The increasing incidence of ‘trafficking’ has added an incontestably disturbing dimension to the contestable nature of a ‘non-trafficked’ UK sex industry. Men who buy sex remain under-researched, though some studies have indicated ambivalence within men's attitudes. This study combines a critical discursive psychology in support of dialogical self theory. Secondary data, from prominent UK media resources, were analysed using Edley's method of combining ‘interpretative repertoires’, ‘ideological dilemmas’ and ‘subject positions’. Contrasting discursive practices indicative of wider ideological conflict were found. Discursive (...) concepts were ‘mapped’ onto Hermans and Hermans-Konopka's ‘I-positions’ to explore how these potentially dilemmatic positions might be understood in terms of identity production. The function of ‘uncertainty’, particularly salient with the increasing complexity of globalisation, was considered a factor in how men's identities might be limited by the current discursive space. A ‘dialogical’ model of self is introduced as a framework for understanding how men who buy sex might take up new, inclusive, positions. A corollary is reflected upon; that researchers, activists and buyers alike, who remain ideologically inflexible, may be sustaining the conditions for coercion through their contribution to the discursive conflict. The synthesis of discursive and dialogical analytical tools is recommended for investigating the production of selves in contested spaces. (shrink)

This paper reports on a study of teachers’ perceptions of teaching and learning in Scotland during the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of engaged pedagogy and the ideas of bell hooks. It aimed to explore the different ways that teachers experienced teaching and learning during this time and the impact this may have had on teacher identity. Sixty teachers and head teachers were interviewed using MS Teams in the period April-June, 2020. For this paper, 18 transcripts were analyzed by members (...) of the research team. Four key themes emerged from the interview data: Working from home, parental engagement, teacher identity, and changes in pedagogy. Each of these themes were discussed in terms of concepts such as engaged pedagogy, agency, self-actualization, recognition and boundary transgression situated in the work of bell hooks. The idea of boundaries wove itself throughout our data as teachers expressed how the transgression of boundaries was occurring in multiple, and often contradictory, ways in pedagogical, professional, institutional and personal spaces and systems. We see in our data evidence of a shift in practice not just in the way teachers are ‘doing’ education but also, perhaps, in the way that teachers are ‘being’ as educators as they adapt to different ways of knowing. This study provides a unique exploration of a time and space in Scotland during 2020. However, the themes and understandings that emerged are of relevance to educators internationally. Schools across the world were impacted by various lockdowns imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and teachers faced a common set of challenges that were resolved via re-negotiation and recognition of individual and collective agency to create new pedagogies. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe increasing recognition of the negative impact of income inequality has highlighted the importance of taxation which can function as a redistributive mechanism. Previous critical social psychological research found that talk about restricting the welfare state, that is funded through tax, is formed of ideology that supports the maintenance of income inequality. Therefore, this research explores how speakers use talk about tax to justify income inequality during a UK BBC radio discussion, ‘Moral Maze: The moral purpose of tax’ which involved (...) public figures discussing the role of tax. This programme was analysed from a critical discursive psychological perspective. It was found that two contrasting constructions of tax were presented: tax as a collective responsibility or tax as an individual burden, whereby speakers drew on social justice and individualistic ideology respectively. Arguments for high tax rates are problematic due to the acceptability of inequality in a meritocracy. By presenting wealthy individuals as more deserving than the less affluent, arguments for higher tax come to be challenged. (shrink)

ObjectivesIn 2015, the Province of Quebec, Canada passed a law that allowed voluntary active euthanasia. Palliative care stakeholders in Canada have been largely opposed to euthanasia, yet there is little research about their views. The research question guiding this study was the following: How do palliative care physicians in Quebec position themselves regarding the practice of VAE in the context of the new provincial legislation?MethodsWe used interpretive description, an inductive methodology to answer research questions about clinical practice. A total of (...) 18 palliative care physicians participated in semistructured interviews at two university-affiliated hospitals in Quebec.ResultsParticipants positioned themselves in opposition to euthanasia. Their justifications were framed within their professional commitment to not hasten death, which sat in tension with the value of patients’ autonomy to choose how to die. Participants described VAE as unacceptable if it impeded opportunities to evaluate and alleviate suffering. Further, they contested government rhetoric that positioned VAE as a way to improve end-of-life care. Participants felt that VAE would diminish the potential of palliative care to relieve suffering. Dilemmas were apparent in their narratives, about reconciling respect for patient autonomy with broader palliative care values, and the value of accompanying and not abandoning patients who make requests for VAE while being committed to neither prolonging nor hastening death.ConclusionsThis study provides insight into nuanced positions of experienced palliative care physicians in Quebec and confirms expected tensions between an important stakeholder and the practice of VAE as guided by the new legislation. (shrink)

This article offers a discursive and ethnomethodological approach to analysing the interplay between class, discourse and talk. Drawing on feminist and sociological work that foregrounds the cultural dimensions of class, this article moves beyond the cultural approach by using the insights of discursive psychology and ethnomethodology. Conceptualising class as a ‘doing’, this article analyses empirical examples that emerged from a qualitative study on young women's relationships with feminism. Providing a novel theoretical framework, but also a close, empirically grounded analysis, the (...) article argues that a discursive and ethnomethodological approach can offer useful insights to the study of class in general, and the cultural approach in particular. (shrink)

The ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe has drawn attention to the reasons why people risk desperate journeys to seek safety. However, less research has focussed on what happens to those on the move once th...

