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This paper applies the notions of impoliteness and shameless normalisation to potentially impolite behaviours produced by Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi in official press conferences. Press conferences, as an activity type, involve relatively clear expectations and norms, so that impolite behaviours theoretically constitute particularly salient violations. We present two case studies involving racist and misogynist insults on the part of Berlusconi and Trump, respectively, analysed in their co-textual, interactional, socio-political as well as historical contexts. We describe the kinds of impoliteness that each politician employs, without any apology, and argue that they involve violations of the traditional moral order that are part of a far-right populist agenda of shameless normalisation. In each case, we examine comments posted in response to YouTube videos of each incident and provide evidence of polarised responses, but with substantial proportions expressing positive evaluations. We observe that impoliteness affords the possibility of presenting authentic and hyper-masculine identities and finish by reflecting on the implications of our findings for the local and global political and cultural landscape.

In this paper, Rheindorf and Wodak provide a discourse-historical analysis of extreme-right cultural politics in Austria, ranging from the blatant racism in the speeches of Vienna’s former Deputy Mayor Johann Gudenus (now MP in the Austrian parliament) to the construction of an idealized national body in the election campaigns of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), its programmatic agenda in handbooks and pamphlets, and the performances of far-right pop singer Andreas Gabalier. Rheindorf and Wodak argue that such cultural politics use a wide spectrum of discursive strategies both inside and outside established party politics and that the accompanying production of an ideal extreme-right subject is informed by nativist ideology. The cross-sectional analysis demonstrates that the cultural politics of the Austrian extreme right ranges from appropriated national symbols to coded National Socialist iconography. These politics pervasively construct a gendered and racialized national body, policed by a ‘strict father’ and nurtured by a ‘self-sacrificing mother’, vis-à-vis an apocalyptic threat scenario identified with migration, intellectual and political elites, cosmopolitanism and progressive gender politics.

It is commonly said that some standards, such as morality, are ‘normatively authoritative’ in a way that other standards, such as etiquette, are not; standards like etiquette are said to be ‘not really normative’. Skeptics deny the very possibility of normative authority, and take claims like ‘etiquette is not really normative’ to be either empty or confused. I offer a different route to defeat skeptics about authority: instead of focusing on what makes standards like morality special, we should focus on what makes standards like etiquette ‘not really normative’. I defend a fictionalist theory on which etiquette is ‘not really normative’ in roughly the same way that Sherlock is ‘not really a detective’, and show that fictionalism about some normative standards helps us explain the possibility of normative authority.

Since the 1980s, the transformation of the former Eastern bloc, Germany's reunification, the enlargement and deeper integration of the European Union, together with persistent debates on immigration, migration and flight, focused attention on issues of historical and cultural (local, regional and national) identities. In the Member States of the European Union, the propagation of a new European identity was accompanied by the emergence or re-emergence of fragmented and unstable national and ethnic identities. Seemingly established collective, national identities became contested political terrain and the focus of political struggles.

This paper presents results from a comparative and qualitative discourse-historical analysis of governmental crisis communication in Austria, Germany, France, Hungary and Sweden, during the global COVID-19 pandemic lockdown from March 2020 to May 2020 (a ‘discourse strand’). By analysing a sample of important speeches and press conferences by government leaders (all performing as the ‘face of crisis management’), it is possible to deconstruct a range of discursive strategies announcing/legitimising restrictive measures in order to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic where everybody is in danger of falling ill, regardless of their status, position, education and so forth. I focus on four frames that have been employed to mitigate the ‘dread of death’ (Bauman, 2006) and counter the ‘denial of death’ (Becker, 1973/2020): a ‘religious frame’, a ‘dialogic frame’, a frame emphasising ‘trust’, and a frame of ‘leading a war’. These interpretation frameworks are all embedded in ‘renationalising’ tendencies, specifically visible in the EU member states where even the Schengen Area was suddenly abolished (in order to ‘keep the virus out’) and borders were closed. Thus, everybody continues to be confronted with national biopolitics and body politics (Wodak, 2021). © 2021, Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

Irony and humor play an important role in both organizing and organizations, because they both help to collide and contrast ideas as well as mitigate and moderate criticism. Our empirical observations of a senior management team suggest participants frequently use verbal irony and aggressive conversational humor through 'ironic personae' - a cast of characters, real or imaginary - as a vehicle for pragmatically making sense of complicated topics. We show how ironic personae perform three functions: (i) testing new positions on topics in a non-committal way; (ii) stretching the frame of comparison of a group; and (iii) aligning shared understanding and commitment. Thus, our analysis sheds light on an underexplored and undertheorised aspect of irony that serves as a pragmatic vehicle for the expression of humorous verbal irony and aggressive conversational humor.

