Aversion to and Understanding of God Talk in the Public Sphere: A Survey Experiment

“God talk” occurs when a member of the public gives religious reasons for a policy claim. The legitimacy of God talk is the subject of great debate among sociological and political theorists of the public sphere. There has never been an empirical study of the general public's views of the legitimacy of God talk itself. Using a vignette survey experiment, I find among the overall public that there is a statistically significant but extremely small degree of aversion to hearing God talk. Additionally, respondents claim to be able to understand God talk just as well as claims justified by science. Aversion to hearing and understanding God talk do differ by the religion of the respondent. I conclude with a discussion of how these results may influence theoretical debate about the public sphere.     

Language matters in counselling diversity

The paper presents a personal view of some issues around therapeutic conversations involving difference and minority experience. Language, discourse and mother-tongue are explored from different theoretical standpoints and considered alongside concepts of difference, otherness and the unvoiced. Intercultural counselling offers a framework for unpacking the meaning of decolonising practice in conversations with clients or counsellors from ethnic or other minorities undertaking counselling or supervision. I discuss possibilities for practice informed by existential and hermeneutic phenomenology, including gestalt therapy interventions to bring in the body alongside discourse, and phenomenological empathy as a non-colonising resource in working across difference and diversity.     

Facilitating supervisees’ developing competence through supervisory conversation

Research on assessing supervisees’ professional development (PD) has been primarily focused on formal end-point, summative evaluations. Little attention has been given to the role that routine supervisory conversations play in formative PD evaluations. This study takes a situated/dialogical approach to explore how PD evaluations are locally proposed, recognized, transacted, and conversationally accomplished in the conversations of actual supervision practice. Informed by ethnomethodology, we discursively analyzed episodes of supervisory sessions selected by supervisory dyads, which they regarded as significant to the supervisee’s PD. We describe and exemplify five conversational Practices by which supervisory dyads brought about shared evaluations vis-à-vis the supervisee’s PD, through supervisory conversations.     

Religion and social action in a city of posts

This article explores the ramifications of religious engagement in social action initiatives in ethnically and religiously plural urban environments in the UK. In particular, it explores this engagement through a series of inter-related analytical frames, which explain the trajectory and political significance of religiously inflected social action in different ways, before examining specific initiatives in localised context. Behind this approach is the recognition of the need to situate religion in complex contexts, resisting its cross-cultural and trans-historical claims, and of the ways in which religion is deployed as a specific mode of both domination and resistance. The author argues that the pluralism of the contemporary city has critical implications for understanding contemporary religion and social action, both in terms of the range of organisations involved and in terms of the negotiation of difference which is an everyday facet of multicultural urban living. The spaces of engagement opened up by these contemporary contexts allow for the development of new ways of conceptualising religion and new potentialities for the role of religion in the developing politics of living in the city.     

Do age-related word retrieval difficulties appear (or disappear) in connected speech?

We conducted a comprehensive literature review of studies of word retrieval in connected speech in healthy aging and reviewed relevant aphasia research that could shed light on the aging literature. Four main hypotheses guided the review: (1) Significant retrieval difficulties would lead to reduced output in connected speech. (2) Significant retrieval difficulties would lead to a more limited lexical variety in connected speech. (3) Significant retrieval difficulties would lead to an increase in word substitution errors and in pronoun use as well as to greater dysfluency and hesitation in connected speech. (4) Retrieval difficulties on tests of single-word production would be associated with measures of word retrieval in connected speech. Studies on aging did not confirm these four hypotheses, unlike studies on aphasia that generally did. The review suggests that future research should investigate how context facilitates word production in old age.     

Reflection in university and the employability agenda: a discourse analysis case study

In UK universities, reflection is promoted not only for its intrinsic value but also for instrumental purposes, for students to gain and demonstrate skills and attributes which are valued by employers. In this paper, I examine reflective writing produced by students seeking an award offered by the careers department of one university. By looking at the evaluative language choices made by the student writers, I shed light on some of their practices regarding self-representation and their articulations of experience. I provide a critical account of what reflective writing looks like in this particular setting, and interpret this in the broader context of the goal to foster reflection among higher education students. I argue that the reflective writing engendered by this particular context and task is different in key respects from the reflection which is commonly advocated as an element of personal, professional or academic development.     

Mother runners in the blogosphere: A discursive psychological analysis of online recreational athlete identities

ObjectivesQualitative research on physically active mothers has shown that recreational sport may allow women to resist good mother ideals that often constrain exercise. The purpose of this study was to extend this understanding in a socio-cultural context by examining how recreational athlete mother identities were constructed within one form of new media - blogging.DesignA qualitative approach grounded in discursive psychology was used to theorize athlete mother identities as subject positions constructed within particular discourses circulated within a blog.MethodCritical discourse analysis of 30 stories and 177 reader comments from the North American online running community Another Mother Runner, was conducted. Visual data analysis of 102 images accompanying stories also contextualized the textual meanings of discourses and subject positions.ResultsTwo primary discourses were identified: discourse of transformation and empowerment and a discourse of disruption and resolution. Subject positions constructed within these two intersecting discourses were role mother/advocate and resilient mother runner.ConclusionsThis study extends discursive psychology literature in sport and exercise psychology as well as media work on athlete mother identities within sport psychology into the realm of the internet and identity construction.     

Essentialism and attribution of monstrosity in racist discourse: Right‐wing internet postings about Africans and Jews

We investigated a total of 4997 postings on an extreme right‐wing Internet discussion board with regard to the groups and themes mentioned. The most frequently mentioned target groups were Africans, Jews, Muslims, Poles, and Turks; the most prominent themes and contexts were conspiracy, criminality, exploitation, threats to German identity, infiltration, mind control and harassment, procreation, rape, and sex. We analysed in detail postings about Africans/Blacks and Jews, that is target groups that were the most clearly connected to particular themes. The analysis reveals that extreme right‐wing discourse essentializes the target groups of Jews and Africans/Blacks and ascribes them immutable group‐specific attributes that effectively make them ‘natural kinds’. The group of Jews appears as a kind of their own with super‐human powers and influence. Africans and Blacks are despised, firstly because their essential characteristics prohibit them to be categorically mixed with Germans (i.e. to become German by nationality) due to their incompatible essence, and secondly when they procreate with Whites. Such procreation produces ‘bastards’ that are met with disgust. We argue that essentialist thinking about social and ethnic groups explains a good part of their rejection by right‐wing followers. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social representations of refugees: Place of origin as a delineating resource

This study investigated social understandings of refugees from Africa in a regional town in NSW, Australia. Drawing from Social Representations Theory (Moscovici, 1984 ), the study investigated whether place of origin (Africa) mediated understandings held about refugees. Two studies were conducted. In the first study, a between‐subjects manipulation using word association tasks revealed that the super‐ordinate term Refugees, and Refugees from Africa shared a common core of elements (poor, war). Although sharing a core, these representations were differentiated by peripheral elements which concurred with social understanding of Africa (e.g. disease), and media portrayal of refugees/asylum seekers (e.g. boat). The salience of these meanings in the community was further explored using a self‐report questionnaire. Results suggested that place of origin, manifested as peripheral representational elements, may play an important role in differentiating, orientating and linking specific refugee groups to particular socio‐political contexts. Further, we contend that place of origin may be understood as a discursive resource, deployed for rhetorical ends. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.