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Recent political trends in many countries have sparked renewed interest in populism. Despite general agreement that the affective/emotive aspects of political communication are particularly important in this, there is little recent analysis of how populists operationalise emotion or how they genuinely differ from mainstream parties in this sense. This article applies mixed methods to explore the ‘affective-discursive practices’ that characterise the discourses of two opposition parties in the United Kingdom: United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and Labour. Comparison of the frequency of semantic subcategories related to emotion in corpora of press releases published by these parties on their websites is complemented by qualitative analysis of how specific emotional areas such as fear, anger and anxiety are invoked by the two parties. Different ‘affective-discursive practices’ underpin their discourses, since Labour characteristically frames reactions to social phenomena in terms of worry and concern, while UKIP legitimates fear and anger, but also projects more positive emotions.

This article examines a case of internet posts discussing social issues affecting men and masculinity. Analysis of 500 posts containing masculine coded language on the subreddit r/unpopularopinion suggests that masculinity, especially when intersected with straightness and whiteness, is discursively constructed in an imagined social hierarchy where the plight of straight white men is invisible. By framing opinions as “unpopular,” these posts suggest that while the poster’s view may be objectively true, it is disvalued in mainstream discourses. Three key findings emerged from this analysis: First, regardless of the particular social issue discussed, efforts to reduce social inequality were negatively evaluated on average. Second, negative posts were more popular on the site; thus, amplifying the visibility of grievances. Third, masculine coded language is structured on Reddit, such that certain issues are bundled together to generate salient, interlocking themes indicating a robust meaning system. Overall, these findings suggest that criticisms of social equality are embedded within a discourse of threatened masculinity, straightness, and whiteness. This research extends past work on internet discursive practices related to masculinity and gender by showing the pervasiveness and intersectional nature of masculinity threat in digital forms.

The farming sector is one of the sectors most affected by climate change while simultaneously contributing to around 20% of global greenhouse emissions. To alleviate the pressures of agricultural production on nature and climate, the European Union (EU) established a new set of agri-environmental regulations positioning farmers as crucial actors in providing sustainable food and safeguarding the environment. However, farmers are increasingly contesting these regulations and mobilizing through EU-wide protests. Despite the obvious potency of the farmers’ actions, scholarly studies problematizing their manifestation in the context of climate governance are scarce. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing the 2023–2024 farmers’ protests in Slovenia to examine the interplay of affects and discourse in meaning-making among the farmers, which shows a mobilization driven by anger and fear as well as self-importance. The paper thus contributes to the knowledge on agrarian populism and farmers’ mobilizations in the European context, uncovering complexities and nuances of the articulated affective-discursive canon.

The paper looks into the emergence of terms and neologisms related to COVID-19 outbreak, which are treated as lexical quantors (LQs). A LQ, as a linguistic nominative unit, reflects the amount of language knowledge (LK) represented in a certain segment of language worldview (LWV). It is represented by a word or a phrase, which constitutes some quantum of information to designate a certain segment of LWV. It has a systemic character and is reflected in the semantics of a linguistic unit. This research is aimed at exploring COVID-19 lexical quantors both in terminological and general vocabulary aspects and it defines the major language concepts for special purposes (LSP). It is characterized by the word formation means expressing all types of LK with the prevalence of a denotative special meaning. General COVID-19 lexical units employ all word formation means to render both denotative and connotative components of LQs meanings revealing also social, cultural, and axiological aspects of LK. The boundary between COVID-19 terminology and general lexical units is quite blurred when the transition from one layer of vocabulary to another is observed. Word formation is viewed as the process of constructing LQs in terms of aggregated, condensed and modified knowledge means. In conclusion, the informative potential realization of LQ is manifested in various discursive practices, namely: media, politics, and public service announcements (PSA) that embrace both linguistic and socio-cultural characteristics of communication.

Research summary: In this article, we explore how keynote speeches come into being as a staged genre of strategic communication. In our critical discursive analysis of video data on Apple Inc.'s keynote speeches, we demonstrate how keynote speeches are multimodally accomplished through the embodied enactment of four discursive practices: referencing, relating, demarcating, and mystifying. We show how different bodily movements, which we describe as leveling and leaping gestures, systematically contribute to constructing different conceptions of strategy through the enactment of these discursive practices as a staged genre of strategic communication. Our findings contribute to strategy-as-practice research by extending the nascent but growing literature on genres of strategic communication, the strategist's body in the strategy process, and the use of video-based research methods. Managerial summary: Firms increasingly rely on keynote speeches to communicate their strategies. As a result, managers invest more and more time and effort into preparing and rehearsing their keynote speeches. But how do managers communicate strategy in these staged performances? Based on an analysis of Apple Inc.'s keynote speeches, we explore the discursive and bodily patterns that characterize this genre. In doing so, we demonstrate that the coordinated use of bodily movements in keynote speeches is consequential for highlighting different aspects of the communicated strategy. This shows that keynote speeches and other types of public speeches cannot simply be scripted, but require managers to engage in bodily rehearsal and training in order to communicate strategies effectively.