Irony is an effective means of dealing with controversy in organizations, but there is a paucity of knowledge of the various ways in which irony helps managers to do so without necessarily ‘solving’ those issues. By drawing on discursive incongruity theory, we examine the use of irony when managers are confronted with controversial issues in a multinational company. As a result, we identify and elaborate on four distinctively different pathways of how irony helps participants to move on: ‘acquiescing’ (framing understanding as having no alternative because of environmental constraints), ‘empowering’ (synthesizing a view through broad inputs from different individuals), ‘channelling’ (subsuming other interpretations under a single and often dominant view) and ‘dismissing’ (rejecting alternative interpretations and often reinforcing the status quo). On this basis, we develop a theoretical model that elucidates the process dynamics in dealing with and moving on with controversial issues and elaborates the specific characteristics of each of these four pathways. Our analysis also leads to a fuller understanding of the discursive underpinnings and intersubjective dynamics in irony use in organizations.

Prison industries represent an important component of service delivery for correctional administrations around the world and yet there have been few attempts to articulate the specific role that they play in prisoner reintegration. This article describes the operation of an Australian prison industry programme. It identifies key programme characteristics that are thought to be associated with success before applying a desistance framework to understand the mechanisms by which change occurs and identify possible areas for improving efficacy. It is concluded that significant opportunities exist to enhance reintegration outcomes in this type of programme.

The results of three studies of the discursive construction of national (Austrian) identities are compared, thus illustrating the change of these constructions over 20 years. The data comprise speeches and interviews of politicians, commemorative events, exhibitions, TV series and radio broadcasts on the end of WWII 1945, the Austrian State Treaty 1955 and EU accession 1995. Moreover, newspaper reports are analyzed in respect to the so-called refugee crisis 2015. Group discussions allow insight in to semi-official debates.

The current study examined the impact of vocational education and training in the custody setting on returns to custody among Australian adult prisoners from selected jurisdictions. Vocational education and training, education, and behavioural change programme participation in custody and demographic and risk assessment data were provided by correctional services in four Australian states for 10,834 Australian prisoners released from custody in 2010–2011. This information was used to predict returns to custody by 2015–2016. Overall, the results showed that participating in vocational education and training in custody contributed to the likelihood of remaining custody free at two and five years post-release for both male and female prisoners. However, for males the relationship was moderated by risk level. These findings are discussed in the context of developing vocational education and training in prison settings to address the specific needs of individuals and expectation of the wider community.

In this paper, I present some results of an interdisciplinary (psychological, historical, discourse-analytical) research project on narratives of persecution, flight and survival. These stories told by the children (and grandchildren) of Austrian victims of Nazi persecution, all of them left-wing political dissidents and some of them also Jewish, relate to World War II and the Holocaust. In their narratives, the interviewees try to come to terms with the experiences of their parents (and grandparents) and bridge the obvious cognitive dissonance of living in Austria and holding a citizenship which was denied to their elders at a traumatic point of their parents' lives. Firstly, I focus on the narratives as they relate to flight and the loss of citizenship and homes. Secondly, I investigate what it meant - from the children's perspective - to later return to and grow up in the country that had excluded their parents. And thirdly, I reflect on what such stories imply for the present and future and what we can learn from them. In the analysis, I integrate quantitative methods (narrative network analysis and corpus linguistics) with qualitative discourse analysis. Although each story and the related context are of course unique, it is nevertheless worth discussing if specific characteristics of the narratives could be generalised to other contexts in order to illustrate the plights of fleeing refugees and their struggles for survival.

Drawing on her monograph The Politics of Fear (2015), Ruth Wodak presents a critical discourse analysis of populist discourses and politics. She underlines the difference between left-wing and right-wing populism and addresses the problems of islamophobia, antisemitism, and the anger and resentment of the so-called “modernization losers”. She also tackles the specificities of the historical approach of discourse in Critical Discourse Studies while giving some insights into her own intellectual trajectory and social involvement as a discourse analyst.

Although not exclusively, it is especially since 1989 and the Fall of the Iron Curtain that the far right has gained traction. Despite various context-dependent, socio-political and historical differences, the ideologies (and the accompanying discursive and material practices) share important ideological features, including the dichotomous view of society (a merger of anti-elitism with a nativist nationalistic anti-pluralism). Accordingly, protecting the fatherland (or heartland/homeland) implies belief in a common narrative of the past, where ‘we’ were either heroes or victims of evil. Moreover, conspiracies are a salient part of the discursive construction of fear which frequently draws on traditional anti-Semitic and anti-elitist tropes. Furthermore, such parties endorse traditional, conservative values and morals (family values, traditional gender roles) and support common sense simplistic explanations and solutions (anti-intellectualism). Certainly, not all far-right parties endorse all the above-mentioned positions. In this chapter, I will elaborate the history of such parties, focusing primarily on their mediatisation and communication strategies which have evolved over the past 30 years. These have managed to successfully dominate both traditional media (the press) and social media outlets. The discursive strategies of provocation, calculated ambivalence, de-tabooization and scandalization have paved the way for a ‘post-truth politics’, indeed for a ‘post-shame politics’.

