Barrierefreie Kommunikation als Voraussetzung und Mittel für die Partizipation benachteiligter Gruppen – Ein (polito-)linguistischer Blick auf Probleme und Potenziale von "Leichter" und "einfacher Sprache"

"Leichte Sprache" as the equivalent concept to Easy-to-read and a form of accessible communi-cation has been established in the German-speaking countries since the early 2000s. It is ad-dressed to people with learning disabilities and other groups with difficulties in reading and understanding (simple and complex) written text. In 2009 the German government ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and thereby committed itself to provid-ing accessible information and communication. However, the concept's scientific exploration is still in its early stages. The existing lists of linguistic features and design rules were devel-oped mainly intuitively. A systematic empirical investigation of "Leichte Sprache" is still to be done. The current practice is often slanted towards (over-)simplification, reduction of infor-mation, of lexical and grammatical variety and of stylistic differentiation. "Leichte Sprache" is intended as a means of supporting and enabling participation in different areas of life for the target group. The article wants to investigate the chances and problems of this accessible form of communication as a prerequisite for and a means of political participa-tion from a linguistic point of view. By way of example three texts are linguistically analysed and compared: For the elections to the Bundestag in 2013 the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) released three manifestos, one regular version, one version modified into "Leichte Sprache" and one version modified into einfache Sprache, which is a similar concept allowing more complexity than "Leichte Sprache". The linguistic analysis mainly focuses on the different strategies regarding the presentation of content, regarding lexis, adequate realisation of text type and function as well as on semantic and pragmatic aspects (frames, speech acts). Subsequently, the article discusses which consequences result from the different linguistic presentations with a view to enabling democratic participation

Social innovation and sustainability; how to disentangle the buzzword and its application in the field of agriculture and rural development

Social innovation is often appointed as an essential part of agricultural and rural innovation. Everybody seems to agree that social innovation is important but what exactly is meant by the term remains often unclear. This paper aims at clarifying the meaning and significance of the concept by going back to its root in innovation science and policy. It appoints three main interpretations of social innovation, referring to the social mechanism of innovation, the social responsibility of innovation and the need for innovating society. Studying its application in the field of agriculture and rural development reveals that social innovation is rarely referred to when agriculture as a singular economic activity is concerned, but prominently present in discussions about rural development. Here social innovation may be referred to when identifying society’s need for more sustainable production methods, the necessity for collaboration and social learning, and the scope of change needed for revitalising (rural) society. Often, however, social innovation is presented as a tangle of interdependent processes and beneficial outcomes. Its fuzziness contributes to its discursive power in discussions about agricultural politics and the significance of sustainability, but also hides the valued-loadedness of social innovation. As a result its critical potential becomes neutralised. For gaining more insight in how to more effectively support social innovation, it is important to disentangle the social innovation jumble, to unravel the diverse interrelations and to explore and monitor its functioning and contribution to processes of social change and renewal

Circulation of Coronavirus Images: Helping Social Distancing?

soon as the SARS‐Cov2 disease was recognized by experts to potentially cause a serious pandemic, a three dimensional diagrammatic image of the virus, colored in strong red, conquered public media globally.This study confronts this iconic virus image with a historic image analysis of 33,000 biomedical articles on coronaviruses published between 1968–2020 and interviews with some of their authors.Only a small fraction of scientific virus publications entail images of the complete virus. Red as an alarm color is not used at all by scientists who don't aim for a non‐scientific public.Circulation in this case concerns the movement of iconic images from a scientific context into a general public. On the basis of hps‐studies on scientific diagrams and especially on color use in scientific diagrams to convey specific messages in public, the paper discusses the role of the claim of public corona‐virus diagram as “scientific.”It points at relevant differences between most frequent scientific corona‐virus images and the diagrammatic image used in public. Both author‐ and readerships (in science and public) follow contrasting aims and values. Thus, the images meet non‐expert readers for whom the images entail very different – and potentially unintended – meanings then to virus experts.Peer Reviewe

Who is afraid of population decline? The Struggle of Keeping Rural Depopulation on the Dutch Agenda

The Netherlands is a small, highly urbanised and densely populated country. The distances are short and levels of welfare high. Throughout the 80s and 90s, people were generally satisfied with service levels in rural areas and experienced the rural areas’ quality of life as high. Around 2006, however, the population started to decline in several rural regions. The government responded with the development of two national Action Plans for Population Decline. This paper analyses the national action plans, their content and implementation. It looks into the problem definition and assignment of responsibility, their success in addressing population decline problems, and in keeping depopulation on the political agenda. The paper concludes with some reflections on what we can learn about population decline and related policies based on the experiences in a highly urbanised country like the Netherlands

