Discourses on wars and conflicts :the discursive construction of Iraq in the US press

PhD ThesisThis study examines the discourses of US newspapers during the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988) and the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq to see how the themes: i.e., Saddam, Iraqi people, Shiites, Halabja/the use of chemical weapons are discursively represented in these two wars. The research also examines whether there is a shift in the US press stance in its reporting by comparing the treatment of the themes during the two wars in question. To operationalise an interdisciplinary framework for this investigation the study employs corpus linguistics tools: frequency, collocates and concordances, in combination with the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) to CDA. The investigation reveals that during the Iraq-Iran war, the US press covered the conflicting official statements of all countries involved in the war, while there was an over-reliance on the opinions and statements of US officials during the US-led invasion, with Saddam’s voice being muted. In the same vein, although Saddam is portrayed negatively in the Iraq-Iran war, he is much more sharply vilified, Hilterlised and demonised in the US-led invasion, and constructed as a threat that needs to be faced and eliminated. With regard to the Iraqis/Shiites, there is also a shift in reporting in the two wars. In the 2003 US-led invasion they appear as worthy victims, a portrayal that fits in within the propaganda that the war had a humanitarian motive. However, the Iraqis/Shiites are never represented in this way during the Iraq-Iran war. In a similar way, whereas the US press coverage of Halabja and chemical weapons (in 1988) consists mainly of reports of the conflicting opinions and statements of Iraqi, Iranian and US officials during the Iran-Iraq war, this is not the case during the 2003 US-led invasion, when the history of the Halabja gassing and the use of chemical weapons by Iraq is brought back to the surface to serve the aims of demonising and criminalising Saddam in particular and Iraq in general: these events are used to support the claim that Iraq possessed WMDs and that there was a real threat that Saddam would use them. It is hoped that this thesis makes a multifaceted contribution to the field: first, in revealing the US press selective nature of human rights violations with regard to Iraqi social groups and showing how this was in line with US foreign policy; secondly, by contributing to our understanding of the quality of journalistic practices in the US during times of conflict and the way they may function to form the overall characteristics of US press discourses during iv international conflicts, especially conflicts in the Middle East. The study also highlights the mechanisms through which the US press discourses incorporate the official state voices in the processes of legitimising and persuading the public of the necessity for a war

A Learning Health System for Radiation Oncology

The proposed research aims to address the challenges faced by clinical data science researchers in radiation oncology accessing, integrating, and analyzing heterogeneous data from various sources. The research presents a scalable intelligent infrastructure, called the Health Information Gateway and Exchange (HINGE), which captures and structures data from multiple sources into a knowledge base with semantically interlinked entities. This infrastructure enables researchers to mine novel associations and gather relevant knowledge for personalized clinical outcomes. The dissertation discusses the design framework and implementation of HINGE, which abstracts structured data from treatment planning systems, treatment management systems, and electronic health records. It utilizes disease-specific smart templates for capturing clinical information in a discrete manner. HINGE performs data extraction, aggregation, and quality and outcome assessment functions automatically, connecting seamlessly with local IT/medical infrastructure. Furthermore, the research presents a knowledge graph-based approach to map radiotherapy data to an ontology-based data repository using FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) concepts. This approach ensures that the data is easily discoverable and accessible for clinical decision support systems. The dissertation explores the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process, data model frameworks, ontologies, and provides a real-world clinical use case for this data mapping. To improve the efficiency of retrieving information from large clinical datasets, a search engine based on ontology-based keyword searching and synonym-based term matching tool was developed. The hierarchical nature of ontologies is leveraged to retrieve patient records based on parent and children classes. Additionally, patient similarity analysis is conducted using vector embedding models (Word2Vec, Doc2Vec, GloVe, and FastText) to identify similar patients based on text corpus creation methods. Results from the analysis using these models are presented. The implementation of a learning health system for predicting radiation pneumonitis following stereotactic body radiotherapy is also discussed. 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are utilized with radiographic and dosimetric datasets to predict the likelihood of radiation pneumonitis. DenseNet-121 and ResNet-50 models are employed for this study, along with integrated gradient techniques to identify salient regions within the input 3D image dataset. The predictive performance of the 3D CNN models is evaluated based on clinical outcomes. Overall, the proposed Learning Health System provides a comprehensive solution for capturing, integrating, and analyzing heterogeneous data in a knowledge base. It offers researchers the ability to extract valuable insights and associations from diverse sources, ultimately leading to improved clinical outcomes. This work can serve as a model for implementing LHS in other medical specialties, advancing personalized and data-driven medicine