The term ‘illiberal democracy’, coined by Fareed Zakaria in 1997, has gained much traction, specifically since its use by Hungarian Prime Minster Victor Orbán in 2014. Ever since, Orbán and his governing party Fidesz have been implementing this vision resulting in major cutdowns on free speech, freedom of press, of various NGOs which support human rights, and so forth. Moreover, Fidesz won the 2018 national election with a strong focus on antiimmigration policies. Although Orbán’s restrictive migration policies were widely criticised during the so-called refugee crisis 2015, many EU member states have started to follow the Hungarian policy of closing borders and protecting the EU from asylum-seekers and an alleged invasion by Muslims. Hence, I claim that formerly taboo subjects and expressions in mainstream discourse are being accepted more and more (‘normalisation’). Such normalisation goes hand in hand with a certain ‘shamelessness’: the limits of the sayable are shifting regarding both the frequency of lies and the violating of discourse conventions – as well as regarding repeated attacks on central democratic institutions. Normalising the assessment of migrants as a threat to inner security and a burden on the welfare state and education system must be perceived as an international development – generally instrumentalising a ‘politics of fear’.

The last two decades have seen a surge of support for normative quietism: most notably, from Dworkin (1996, 2011), Nagel (1996, 1997), Parfit (2011a, b) and Scanlon (1998, 2014). Detractors like Enoch (2011) and McPherson (2011) object that quietism is incompatible with realism about normativity. The resulting debate has stagnated somewhat. In this paper I explore and defend a more promising way of developing that objection: I’ll argue that if normative quietism is true, we can create reasons out of thin air, so normative realists must reject normative quietism.

In this chapter, I explore the ‘micro-politics’ of right-wing populism. I discuss adequate qualitative and quantitative methodologies to analyse the exclusionary rhetoric of such parties and focus on the Austrian Freedom Party (FPO) and the presidential election campaign in Austria (2016). To explain why such parties and their programmes are successful, we need a careful context-dependent, multi-methodical, multi-modal and critical interdisciplinary analysis of the ‘micro-politics’ of the Far Right; that is how they actually produce and reproduce their ideologies and exclusionary politics in everyday politics, in the media, in campaigning, in posters, slogans and speeches, travelling from backstage to frontstage, thus normalising extreme right agenda and policies.

This chapter considers the question of whether antisemitism today should be regarded as a genuine structural feature of contemporary society or rather as a relic of an old but now overcome European ideology. It begins by providing some working definitions of the most prominent forms of current expressions of antisemitism. It then describes some relevant antisemitic stereotypes as well as related strategies of denial. It summarizes the few existing opinion polls oriented toward right-wing populism that correlate with antisemitism. Finally, it presents two typical manifestations of antisemitism from right-wing populist parties, analyzed in a qualitative discourse-analytical way, to illustrate explicit as well as coded manifestations recurring across Europe (and beyond).

After 1945 and the end of WWII, denying the Holocaust became an explicit taboo in most European countries. More specifically, in Austria, denying the Holocaust in public implies legal consequences: the so-calledVerbotsgesetzpersecutes any public utterances which even insinuate National Socialist ideology (utterances, symbols, songs, images) and the Holocaust denial. Naturally, it remains difficult for the courts to substantiate any accusations and to prove that somebody has actually uttered Holocaust denial if the meanings are only implied, inferred, or alluded to. Thus, in spite of such explicit sanctions, politicians of the far-right have found many coded and implicit discursive-pragmatic practices and devices of denying the Holocaust, even during parliamentary debates and official speeches. In my paper, I compare the “discourses about Holocaust denial” in Austria and the UK, in two case studies: the first one relates to the controversy about some utterances of Barbara Rosenkranz who stood as candidate of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) for election to Austrian Presidency in April 2010. Secondly, I focus on the debates triggered by Nick Griffin from the British extreme right party BNP, in and after his appearance in the prominent BBC 1 weekly showQuestion Time, in 2009. I apply the Discourse-Historical Approach in CDA for the detailed analysis of such recurring debates and foreground the patterns of a globalisedpolitics of denial.

