artefacts. Due to these factors, members of interdisciplinary teams can experience problems in communication and collaboration. Through a centered focus, members can benefit individually, inspire one another, and ultimately reach a timely delivery of their common pedagogical goal(s). Using the lens of dialogism, this paper aims to identify the conceptual considerations that arose during the development of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for higher education in eHealth. Methods included auto-ethnography and interdisciplinary dialogue supported by literacy artefacts, including visual material. Results yielded a visual tool for meta-assessment of team communication, and an organizing principle for topics in the MOOC. A major implication is that especially for eHealth, scientific communicative competence of experts—while establishing a common understanding—can lead to a unique and meaningful delivery of high pedagogical quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language technologies are gaining momentum as textual information saturates social networks and media outlets, compounded by the growing role of fake news and disinformation. In this context, approaches to represent and analyse public speeches, news releases, social media posts and other types of discourses are becoming crucial. Although there is a large body of literature on text-based machine learning, it tends to focus on lexical and syntactical issues rather than semantic or pragmatic. Being useful, these advances cannot tackle the nuanced and highly context-dependent problems of discourse evaluation that society demands. In this paper, we present IAT/ML, a metamodel and modelling approach to represent and analyse discourses. IAT/ML focuses on semantic and pragmatic issues, thus tackling a little researched area in language technologies. It does so by combining three different modelling approaches: ontological, which focuses on what the discourse is about; argumentation, which deals with how the text justifies what it says; and agency, which provides insights into the speakers' beliefs, desires and intentions. Together, these three modelling approaches make IAT/ML a comprehensive solution to represent and analyse complex discourses towards their understanding, evaluation and fact checking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions around assessment integrity often focus on the exam conditions and the motivations and values of those who cheated in comparison with those who did not. We argue that discourse needs to move away from a binary representation of cheating. Instead, we propose that the conversation may be more productive and more impactful by focusing on those who do not cheat, but who are tempted to do so. We conceptualise this group as being at risk of future cheating behaviour and potentially more receptive of targeted strategies to support their integrity decisions. In this paper we report on a large-scale survey of university students (n = 7,511) who had just completed one or more end of semester online exams. In doing so we explore students' reported temptation to cheat. Analysis surrounding this "at risk" group reveals students who were Tempted (n = 1379) had significant differences from those who Cheated (n = 216) as well as those who were Not tempted (n = 5916). We focus on four research questions exploring whether there are specific online exam conditions, security settings, student attitudes or perceptions which are more strongly associated with the temptation to cheat. The paper offers insights to help institutions to minimise factors that might lead to breaches of assessment integrity, by focusing on the temptation to cheat during assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes that intuitive technologies play a vital role in cognition and cultural reception. The case of music is considered in particular. The perceived temporality of contemporary technology is shown to be an artificial barrier to the acknowledgement of longer-term dynamics. The increased role of explanatory metaphors from technology is traced across various fields of study. Processes of sense-making—conscious or otherwise—are seen as an informal, unreflected repertory of mechanisms ranging from predictive models to instrumental metaphors. It is suggested that these derive by assimilation and induction from the technological milieu within which the subject develops and operates. The acquisition of these models and metaphors is itself an imaginative process, based on experience ranging from partial expertise to fantastical extrapolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs Ruth Millikan's biosemantic theory of representation to develop a proposal about the function of ethical claims and judgments. I propose that ethical claims and judgments (or ethical 'affirmations') have the function of simultaneously tracking the morally salient features of social situations and directing behavior that coordinates in a collectively beneficial way around those features. Thus, ethical affirmations count as a species of what Millikan labels 'Pushmi-Pullyu' representations that simultaneously have a descriptive and a directive direction of fit. This proposal supports a version of motivational internalism that can accommodate a surprising range of actual failures of motivation. I also briefly situate this proposal in the metaethical literature, contrasting it with other hybrid views incorporating elements of cognitivism and expressivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Force majeure circumstances, such as those witnessed in the COVID-19 pandemic, have been used to justify new technologies of governance as policy-makers around the world began to realise the magnitude of the problem and its political implications. In Australia, the coronavirus crisis focussed attention on the vital role education plays in society and was used as an opportunity by policy-makers to reinforce an agenda that, over the past two decades, has tied education policy-making to the economy and 'national interest'. Indeed, Australia's growing federal involvement, with respect to schooling policy was continued in the pandemic as the Australian Prime Minister (PM) created a national cabinet to deal with the crisis, consisting