Argumentation, Ideology and Discourse in Evolving Specialized Communication

In the digital age, the transformation process of information into ‘knowledge’ is characterized by hyper-connected communities, where a potentially infinite amount of information is ubiquitously accessible to individuals or community users and is instrumental in the creation of shared knowledge, but also in building consensus across community participants, societal membership and grouping, through the argumentative ideological representation of assumptions, values and practices. This Special Issue of “Lingue e Linguaggi” on the theme Argumentation, Ideology and Discourse in Evolving Specialized Communication explores the interface between these three dimensions and combines an array of perspectives into a distinctly unified volume, offering synchronic, diachronic, comparative, interlinguistic and intercultural approaches over a range of specialized knowledge domains. The volume integrates quantitative and qualitative approaches, making use of Corpus Linguistics, alongside other methods incorporated in theoretical approaches such as Critical Discourse Analysis, Appraisal Theory and Argumentation Theory, focusing on the pragma-linguistic features of different texts and genres, together with their ideological purposes for different audiences in various contexts of use. The collection of essays investigates argumentative styles and patterning along with the discursive socio-construction of ideology in the dynamics of recontextualization, rescripting and remediation which affect the multi-faceted nature of contemporary communication

The discursive construction of discrimination: the representation of ethnic diversity in the Korean public service broadcasting news

Globalisation has intensified the international movement of labour and South Korea is no exception. Korea, which in the past was itself a labour-exporting country, has seen a reversal in human mobility since the late 1990's with a rapid growth in immigration and a transformation of a previously almost ethnically homogenous society. However, studies on migrant and ethnic minority groups in Korea have primarily focussed on such areas as industrial law and social policy. In this context, the important questions about the cultural and political implications associated with the construction of minority representations in the media have remained highly unexplored. The starting point of this study is an examination of the vital role of public service broadcasting (PSB) in Korean society, where ethnic minorities have increasingly become visible. Korean PSB's mandate, following the BBC model, emphasises the broadcaster‟s responsibility to represent and reflect the range of public opinion and experiences beyond class, age, ethnicity and ideological orientation. Despite this commitment what this study shows is that PSB in South Korea has failed to fairly represent the culturally diverse groups within Korean society. The main purpose of this study is to empirically examine the means through which PSB generates discourses of We-ness and Otherness at times of change in the Korean society. Empirically, the study focuses on primetime PSB news visual and textual representations of migrants and ethnic minorities. With the use of critical discourse analysis (CDA) it demonstrates that PSB gives a concrete form to the ideological constructions of Otherness, sometimes transforming subtle cultural or social differences into fundamental and oppositional ones. Korean PSB appears to be ideologically biased toward nationalism, while in its visual and textual representations it constructs ideological systems of social and racial stratification, with Southeast Asian migrants constantly represented as the ultimate Others. The study shows the significant role of PSB in representing cultural diversity in public debates and the ways in which such representations and their dissemination reflect media power

Reset'i katsumus: Barack Obama ja Dmitri Medvedevi Venemaa ja USA viidete diskursusanalüüs aastatel 2008–2012

