Language and Power

Vladimiro Giacché, La fabbrica del falso. Strategie della menzogna nella politica contemporanea, 3a ed., Reggio Emilia, Imprimatur, 2016, rist. 2018.

I diritti di pubblicazione appartengono esclusivamente all’autore.
È consentita la riproduzione del testo o di sue parti solo a fini non commerciali.

Indice:
7    Premessa

11  Parte prima. Guerra alla verità:
15  1. Fenomenologia della menzogna
71  2. Menzogna, ideologia, informazione: iluoghi comuni della «guerra al terrore»
101 3. La Democrazia in ostaggio
131 4. La Sicurezza al primo posto
153 5. Mercato: i mille volti di un prestanome
175 6. Totalitarismo: triste storia di un non-concetto
199 7. Dialettica del Terrorismo

229  Parte seconda. La verità del falso:
233 8. Uomini e merci. Cronache dal mondo alla rovescia
261 9. Potere e regressione
291 10. La fabbrica del falso

315  Parte terza. Strategie di resistenza:
321 11. Spiragli
343 12. Dire la verità
365 13. Smascheramenti
385 14. La verità ricordata
405 15. Parliamo di noi

The research project carried out in one primary school in Scotland was guided by an intention to discover and provide up-to-date data on what literacy teachers knew about critical literacy and whether this knowledge was promoted, achieved, and enacted in praxis. By specifically focusing on reading and teachers' approaches to texts, this study explores to what extent critical literacy makes its explicit or implicit appearance in the early years' reading classes as a result of teachers' understanding of it-their content knowledge, personal and professional beliefs. The findings have fueled the discussion about the preconditions for greater and more direct utilization of critical literacy in language classrooms. The knowledge and practices the teachers in this study revealed, reflect a promising springboard for developing new, more unified ways of teaching reading. After being reminded of and exposed to some of the central concepts of critical literacy, the teachers became more interested and confirmed that they would teach for it if they only knew how. This is also one of the main implications of the study for teacher educators, curriculum developers and researchers.

... a typical naive set of assumptions about "group oriented" cultures it that the participants within them are basically altruistic, self-effacing, self-sacrificing and sociable. A society of such individuals should exhibit the very best of human civilization working in equitable, democratic communities. By contrast, those from individualistic cultures should be cold, grasping, selfish, egotistical and almost incapable of the cooperation demanded by a civil society. Indeed, a society of individualists, by this stereotype would be a dog eat dog affair, dedicated to conflict, riven with disloyalty and betrayal, forever failing to build a stable and humanistic community.

How can we explain the dynamics of nonconventional struggles such as the Gaza flotilla case of May 2010? Most international relations scholars analyze international disputes using a “chess logic,” according to which the actors seek to outmaneuver their opponents on the battleground. However, an increasing number of clashes are guided by a “performance logic”: although the players interact with one another, their real targets are audiences. The present study aims to bridge this gap, proposing a phenomenological framework for analyzing this particular kind of performative contest over legitimation and delegitimation in contemporary conflicts. It expands upon the idea that current anarchical global politics increasingly lead contending actors to engage in “pure” legitimation struggles—“battles for legitimacy”—seeking to persuade international audiences that they deserve political support. After providing guidelines for the identification of these phenomena, this article presents a model for the methodical examination of their interactive dynamics based on three legitimation functions (appropriateness, consensus, empathy). This model is applied to the flotilla case by mapping the protagonists’ framing contests across “legitimation (battle)fields.” The findings of this study, which emphasize the strong interplay between normative, political, and emotional mechanisms for empowering (de)legitimation strategies, can contribute to expanding the research program concerning international legitimacy.

Negotiation techniques are useful — unless the other side refuses to cooperate. What then?
Asaf Shani teaches powerful techniques to make it worthwhile for the other side to negotiate during confrontational situations. These are not cliché power games that can leave your situation worse than when you started. The techniques — based on the psychology of human behavior — are designed to help you achieve the positive outcomes you seek.
Make no mistake. This book is not for the faint-hearted. If you believe you can get what you need by asking as nicely as possible . . . well, let us know how that works out. The truth is, you can negotiate any conflict and get what you need — without destroying relationships. But it requires tough-minded adherence to proven principles.
Based on 15 years of experience teaching conflict management and negotiation skills to Fortune 500 execs and small business operators, the book provides a structured way to examine situations and tactics on the “darker side of negotiation” — using levers, guns (figurative guns, not the hurtful kind) and sanctions to persuade the other side to address issue that are most important to you.
Written in a style that’s easy to understand and implement, you’ll be way ahead of the other side — before you even reach the negotiating table.