To date, the concept of ‘European identity’ remains quite vague and obscure. Who is European and who is not? What values do Europeans share, and who is included in or excluded from the European community? This paper deals with the renegotiation of European identity/ies and the simultaneous increase of discourses about national security and nationalism in Europe, especially during the financial crisis since 2008. We first discuss a range of theoretical approaches to European identity from an interdisciplinary perspective. In a second step, after summarising theDiscourse-Historical Approach(DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and especially the concept oftopos, we illustrate the link between discursive constructions of European identities and cultural ‘Others’ via some recent examples of European and national debates on migration and economic issues. More specifically, we first analyse a speech by Geert Wilders on immigration and multiculturalism after the clashes in Tunisia in 2011 and the subsequent arrival of many refugees in Italy; secondly, we focus on a speech about British relations to the European Union in the 21st century by the British Prime Minister, David Cameron. It becomes apparent that debates about European identities – especially since the financial crisis of 2008 – have increasingly been accompanied by debates about both more traditional racialised cultural concerns and more recently, about economic security, leading to new distinctions between ‘Us’, the ‘real Europeans’, and ‘Them’, the ‘Others’. In this way, the socio-political unification of Europe is challenged – once again.

This introductory contribution frames the theoretical and methodological endeavour of the special issue. The underlying goal of the special issue is two-fold: On the one hand, it aims to shed light on the diversity of discourse theories and related toolkits for analysis. On the other hand, it aims at applying these approaches to the European Union’s (EU) discursive practices, with special attention to foreign policy discourses. All contributions revolve around a central focus: the manifold ways in which various EU institutional, national or societal actors employ different discursive strategies (such as justification, legitimation, and argumentation) related to foreign policy with bilateral partners; within multi-lateral milieus or vis-á-vis domestic audiences. In the last section, the contributions to this special issue are briefly summarised.

The discourse-historical approach (DHA) belongs in the broadly defined field of critical discourse studies (CDS). Many theoretical and also methodological concepts used in DHA are equally valid for other strands in critical discourse studies—even if their contexts of emergence have led to different toolkits. Still, these approaches draw on each other, thereby reproducing a common conceptual frame while they develop their own distinct orientations. The DHA is distinctive both at the level of research interest and methodical orientation (an interest in identity construction and in unjustified discrimination; a focus on the historical dimensions of discourse formation) and with respect to its epistemological foundation—that is, with respect to its being oriented toward the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, and in particular toward Habermas's language philosophy. Keywords: argument and persuasion; cultural/critical communication; interdisciplinarity; language and social interaction; media theory; argumentation; critical theory; discourse studies; intertextuality; perspectivation

In this paper we juxtapose the European Union's (EU's) supranational policies on language and migration with their recontextualisation into national policies of the linguistic integration of migrants in two EU member states, Austria and Greece. The EU member states adapt the European legislation according to their national laws (National Acton Plans) which have to also account for national traditions and national citizenship legislation. Moreover, we explore the national regulations on language testing and the linguistic integration of migrants in Austria and Greece which are part and parcel of the National Action Plans and which establish obstacles for migrants: Indeed, they function as gate-keepers. Hence, a context-dependent micro-level discourse analytic approach suggests itself.The data for the analysis stem from legal and policy texts of the EU, Austria and Greece (regulations on citizenship, language education, testing and the linguistic integration of migrants). By employing the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) of Critical Discourse Studies we analyze how specific EU regulations are implemented in national legislation; how migrants, who live in Austria and Greece are represented by the legislators, and finally how the respective national identities in the context of migration legislation are constructed.

In 1999, Theo van Leeuwen and I co-authored a paper on ‘Legitimising immigration control’ in the first issue of the then new journal Discourse Studies. Not only has this paper been very well received and widely cited, the topic has remained just as relevant or become even more relevant. Indeed, since the summer of 2015, when thousands of refugees tried to enter the European Union countries because of the terrible wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and so forth, the topics of immigration and flight have gained more salience: governments, the EU institutions, NGOs, and the media are debating how to cope with the so-called ‘refugee problem’, ‘refugee crisis’, or ‘immigration problem’. Ever-new ways of legitimising measures to keep ‘strangers’ out of Europe (and elsewhere) dominate these debates. Slogans such as ‘Fortress Europe’ and “we have to protect our borders” have become hegemonic. Although first launched by right-wing populist parties and politicians (Carr, 2015, 5ff.), this rhetoric has influenced both centre-right and centre-left wing parties, and a much more general border-and-body politics has emerged in current political debates (Wodak, 2015, 2016).

Nationalism, once declared an obsolete force, especially after World War II and the establishment of the European Union, has obviously returned with renewed vigour. This chapter explains passionate nationalist movements everywhere, in Africa, South America, the Middle East, Southern Europe, and in the successor states of the former Soviet Union. It discusses salient concepts such as nationalism and, inasmuch as they relate to it, also transnationalism, post-nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Modern nationalism originated in Europe in the period following the French Revolution, as a result of the emergence of industrial society and the establishment of the nation-state as the primary principle of social organisation. Nationalism and nationhood are thus regarded as projects of modernity, related to the centralising tendency towards the homogenisation of populations, thus defining modern statehood. The discourse of sameness, for example, emphasises national uniqueness and inward sameness, ignoring differences within. The discourse of difference, by contrast, emphasises the strongest differences to other nations.

