Hope and dread in representing Palestine-Israel: a case study of editorials in the British broadsheets

Part of a comprehensive study to analyse British broadsheets’ coverage of the First Gaza War, this paper examines the moral arguments presented in editorials. Doing so, it showcases a non-dualist, relational inquiry of the representation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead of focusing on what is empirically ‘true’, morally ‘right’, and ethnically ‘Israeli/Jewish’ or ‘Palestinian/Arab’ as extra-discursive categories, it approaches them as discursive constructions and asks what relations, what forms of lives the editorials cultivate in representing them. The analysis demonstrates that whilst newspapers overwhelmingly imagine isolated and ahistorical essences to clash in Palestine-Israel, they do not exclusively do so. Traces of a discourse of relations, where ‘I’ (Palestinian or Israeli) is partly constituted by the ‘Other’ (Israeli or Palestinian) can also be found in the editorials. It is with the vicissitudes of such relational accounts that the article concludes

Saving a victim from himself: the rhetoric of the learner’s presence and absence in the Milgram experiments

This paper contests what has remained a core assumption in social psychological and general understandings of the Milgram experiments. Analysing the learner/victim’s rhetoric in experimental sessions across five conditions (N= 170), it demonstrates that what participants were exposed to was not the black-and-white scenario of being pushed towards continuation by the experimental authority and pulled towards discontinuation by the learner/victim. Instead, the traditionally posited explicit collision of “forces” or “identities” was at all points of the experiments undermined by an implicit collusion between them: rendering the learner/victim a divided and contradictory subject, and the experimental process a constantly shifting and paradoxical experiential-moral field. As a result, the paper concludes that evaluating the participants’ conduct requires an understanding of the experiments where morality and non-destructive agency were not simple givens to be applied to a transparent case, but had to be re-created anew – in the face not just of their explicit denial by the experimenter but also of their implicit denial by the victim

Brexit and emergent politics: in search of a social psychology

In this paper we develop a conceptual and methodological approach which psychologists and other social scientists can employ to study emergence. We consider relevant social psychological approaches and conclude that, for the most part, social psychology has tended to focus on processes of normalisation following disruptions, rather than examining emergence in itself. An exception to this is G.H. Mead, whose work we draw on to theorise emergence with a focus on contemporary ‘affective politics’. In the second part of the paper, we use focus group data on the EU referendum in the UK to empirically illustrate our theoretical points. We discuss in particular three axes for exploring the emergent politics of Brexit: political values, political authority, and the authority of affect. We conclude our discussion by reflecting on some of the theoretical and political implications of our analysis

The second wave of critical engagement with Stanley Milgram's ‘obedience to authority’ experiments: What did we learn?

Abstract: The study critically examines contemporary academic engagement with Stanley Milgram's classic ‘obedience to authority’ experiments. It argues that, following what will be termed the ‘first wave of criticism’ (1964 to mid‐1980s) and ‘consensus and canonization’ (mid‐1980s to mid‐2000s), this present‐day phase has constituted a veritable ‘second wave of criticism’. The ‘second wave’ is reviewed in terms of, first, a return to fundamental dilemmas around the experiments (i.e., replication, ethics, methodology, and theory); and second, a recourse to novel data sources as well as theoretical and epistemological‐methodological developments. Such integration of traditional concerns and new perspectives has resulted in focus being redirected to a forgotten aspect of the experiments: the interactional production of affective dynamics in the lab. Although the ‘second wave’ will be critiqued for selectively focusing on either affective atmosphere or interactional process, the paper will conclude with the suggestion that bringing these two aspects together continues to promise a theoretical contribution to the understanding of the experiments not seen before

Race, racism, discourse

This chapter will examine race and racism and the relations between social ideas (e.g. the existence of races; the association of qualities/characteristics with particular racial/ethnic/religious groups), social stratification based on these ideas, and discourse. After introductory and contextualising sections, where we introduce the historic and conceptual bases of the subject, the empirical and analytic sections of the chapter will be structured in such a way that we gradually examine levels and details that the reader may not have initially considered. We start with the most obviously prejudicial texts, produced and circulated by European extreme-right political parties. Next, we will examine a case which appears to have a racial dimension without race being explicitly articulated: a televised interview with the actor Samuel L Jackson, in which the interviewer mistook him for Laurence Fishburne. Finally, we will consider British conservative broadsheet newspapers’ reporting of a conflagration of the Israel/Palestine conflict (‘Operation Cast Lead’), and the ways they related this act of reporting to acts of antisemitism. The chapter will thus progressively move to less conspicuous and more dilemmatic waters, and in so doing demonstrate the value of close analysis when examining discourse on this topic