This paper examines leadership discourse in a small, non-commercial organisation with a hierarchical structure, a rugby club. The focus of the research is the captain of the club and the way in which he discursively constructs his identity as a deputy leader. The notion of covert leadership (Mintzberg 1998) is explored and extended by linking it to the concept of Relational Practice. The analysis demonstrates how, using covert leadership strategies, the captain accomplishes both relational and task-oriented leadership. Using an interactional sociolinguistics framework, three extracts of the captain’s discourse are analysed in detail. These extracts were part of a larger corpus of data gathered from six months participant observation of a rugby club in Edinburgh, Scotland. The extracts show how the captain, as a deputy, helps the coach to provide effective leadership during the team in training sessions, and how he constructs different identities in order to achieve this.

The social language forms of English as foreign language (EFL) teachers help them dominate their students through the application of lesson plans in a classroom context. The present review paper attempts to examine the classroom lesson plan, language and power in teaching English in a foreign language classroom by reviewing the application of a lesson plan in an EFL class, language, power and lesson plan and presenting some evidence for techniques of power in pedagogical interaction. It studies language and power across the application of a lesson plan in the EFL classroom context, the paper concludes that how the lesson plan of a foreign language teacher shapes the classroom discourse and power and how language teachers in turn have the capacity to create and impose discourses. The article concludes that the lesson plan and teacher’s talk play a crucial role in the exercise of power through the language of classroom teacher and both language teachers and mentors can benefit from the role of the lesson plan in the classroom context and finally recommends the future generation of digital classroom lesson plans.

http://www.ijllalw.org/finalversion825.pdf

The use of participant-led visual data production is often seen as advantageous because data can be directed, constructed and created away from the influence of the researcher. The case for employing the visual to engender participatory research, and specifically to limit the intrusive presence of the researcher, is well versed and in vogue within the field of social science; however, although participatory techniques offer an opportunity to disrupt power relations, they are unable to transcend familial practices. Drawing from a study in which mother/daughter dyads produced photographs, collages, maps and stories to communicate their everyday lives and ideas of the future, this paper examines the wider role of ‘intrusive presence’. The paper documents incidents of external physical interference where visual data was amended, the influence of outside suggestion in the creative process, and the restrictions placed by the imagined reactions of the viewer. The paper argues that when the ‘intrusive presence’ of the researcher steps out of the site of visual data production this leaves a space that is often filled by the ‘intrusive presence’ of significant others.

This paper focuses on local perceptions of wellbeing, their underlying social and power relations and the resulting cultural resistance by Rarámuri indigenous people in the Tarahumara region, Mexico. It is based on findings from doctoral research that argues that understandings of wellbeing must be analysed in conjunction with its socio-cultural and political context and in relation to ethnic differences.  In this sense, the paper presents evidence that shows how Rarámuri people hold discursive understandings of wellbeing which evoke differentiated ways of living compared to those accounts described both in mainstream development thinking and those which occur in the national society in Mexico. Similarly, the paper considers the value of ethnography, semi-structured interviews and participant observation as a tool in documenting notions of wellbeing and what Rarámuri people value, as well as exploring reflections, fieldwork experiences, and methodological challenges encountered while doing fieldwork research.

"By inviting educators from diverse backgrounds to participate in creative conversations I had hoped to reflect on experiences that had helped construct our theories of environmental education, and inform practice. I sought consistency across the espoused ethics of co-participants, namely critical perspectives grounded in environmental justice. However, this quest was interrupted by a growing awareness of the interference of power dynamics between myself and the other participants, and of my own commitment to respect the stories being told. This narrative describes my “dance” of meaning making.
The community dance examining privilege, identity and meaning is a study of how I may be contributing to the same oppressive situations I passionately strive to work against. Concepts of knowledge, power, and identity ebbed and flowed within stories drawn from the mountains of Tanzania to the hills of Colombia, and from the frozen shores of Kirkland Lake to the trout filled streams of Karman, Iran. Making meaning is itself an act of power and privilege, so I danced to make room for multiple understandings of these stories, of environmental education, and of research. This work offers an experience of disruption that raises questions and broadens the inclusion of people, ideas and other life into “accepted” research and pedagogical practices.
Conventions embedded within research and education were disrupted throughout this reflexive process. As the author of this text, I was uncomfortable with the role of being the dominant voice, and consciously chose not to impose my interpretation on the stories shared by co-participants. The struggle to resist the very privilege in which my own education practice and this research process are so deeply steeped revealed normative forces that often threaten to undermine attempts by educators and researchers to act according to critical theories and environmental justice ethics. To accept the invitation to dance with the text is to step into the rhythmic intricacies of a collaborative process of reflexion. Circling hand-in-hand and giving weight to fellow dancers’ movements shifts individuals from being carriers of truths to being community members sharing in the collaborative process of dancing the world into existence."