In this paper, I discuss the attempt by all right-wing populist parties to create, on the one hand, the ‘real’ and ‘true’ people; and on the other, the ‘élites’ or ‘the establishment’ who are excluded from the truedemos. Such divisions, as will be elaborated in detail, have emerged in many societies over centuries and decades. A brief example of the arbitrary construction of opposing groups illustrates the intricacies of such populist reasoning. Furthermore, I pose the question why such divisions resonate so well in many countries? I argue that – apart from apolitics of fear(Wodak 2015) – muchresentmentis evoked which could be viewed as both accompanying as well as a reaction to the disenchantment with politics and the growing inequalities in globalized capitalist societies.

Greece has been in ‘crisis’ for six consecutive years now and during this time living standards have dropped considerably for the majority of the population, strict austerity measures have been implemented and unemployment has reached a record figure of 27.8% (with a Eurozone average of 12%). At the same time, a ‘success story’ is prominent in dominant discourses where Greece is portrayed to have achieved a primary budget surplus and according to which the ‘worst has passed’. The dire consequences of austerity, the political polarisation of Greek society and the rise of the far-right party Golden Dawn (GD), however, indicate a much less positive picture. In this context, the article aims to problematise the complex nexus of relationships between the financial crisis and the re-emergence of the extreme right-wing party, GD. The discussion draws on an analysis of 1497 postings from the online website of the British newspaper, The Guardian. We focus on discourse strategies for attributing/resisting blame emerging from the analysis of the postings, but also as negotiated in two popular threads on the online discussion board. The article takes a critical stance and combines the discourse-historical approach with a micro analysis of the interaction. This allows us to pay special attention to the multiple layers of context and to combine the macro and the micro in the constructions of blame and sense making of the crisis. Analysis of the data shows that a range of actors is held responsible for the current situation, while the rise of GD is constructed both as a ‘product of’ and ‘movement against’ the crisis. We close the article with the implications of our study and areas for further research.

Australia's prompt and effective response to HIV among people who inject drugs is recognized internationally. In the early 1980s, there was growing awareness of the evolving threat presented by HIV. Despite erroneous but commonly held assumptions that people who inject drugs generally disregard their health, injecting drug users contributed significantly to Australia's response to HIV. They formed peer-based organizations which advocated for: engaging affected communities in policy development and implementation; funding for peer education; and access to sterile injecting equipment. While government fear of appearing to condone injecting illicit drugs delayed the bi-partisan political support needed to implement programs to provide readily accessible sterile injecting equipment, needles and syringe programs were established relatively quickly. Strong evidence supports the effectiveness, safety, and cost-effectiveness of Australia's early, decisive, and pragmatic public health and human rights-based approach. Without a comprehensive package of harm reduction and peer-based responses, HIV epidemics can develop rapidly among and from people who inject drugs.

While major progress has been achieved in the experimental techniques used for the detection of protein interactions and in the processing and analysis of the vast amount of data that they generate, we still do not understand why the set of identified interactions remains so highly dependent on the particular detection method. Here we present an overview of the major high-throughput experimental methods used to detect interactions and the datasets produced using these methods over the last 10 years. We discuss the challenges of assessing the quality of these datasets, and examine key factors that likely underlie the persistent poor overlap between the interactions detected by different methods. Lastly, we present a brief overview of the literature-curated protein interaction data stored in public databases, which are often relied upon for independent validation of newly derived interaction networks.

Inclusion and exclusion of migrants are renegotiated in the European Union on almost a daily scale: ever new policies defining and restricting immigration (usually from third world countries) are proposed by European member states. Thus, a return to ever more local policies and ideologies can be observed on many levels: traditions, rules, languages, visions, and imaginaries are affected. In this article, I suggest that we are currently experiencing a re/nationalisation in spite of (or perhaps because of) multiple globalising tendencies. Thus, citizenship and language tests are being or have already been introduced to all European nation states, thus emphasizing a revival of “the national language” as constitutive for access to employment, housing, or education and promising achievement of successful “integration.” In this way, migrants are perceived as having a “deficit” even if manifold tests provide evidence that native speakers (of German, for example) might also lack many language skills.

