Education and Learning in Sustainable Development: Foregrounding an Emergent Discourse

The framing of education and learning in sustainable development has evolved out of global environment and development discussions to shape how knowledge, learning and action are applied in efforts to address complex socio-ecological and sustainability challenges of the times. Such framings have over time contributed not only to the establishment of the importance of education and learning in issues of environment and development – sustainable development – but also to the definition of what forms education and learning should take. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has since emerged from such framings in international discussions to pave the way for the formal recognition of the role of education and learning in the global quest for sustainable development. While the ESD discourse has since evolved to become a pragmatic educational ideology and tradition; while many countries and institutions have embraced its ideals in practice, not a lot of attention has been given to the seemingly instrumentalization of education in the ESD discourse. This work foregrounds ESD as an emergent discourse to critically explore how education has been framed in the discourse. Through Discourse Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis, the paper examines the coarseness of words used in creating the ESD discourse across time by paying close attention to texts – specific language use – in key discourse moments to understand how linguistic choices, power, and institutional structures have helped to create a role for education in sustainable development and how that has facilitated the formation of the ESD discourse.

From Lutheran Dominance to Diversity

This article examines religion in Finnish newspapers, arguing thatreligion-related discourses have changed from one of Lutheran dominance to one of diversity. The main data consists of a longitudinalsample (1946–2016) of the most popular Finnish newspaper, HelsinginSanomat, and especially of its editorials and readers’ letters. Additionaldata covers a wider variety of newspapers from the 1990s to 2018. Thedata is analysed using quantitative content analysis and a discursiveapproach. It will be suggested that it is possible to discuss diversityboth as an emergent discourse and a theme in the Finnish media sincethe mid-1990s, thereby overcoming earlier frameworks that took Lutheranism for granted or gave it a special role in the private sphere.The analysis shows that these shifts do not provide clear support forthe idea that newspapers and journalism are anti-religious; rather, itsuggests that they may be understood as having a ‘liberalizing’ effect,especially when religious values are not seen as compatible with thoseof journalists and newspapers.

Exiting the Marketplace of Intolerance

This chapter investigates Michel de Montaigne’s treatment of the emergent discourse of reason of state. It shows that Montaigne neither affirms nor rejects reason of state; instead, he argues both for and against it without resolution. His purpose is to highlight the danger of following elite justifications for violence, given either in terms of political necessity or with moral reasons. Montaigne seeks to call into being a public with the capacity to resist elites’ stimulation of popular demand for intolerant policy and their promises to supply it. In doing so, Montaigne develops an original early theory of public opinion and its role in tolerance conflicts. The chapter engages with Bernard Williams’s conception of tolerance in terms of “political realism.”

Creating the Aboriginal Vagrant

This article considers how shifting programs of Aboriginal protection in nineteenth-century Australia responded to Indigenous mobility as a problem of colonial governance and how they contributed over time to creating an emergent discourse of the Aboriginal “vagrant.” There has been surprisingly little attention to how the legal charge of vagrancy became applied to Indigenous people in colonial Australia before the twentieth century, perhaps because the very notion of the Aboriginal vagrant was subject to ambivalence throughout much of the nineteenth century. When vagrancy laws were first introduced into Australia’s colonies, Aboriginal people were exempt from them as a group not yet subject to the ordinary regulatory codes of colonial society. Bringing them within the protective fold of colonial social order was one of the principal tasks of the office of ‘protection’ that was introduced into three Australian jurisdictions during the late 1830s. As the nineteenth century progressed and Aboriginal people became more susceptible to social order policing, a concept of Indigenous vagrancy hardened into place, and programs of protection became central to its management.

Historical Emergences of Design Thinking in Theory and Practice.

Design thinking has emerged over the last twenty years as a new way of understanding the process and value of design, as it is applied in practice to assist the processes of other industries and organizations. By envisaging this through a Foucauldian lens, we are able to excavate the strategic ‘gathering’ of sources which act to validate and empower this set of practices as a coherent, historically situated, emergent discourse. This paper identifies the early emergences of the discursive elements of design thinking, and indicates the key validating theories and practices that support it.

MOKSLAS, GENETINĖS ŽINIOS IR ŽMOGAUS KŪNAS

Straipsnyje apžvelgiamas mokslo ir mokslinio pažinimo dinaminis pobūdis besikeičiančioje biotechnologijų eroje, taip pat besiformuojantis genetizacijosdiskursas ir jo reikšmė genetiniam konsultavimui (akcentuojant Huntingtono ligą) ir žmogaus kūnui. Žvelgiant iš daugiadalykės perspektyvos, siekiamanuodugniai ištirti ir kritiškai įvertinti šiuolaikinę kritinę literatūrą, skirtą šiems atskiriems, tačiau susipynusiems klausimams. Straipsnyje taip pat kviečiamasvarstyti, ką reiškia būti žmogumi ir kaip tvarkyti genetinį ir kūno pažinimą bei praktikas.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: mokslas, genetinis pažinimas, žmogaus kūnas, gamta, etika.Science, Genetic Knowledge and the Human BodyCharalambos Tsekeris, George Alexias SummaryThis paper aims to overview the dynamical character of science and scientific knowledge within the changing biotechnological era, as well as the emergent discourse of geneticization and its relevance to genetic counseling (with particular emphasis on Huntington’s Disease) and the human body. Its mainpurpose is to carefully explore and comprehensively critique the contemporary theoretical literature on these distinct but interdependent issues from an interdisciplinary standpoint. The paper encourages further critical contributions to thinking about what it means to be human, as well as about how to copewith current genetic and bodily knowledge and practices.Key words: science, genetic knowledge, human body, nature, ethics.

The relevance of narrative ratifications in talk-in-interaction for Japanese pre-service teachers of English

In everyday conversation, narratives are used as rhetorical tools for managing identities, allowing participants to carve out identity positions in moment-to-moment interactions. An interesting, yet understudied, focus of these narratives involves exploring the links between the discourse identities (or narrative participation roles) and larger, social identities of participants in the narrative interactions (e.g., Georgakopoulou, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007). In this paper, I build on this work by looking specifically at the relevance of narrative ratifications for the emergent discourse and social identities of those offering the ratifications. Following Bamberg’s (1997, 2003) analytical framework for examining narratives in talk-in-interaction, I examine how participants are positioned with respect to whose contributions they choose to ratify and how their ratifications (or lack thereof) make available certain discourse identities, which may then point to larger, social identities. Findings not only demonstrate the relevance of ratifications for identity work in narrative interactions, but also advance our understanding of certain aspects of narrative structure, in particular, sequences of narrative openings in talk-in-interaction.