ABSTRACT
The postmodern medical paradigm has empowered online users in the (de)legitimating process of health-related topics. By employing a co-occurrence analysis, this study identifies the thematic patterns used by Romanian online users in their multimodal comments to the #storiesfromvaccination Facebook campaign run by the Romanian government. The findings show that the commenters assessed source credibility through two thematic patterns: ‘source exemplarity' and ‘source distrust'. Health experts were more legitimized than laypersons and role models as sources in the COVID-19 vaccination campaign. Two thematic patterns emerged in the assessment of vaccination, namely: ‘immunization – past and present challenges' and ‘vaccination supporter versus opponent cleavage'. In the discussion on immunization, a polarization between a nostalgic longing for the past and a present corrupted medical and political system prevailed, whereas the important feature of discursive antagonism could be observed in the latter thematic pattern. The co-occurrences of (de)legitimation strategies are explained with reference to the political and medical context, along with the challenges of social media usage in online vaccination communication campaigns. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Discourse & Society is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
ABSTRACT
In this formulation, the US-ROK Alliance—what the State Department deems the "linchpin of peace, security, and prosperity" in the region—stands not as a form of military occupation or imperial clientelism, but one of righteous defense from regional bogeyman such as the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).3 The endemic violence of US militarism—from sexual exploitation in military "camptowns" to the extralegal status of US servicemen—is rendered a mere footnote to a program of liberal internationalism which claims to preside over what the US military euphemistically terms a "Free and Open Indo-Pacific. "4 Blinken's easy distinction between the singular act of the Atlanta shootings and the routinized violence of US imperialism speaks to the contradictions at the heart of the Biden administration's aspiration to restore both racial liberalism and global US power.5 Since the campaign trail, platitudes about restoring global US leadership have made up the core of the Biden administration's foreign policy platform. [...]Biden pitched his presidency as a means to reinstate the era of racial liberalism in order to "restore the soul of the nation" from the crude racism of the Trump era.7 Asian /Americans have been cast to perform the work of legitimation under the intersecting projects of racial liberalism and US hegemony—from the symbolic inclusion of Asian /Americans into the US national body to the incorporation of allied Asian states into a US-led orbit of militarized peace.8 On the one hand, Asian /Americans have become a performative symbol of a reascendant racial liberalism. What does it mean, then, in a region still shaped by Cold War imperialism, to proclaim that "America is back," as Kamala Harris did on her first trip to Asia as Vice President in August 2021?13 Even more, how do we make sense of the declaration of a "new" Cold War, emerging as it does from the unfinished business of an "old" Cold War that never ended?
ABSTRACT
The article analyzes the reasons for the important effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has become the catalyst for long-overdue decline in the authority of expert knowledge. The author claims that widespread access to information and scientific data results in the collapse of universal and monopolistic expert-scientific hierarchies of knowledge of a large society, controlled by the state. Scientific experts, who acted as the historical heirs of priests and shamans, have lost their privileged access to sacred knowledge, made public by the media and the Internet. This resulted in severe damage to the key function of expertise - legitimization of the political order and power elites. Experts without the status of agents of the state have become indistinguishable from ordinary citizens. The example of discussions between Waxers and Anti-Waxers shows that both sides are able to put forward convincing scientific arguments that rhetorically do not allow the authorities to bring the discussion about the effectiveness of vaccinations down to a completely unobvious dispute between enlightened state experts and uneducated obscurantists. It is in the most developed Western states where one can see a strong civil dissident movement that distrusts or calls into question the disciplinary regimes of collective coexistence, legitimized by the paternalistic rhetoric of concern from political elites. Accordingly, the elites in the background situation of strengthening the practices of heterarchy, post-truth and postmodernism can no longer rely on the usual metanarratives of the Enlightenment, which allowed them to monopolize the discourse of science in the name of progress and unconditional good, building hierarchies of knowledge-power convenient for their priorities. Since science, knowledge and information have long became public domain, the line between elites, experts and citizens in the field of access to science has become almost indistinguishable. The actual political problem is that the situation of collision of different paradigms, opinions and data is exactly the normal state of science, which is now transferred to the field of public discussions following the final secularization of science. Thus, the institution of expert knowledge turns into an unnecessary link in a situation of equal access of all interested parties to scientific data;to an institution that hardly would efficiently perform the functions of scientific legitimation of socially significant decisions in the foreseeable future.