ABSTRACT Refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea in small boats has become a common sight in the media, particularly since the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015. The number of boats crossing the English Channel between the French and UK coasts has been increasing as other migration routes have been closed down. This article reports the findings of a discourse analysis of 96 UK newspaper articles published in December 2018 when the daily crossings were referred to as a ‘major crisis’. Adopting a (...) broadly critical discursive psychology perspective, we identify the use of three main interpretative repertoires used within the media reporting. Firstly, a ‘secure the borders’ repertoire which positions the UK’s borders as porous and easily breached, secondly, a ‘smuggling is immoral’ repertoire which works to position smugglers as to blame for the current ‘crisis’ and removes responsibility for the crisis from the Government, and finally, a ‘desperate people’ repertoire which worked to position the refugees themselves as vulnerable and in need of protection, but also as people who will engage in risky behaviours. We suggest that the use of these repertoires ultimately functions to obscure the need for safe and legal migration routes to the UK. (shrink)

Analysis of contemporary political discourse reveals that the topics of ‘immigration’ and ‘asylum’, historically the preserve of extreme right-wing politics, have increasingly entered more centrist conservative discourse. Meanwhile, it is also argued that elite political discourse on ethnic affairs cuts across traditional political divides. Thus, contemporary left-wing discourses also require scrutiny. The current article examines one example of elite discourse from liberal media commentary, which addresses ideological concerns regarding diversity, immigration and the welfare state in Britain. Adopting a discursive analytic (...) approach, three predominant discursive themes are identified in the text, which we term: ‘Unnatural Sharing’, ‘Diversity as Ethnic Difference’ and ‘Immigrant-Minorities Alchemy’. Through careful examination of these themes, we show how, via their engagement, the text subtly yet persuasively builds a version of ‘reality’ inimical to progressive ideals. (shrink)

This paper addresses the ways in which asylum seekers in the UK manage making complaints about their host country. The authors demonstrate that asylum seekers have fled dangerous situations in their countries of origin and then can face difficulties and hostility in the UK. A discursive psychological approach is used to assess the ways in which asylum seekers made complaints regarding their treatment. Interviews were conducted in a refugee centre in the Midlands with nine asylum seekers and were transcribed for (...) a discourse analysis to be conducted. Analysis of the data showed that participants criticised the asylum system for being unfair. They also made claims about not being happy in the UK, but did so in ways that downgraded the problem so as to manage the possible dilemma of appearing ungrateful and undermining their reasons for claiming asylum. The problems associated with these strategies are discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article proposes a discursive approach to beauty, which it illustrates with a close data analysis of women's relationship with the ‘male gaze’. In gender and feminist studies, the male gaze is invoked with reference to the patriarchal surveillance of women's bodies. The article complements studies that approach the surveillance as a socio-cultural phenomenon by investigating it as a discursive accomplishment of a social relation and identification. Taking a Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis approach to the matter, this article focuses on (...) the complexities and ambiguities underwriting individuals’ personalized ways of dealing with being looked at. Women's positioning to the male gaze by means of culturally available discourses is found to reveal ambiguous sites of agency and submission within its scope. Examining them, the article addresses the importance of combining a feminist poststructuralist perspective on the relations of gender with women's lived understandings of being implicated in them. can lived and academic sensibilities be set side by side in gender research? Is there a methodology of discourse analysis that facilitates this? (shrink)

This article focuses on the British Broadcasting Corporation's decision to deny a request to air a Disasters Emergency Committee Appeal for Gaza in January 2009. The BBC argued that airing the appeal would threaten its impartiality. Despite the centrality of impartiality to the BBC, the concept's meaning is anything but unequivocal. An exploration of a media offensive, which BBC executives launched in response to public outrage over the decision, seeks to reconstruct what definition of impartiality is inferred by the BBC's (...) rationale behind not airing the appeal. The analysis illustrates how the BBC's justification engages dialogically with the critical position of others and, by doing so, draws on diverse understandings of impartiality. We argue that this ‘semantic plasticity’ of impartiality does not point at institutional confusion, but rather at BBC's executives capitalising on the rhetorical potential this plasticity affords. (shrink)

This empirical study examines how practitioners from the organizational functions of human resources, occupational safety and occupational health services within a Finnish industrial organization view the challenges that production supervisors face in their daily work. The article presents a formative intervention, which focuses on supervisors’ changing work and how these organizational support functions could collaboratively serve supervisors better, especially in their task of promoting well-being at work. The article approaches this collective learning effort from the framework of the Cultural Historical (...) Activity Theory , by examining how crossfunctional collaboration evolves and the transitions through which it develops in an intervention process. The development of collaboration is analysed through a process of collective concept and tool formation by following a cross-meeting trajectory of specific annual clock episodes. An annual clock, a co-ordinating tool used in organizations to assist the yearly planning and management of specific operations, emerged in the intervention as the practitioners’ attempt to synchronize overlapping and inconsistent well-being related practices assigned to supervisors. The article presents a framework that can be applied in this kind of combined empirical analysis of tool development and the evolving collaboration. The analysis shows how the idea of the annual clock grew through multifaceted conceptualizations, in which it first had the status of a conceptual object, then a collaborative tool, and eventually a script for becoming a novel cross-functional practice. Simultaneously, the mode of interaction expanded from a function-based co-ordination to task-oriented co-operation, and finally to communication. (shrink)