of the PM and state and territory leaders. However, despite the ongoing ambition of a national policy agenda pursued by federal policy-makers, fault lines appeared. Informed by Foucauldian notions of discourse, governmentality and biopolitics, this paper explores how Australia's federal Coalition government endeavoured to manage the population at the outset of the pandemic and subjectified teachers as responsible in the service of the economy. While COVID-19 was a crisis in search of a narrative, federal policy-makers experienced pushback as state and territory leaders assumed control and teachers refused subject positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional discourse is a culturally situated construct. However, due to methodological constrains, culture as a discourse determinant revealed by analytical traditions cannot easily be generalized. By integrating culture representative word stems generated by a bag-of-word (BoW) model into a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model, this paper explored a lexicon-based hybrid approach to mining corporate cultures from MD&As. Two separate corpora, the corporation culture corpus sized 801,219 tokens and the MD&A corpus with 2,199,109 tokens, were used. Key word stems drawn from the corporate culture corpus by the BoW showed a strong capacity of distinguishing implicit corporate values between texts, while the LDA model applied to the MD&A corpus succeeded in identifying three types of cultures in MD&As. Case studies confirmed the credibility of the classification. The hybrid method extends the literature by providing a quantitative tool for the qualitative study of culture in professional discourse, and shows implications for what interdiscursivity in MD&As looks like and how it works to formulate a renewable cycle in discourse realization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the potential of learning analytics (LA) to support teachers' everyday practice, its adoption has not been fully embraced due to the limited involvement of teachers as co-designers of LA systems and interventions. This is the focus of the study described in this paper. Following a design-based research (DBR) approach and guided by concepts from the socio-cultural perspective and human-computer interaction (HCI), we design, test, and evaluate a teacher-facing LA dashboard, the Canvas Discussion Analytics Dashboard (CADA), in real educational settings. The goal of this dashboard is to support teachers' roles in online environments through insights into students' participation and discourse patterns. We evaluate CADA through 10 in-depth interviews with university teachers to examine their experiences using CADA in seven blended undergraduate and graduate courses over a one-year period. The findings suggest that engaging teachers throughout the analytics tool design process and giving them control/agency over LA tools can favour their adoption in practice. Additionally, the alignment of dashboard metrics with relevant theoretical constructs allows teachers to monitor the learning designs and make course design changes on the fly. The teachers in this study emphasise the need for LA dashboards to provide actionable insights by moving beyond what things are towards how things should be. This study has several contributions. First, we make an artefact contribution (e.g. CADA), an LA dashboard to support teachers with insights into students' online discussions. Second, by leveraging theory, and working with the teachers to develop and implement a dashboard in authentic teaching environments, we make an empirical, theoretical and methodological contribution to the field of learning analytics and technology enhanced learning. We synthesise these through practical design and implementation considerations for researchers, dashboard developers, and higher education institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the abundant scholarship on sociopolitical embeddedness of expertise, its relation to emotions remains understudied. The paper fills this gap by discussing how public framings of expertise work against the inclusion of emotional contexts, affecting what kind of professional knowledge dominates in a public debate. The analysis of the Czech public debate on birth care shows that while midwives embrace emotional contexts of birthing and integrate them as an essential part of their professional expertise, obstetricians see these contexts as troubling their expertise. This professional difference is sustained by the public framing of expertise in the media, favoring obstetricians' expertise over midwives'. The analysis shows that public framing of expertise outweighs evidential work done by midwives and legal advisors and impacts how emotional contexts are understood in the debate. Rather than referring to feelings and personal experience of the body, the "emotional" becomes a discursive label to delegitimize professional opinion. The results raise thus important questions about how the public framing of expertise impacts whether emotional context and experiences of bodily harm are seen as relevant in policy debates and policy regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video clubs have become an increasingly popular professional development model. The literature has suggested that when such video analysis groups lack an external facilitator, teacher participants struggle with focusing on salient aspects of mathematical practice. However, there is little research comparing externally and participant-led facilitation of, otherwise, identical professional development. This paper seeks to add to our understanding of professional development facilitation by reporting on a study in which video clubs were randomly assigned to either externally or participant-led groups for an MQI-based video analysis program. MQI refers to Mathematical Quality of Instruction observational tool, developed by Heather Hill et al. Participants watched lesson segments and scored them using code from the MQI, then discuss their scores using evidence from the clip and the MQI in pairs and then groups. We recorded whole group discussions and coded conversations for research-based, high-quality discourse moves. We also tracked participants MQI scores