ABSTRACT
The enormous scale of suffering, breadth of societal impact, and ongoing uncertainty wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic introduced dynamics seldom examined in the crisis entrepreneurship literature. Previous research indicates that when a crisis causes a failure of public goods, spontaneous citizen ventures often emerge to leverage unique local knowledge to rapidly customize abundant external resources to meet immediate needs. However, as outsiders, emergent citizen groups responding to the dire shortage of personal protective equipment at the onset of COVID-19 lacked local knowledge and legitimacy. In this study, we examine how entrepreneurial citizens mobilized collective resources in attempts to gain acceptance and meet local needs amid the urgency of the pandemic. Through longitudinal case studies of citizen groups connected to makerspaces in four U.S. cities, we study how they adapted to address the resource and legitimacy limitations they encountered. We identify three mechanisms—augmenting, circumventing, and attenuating—that helped transient citizen groups calibrate their resource mobilization based on what they learned over time. We highlight how extreme temporality imposes limits on resourcefulness and legitimation, making it critical for collective entrepreneurs to learn when to work within their limitations rather than try to overcome them.
ABSTRACT
This article makes a case for studying the legitimation of emergency politics from the vantage point of securitisation. To that end, it zooms in on politics during the COVID-19 pandemic – a many-sided crisis that generated a heightened insecurity environment. Based on a qualitative content analysis of the French official rhetoric on two COVID-19 emergency measures, it foregrounds how securitising speech acts construing a macro threat and notable shifts in hierarchical ordering of securitisations underpinned justifications for COVID-19 pandemic politics. Conceptually, this research bridges the literature on legitimation and securitisation by synthesising scattered securitising elements in typologies of legitimation and outlining the legitimating function of two securitisation dynamics – macrosecuritisation and securitising dilemma. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Contemporary Politics is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
ABSTRACT
This paper analyzes legitimation practices of international organisations in the face of the global COVID-19 pandemic. We analyse a sample of 252 major international governmental organisations (IGOs) and 250 international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), using information collected from their websites in September–December 2020. We seek to understand why the vast majority of both IGOs and INGOs responded to the crisis and what were the different types of reactions. We study variations in legitimation practices among different types of organisations–governmental vs non-governmental, general-purpose vs task-specific, large vs small, etc. Drawing on rational choice and neo-institutionalist scholarship, we test several hypotheses to account for the patterns of IO's legitimation work triggered by COVID-19 crisis. Our findings give some support to both theoretical perspectives. Organisation's resources are the best predictor for its conduct in response to the crisis. At the same time, organisations largely behave in a conformist way, actively engaging in legitimation work, and investing in their public visibility in relation to COVID-19 pandemic. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
ABSTRACT
What knowledge matters in health professions education is an issue of debate in the literature, foregrounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and informed by calls for students who are not only clinically competent, but also critically conscious of global health inequity. Building on this work, this paper explores what kinds of knowledge are legitimated in two health science programmes at a South African university. Thirty-four health professions teachers participated in the study. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) Specialisation was used as an analytical framework, with Epistemic and Social Relations as coding categories. Results revealed the dominance of a knowledge code, with the social dispositions and attributes relating to the development of critical consciousness often not considered knowledge at all. Our contention is that both knowledge and social dispositions are equally important in the development of future healthcare professionals and that collaborative curriculum conversations are needed to enable them being interwoven throughout curricula. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
Following the first coronavirus case reported to the World Health Organization in Wuhan in 2019 and the ensuing city-wide lockdown that was imposed, many people attempted to leave the city, culminating in a vigorous discourse on the dominant Chinese microblogging site, Weibo. This study seeks to examine how online participants discursively delegitimated and legitimated people who left Wuhan before the lockdown. Weibo posts with the hashtag (sic) ('Fleeing Wuhan') were collected, and delegitimation and legitimation strategies deployed by users were identified. My findings reveal that the delegitimators exploited moral evaluation and impersonal authority to highlight the construed unethicality and shamelessness of people who left Wuhan, whereas the legitimators used an array of strategies, including explanation and definition, to normalize their intentions and counter linguistic hostility. These findings also provide implications vis-a-vis the clustering of delegitimation strategies as well as their linkages with emotional appeals in online discourse.
