From Teamchef Arminius to Hermann Junior: glocalised discourse about a national foundation myth

If for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ‘Battle of the Teutoburg Forest’, fought in 9 CE between Roman armies and Germanic tribes, was predominantly a reference point for nationalist and chauvinist discourses in Germany, the first decade of the twenty-first century has seen attempts to link public remembrance with local/regional identities on the one hand and international/intercultural contact on the other. In the run up to and during the ‘anniversary year’ of 2009, German media, sports institutions and various other official institutions articulating tourist, economic and political interests attempted to create a new ‘glocalised’ version of the public memory of the Teutoburg battle. Combining methods of Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, the paper analyses the narrative and argumentative topoi employed in this re-orientation of public memory, with a special emphasis on hybrid, post-national identity-construction. Das zweitausendjährige Gedenkjahr der „Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald“ im Jahr 2009 bot eine günstige Gelegenheit, die bis in die zweite Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts dominante Tradition nationalistisch–chauvinistischer Deutungen des Sieges von germanischen Stämmen über drei römische Legionen zu korrigieren und zu überwinden. Der Aufsatz analysiert mit Hilfe diskurslinguistischer Methoden die Anstrengungen regionaler Institutionen und Medien, die nationale Vereinnahmung des historischen Gedenkens kritisch zu thematisieren sowie neue, zum eine lokal situierte, zum andern international orientierte Identifikationsangebote anzubieten. Die Analyse zeigt, dass solche „de-nationalisierten“ Identifikationsangebote zwar teilweise auch früher verwendet wurden, aber heutzutage rekontextualisiert und auf innovative Weise in den Vordergrund gestellt werden

The Abjection of James Dean: Mixed Media/Mixed Race Performances in Ai\u27s Poem, James Dean

This paper investigates how the developmental process of the Japanese-Black-Choctaw-Irish American poet Ai translates into a creative process that integrates aspects of identity thrown out or made abject by dominant cultural norms and ideals. Just as Ai once disidentified with parts of her identity to discover and integrate her abject Japanese heritage, Ai\u27s dramatic monologue James Dean explores the intersections where the poetic voice-the narrator or subject speaking-disidentifies with the cinematic and textual image of iconic white, heterosexual masculinity in order to integrate a sexuality that usually constitutes its outside. In the process, this paper argues that by mixing print and visual mediums, Ai\u27s mixed media, mixed race performance on the page creates an allegoric body, a space for a mediated identification with the icon that recognizes the oppressive discourses of white, male hetero-normativity and the apparatuses that sustain such an ideal by making certain bodies abject

Four types of diaspora mobilization : Albanian diaspora activism for Kosovo independence in the US and the UK

This comparative study explores the conditions and causal pathways through which conflict-generated diasporas become moderate or radical actors when linked to homelands experiencing limited sovereignty. Situated at the nexus of scholarship on diasporas and conflict, ethnic lobbying in foreign policy, and transnationalism this article develops four types of diaspora political mobilization—radical (strong and weak) and moderate (strong and weak)—and unpacks the causal pathways that lead to these four types in different political contexts. I argue that dynamics in the original homeland drive the overall trend towards radicalism or moderation of diaspora mobilization in a host-land: high levels of violence are associated with radicalism, and low levels with moderation. Nevertheless, how diaspora mobilization takes place is a result of the conjuncture of the level of violence with another variable, the linkages of the main secessionist elites to the diaspora. The article uses observations from eight cases of Albanian diaspora mobilization in the US and the UK from 1989 until the proclamation of Kosovo's independence in 2008

Consumed by the real: A conceptual framework of abjective consumption and its freaky vicissitudes

