User-Centered Discourse: An Analysis of the Subject Positions of the User and the Librarian

1997 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 350-371 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimmo Tuominen
Keyword(s):  
Subject Positions ◽  
The Subject ◽  
User Centered

scholarly journals Tolerance and intolerance: Cultural meanings and discursive usage

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 172-186
Author(s):  
Maykel Verkuyten ◽  
Rachel Kollar
Keyword(s):  
National Survey ◽  
Culturally Diverse ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Lay People ◽  
The Subject

The notion of tolerance is widely embraced across many settings and is generally considered critical for the peaceful functioning of culturally diverse societies. However, the concepts of tolerance and intolerance have various meanings and can be used in different ways and for different purposes. The various understandings raise different empirical questions and might have different implications for the subject positions of those who are tolerant and those who are tolerated. In this study, we focus on cultural understandings of tolerance and intolerance and how these terms are used in discourses. We first describe how in an open-ended question in a national survey lay people use a classical and a more modern understanding of tolerance to describe situations of tolerance and intolerance. Second, we analyze how those who tolerate and those who are tolerated can flexibly use these different understandings of (in)tolerance for discursively making particular “us–them” distinctions. It is concluded that the notions of tolerance and intolerance have different cultural meanings which both can be used for progressive or oppressive ends.

scholarly journals Hidden in the limelight: A feminist engagement with innovation studies

Organization ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 135050842110153
Author(s):  
Lara Pecis ◽  
Karin Berglund
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
Innovation Studies ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Space Race ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Positively Charged ◽  
Blind Spots

Innovation is filled with aspirations for solutions to problems, and for laying the groundwork for new technological and social breakthroughs. When a concept is so positively charged, the hopes expressed may create blindness to potential shortcomings and deadlocks. To disclose innovation blind spots, we approach innovation from a feminist viewpoint. We see innovation as a context that changes historically, and as revolution, offering alternative imaginaries of the relationship between race, gender and innovation. Our theoretical framework combines bell hooks (capitalist patriarchy and intersectionality), Mazzucato (the entrepreneurial state and the changing context of innovation) and Fraser (redistributive justice) and contributes with an understanding of innovation from the margin by unveiling its political dimensions. Hidden Figures, the 2016 biographical drama that follows three Black women working at NASA during the space race, provides the empirical setting of the paper. Our analysis contributes to emerging intersectionality research in management and organisation studies (MOS) by revealing the subject positions and dynamics of inclusion/exclusion in innovation discourses, and by proposing a radical – and more inclusive – rethinking of innovation. With this article, we aim to push the margins to the centre and invite others to discover the terrain of the margin(alised). We suggest that our feminist framework is appropriate to study other organisational phenomena, over time and across contexts, to bring forward the plurality of women’s experiences at work and in organisations.

Better politics: Narratives of indignation and the possibility of a prosocial politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Moral Outrage ◽  
Social Crisis ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Politics Of Resistance ◽  
The Subject

This chapter calls for a truthful understanding of politics that admits the complex and sometimes very contradictory subject positions that people adhere to. There is always a temptation to disengage from contemporary political struggles and instead expend time postulating what a ‘postneoliberal’ future might entail. In examining neoliberalism, the politics of resistance, and prosocial forms of engagement, the chapter argues that a useful starting point is to interrogate the subject positions people adopt to understand the contemporary political era. Often these rely on a depiction of an economic and social crisis accentuated by neoliberalism, a sense of moral outrage, and the attribution of culpability on to those who are considered responsible.

scholarly journals Tarnished Stars: The Discourses of Celebrity in the British Tabloid Press

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Breeze
Keyword(s):  
The Sun ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Tabloid Press

En este estudio se analiza el discurso referido a las celebridades en la prensa popular inglesa. El análisis se centra en los recursos lingüísticos utilizados en este contexto, y el discurso informal que se emplea para atraer y representar a los lectores. Se procede a un estudio crítico de las posiciones de sujeto ofrecidas al lector, y las relaciones retóricas que se establecen. En las conclusiones se subraya la función de la prensa popular como mediador social, irreverente sin ser amenazador, que genera discursos populistas para enganchar una audiencia de masa en una época de fragmentación.Abstract:This study analyses the discourse of celebrity in texts from the British tabloid newspaper The Sun. The analysis focuses on the linguistic resources deployed in association with celebrities, and the typically vernacular voice with which the writer engages readers and claims to speak for them. The article then discusses factors underlying the subject positions offered to the readers and the nature of the rhetorical relations that are established. Conclusions are drawn about the operation of tabloid newspapers as social mediators that are irreverent without being threatening, generating populist discourses that contrive to engage mass audiences in an age of fragmentation.

Some remarks on subject positions and the architecture of the left periphery in Spanish

2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernhard Pöll
Keyword(s):  
Simple Rule ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Subject Field ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Landing Sites ◽  
The Subject

AbstractThis article reexamines the puzzling issue of where subjects, lexical and null, are located in Spanish and offers a novel explanation for the incompatibility of preverbal lexical subjects with fronted focussed constituents. Both SpecIP and the left periphery appear to be potential landing sites for subjects, according to discourse-pragmatic factors. Assuming that pro is a clitic, it is argued that the aforementioned incompatibility can be captured by a simple rule: SpecIP must be empty for focus fronting to occur. This is the case with pro, which adjoins to Infl, or with postverbal subjects since they remain in SpecVP. From this analysis it follows that: 1) the subject field in Spanish is less articulated than is generally assumed, 2) the differences between Spanish and other null subject languages with respect to the availability of preverbal subjets can be reduced to this rule and a different ordering of focus and topic phrases, and 3) it is unnecessary to posit two different topic positions.