and coded lesson/video reflections for MQI noticing. We found no differences in either MQI noticing or conversation quality between group types, on average. Despite what current research suggests, we found participant-facilitated groups were able to sustain high-quality conversations as externally facilitated groups, though there was variability within group type. In this paper, we explore some factors which may have contributed to this variation, including the professional development model, itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to perform a multi-level analysis of the Irish public discourse on Covid-19. Despite widespread agreement that Ireland's response was rapid and effective, the country's journey through the pandemic has been no easy ride. In order to contain the virus, the Government's emergency legislation imposed draconian measures including the detention and isolation of people deemed to be even "a potential source of infection" and a significant extension of An Garda Síochána's power of arrest. In April 2020, journalists John Waters and Gemma O'Doherty initiated judicial review proceedings before the High Court to challenge such legislation, which they defined as unconstitutional, "disproportionate" and based on "fraudulent science". The proceedings attracted widespread media coverage in what soon became a debate on the legitimacy of emergency legislation and the notion of 'fake news' itself. After a brief survey of the legislative background to Ireland's Covid response, the argumentative strategy is analysed through which the High Court eventually dismissed Mr Waters and Ms O'Doherty's challenge. Focusing on the process of justification of the judicial decision, the paper provides a descriptive account of the argument structure of the Court's decision. This sheds light on the pattern of multiple argumentation through which the Court interpreted relevant norms in the Constitution and at once re-established the primacy of "facts" informing political decision-making at a time of national emergency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the potential paradigm shift in Europe linking refugees' influx with the security phenomenon through the works of intellectuals belonging to Copenhagen and Paris School. The article has been written exclusively in the milieu of the Civil War in Syria which brought migrants/refugees into the international limelight as a threat to security after 2011. The paper initially examines the Political position occupied by right wing and the rightist politicians' discourse on refugees in Europe. Afterwards the paper discusses discursive phenomenon of securitization in the framework of theory on the premise of the works of different scholars of the field. The last section probes the construction of refugees as a threat to security in Germany as a unique case which underwent securitization and de-securitization. Turkey presents another case study to investigate the security threat posed by the refugees as a reality or misconception in the ambit of the theoretical framework and how the securitization narrative influenced the Turkish policies towards refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing economic importance of urban networks transforms the political relations in metropolitan regions. New forms of regional cooperation emerge, but many municipalities outside the cities which have become a vital part of metropolitan networks resist this urban led development. This paper analyses why while the importance of areas outside the cities for metropolitan regions has increased, many oppose this and regard this as an unwanted urban incursion threatening the interests and identities of their communities in well-established territories. This paper analyses the backgrounds of these political conflicts by looking at the different perspectives on identity and legitimacy. It develops a typology of the different legitimising identity discourses used by urban and non-urban administrations to promote or resist cooperation in metropolitan regions. There is a clear and coherent contrast between backward and inward looking 'thicker', and forward and outward looking 'thinner' legitimising identity discourses. These are based on opposing views on nine related aspects which help to better understand the deep roots of the opposition between urban competitiveness and territorial protection. The typology of different legitimising identity discourses is a useful tool to analyse the growing resistance in more peripheral regions to the further strengthen the global competitiveness of metropolitan regions. The examples in this paper of how legitimising identity discourses are used in the Netherlands—where economic policies like in many other countries focus on the strengthen of metropolitan regions—showed not only how these divisions fuel conflicts, but also how these are sometimes bridged through cooperation legitimised by a partially shared identity discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humanity inhabits a discursive landscape that stimulates our imaginations, guides and influences our behaviour, shapes our ideas of what is possible, and governs what we perceive as normal. The collective human imagination is currently dominated by a discourse of neoliberal capitalism that contributes to global sustainability challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss by framing nature as a resource to be exploited in service of perpetual growth in economic activity. Transformation towards flourishing, sustainable futures will not be possible without the transformation of this dominant discourse. Alternative discourses exist but little is known about how to proactively and ethically pursue the transformation of dominant discourses. In response, this paper develops a conceptual framework to guide an ethical practice of meaning-making towards discursive transformation. It introduces 'discursive entrepreneurship', defined as the practice of creating, performing, and transforming memes, stories, narratives, and discourses to promote a desired structure of the discursive landscape. Normative strategies for discursive entrepreneurship are identified from a systematic review of recent literature on how social-ecological stories, narratives, and