An intensive care unit (ICU) is a demanding environment, defined by significant complexity, in which physicians must make decisions in situations characterized by high levels of uncertainty. This study used a phenomenological approach to investigate the decision-making (DM) processes among ICU physicians’ team with the aim of understanding what happens when ICU physicians must reach a decision about the infectious status of a patient. The focus was put on the identification of how the discursive practices influence physicians’ DM processes and on how different ICU environments make different discursive profiles emerge, particularly when a key issue is at the center of the physicians’ discussion. A naturalistic approach used in this study is particularly suitable for investigating health care practices because it can best illuminate the essential meaning of the “lived experiences” of the participants. The findings revealed a common framework of elements that provide insight into DM processes in ICUs and how these are affected by discursive practices.

When lay coffee drinkers taste the coffee in their cups, the flavors they note are shaped by the local interaction that provides the context for the occasion. Three methods they use for identifying flavors are examined and described: clustering, or how flavor descriptors are articulated in ensembles during a collaborative process; objectivating, the concerted work of transforming tentative suggestions into objective findings; and calibrating, how drinkers align their practice of tasting in order to conform with — and make meaningful — the objectivated accounts. These microsocial practices continuously intrude upon tasting, and a serendipitously developed local order guides their taste identification. This does not mean that there is no real taste, only that the taste never stands apart from the social contingencies and the discursive practices that are developed to describe it.

PowerPoint has come to dominate organizational life in general and strategy making in particular. The technology is lauded by its proponents as a powerful tool for communication and excoriated by its critics as dangerously simplifying. This study takes a deeper look into how PowerPoint is mobilized in strategy making through an ethnographic study inside one organization. It treats PowerPoint as a technology embedded in the discursive practices of strategic knowledge production and suggests that these practices make up the epistemic or knowledge culture of the organization. Conceptualizing culture as composed of practices foregrounds the \"machineries\" of knowing. Results from a genre analysis of PowerPoint use suggest that it should not be characterized simply as effective or ineffective, as current PowerPoint controversies do. Instead, I show how the affordances of PowerPoint enabled the difficult task of collaborating to negotiate meaning in an uncertain environment, creating spaces for discussion, making recombinations possible, allowing for adjustments as ideas evolved, and providing access to a wide range of actors. These affordances also facilitated cartographic efforts to draw boundaries around the scope of a strategy by certifying certain ideas and allowing document owners to include or exclude certain slides or participants. These discursive practices-collaboration and cartography-are part of the \"epistemic machinery\" of strategy culture. This analysis demonstrates that strategy making is not only about analysis of industry structure, competitive positioning, or resources, as assumed in content-based strategy research, but it is also about how the production and use of PowerPoint documents that shape these ideas.

Pastoral social-ecological systems (SES) provide myriad benefits to humanity and face multiple challenges in the 21st century, including interacting climate and land-use change, political marginalization, and demographic shifts, leading to loss of traditional knowledge and practices associated with sustainable use. Research and policy increasingly recognize women's roles in sustaining pastoral SES in the Global South, yet women pastoralists in the Global North have received scant attention. In Spain, like other countries in the Global North, the rise of intensive industrialized agriculture contributed to rural depopulation, land abandonment, and the masculinization of rural spaces. In this qualitative study, we address the empirical gap in studies of women pastoralists in the Global North by investigating Spanish women pastoralists' roles in pastoral SES conservation, adaptive transformation, and abandonment (regime shift). Drawing on in-depth life-history interviews with 31 women from 4 regions of Spain, and participatory workshops with women in each region, we explored women pastoralists' diverse identities and roles in conserving, transforming, and abandoning pastoral SES, focusing on 3 levels of social organization: the household/enterprise and local community, the extensive livestock sector, and society broadly. We found that women contributed to all three processes and we highlight synergies between women's roles as tradition-keepers and change agents that could serve as a leverage point for adaptive transformation. Our analysis also revealed key contradictions in women's material and discursive practices; how these are shaped by intersecting axes of social differences such as age, class, origins. and family status; and their implications for policy and practice to foster adaptive transformation of extensive livestock systems. This work advances SES/resilience research by addressing social science critiques of resilience approaches through the application of feminist theories and methodology that center the voices and subjective lived experiences of women pastoralists and attend to the roles of gender and power in SES dynamics.

Frames and Discursive Practices between State and Black Populations in Colombia: Structural Racism and Human Rights Abstract This article discusses the way the discourses and counter-discourses have been used in the construction of frames on behalf of the actor-network, Process of Black Communities, in its dialogue with the Colombian government within the framework of the hearings of the Inter-american Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) between 2007 and 2013. Theoretically, the notions of biopower, biopolitics, governmentality and discursive practices developed by Michel Foucault are addressed , as well as the theory of frames by Snow and Bendford. Methodologically, audios and videos of the hearings before the Commission are analyzed. In the analysis of the interaction between State and Afro petitioners there were identified frames, discourses and counter-discourses related to racism, territoriality, victimization of afro populations and women, and armed conflict. The findings identify frames around the issue of human rights, aimed at harnessing the discursive and political opportunities opened by the Commission to influence the decisions of the state actor.