Discourse

We contrast two political inquiries in light of Luhmann’s system theory of procedure. The article asks whether and to what extent these inquiries can be considered as procedural systems, meaning as distinct frames of action that generate specific meanings and relevancies. Starting from the micro-sociological analysis of interactions in the British ‘‘Hutton Inquiry’’ and the European Union’s ‘‘CIA Inquiry’’ the authors reconstruct the specific functionalities of each with regard to their different ways of engaging and enabling self-referential processes of communication, knowledge production, and decision-making. As a system, each merges these three processes into a consistent, relatively strong or weak procedure, but they do so to different degrees. Overall, the article encourages a sociological understanding of the procedural mechanism as well as an empirical qualification and variation of system-theoretical assertions.

This paper traces the development of the concept of the outgroup as a biological threat, and the relationship of this concept to the practice of genocide. The biopolitical discourse which emerged in the modern period made the practice of genocide conceivable, and constructed genocide as justifiable and as necessary. Two developments in the modern period are highlighted: firstly, the conception of the boundaried and ethnically homogenous nation-state, and secondly, new biological theories about race, and about the spread of disease. Discourse emerging from the biological sciences dehumanised outgroups both literally and metaphorically. This dehumanisation, in combination with the ideal of the homogenous nation-state and the new technologies of population, provided a justification and a motivation for genocide, and a model of implementation. Conceptions of the nature of dehumanisation as a process are examined, with specific reference to the role of language and metaphor, and to concepts of hygiene, purity and contamination. Particular attention is paid to eugenics and Social Darwinism, to the role of physicians in genocide, and to the relationship between medical and military vocabularies. The features of this discourse, its persistence, and its commonality in otherwise widely different genocidal episodes, are exposed through an examination of four twentieth-century genocides (Armenia, Nazi genocide, Cambodia, and the former Yugoslavia).

This paper presents the results of a comparative qualitative study of British Indian and British Pakistani gay men, all of whom self-identified as members of their religious communities. Data were analysed using thematic analysis and identity process theory. Results suggest that the intersection between sexuality and religion is more relevant to British Pakistani participants, while the intersection between sexuality and ethnicity is more relevant to British Indian participants. For British Indian participants, in particular, homosexuality seems to be socially problematic, posing potential obstacles for interpersonal and intergroup relations. Conversely, for British Pakistanis, homosexuality is both socially and psychologically problematic, affecting intrapsychic as well as interpersonal levels of human interdependence. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

""This project examines various discursive encounters between faiths in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH). What I mean by ‘discursive encounters’ includes a broad variety of linguistic phenomena which involve encounters across religious boundaries, such as conversations (of different degrees of publicness), disagreements, agreements, truth-claims with a reference to other traditions, debates, ‘folk-religious’ talk across religious boundaries, and similar.

It is widely recognised that (ethno)religious discursive practices, such as applying religious-nationalist mythologies to present political situation or demonizing the ethnic and religious other, have contributed importantly to the inter-ethnic conflict in BiH in the 1990s, or have at least (according to another interpretation) been extensively ‘used’ for legitimating it. It has also been observed that, in turn, the conflict has contributed to the revivification of discursive practices in which religious identities in BiH (esp. Christian Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim) have been re-constituted and reasserted. On the brighter side, remarkably respectful ways of long-term coexistence between different kinds of Christians, Muslims and Jews have developed throughout the history of BiH (a country aptly described as being at the ‘crossroads of civilizations’, i.e. Eastern/Western Roman Empire, Western Christendom/Islam). Both respectful as well as hostile ways of relating between communities and their individual members are encoded in, as well as shape, discursive practices.

This study tries to further our understanding of the different ways in which Catholic, Muslim, Christian Orthodox and some other religious language-games in B-H interact, meet (or don’t) and contribute to the broader trans-religious and/or secular(ized) discourse there. Methodologically, philosophy of language will be combined with discourse studies, anthropology and sociology of communication. The project can be seen as a way of taking Wittgenstein’s advice to philosophers of language seriously (understood properly!), when he writes “Don’t think, but look!” (Philosophical Investigations §66). It includes some careful attention to concrete examples of interreligious discursive encounters in Bosnia-Herzegovina and consults the recent literature on the regional religious and national mythologies written by sociologists, historians and philosophers from the region (M. Velikonja, N. Curak, U. Vlaisavljevic, I. Lovrenovic, and others).""

Достижение поставленной цели предполагает решение следующих задач:–определение места авторитетности в системе категорий дискурса;–уточнение системных характеристик жанра диссертационной работы;–выделение маркеров авторитетности в научном дискурсе (на материале диссертационных работ, написанных на русском и английском языках);–сравнение средств повышения авторитетности научного дискурса русского и английского языков.

This study examines the production of English relative constructions by Japanese learners in terms of semantic and discoursal properties. English relative constructions of Japanese learners and native speakers of English were extracted from a written corpus: the Nagoya Interlanguage Corpus of English (Sugiura 2008). This study examines the data according to the levels of the learners’ English proficiency and investigates the information status (New, Given, and Identifiable) (Chafe 1974), animacy status of the head noun phrases (Animate, Concrete Inanimate, and Abstract Inanimate) (Ming and Chen 2010), and head types (intransitive subject, transitive subject, object, oblique, main clause, noun phrase and predicate noun phrase). The results show (1) different patterns of relative constructions between Japanese learners and native speakers of English and different patterns depending on the learners’ proficiency; (2) that intransitive subject relative clause was the most frequent regardless of the animacy status; (3) that the native speakers and the advanced learners tended to produce the relative constructions when the heads are New in general English discourse, while the less advanced learners tended to produce English relative constructions according to the preference of Japanese information status; (4) that the high-intermediate learners showed a strong tendency to produce relative constructions when they modified human referents; and (5) that the learners produced relative clauses to introduce New referents into the discourse. This study demonstrates that the semantic and discoursal information affect the mechanisms of the L2 acquisition of the relative constructions in written language.

""The social discourse revolves around signifiers. If the « great narratives » (Lyotard, 1979) of the emancipation structured the modern society, their disappearance characterizes our new modernity and make way for the proliferation of little narratives, co-extensive to the discourse of clans and cults. Those « fixions » (Ronell, 2009) – made up of signifiers structured according to an addictive and adhesive modality -, trap the subject into a discursive web which is not under the symbolic castration.

Le discours social s’organise autour de signifiants. Si les « grands récits » (Lyotard, 1979) de l’émancipation structuraient le socius moderne, leur disparition caractérise notre nouvelle modernité et fait place au foisonnement de petits récits, coextensifs aux discours du communautarisme et du sectarisme. Ces « fixions » (Ronell, 2009), faites de signifiants structurées suivant une modalité addictive et adhésive, prennent le sujet au piège d’un discours non soumis à la castration.""

"""This text deals with a problem concerning processes of the productive power of knowledge. We draw on the so-called poststructural theories challenging the classical image of thought – as hinged upon a representational logic identifying entities in a rigid sense – when formulating a problem concerning the gap between knowledge and the object of knowledge. More specifically we are looking at this problem in the contexts of sustainable development and childhood, using illustrating examples in order to test the validity of these theoretical accounts. The examples we use range from internationally agreed documents claiming universality concerning environmental protection and childhood to national curricula for the pre-school to a Swedish governmentally produced and distributed TV series called Needle and Stick save the world, addressing the issue of sustainable development. In short, we wish to problematise the rigid positions of the child and the human being in relation to nature.
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