Evaluation in Political Discourse Addressed to Women: Appraisal Analysis of Cosmopolitan\u27s Coverage of the 2014 US Midterm Elections

Before the US midterm elections of November 2014, the well-known women’s magazine Cosmopolitan decided to include politics in its contents. The editorial board stated that their aim was to encourage readers to vote and to be engaged with women’s rights advocay in the election process. To that end, Cosmopolitan created a new website, CosmoVotes, with content ranging from discussion of political issues to endorsement of specific candidates who were believed to advance women’s issues. Topics include labour rights, abortion, contraception, health, minimum wage and social equity. This paper evaluates the discourse of this new section of the Cosmopolitan website, together with readers’ responses, concentrating on evaluative language. In particular, we are concerned with differences between the editorial position and readers’ responses as viewed through the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005), and the role that verbal processes play in the expression of evaluative meanings. The corpus used for the analysis consists of a selection of articles and readers’ opinions from CosmoVotes. The methodology is based on annotation of Appraisal features and processes related to the interpersonal dimension of meaning. Those features reveal how attitudes are evaluated and capture ideological positionings in this discourse. Our results show that CosmoVotes has special characteristics, such as a predominance of high intensification in the readers’ opinions, and strong negative judgements and expressions, while the magazine’s pieces on political issues are more nuanced and eschew intensification

Reducing the environmental impact of surgery on a global scale: systematic review and co-prioritization with healthcare workers in 132 countries

Abstract Background Healthcare cannot achieve net-zero carbon without addressing operating theatres. The aim of this study was to prioritize feasible interventions to reduce the environmental impact of operating theatres. Methods This study adopted a four-phase Delphi consensus co-prioritization methodology. In phase 1, a systematic review of published interventions and global consultation of perioperative healthcare professionals were used to longlist interventions. In phase 2, iterative thematic analysis consolidated comparable interventions into a shortlist. In phase 3, the shortlist was co-prioritized based on patient and clinician views on acceptability, feasibility, and safety. In phase 4, ranked lists of interventions were presented by their relevance to high-income countries and low–middle-income countries. Results In phase 1, 43 interventions were identified, which had low uptake in practice according to 3042 professionals globally. In phase 2, a shortlist of 15 intervention domains was generated. In phase 3, interventions were deemed acceptable for more than 90 per cent of patients except for reducing general anaesthesia (84 per cent) and re-sterilization of ‘single-use’ consumables (86 per cent). In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for high-income countries were: introducing recycling; reducing use of anaesthetic gases; and appropriate clinical waste processing. In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for low–middle-income countries were: introducing reusable surgical devices; reducing use of consumables; and reducing the use of general anaesthesia. Conclusion This is a step toward environmentally sustainable operating environments with actionable interventions applicable to both high– and low–middle–income countries