The concept of trust as category in intelligence work. An exemplary linguistic analysis of trust in the internal communication of the GDR secret service (DDR-Staatssicherheit)

Den im Band präsentierten Beiträgen liegt sowohl theoretisch als auch empirisch eine medienlinguistische Perspektive in der Betrachtung gegenwärtiger gesellschaftspolitischer Ereignisse in Deutschland und Polen, die in letzter Zeit viele kontroverse Debatten hervorgerufen haben, zugrunde. Die gezeigten unterschiedlichen Möglichkeiten der Vernetzung linguistischer und medienorientierter Forschungen resultieren deshalb aus der Überzeugung, dass die Medien die Welt der Politik auf ihre Art interpretieren, und zwar mit verschiedenen sprachlichen und visuellen Mitteln. Nicht nur in der theoretisch-empirischen Reflexion über die neusten Verschränkungen der Politik, Medien und Sprache sind aber die Vorteile dieser Arbeit zu sehen, sie betreffen auch text- und diskursanalytische Vorschläge der Interpretation solcher Vernetzungen, die besonders für Studierende, Doktoranden der linguistischen und journalistischen Studienrichtungen sowie andere Interessierte inspirierend sein können.Vertrauensbildung und Aufrechterhaltung von Vertrauen sind Prozesse, die maßgeblich an die Möglichkeiten von Sprache und Kommunikation gebunden sind. Auch wenn Vertrauen typischerweise mit dem privaten Raum verbunden wird, spielt es doch in fast allen Lebensbereichen eine Rolle, sei es im Arbeitsleben, in der Werbung oder in der Politik. Der Aufsatz thematisiert das Verhältnis von Sprache und Vertrauen im spezifischen Kontext einer historischen politischen Institution, nämlich in der internen Kommunikation der DDR-Staatssicherheit. Zum einen wird untersucht, mit welchen Kommunikationsstrategien Vertrauensverhältnisse in der Geheimdienstarbeit gestiftet und aufrecht erhalten werden sollten. Zum anderen soll auch die kontextspezifische Semantik des Begriffs Vertrauen analysiert werden: Was versteht ein Geheimdienst unter Vertrauen, wenn er einerseits damit arbeitet, dass seine Mitarbeiter Vertrauensverhältnisse hintergehen und ausnutzen, und andererseits auf Vertraulichkeit angewiesen ist?Building and maintaining trust are processes strongly connected to language and communication. Although the concept of trust is typically associated with the private sphere, it plays an important role in almost every area of life, for example working life, advertising or politics. The article focusses on the relation between language and trust in the specific context of a historical political institution, namely the internal communication of the GDR secret service (DDR-Staatssicherheit). We investigated the communication strategies the Staatssicherheit used to build and maintain bonds of trust in their intelligence work. Moreover, we analysed the context-specific semantics of the word ‘Vertrauen’ (trust): What does the secret service of a dictatorial state understand by ‘trust’, considering that its own employees and informants betrayed and exploited bonds of trust while at the same time the secret service was reliant on confidentiality and honesty?Die vorliegende Publikation ist durch die Philologische Fakultät der Universität Łódź und den Verband Stowarzyszenie Nauczycieli Akademickich na rzecz Krzewienia Kultury Języków Europejskich finanziell gefördert worden

Rethinking the bounds of regional justice:A scoping review of spatial justice in EU regions

This paper contributes to the debate on spatial justice in a geography of regional uneven development in the EU. The purpose of this study is to provide a philosophically grounded and empirically informed review of how regional inequality relates to spatial justice. This is done inventorying spatial injustices through a systematic literature review, unravelling the kind of injustices based on a philosophical principle and categorisation of (in)justice. The paper starts with a discussion of how spatial justice has been conceptualised, looking more particularly into Nancy Fraser’s egalitarian understanding of social justice. Her tripartite distinction of justice as (re)distribution, recognition, and representation allows us to re-examine regional inequality and to sharply formulate what is understood as just or unjust. Through a spatial reinterpretation of Fraser’s prism, we then re-examine 134 empirical papers carefully selected with a scoping review method. Our results reveal six manifestations of regional injustice in the EU, which not only encompass an unequally distributed regional development of economic wealth and access to services, but also signal a cultural hierarchy imprinting territorial stigmas and neglecting environmental issues, as well as a political geographical divide of deeply felt rural and regional misrepresentation