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This chapter discusses features of conspiratorial discourse related to the representation"of social actors through the lens of rhetorical and argumentative"analysis. Specifically, it identifies a previously undocumented variant of the straw"man fallacy (a misrepresentation of an opponent's position meant to refute it"more easily), namely the ethotic straw man, which unscrupulous arguers can"use to legitimate their own credibility and undermine their opponents', thereby"evading scientific discussion of relevant issues. A TV-interview with French virologist"Didier Raoult, who championed hydroxychloroquine-based treatments"in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, is taken as a case in point to"explain why such quasi-populistic discourse, prominently centred on questions"of ethos, fits conspiratorial narratives so well. © 2022 John Benjamins Publishing Company.
ABSTRACT
On 18th March 2020, the Malaysian government enforced a movement control order (MCO) that required everyone to stay in their homes until 4th May 2020 to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus. During this time, social media became not only a source of information for citizens but also the main space for their mediated social and public lives. Besides the hashtags #stayhome and #dudukrumah, the hashtag #KitaJagaKita started trending as netizens and civil society took the initiative to champion the proper enforcement of the MCO and safe distancing, as well as to find solutions for the shortage of medical safety equipment. This chapter presents findings from a discourse analysis on the discourses surrounding the hashtag #KitaJagaKita on Twitter and its use to (de)legitimise the Perikatan Nasional government and its leader, Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin. Pro-government netizens use the hashtag to represent the government as protecting citizens through its policies and guidelines, and fellow citizens, who adhere to the MCO, as partnering in this effort. Netizens who are less supportive of the government, however, argue that the government is not doing enough to protect citizens and healthcare workers. They use the hashtag to criticise government policies and a lack of decisiveness and speed in properly implementing the MCO. They also use the hashtag to rally citizens to take care of each other by fundraising and finding "better” solutions for healthcare workers. © 2023, The Author(s).
ABSTRACT
Innovative technologies often face acceptance challenges. This is especially true when they constitute disruptive innovations. Disruptive innovations can forcefully alter the way things are done in the economy and society and have differential impacts for social groups. Legitimacy – the fit between an innovation, and society at large – is an important explanatory factor of the success of disruptive technologies. The micro-judgements of legitimacy that individuals make with regards to a technology, can help understand why some innovations succeed or fail. Likewise, users’ actions when using said innovations may indicate how acceptable the technology is to users. This paper analyses how users judge, and use, the NHS COVID-19 Test & Trace app. Preliminary findings suggest that individuals’ micro-legitimacy judgements are strongly related to the decision to use the app or not, and that users have adopted a number of workaround behaviours to resist or compensate for the app’s functionality. © 2022, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.
ABSTRACT
What knowledge matters in health professions education is an issue of debate in the literature, foregrounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and informed by calls for students who are not only clinically competent, but also critically conscious of global health inequity. Building on this work, this paper explores what kinds of knowledge are legitimated in two health science programmes at a South African university. Thirty-four health professions teachers participated in the study. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) Specialisation was used as an analytical framework, with Epistemic and Social Relations as coding categories. Results revealed the dominance of a knowledge code, with the social dispositions and attributes relating to the development of critical consciousness often not considered knowledge at all. Our contention is that both knowledge and social dispositions are equally important in the development of future healthcare professionals and that collaborative curriculum conversations are needed to enable them being interwoven throughout curricula.
ABSTRACT
This article analyzes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's first speeches on COVID-19, in the context of the unique political crisis in which Israel was plunged when the pandemic broke out. It suggests that Netanyahu's rhetoric was not aimed, similarly to that of other Western leaders, uniquely at persuading his audience to obey liberticidal regulations that were imposed-and thereby build his authority and legitimacy, as well as the legitimacy of the measures advocated against the pandemic;but that it was also aimed at reconstructing and rehabilitating his ethos (impaired by his indictment), repositioning him as head of State, as the only leader capable of managing a crisis of such magnitude, and thus of leading the country;and finally, at convincing his political rival to join a so-called "emergency national unity" government.