Laclau ja Mouffe’i (1985) teooria kohaselt peab poliitiline jõud tänapäeval võimu saavutamiseks osaliselt siduma tühja tähistaja, mis on hetkel ühiskondlikult ja poliitiliselt oluline (nt demokraatia), teatud sõlmpunktidega (nt õigusriik ja inimõigused) nii, et tunduks, et sellel hegemoonilisel artikulatsioonil puuduvad alternatiivid. Selleks aga, et hegemoonia püsiks, peab hegemoonilist artikulatsiooni üha uuesti ja erineval viisil taasesitama, et konkureerida teiste poliitiliste jõududega, kes pakuvad välja selle ühiskondlikult tähtsa tühja tähistaja alternatiivseid artikulatsioone. Poliitiline retoorika keskendubki hegemooniliste artikulatsioonide edendamisele, kasutades erinevate kuulajaskondade veenmiseks erinevaid käike. Poliitilist retoorikat aga piiravad riigi ajaloo käigus kujunenud diskursused, mis mõjutavad riigi identiteeti ja suhteid teiste riikidega. Näiteks on Venemaa ja USA poliitikutel raske edendada stabiilset partnerlusretoorikat teise riigi kohta, kuna nii Venemaa kui ka USA kultuuris on teist riiki kaua konstrueeritud oma riigi identiteedi jaoks tähtsa Teisena. Lisaks ajaloolistele diskursustele teevad poliitilise retoorika ebastabiilseks ka tühja tähistaja muud artikulatsioonid, millega poliitik on varjatult dialoogis ja millest ta püüdleb vabaneda, kuid mis siiski tihtipeale hägustavad tema retoorikat. Käesolev väitekiri oligi suunatud selliste ebastabiilsuste ja diskursiivsete võitluste tuvastamisele Barack Obama ja Dmitri Medvedevi lausungites USA ja Venemaa vaheliste suhete kohta aastatel 2008–2012, perioodil, mil riigid proovisid omavahelisi suhteid normaliseerida. Diskursusanalüüs, mis ühendas Laclau ja Mouffe’i diskursusteooria kriitilise diskursusanalüüsi meetoditega (deiksis ja oletused), näitas muuhulgas seda, kuidas Obama saavutas oma retoorikaga hegemoonia USA ja Venemaa suhetes tollel ajal olulise tähenduse fikseerimise sõlmpunkti, suhete taaskäivitamise (reset), üle. Samuti näitas analüüs, et suhete taaskäivitamise diskursus oli lõppkokkuvõttes nihestatud, sest Obama ei suutnud vastu võtta Medvedevi hegemoonilist artikulatsiooni, mille keskmes oli USA ja Venemaa võrdne koostöö julgeoleku küsimustes, kuna USA Kesk- ja Ida-Euroopa liitlased artikuleerisid sellist koostööd USA nõrgenenud pühendumusega nende julgeoleku tagamisele. Medvedev omakorda ei suutnud nõustuda Obama hegemoonilise artikulatsiooniga, mis rõhutas Venemaa avatust läänele, kuna Medvedevi Euroopa julgeolekulepingu projekt, mis andnuks Venemaale keskse rolli Euroopa julgeolekus, lükati tagasi, samal ajal kui raketitõrjekilp, mida Venemaa fikseeris ohuga oma riiklikule julgeolekule, loodi hoolimata Venemaa tugevast vastuseisust.According to Laclau and Mouffe (1985), hegemony is achieved when a political force succeeds in fixing a socially important empty signifier (e.g., democracy) with specific nodal points (e.g., rule of law and human rights), so that there appear to be no alternatives to this hegemonic articulation. However, such a fixation can only be temporary. Since hegemony is inherently unstable, the hegemonic articulation needs to be constantly reproduced in various ways, to compete with other political forces articulating this empty signifier differently, in a struggle for political power. This is one of the core principles of political rhetoric. Political rhetoric is, however, limited by discourses that have evolved throughout the history of a state and that influence its relations with other states. For instance, for politicians in Russia and the U.S, it is hard to maintain a stable partnership rhetoric about the other country because in both the other has been an important Other in the country’s identity construction for a long time. Political rhetoric is often undermined from within by other articulations, with which a speaker is in an implicit dialog, and which he/she seeks to suppress, but which often loom large at the background of what is being said. This dissertation detects exactly such instabilities and discursive struggles in the utterances of Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev on U.S.–Russian relations from 2008–2012, in the period when the two countries attempted to improve their dialog. Discourse analysis, combining analytical concepts from Laclau and Mouffe’s theory with the linguistic tools from critical discourse analysis (indexicality and assumptions) performed in the dissertation demonstrated, among other things, how Obama, through his rhetoric, achieved hegemony over reset, a significant nodal point in U.S.–Russian relations at that time. The analysis also showed that the reset discourse, although successful to some degree, was ultimately dislocated because Obama could not accept Medvedev’s hegemonic articulation of reset with Russia’s and U.S.’s equal cooperation on security, since the U.S.’s CEE allies articulated such cooperation with the U.S.’s weakened commitment to protecting their security. Medvedev, in turn, could not accept Obama’s hegemonic articulation of reset with Russia’s openness to the West, since Medvedev’s project of the European Security Treaty, through which Russia would play a central role in European security, was rejected, while missile defense shield, fixed with a threat to Russia’s national security, was being, in a reviewed form, implemented despite Russia’s strong opposition.https://www.ester.ee/record=b529246