In her 1990 text “homeplace (a site of resistance),” bell hooks argues that for black women throughout history, the making of home cannot be extricated from the struggle against racism and forging of community. This paper explores how artists who occupy tenuous subject positions as immigrants, people of color, and female engage with home-making. Instead of examining home as an object, I engage with home-making as an action that is shifting and provisional. Using philosophical, sociological, and anthropological constructs of “home” as points of departure, I turn toward the domestic projects of visual artists Amanda Williams, Mona Hatoum, and Doris Salcedo. In Color(ed) Theory (2015), Amanda Williams repaints and reconstructs vacant urban homes in such a way that demonstrates the persistent presence of the human even beyond its bodily inhabitation of home’s hallowed halls. Mona Hatoum’s installations Homebound (2001) and Mobile Home (2005) fold the alien and violent into domestic objects that defy being fixed to domestic architectures. Doris Salcedo’s La Casa Viuda (1995) and other untitled sculptures transform doors, dressers, and wardrobes with concrete, dust and bone in response to the flights of Colombian women from their homes and vacillate between tracing memories of the past and
being haunted by premonitions of violence, evacuation, and ruination with the ongoing passage of time. In the works of these three artists, the binary between homely and unhomely comes apart, and homemaking becomes the act of inhabiting or embodying something that shifts, accommodating for a wider range of experiences in how one constitutes self in relation to one's environments.

A study of the limits of multilingual literary expression in print culture. Beginning with the insight that multilingual literature defies simple translation, Brian Lennon examines the resistance multilingual literature offers to book publication. Looking closely at the limit of multilingual literary expression and the literary journalism, criticism, and scholarship that comments on multilingual work, In Babel’s Shadow presents a critical reflection on the fate of literature in a world gripped by the crisis of globalization.

Inspired by the growing attention to the politics of comedy in the United States and elsewhere, this paper asks what it would mean to think critically about relations of power mobilized through cheerfulness, humor, and laughter. The paper shows that existing answers to this question are tainted by skepticism about the enduring contributions of comic acts, and it then goes on to suggest that we turn to an alternative trajectory in democratic theory, one that encourages us to focus on the empowering and pluralizing potential embedded in what the paper names  “comic power.” The wager is that attention to the potential embedded in this power can give us new traction on the conditions of democracy more broadly understood. To show this, the paper draws on two rarely paired resources—Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence and Dave Chappelle’s critique of racial discrimination—placing both of them in conversation with discussions about the mediations embedded in new media technologies.

Abstract: The argument I will develop in this essay is that the foreign students are a latent human resource who can assist with overcoming English monolingualism in the Australian population. Foreign students, properly rewarded, can be a major source of skills transfer. Every one of those students is a walking compendium of language and cultural skills that Australians need to know.

Provincializing Bollywood argues that Bhojpuri cinema exemplifies the overflow of a provincial derivative form that defies its place in the given scheme of things. Situating it at the intersection of vernacular media production and the infrastructural-political reordering of provincial north India, the book shows that Bhojpuri media's characteristic 'disobedience' is marked by a libidinal excess - simultaneously scandalizing and moralizing - to address the inexact calculi of Bhojpuri speaking region's'underdevelopment'. Bhojpuri media therefore demands that it is assessed not merely for its internal content but within the comparative media crucible, marked by interpenetrating forms and histories as diverse as those of ecological distress, musical traditions, gendered segregation, real estate, urban resettlements, and highway modernities. Foregrounding the libidinal excess, language politics, and curatorial informalities, Provincializing Bollywood synthesizes Bhojpuri media's spectacular public insubordination and its invocation of a shared debt, which is by no means regional in its provenance.