Aim To determine the short-term outcomes of Australian buprenorphine-exposed mother/infant dyads. Methods Retrospective record review of drug-exposed mothers and infants in Australia. Groups were based on drug exposure: buprenorphine (55, 3.8%), non-buprenorphine opiates (O, 686, 48.6%) and non-opiates (NO, 671, 47.5%). Results More than 30% of buprenorphine mothers continued to use heroin (21, 38%) and benzodiazepines (16, 29%). They were more likely to have child at risk concerns (29, 52.7%, P = 0.019) and have previous children placed in out-of-home care (9, 16.3%, P = 049). Buprenorphine babies were less likely to be preterm (16% vs. 25% (O), P = 0.001 and 23% (NO), P = 0.004) and had higher birthweights (median: 3165 g vs. 2842.5 g (O), P < 0.001 and 2900 g (NO), P = 0.004). Buprenorphine and non-buprenorphine opioid babies had similar maximum Finnegan scores (median 10 vs. 11(O), P = 0.144). The number of babies needing abstinence treatment (45% vs. 51% (O), P = 0.411) and length of hospital stay (median days 9 vs. 11(O), P = 0.067) were similar, but buprenorphine infants required lower maximum morphine doses (mg/kg/day) (median 0.4 mg vs. 0.5 mg (O), P = 0.009). Conclusions Short-term medical outcomes of infants of buprenorphine-using mothers are similar to those of non-buprenorphine opiate-using mothers, but interpretation of these results is confounded by the high rates of polydrug exposure in the buprenorphine group. This and other social concerns noted in buprenorphine mothers and infants warrant further study.

Although the association between unemployment and offending is well established, relatively little is known about the impact of vocational education and training programs on re-offending, with much of the previous work in this area failing to control for, or correct, selection bias. This article reports the findings of a systematic review, which considers the findings of only those studies that have used experimental or quasi-experimental designs to evaluate vocational training and employment program outcomes for adult offenders. The analysis identifies key features, based on these studies, of those programs associated with the best outcomes and recommends selection criteria for those who are most likely to benefit from prison vocational education and training.

More than three years have passed since former British Prime Minister David Cameron delivered a much acknowledged and controversial speech on 23rd January 2013, in respect to the British relationship with the European Union. Europe and the European Union (EU) are now, of course, facing different challenges than three years ago. The contrasting national and transnational identities which emerge in the so-called Bloomberg Speech (BS) imply a nationalistic body politics which constructs the United Kingdom and England as separate entities contrasted to "the continent", i.e. Europe. Hence, BS oscillates between two extremes, in its attempt to alternatively observe maximum distance to the EU and some proximity to its economic policies. Moreover, both the topoi of urgency and threat/danger are appealed to – warning the EU that it would suffer under the loss of the United Kingdom; but also warning British voters that Brexit would damage their future and prosperity. This speech can be perceived as the starting point for the referendum on June 23rd, 2016 – which resulted in a tiny majority wanting to leave the EU ('Brexit'). Of course, there is no clear causal connection between BS and Brexit; but many arguments of the "remain and leave campaigns" can be traced to the BS; as well as the huge ambivalence framing Cameron's position towards the EU.

In 2013, the British right-wing tabloid Daily Mail triggered a fierce controversy, focused on antisemitism and patriotism/nationalism. It was sparked by the publication of an article on the British economist Ralph Miliband with the provocative headline ‘The man who hated Britain’. The lead refers to Ed Miliband, then leader of the British Labour Party: ‘Ed Miliband’s pledge to bring back socialism is homage to his Marxist father. So what did Miliband Snr really believe in? The answer should disturb everyone who loves this country’. In this paper, we analyse how Ralph Miliband is discursively constructed as a dangerous ‘Other’ and subsequently politically instrumentalised in a campaign against his son, Ed Miliband. We focus on how a particular concept of national unity is constructed with reference to the stereotype of the ‘disloyal, intellectual, international Jew’. This figure emerges as the ‘Iudeus ex machina’ in the scenario of impending doom in order, we assume, to distract attention from structural issues facing British society and economy. In our analysis we tackle the complex interdependencies of – mostly coded – antisemitic and nationalist rhetoric with the help of an interdisciplinary framework that integrates approaches to antisemitism, nationalism, media studies, and critical discourse studies, and related methodologies.

Issue. The prevalence of smoking among prisoners is exceptionally high and is often comorbid with alcohol and drug problems, mental illness and other health problems. This review paper summarises the literature and available research related to smoking prevalence and smoking cessation initiatives among prisoners and identifies areas of need for further research and intervention. Approach. This paper highlights three studies conducted in the New South Wales prison system which attempt to address these high rates of smoking including a feasibility study, a focus group study and a randomised controlled trial. Key Findings. The challenges of making systems-level changes to address these high rates of smoking are discussed including a recent National Summit on Tobacco Smoking in Prisons. Implications. Dissemination of research findings has assisted in highlighting the importance of tobacco smoking among prisoners and the need to develop culturally and setting appropriate smoking cessation initiatives for prisoners. Conclusions. As one of the most marginalised and socially disadvantaged populations in Australia, prisoners represent an important population to target for smoking cessation programs and interventions. This paper highlights a number of initiatives undertaken to address this problem and suggests directions for the future.[Richmond RL, Butler TG, Indig D, Wilhelm KA, Archer VA, Wodak AD. The challenges of reducing tobacco use among prisoners. Drug Alcohol Rev 2012;31:625–630]