discourses evolve and change. The paper clarifies the often-inconsistent terminology used to define these ideational concepts, arguing for a nested relationship between discourses, narratives, stories, and memes. Further, it shows how discursive entrepreneurs can engage in iterative strategies of deconstruction, reframing, construction, performance, connection, and collaboration to increase the chances that their meanings will reach audiences, be heard by them, be retold, and perhaps contribute to the emergence of inclusive, life-affirming discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Families globally experience child to parent violence (CPV). Stories of CPV have been considered at an individual and collective level to ascertain themes in parents' accounts to identify enabling and restraining factors for CPV. However, understanding the societal narratives, defined as discourses, which have a multi-directional and entangled relationship with individual recounts of CPV have yet to be investigated. This research utilizes Narrative Inquiry with participatory approaches to explicate the societal narratives within mothers' recounts of CPV. This analysis, guided by the interactional and discursive view of violence, and response-based practice, identifies societal narratives which set the conditions for what is possible and impossible in relation to CPV. The analysis contributes to understanding the attitudes of minimization and concealment of violence within parents' accounts of CPV. The mothers' recounts were constrained and made possible by the 'good' mother narrative and narratives of adolescence and gender. This research examines the intra-actions mothers' recounts have with the societal narratives, and the performance of their roles as (en)actors of the subject positions 'mother' and 'child'. Implications for practice and research include: consideration to practitioner's views of power and subject positions in a parent and child relationship when working with CPV; and practitioners to be critical of essentialism and gender in working with CPV. This study posits a practical demonstration for using the response-based practice approach in research; and a way of viewing stories which can be incorporated in working with families experiencing CPV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global neoliberal discourse on Higher Education (HE) reform has become dominant in both the developed and developing worlds. The paper tackles the Egyptian HE reforms that have been produced in line with the global neoliberal discourse through the World Bank's (WB) funded reform projects. Through Foucauldian discourse and genealogical analysis, the study questioned, troubled, and de-naturalized the inevitability and persistence of the neoliberal discourse in Egyptian HE. Far from being deterministic and rational, the process of transfer of the global neoliberal discourse to Egyptian HE was embedded in the interaction of a number of discursive and structural selectivities as captured by the Strategic Relational Approach. On one hand, privatization, cost-sharing strategies, and quality assurance systems constituted the major policy reforms produced by the neoliberal discourse. On the other hand academic freedoms, university autonomy, and equitable access to HE have been discursively disallowed, de-problematized and excluded. The 25th of January revolution represented a discontinuity that threatened the collapse of the neoliberal discourse while the crushing of the revolution perpetuated and reinforced the neoliberal discourse reflecting a mutual relationship between neoliberal and authoritarian discourses and governmentalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the aim is to make a theoretical contribution by focusing on the origin, characteristics, and potential values of the concepts of instrumental and relational understanding. Five characteristics are identified to make it easier to operationalise the concepts and use them as an analytical framework. There is also a focus on how the concepts are closely related to two rationales for learning, the instrumental and the social rationale. The potential values of the concepts and their rationales are shown by using them to suggest a revision of the van Hiele framework and to analyse three empirical examples concerning young students' understanding of triangles and a cylinder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue for a unified semantics for hypothetical conditionals, hcs, e.g. if it rains, we'll cancel the picnic, and biscuit conditionals, bcs, e.g., if you are hungry, there are biscuits on the sideboard. We side with recent literature in proposing that differences in the interpretation are related to (in)dependence between antecedent and consequent, but we move beyond current accounts in spelling out a characterization of independence that is actually predictive. We further establish a systematic link between if-constructions and discourse structure, providing a dynamic update model that integrates the QUD, and thus the intentional discourse-structure. We argue that in bcs the antecedent sets up the question that is addressed by the consequent, and show that rescuing (Gricean) relevance in face of independence gives rise to implicatures corresponding to the different flavors associated with bcs. Crucially, we argue, this is the same mechanism responsible for our understanding that in the hc above, for example, it is the rain that will cause the cancellation of the picnic. Along the way we notice how the phenomena observed in if-constructions are also replicated in other quantificational structures. Ultimately, there is not much that is biscuit-specific. Their interpretation is the result of a conspiracy among semantics, dynamic update and intentional discourse-structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the complex discourse on perspective which the Milanese painter Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo writes in book V of his Trattato dell'Arte della Pittura (1584), explaining why the theoretical and practical discourse on the subject can be interpreted as the result of the artist's erudition, personal connections and direct artistic experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]