Book Review
The world is changing, no doubt. Would you like to know how some of the elements of our contemporary world are evolving? I would encourage you to read The Death of the Gods by Carl Miller to find out more about these changes. Carl Miller demonstrates how some of the elements of our contemporary world are shifting, and this book traces a historically embedded sequence of changes in power, including its latest phase. More specifically, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, public opinion pays more attention to how Internet activity is affecting our daily and political realities. Both sociologists and the public should be getting more attuned to what is going on in that space. Thus, one way of doing that is by reading Carl Miller's The Death of the Gods. Cyberattacks during election times might affect a political landscape, so it would be good for social scientists to understand more how critical these issues are to democracies. This book is a timely reminder of how some of the changes in the power structure affect all of us, even though most examples and situations discussed in this book relate to the developed countries. The Death of the Gods highlights how centres of power are shifting in contemporary societies of the Global North (and no doubt South too), with emphasis on the unparalleled speed and pace of change. The book is aimed mostly at non-academic audiences, but it offers some basic theoretical grounding about debates on power. It aims to show how some old "gods" (a direct reference to Greek mythology) are losing their power and how new ones are emerging in the early twenty-first century. This book discusses the association between power and modern technology (i.e. computers, all types of computer software, and mobile phones). This book is relevant and has broad scope. It sits at the intersection of discussions on power, crime, and how technology influences contemporary globalised societies. It fits into public debates on the role of the internet, social media, and "post-truth" in shaping contemporary communication, culture, and politics. It describes a shift from power based on means of production towards power based on means of mediation (for example, the ownership of software and devices using that software). Carl Miller begins his book by introducing basic information on the discourse on power. He examines how power was perceived from a traditional geopolitical point of view. Miller mentions some of the most influential authors in that academic space (i.e. sociology and philosophy, for example, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Robert Dahl) and some of their approaches. He taps into a growing tendency amongst journalists, academics, and influencers assuming a societal transition or revolution within a contemporary globalised world induced by technological change. More detailed historical context is provided in specific chapters. One emerging theme of the book is that most shifts in power have their roots in social, political, and cultural changes (e.g. means of communication or technological advancement) occurred during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. For Carl Miller, all forms of technologies are instruments of social control; for instance, certain social media platforms can influence social norms and pressure people to conform to these reformulated norms. Similarly, these technologies affect how power can be gained and lost. The association between modern technology (based on digital means of communication) and power is not a new one as it is present in the public sphere from at least the 1980's. Miller shows how information is transferred into power, and how, for example, hacking became a new route to power. Thus, he claims that hackers-a multiform social group-are "a strange new kind of ruling class" (p. 21). Hackers are defined by their skills, knowledge, mind-set, and curiosity as to how the technology works. David thanking God after death of Goliath Hacking is all about knowing how specific elements of our contemporary reality operate and interact, and about being able to exploit its imperfections and vulnerabilities to one's advantage. In Miller's own words: "[t]he device isn't doing what the maker designed it to do. It's doing what you wanted it to do. You, through a mixture of knowledge, skill, perseverance-you've owned the device! You have reached out and changed the world" (p. 23). Thus, hacking is one of the defining skills shaping the contemporary public sphere. Hackers can influence power relations which depend on technology by exploiting vulnerabilities of that technology (for example, to blackmail someone over their illegally obtained private correspondence or pictures). Similarly, this book demonstrates how governments can be ridiculed, undermined, or even overthrown using social media and connectedness. Considering that, whoever mastered control over computers, mobile devices, or relevant software can create favourable conditions for themselves to control a portion of a public sphere which is reliant on that hardware and software. In the context of traditional institutions and centres of power, Miller notes that "... the technology weakens the very structures and institutions that determine where power sits, they weaken the rules for how power can be legitimately used" (p.333). The main weakness of the book is that some arguments are scattered across chapters, or else, the discussed arguments are not following the central themes of specific chapters. The most vivid example of that is a chapter on warfare. This section focuses predominantly on the use of information in modern warfare, and the military element of that chapter is somewhat in the background. Armies depend on information; nonetheless, the focus of this section of the book seems to be fluctuating between warfare and attention-hacking or fact-checking. Such fluctuation influences the strength of the presented arguments. Miller claims that his book is a groundbreaking examination of the new centres of contemporary power and control. Indeed, his book challenges the prevailing assumptions about the centres of contemporary power by providing examples of entities which gained or lost power in recent times, such as such as, the Big Four (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) or governments. This book brings to light multiple facets of power. It is a story about liberation and control, and how the new communication channels are changing the composition of power structures. Also, The Death of the Gods is a story about the weakening of the old hierarchies (e.g. elite political parties, business leaders, and those who controlled other traditional centres of power). Miller observed that in the United States older and newer forms of power feeds off one another, for example, when the tech giants (the new power) finance politics and politicians (the old power). The book's content was enhanced and contextualised by personal experience acquired in the process of meeting with, and interviewing, people who thanks to their expertise and experience on power and dominance significantly enriched the author's understanding of discussed matters. It uses some of the most current examples (relating to fake news or information warfare) which may prove especially useful for lecturers wishing to include an accessible reading about the effects of technology on the political, social, and cultural spheres of life. Overall, The Death of the Gods offers a fresh and broad perspective on the new and emerging form of power that is coming to distinguish twenty-first-century liberal democracies.

