Space construction in media reporting: A study of the migrant space in the 'Jungles' of Calais

Media are intrinsically implicated in constructing and framing space as well as in the imagination of communities. This paper examines how media through the spatial construct of the ‘jungle’ premises the discourses of migration between the borders of UK and France. We argue that newspapers impose a cartography by invoking a social imaginary of a bounded community sustained through imagined boundaries. Metaphors such as the ‘jungle’ function as spatialisation techniques to not only renew the sacrosanct boundaries of a nation-state, but they also become instrumental tools in invoking fear, anxiety and the visceral in migrant discourses. Conceptually, the paper argues that media sustains ‘an imagined community’ by techniques of spatialisation which encode politics of space in migrant discourses. These discourses are central in sustaining and enacting a social imaginary, where space framing and construction become tools to imagine and locate communities and to exclude the ‘other’

Examining framings of geoengineering using Q methodology

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Heroes of Agricultural Innovation

New technology has a prominent place in the theory and practice of innovation, but the association between high tech and innovation is not inevitable. In this paper, we discuss six metaphorical heroes of agricultural innovation, starting with the dominant hero of frontier science and technology. At first sight, our six heroes can be divided in those who are pro- and those who are anti-technology. Yet in the end technology, and more specifically GM technology, does not emerge as the main issue. Empowering the poor, finding solutions for urgent climate problems, and enhancing the quality of our daily relations to food and the environment – these are the issues the heroes are fighting for. Relations between innovation and (frontier) technology are better seen as a matter of pragmatic consideration, we will argue

The politics of displacements. Towards a framework for democratic evaluation

The confrontation of values and interests and an impact in the public realm constitutes a broadly recognised political dimension of technological innovation processes. There is, however, a gap between empirical research into these politics of innovation and normative research into their democratic evaluation. Especially methods for evaluating the democratic quality of dynamic and non-formal forms of innovation politics are lacking. This paper aims to fill the gap by developing a framework for analysing the politics of innovation in terms of displacements of issues. Its first part reviews different theoretical approaches and concludes that decision-making about design and use generally takes place in a multitude of settings and that this circumstance calls for theoretical investigation of displacements between settings. In the second part, the notions of ‘issue’, ‘setting’, and ‘displacement’ are further elaborated and related to one another. A conceptual framework is construed that is suggested to be helpful in the democratic evaluation of the politics of displacements. The paper ends with a reflection on the applicability of recently developed democratic criteria. Because these criteria are devised for proceduralised and static decision-making processes, they needed to be reduced to three democratic principles that are general enough to capture local variation and specific enough to make a difference between good and bad politics.

“Imagine this kebab is the Greek national economy”: Metaphor scenarios in mediatized explanations of economic news

This article investigates a series of explainer videos that offer explanations of financial institutions, policies, and terms used in news coverage of the European financial crisis, particularly as reported in relation to the 2015 Greek bailout negotiations. By approaching digital news explainers as multimodal meta-commentaries, the study focuses on the prevailing metaphorical scenarios (Mussolf, 2012) and their strategic use as key stylistic resources for explaining complex financial issues. In addition to the dystopic metaphors of DISASTER or WAR found in mainstream financial reporting, financial matters are explained in my data primarily through metaphors that liken national economies and currencies to FOOD and economic policies to COOKING. The article discusses how verbal and visual modes work together in projecting metaphorical scenarios from the domain of home economics that embed specific evaluations and stances toward national economic policies. The study concludes with a critical discussion of the implications of such metaphorical scenarios for discourses of agency and accountability in the European financial crisis, and situates the digital genre of explainers in the context of wider sociocultural shifts related to the process of mediatization

GM crops on trial: technological development as a real-world experiment

Through the European controversy over agricultural biotechnology, genetically modified (GM) crops have been evaluated for an increasingly wide range of potential effects. As the experimental phase has been extended into commercial practices, the terms for product approval have become more negotiable and contentious. To analyse the regulatory conflicts, this paper links three theoretical perspectives: issue-framing, agri-environmental discourses, and technological development as a real-world experiment. Agri-biotechnological risks have been framed by contending discourses which attribute moral meanings to the agricultural environment. Agri-biotech proponents have emphasised eco-efficiency benefits which can remedy past environmental damage, while critics have framed 'uncontrollable risks' in successively broader ways through ominous metaphors of environmental catastrophe. Regulatory authorities have translated those metaphors into measurable biophysical effects. They anticipate and design commercial use as a 'real-world experiment', by assigning greater moral-legal responsibility to agro-industrial operators who handle GM products. Expert-regulatory debate reflexively considers the social discipline necessary to prevent harm, now more broadly defined than before. Official procedures undergo tensions between predicting, testing and prescribing operator behaviour. In effect, GM crops have been kept continuously 'on trial'