Identity constructions in multilingual advertising

2001 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
INGRID PILLER
Keyword(s):  
Social Identities ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Consumer Market ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Business Elite ◽  
Identity Constructions ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Commercial Advertising ◽  
English Dominant

Contemporary social identities are hybrid and complex, and the media play a crucial role in their construction. A shift from political identities based on citizenship to economic ones based on participation in a global consumer market can be observed, together with a concomitant shift from monolingual practices to multilingual and English-dominant ones. This transformation is here explored in a corpus of German advertisements. Multilingual advertisements accounted for 60–70% of all advertisements released on various television networks and in two national newspapers in 1999. The subject positions that are created by multilingual narrators and multilingual narratees are characterized by drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism, and on point-of-view more generally. In order to test the acceptance of or resistance to these identity constructions outside the discourse of commercial advertising, the uses of multilingualism in nonprofit and personal advertising are also explored. All these discourses valorize German–English bilingualism and set it up as the strongest linguistic currency for the German business elite.

Justifications of citizens’ subject positions in public debates on welfare

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janne Mikael Autto ◽  
Jukka Törrönen
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Day Care ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Welfare State

Foucault’s work has inspired studies examining how subject positions are constructed for citizens of the welfare state that encourage them to adopt the subject position of active and responsible people or consumers. Yet these studies are often criticised for analysing these subject positions as coherent constructions without considering how their construction varies from one situation to another. This paper develops the concept of subject position in relation to the theory of justification and the concept of modality in order to achieve a more sensitive and nuanced analysis of the politics of welfare in public debates. The theory of justification places greater weight on actors’ competence in social situations. It helps to reveal how justifications and critiques of welfare policies are based on the skilful contextual combination of diverse normative bases. The concept of modality, in turn, makes it possible to elaborate how subject positions in justifications and critiques of welfare policies become associated with specific kinds of values. We demonstrate the approach by using public debates on children’s day care in Finland. The analysis illustrates how subject positions are justified in relation to different kinds of worlds and made persuasive by connecting them to commonly desirable rights, responsibilities, competences or abilities.

Vox Electronica: Nostalgia, Irony and Cyborgian Vocalities in Kraftwerk’s Radioaktivität and Autobahn

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
IAN BIDDLE
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Political Identities ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Electronic Groups ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Theoretical Considerations

This paper takes a close look at the music of Kraftwerk, perhaps the best known of the ‘electronic’ groups of former West Germany’s so-called neue Welle, in order to raise some fundamental questions about the politics of elektronische Musik before the dawn of the digital age and, in particular, how constructions and performances of the voice in late analogue technology rehearse new and critical strategies of resistance in the aftermath of 1968.It is a commonplace of recent cultural-theoretical considerations of digital technology to ascribe to it a fundamental re-positioning of imaginations of the subject, of authorship and of agency in the broadest sense. What has never really been fully worked through in this (usually utopian) figuration of digital technology is the extent to which technology can be conceived as ‘autonomous’ (as Rosie Braidotti would have it) or whether new technologies in themselves are a guarantor of new cultural formations. In particular, this paper seeks to test the extent to which Kraftwerk’s pre-digital imagination can be read as an expression of the politics of the so-called Tendenzwende (a ‘turning inwards’ from explicitly activist politics to a more diffuse politics of the personal) of the Schmidt- and early Kohlzeit. The article looks in particular at Kraftwerk’s use of what might be termed the ‘electronic sublime’ as a way of disengaging the music from the ego-centred practices of earlier German rock music and as a way of anticipating new German subject positions and political identities in the light of de-industrialization and globalization.

Scaling and Subjectification in an ESD Educational Project

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Mickelsson ◽  
Anna Danielsson
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Antibiotic Resistance ◽  
Learning Process ◽  
Educational Innovations ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Educational Project ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Way

The aim of the article is to investigate, in the light of the emphasis laid on scaling by UNESCO (UNESCO, 2014a), how subjectification of those involved in educational innovations both enables and constricts scaling understood as a learning process. This is carried out through a case study of the Alforja Educativa, an educational project in Ecuador on antibiotic resistance (ABR). The ABR has been described as a sustainability challenge comparable to climate change. The way in which subjectification enables and constricts scaling as a learning process is analysed by drawing on educational scaling research and the article illustrates how the subject positions of those involved in scaling emerge as scaling subjects in transactional relationships, both with the sites where the educational project is to be scaled, and in relation to that, which will be scaled.

Civilization and Culture in Anticolonial and Comparative Political Theory

2019 ◽  
pp. 653-676
Author(s):  
Jimmy Casas Klausen
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Comparative Political Theory ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
The Subject

This chapter interrogates the political practices and forces that constitute anticolonial thought and comparative political theory. Both anticolonial and comparative political theorists are curators or collectors of culture and civilization. However, their political projects often point in distinct, if not opposed, directions. This chapter aims to map the different conditions under which each group collects, the different strategies by which they curate, the subject positions these conditions and strategies produce, and, most important, the effects of their appropriations. It does so by way of four contrapuntal pairings: Aurobindo Ghose with Fred Dallmayr, Mohandas Gandhi with Farah Godrej, Frantz Fanon with Leigh Jenco, and Amilcar Cabral with Roxanne Euben. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the need to take seriously a politics of incommensurability as a political practice, one attuned to the constraints that enable subjectivity oriented toward minimizing (usually historically sedimented) forms of domination.

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