Purpose – This paper furnishes an inaugural reading of abjective consumption by drawing on Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of abjection within the wider terrain of consumer cultural research. It offers a conceptual framework that rests on three pillars, viz. irrationality, meaninglessness, dissolution of selfhood. Design/methodology/approach – Qualitative research design that adopts a documentary ethnographic approach, by drawing on a corpus of 50 documentary episodes from the TV series “My Strange Addiction” and “Freaky Eaters”. Findings – The findings from this analysis point to different orders of mediatized discourse that are simultaneously operative in different actors’ frames (e.g. moralizing, medical), in Goffman’s terms, yet none of which attains to address the phenomenon of abjective consumption to its fullblown extent. Research limitations/implications – Although some degree of bias is bound to be inherent in the data because of their pre-recorded status, they are particularly useful not in the least because this is a “difficult sample” in qualitative methodological terms. Practical implications – The multi-order dimensionalization of abjective consumption opens up new vistas to marketers in terms of adding novel dimensions to the message structure of their communicative programs, in line with the three Lacanian orders. Social implications – The adoption of a consumer psychoanalytic perspective allows significant others to fully dimensionalize the behavior of abjective consumption subjects, by becoming sensitive to other than symbolic aspects that are endemic in consumer behavior. Originality/value – This paper contributes to the extant consumer cultural research literature by furnishing the novel conceptual framework of abjective consumption, as a further elaboration of my consumer psychoanalytic approach to jouissance consumption, as well as by contrasting this interpretive frame vis-à-vis dominant discursive regimes

Migrants, COVID-19, and Italy: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of the Construction of and Resistance to Nationalist Discourses

Migration has historically been a controversial issue around the world and one that has often been harnessed by people in power (or people hoping to gain power) for their own political agendas. In times of a global pandemic, the scapegoating of migrants has only increased, often rooted in nationalist ideologies which lead to policies and practices that harm migrants and the larger society. The present paper employs multimodal critical discourse analysis to explore how nationalist ideologies supported by right-wing populism are constructed visually and verbally during COVID-19 on Italian social media in regard to migration. We analyze Giorgia Meloni’s (leader of the nationalist party “Fratelli D’Italia”) Twitter thread discussing the arrival and detention of migrants in Italy in July-August 2020 as a representative sample of the discourse. Findings show one example of how nationalist discourses scapegoat migrants visually and verbally, but also how this discourse can be countered by the public via social media. Additionally, subtle details revealed in the visual analysis show the importance of multimodal research in un-packing ideologies that are easy to deny and hence more dangerous because of social media’s capacity to spread (mis)information

Analogy as Higher-Order Metaphor in Aquinas

At a Thomas Instituut conference in 2000, Otto-Hermann Pesch suggested somewhat enigmatically that the sharp distinction in scholastic Thomism between analogy and metaphor can no longer be maintained since on closer examination analogous statements are in effect instances of a kind of \u27higher-order metaphor\u27. I Pesch intended this qualification primarily to draw attention to the agnostic or negative aspect of analogous speech.2 It is evident from Herwi Rikhof\u27s portrait of \u27Thomas at Utrecht\u27 ,3 that this emphasis on the negative dimension did not introduce anything controversial or novel at the Instituut

The "unknown territory" of goal-setting: Negotiating a novel interactional activity within primary care doctor-patient consultations for patients with multiple chronic conditions.

Goal-setting is widely recommended for supporting patients with multiple long-term conditions. It involves a proactive approach to a clinical consultation, requiring doctors and patients to work together to identify patient’s priorities, values and desired outcomes as a basis for setting goals for the patient to work towards. Importantly it comprises a set of activities that, for many doctors and patients, represents a distinct departure from a conventional consultation, including goal elicitation, goal-setting and action planning. This indicates that goal-setting is an uncertain interactional space subject to inequalities in understanding and expectations about what type of conversation is taking place, the roles of patient and doctor, and how patient priorities may be configured as goals. Analysing such spaces therefore has the potential for revealing how the principles of goal-setting are realised in practice. In this paper, we draw on Goffman’s concept of ‘frames’ to present an examination of how doctors’ and patients’ sense making of goal-setting was consequential for the interactions that followed. Informed by Interactional Sociolinguistics, we used conversation analysis methods to analyse 22 video-recorded goal-setting consultations with patients with multiple long-term conditions. Data were collected between 2016 and 2018 in three UK general practices as part of a feasibility study. We analysed verbal and non-verbal actions for evidence of GP and patient framings of consultation activities and how this was consequential for setting goals. We identified three interactional patterns: GPs checking and reframing patients’ understanding of the goal-setting consultation, GPs actively aligning with patients’ framing of their goal, and patients passively and actively resisting GP framing of the patient goals. These reframing practices provided “telling cases” of goal-setting interactions, where doctors and patients need to negotiate each other’s perspectives but also conflicting discourses of patient-centredness, population-based evidence for treating different chronic illnesses and conventional doctor-patient relations