L'activité d'expertise et les discours d’individus érigés ou auto-proclamés en experts sont devenus omniprésents dans la société contemporaine. Cet ouvrage traite des discours et rapports qu’ils fournissent ou qui sont produits en leur nom. Il confronte les points de vue de plusieurs champs disciplinaires des sciences humaines et sociales : sciences politiques, droit, sociologie, sociologie politique, sciences de l’information et de la communication, analyse conversationnelle, linguistique et analyse de discours sont ainsi convoqués. L’ambition de cet ouvrage est de faire communiquer les apports de ces approches avec les analyses de corpus attentives aux contraintes et aux effets so-ciaux dont le langage est porteur. Il traite de trois thèmes : expertise et médias, expertise et justice, expertise et citoyens. En caractérisant les discours qui sont produits, il interroge les liens entre expertise et savoir, rapproche expertise et manipulation et montre les liens entre expertise et pouvoir.

The paper discusses ways in which the song form known as isicathamiya mediates
subjectivity on a national and transnational scale in the new post-1994
era, known by isiZulu speakers as uhlel' olusha. Singers are constantly testing
the limits of the genre, both through the choice of subject matter for songs
and in their performance style. They take it in new directions and through
the "embodied knowledge" they display, they engage in emergent and established discourses on the nature of contemporary South African, and Zulu identity. Singers align themselves and their audiences to the global through commentary in song on events such as 9/11 and this itself becomes a shifting topic of choral conversation through time, reflecting, among other items, changing responses to America and to "Bin Laden." The paper also explores the different publics with which performers interact and argues that a group such as the famous Ladysmith Black Mambazo, which now performs mainly on global circuits, has to limit its discourse accordingly; it cannot engage with urgent and topical events that inform social consciousness within South Africa
as freely as groups more closely in touch with their local constituencies. The
paper also sketches the history of the genre and sets the overall discussion
within a paradigm of popular culture and the political; it draws on work by
Catherine Cole, Johannes Fabian, Veit Erlmann, and Louise Meintjes.

‘L’avenir de l’enseignement des langues locales : les obstacles juridiques et idéologiques dans un monde globalisant’, in L’enseignement des langues locales, institutions, méthodes idéologies : Actes des Quatrièmes journées des droits linguistiques, Giovanni Agresti & Michele de Gioia (eds), Aracne, Rome, Italie, 2012.

In the current debates on educational language policy, the focus is still on the second language competencies - especially the written language competencies - of students with a first language other than German. With this background, this study focuses on the development of written language competencies of multilingual students in the syntactic domain. Syntactic development in Turkish and German is investigated in the 7th, 10th, and 12th grades using written argumentative texts. For this purpose, simple, compound and complex sentences in both languages are considered. The study of the effects of bilingual vs. monolingual schooling is conducted using two groups of subjects: (a) from a bilingual school with Turkish as the language of instruction from the 1st grade onward and (b) from a German monolingual school with Turkish as a second foreign language from the 7th grade onward. The study is one of the few to investigate the acquisition of written language by multilingual students, taking into account both languages and first language instruction, and to compare the syntactic development of students in three different grades of lower and upper secondary school.

One of the factors in monolingual interactions is language ideology, the underlying beliefs people have about communication. This is also true in interpreter-mediated interactions. In this paper, I begin to unpack the impact not only of ideologies held by recipients of interpreted presentations, but also of interpreters themselves. After recognizing four domains of interpreted utterances that affect hearing listeners' perceptions of the identity of Deaf professionals, the next questions are what drives interpreters' discursive choices and how do their language ideologies contribute to their spoken output.

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

This work points toward a need for a plainer legal language: a legal language that is not a wall between those seeking justice and justice itself. We, as Law professionals, have become increasingly comfortable with a type of technical language that excludes those who have not entered the classrooms of Law Schools. And we often fail to find a problem with the fact that non-professionals need a “translator” –a
lawyer– to explain the contents of the rules and laws to them.