This article analyzes multilingual practices in interactions inside European Union (EU) institutions. On the basis of our fieldwork conducted in EU organizational spaces throughout 2009, we explore different types of communication in order to illustrate how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and officials at the European Commission practice and perform multilingualism in their everyday work. In our theoretical and methodological framework, we draw on existent sociolinguistic ethnographical research into organizations and interactions, and integrate a multilevel (macro) contextual and sequential (micro) analysis of manifold data (observations, field notes, recordings of official and semi-official meetings, interviews, etc.). In this way, a continuum of context-dependent multilingual practices becomes apparent, which are characterized by different patterns of language choice and which serve a range of both manifest and latent functions. By applying the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), the intricacies of the increasingly complex phenomenon of multilingualism in transnational-organizational spaces, which are frequently characterized by diverse power-related and other asymmetries of communication, can be adequately coped with. (Code-switching, multilingualism, power, institutional spaces, European Union, ethnography, discourse-historical approach, critical discourse studies)*

Issues.Consumption of prescription opioid analgesics (POAs) in Australia has increased steadily in recent years, raising concerns of increasing harms including overdose and dependence, as has occurred in the USA. Approach.Exposition of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians Prescription Opioid Policy with reference to the published literature, drawing out principles for harm reduction for psychoactive pharmaceutical drugs. Key Findings.Complex professional, patient, regulatory and market factors influence health professionals balancing the benefits and harms of POAs. Owing to the potential for diversion, overlapping markets probably exist for pharmaceutical opioids used for populations with cancer pain, chronic non-cancer pain, and people dependent on pharmaceutical and illicit opioids (including those needing opioid substitution treatment). Attempts to reduce or restrict supply in one area may increase demand in others. There is a need to consider new harm reduction strategies for people with problematic pharmaceutical opioid use. These people are demographically not well characterised, and may be distinct from the more familiar population of injection drug users. Implications.Harm reduction is a valid approach for POAs. However, the role of health professionals as gatekeepers of opioid supply, the need to optimise health benefits of POAs, and the likely interplay of complex market forces among populations consuming opioids have no close parallel in harm reduction for other substances. This poses fundamentally different challenges. Conclusions.Reducing inappropriate supply and demand for POAs while maximising their benefits and minimising their harms may improve health outcomes.[Hallinan R, Osborn M, Cohen M, Dobbin M, Wodak A. Increasing the benefits and reducing the harms of prescription opioid analgesics. Drug Alcohol Rev 2011;30:315–323]

How are identities constructed in discourse? How are national and European identities tied to language and communication? And what role does power have – power in discourse, over discourse and of discourse? This paper seeks to identify and analyse processes of identity construction within Europe and at its boundaries, particularly the diversity of sources and forms of expression in several genres and contexts. It draws on media debates on Austrian versus Standard High German, on focus group discussions with migrants in eight European countries and on public and political debates on citizenship in the European Union which screen newly installed language tests. The analysis of different genres and publics all illustrate the complexity of national and transnational identity constructions in a globalised world. What is experienced as European or as outside of Europe is the result of multiple activities, some of them consciously planned in the sense of political, economic or cultural intervention, others more hidden, indirect, in the background. Such developments are contradictory rather than harmonious, proceeding in ‘loops’ and partial regressions (rather than in a linear, uni-directional or teleological way). Thus, an interdisciplinary approach suggests itself which accounts for diverse context-dependent discursive and social practices.

Discourse studies and the re/writing of History In recent years, much research in Discourse Studies and Critical Discourse Studies has started to analyse the many dimensions of national and transnational “identity politics” and to investigate how the discursive construction of such identities draws on collective and individual memories, on hegemonic and common sense narratives, and on myths which are proposed as constitutive for national identification (see below:“Discourses of/about the past...

Background: Heroin availability and purity decreased precipitously in Australian markets between 2000 and 2001. This led to increased use of non-opiate drugs in the general community but whether pregnant drug users and their newborn infants were affected remains unknown. Aim: To determine if perinatal drug exposure and outcomes are affected by changes in street drug availability. Methods: Retrospective review was carried out of known drug-exposed mothers delivering live-born infants at the Royal Hospital for Women, Randwick, Australia (n = 316). Study periods were divided into preshortage (A = 1998–2000, n = 79), shortage (B = 2001–2002, n = 92) and post-shortage (C = 2003–2006, n = 122) periods. Cannabis-only users were excluded (n = 23). Results: The percentage of confined women who admitted to using heroin decreased significantly (65%(A) vs 34%(B), P

This paper explores, in some detail at the European Union scale, processes and relationships of recontextualization between higher education and other EU policy fields, including for instance the recontextualization of ‘competitiveness rhetoric’ and ‘globalization rhetoric’ in HE policy documents. We trace the implementation of the Bologna Process in two EU member states, Austria and Romania, illustrating the effects of these very different socio-political and historical contexts on EU standardization processes through a detailed discourse analytic study of recontextualization processes of policy documents. This paper integrates two approaches in critical discourse analysis, Fairclough's dialectic-relational approach and Wodak's discourse-historical approach, by introducing recontextualization as a salient critical discourse analysis category and explaining its relationship to other categories within a discourse-analytical approach to (or ‘point of entry’ into) trans-disciplinary research on social change.