The clash of identities : discourse, politics, and morality in the exchange of letters between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem

This thesis analyses the fabled public exchange of letters that occurred between political theorist Hannah Arendt and historian of Jewish religion Gershom Scholem in 1964 following the historic trial of Adolf Eichmann and Arendt's subsequent publication of her report of the event, Eichmann in Jerusalem. The thesis covers the historical issues that form the contextual background to the exchange. It involves the introduction of the two participants as defining Jewish intellectuals of the past century, the course of the trial itself and the political and ideological problems it entailed as well as the turbulent history of the reception of Arendt's book. It is down to these four factors that guaranteed the eminence of the exchange of letters analysed in the thesis. Oft-quoted as the exchange is, there has been no proper analysis of it to this date. To accomplish this task, the thesis adopts the theoretical-methodological framework of discourse analysis in general, and the version of rhetorically oriented discursive psychology, proposed mainly in the publications of Potter and Wetherell (1987) and Billig (1996), in particular. This approach allows the thesis to provide a fine-grained analysis of the various ways of textual construction. Firstly, the ways examined concern the significance, worth and value of the debate itself, as formulated by both of the participants. Secondly, they involve the construction of the attempt to establish definite versions of the content of the book. Thirdly, they cover the textual acts of accounting for that content, or the practice of misinterpretation of that content, respectively. What all these three aspects have in common is the positioning of the problems touched upon in a moral and political context, and ultimately approaching them in terms of the identities of the participants. In this sense, versions of the events and ways of accounting for it will not only aim at producing accurate descriptions of events but in the forms of an implied morality or politics an implied "action-plan" for the future as well. The construction of Arendt and Scholem is, hence, analysed in terms of its argumentative organisation in order to undermine the other's counterversion and to establish its own as the definite one. While, structurally, there are many similarities in the two letters, what distinguishes them is that they conceive of their objects (i.e. the text), subject positions, and political or moral values according to which they should be assessed in quite diametrically opposite ways. This thesis not only registers the various rhetorical ways the participants fashion their versions as definite ones, but also accounts for the differences in their contents.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Supramolecular spangling, crocheting, and knitting of functionalized pyrene molecules on a silver surface

Pyrenes, as photoactive polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), represent promising modules for the bottom-up assembly of functional nanostructures. Here, we introduce the synthesis of a family of pyrene derivatives peripherally functionalized with pyridin-4-ylethynyl termini and comprehensively characterize their self-assembly abilities on a smooth Ag(111) support by scanning tunneling microscopy. By deliberate selection of number and geometric positioning of the pyridyl-terminated substituents, two-dimensional arrays, one-dimensional coordination chains, and chiral, porous kagomé-type networks can be tailored. A comparison to phenyl-functionalized reference pyrenes, not supporting the self-assembly of ordered structures at low coverage, highlights the role of the pyridyl moieties for supramolecular crocheting and knitting. Furthermore, we demonstrate the selective spangling of pores in the two-dimensional pyrene assemblies by a distinct number of iodine atoms as guests by atomically resolved imaging and complementary X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy

The Breakdown of Discourse: Post-Holocaust Jewish Identity and the Scholem-Arendt Exchange

This article examines the significance of the private-public exchange of letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt in the wake of the Eichmann trial. Using rhetorical analysis, it considers the respective arguments concerning Jewish responsibility, the incompatible political-moral frameworks offered to underpin such judgments, and the extreme identities the correspondents construct for each other. In doing so, it identifies the ultimate significance of the exchange with the total breakdown of discourse it symbolically resulted in—in other words, with the consensus pertaining to the Holocaust leading to a complete incommensurability of the respective political-moral positions. Such a state of affairs is finally accounted for, paradoxically, in terms of the far-reaching agreement. between Arendt and Scholem, reaching beyond politics and even identity: the total inescapability of Jewishness

A proper study of the discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Methodological implications of a large-scale study of the first Gaza war

Drawing on a large-scale study examining the British broadsheets’ coverage of the first Gaza war, this paper proposes some methodological considerations for analyzing the particularly emotive discourse on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and suggests a reflective multi-methodological approach to account for both the complexities and the intensities of the conflict. The paper starts by arguing that, working with a large data-set, quantitative data are both required and required to be interpreted by acts of contextualisation. Two strategies of contextualization are then introduced: interpreting patterns and associations in the numerical data. Following this, the paper continues by examining the findings and dilemmas that have emerged from quantitative analysis, using qualitative analysis of editorial extracts. It therefore shows examples for how quantitative codes can be built into and built up by narratives and arguments. Doing this, it also demonstrates possible ways of connecting qualitative to quantitative research: explanation, extension, and transformation/subversion