This article investigates the ‘glocalization’ of the US TV popular drama series The West Wing, while focusing on one (in some ways) exceptional episode . Because politics is inherently linked to language, discourse and communication, I will take an approach from the perspective of critical discourse analysis (the discourse-historical approach), with a particular focus on elements of argumentation theory and rhetoric, and combine this with media studies. More specifically, I attempt to illustrate how a thorough understanding of the topoi operating within the complex dialogues and interactions helps to reveal the series’ (manifest and latent) political and didactic objectives, embedded in a longstanding tradition of conveying US American liberal values via films and TV.The episode analyzed in this article, Isaac and Ishmael (which was broadcast immediately after 9/11) is exceptional because it explicitly relates to salient real life events; its topical focus on the ‘war on terror’ shifts attention from US domestic politics to an issue that, according to US policy rhetoric, concerns the whole world. Thus, this episode links the debates taking place in one of the world’s most famous institutions, The White House, with those occurring in workplaces across the world: a truly ‘g/local’ moment. The interdisciplinary analysis allows insight into the intricate and complex discursive construction of new glocal narratives, particularly in times of political crisis, revealing which norms are projected and recontextualized both locally and globally, given the many translations of the series worldwide.

In this article, we trace the histories of discourses supporting ‘jobs for natives’ in the UK and Austria using the discourse-historical approach (DHA) to critical discourse studies. DHA uses four ...

Objective: To examine the role of tobacco use in prison and possible influences of the prison environment on smoking among inmates in the context of developing inmate smoking cessation programmes. Method: Qualitative study based on seven focus groups with prisoners and ex-prisoners. Settings: A maximum security prison in rural New South Wales (NSW), Australia, and a community justice restorative centre and accommodation service for ex-prisoners in Sydney, NSW, Australia. Participants: 40 participants (28 men and 12 women) comprising nine prisoners (including four Indigenous inmates) and 31 ex-prisoners. Results: Prisoners reported that tobacco serves as a de facto currency in correctional settings and can be exchanged for goods, used to pay debts and for gambling. Smoking helps manage the stressful situations such as transfers, court appearances and prison visits. Inmate smoking cessation programmes need to address the enmeshment of tobacco in prison life, improve availability of pharmacotherapies (for example, nicotine patches, bupropion) and the quitline (a free telephone helpline providing information on stopping smoking), provide non-smoking cells and areas within prisons, encourage physical activity for inmates and maintain monitoring of smoking cessation status after release. Conclusions: Tobacco is integrally bound up in the prison “culture”. Our findings are relevant to inform prison health authorities concerned with improving the health of prisoners, and for support organisations attempting to facilitate smoking cessation both in prison and after release. Smoking cessation programmes in prisons should be tailored to the unique stresses of the prison environment. Programmes need to acknowledge the difficulties of quitting smoking in prison arising from the stresses posed by this setting.

Aim To examine the safety and efficacy of modafinil (200 mg/day) compared to placebo in the treatment of methamphetamine dependence and to examine predictors of post-treatment outcome. Participants and design Eighty methamphetamine-dependent subjects in Sydney, Australia were allocated randomly to modafinil (200 mg/day) (n = 38) or placebo (n = 42) under double-blind conditions for 10 weeks with a further 12 weeks post- treatment follow-up. Measures Comprehensive drug use data (urine specimens and self-report) and other health and psychosocial data were collected weekly during treatment and research interviews at baseline, week 10 and week 22. Results Treatment retention and medication adherence were equivalent between groups. There were no differences in methamphetamine abstinence, craving or severity of dependence. Medication-compliant subjects tended to provide more methamphetamine-negative urine samples over the 10-week treatment period (P = 0.07). Outcomes were better for methamphetamine-dependent subjects with no other substance dependence and those who accessed counselling. There were statistically significant reductions in systolic blood pressure (P = 0.03) and weight gain (P = 0.05) in modafinil-compliant subjects compared to placebo. There were no medication-related serious adverse events. Adverse events were generally mild and consistent with known pharmacological effects. Conclusions Modafinil demonstrated promise in reducing methamphetamine use in selected methamphetamine-dependent patients. The study findings support definitive trials of modafinil in larger multi-site trials.