ABSTRACT
Mid-March 2020, European governments (and beyond) could not deny the Covid-19 dangerous pandemic anymore;they had to quickly cope with the crisis. Different modes of crisis communication have been adopted by government leaders to persuade people to abide by various measures to counteract the spreading of the virus, and thus to reduce fears and uncertainties. Some measures implied severe restrictions of human rights (such as freedom of movement, and so forth). Therefore, different legitimation strategies were applied to create society-wide consensus that such measures were indeed necessary. Some governments have also instrumentalized the pandemic for their authoritarian aims. This paper analyzes various strategies of legitimation, following the approach first developed by Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) and elaborated in Wodak (2018, 2021). In this way, legitimation is linked to specific argumentation schemes, always in context-dependent ways. The data for this paper stem from governmental speeches and press conferences in Austria, Hungary, Sweden, New Zealand, and France, in the period of March 2020 until December 2020.
ABSTRACT
This article examines the discursive and argumentative procedures tinged with populism by which Donald Trump, who goes against the health policy adopted by most democratic countries against Covid-19, tries to legitimate his decisions and present them as complying with the public good. We analyze the way in which the address to the nation of the United States leader endeavors to reaffirm his legitimacy as incumbent president weakened by recent attempts at impeachment, and to strengthen the authority of his person in view of the forthcoming elections. From this perspective, we attempt to identify the discursive strategies that fall under the rubric of national populism and the shared values that underlie them, examining how they fit into the overall argumentation used to achieve the president-candidate's persuasive ends.
ABSTRACT
This article examines the construction of political legitimacy and authority in the discourses of democratic leaders by attempting to distinguish between two often confused notions, and to identify the discursive and argumentative procedures that put them in place. It takes stock of a body of work devoted to the subject and proposes an original approach that emphasizes the centrality of argumentation in the process of legitimation and the construction of a leader's authority. Using the example of the first speeches of the heads of state at the time of the Covid-19 crisis, it proposes an analytical framework that can account for discursive and argumentative operations and their socio-political stakes in context.
ABSTRACT
A number of countries have placed police officers in charge of policies aimed at suppressing the transmission of COVID-19. While scholarly attention has been paid to the legitimacy of a law enforcement response to the pandemic, less attention has been paid to the discursive techniques used by state officials when attempting to represent controversial policies as uncontroversial. This article examines the role of discourse in the rationalization of a law enforcement approach to the COVID-19 pandemic in NSW, Australia. I conduct a critical analysis of the language of policing officials in press conferences, interviews, and media releases to identify discursive strategies of authorization, moral evaluation, and rationalization, as described in Van Leeuwen's analytical framework of legitimation (2007, 2008). I argue that the use of discursive techniques to depict punitive sanctions as desirable and effective, and public health rules as clear and of equal application to all, helped to naturalize a coercive response in the application of public health measures. The naturalness of this police-led approach is deconstructed by drawing on alternative accounts to show how COVID-19 rules were complicated and poorly communicated, and policed in an uneven, and at times, overzealous fashion.
ABSTRACT
Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Republic of the Philippines, has been heavily criticized by the local and international media, primarily for his brutal anti-drugs campaign and suppression of political opposition and journalists. Nevertheless, despite controversial decisions, Duterte remains, as surveys show, extremely popular among Filipinos. In this context, this study aims at answering the following questions: 1. What are the sources of the popularity of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines? 2. What are the mechanisms of legitimation of his actions? Beginning with a theoretical discussion of the differences between legitimation, popularity, support, and trust, the article concludes by pointing out a combination of structural, situational, personal, and technological factors that impact his popularity.
ABSTRACT
During the Covid-19 pandemic, considerable scholarly attention has been paid to the proliferation of conspiracy theories and their potential impacts. How and why digital media has facilitated the production, consumption, and distribution of such discourses as ‘truth’ remains largely neglected in the literature though. This paper explores this process through a transdisciplinary methodology designed to investigate legitimation in digital spaces. Based on a theoretical bridge between Beetham’s theory of legitimation and KhosraviNik’s principle that visibility-equals-legitimacy, the Multimodal Critical Affect-Discourse Analysis of an audio-visual performance of the 5G conspiracy theory exposes how it has been simultaneously legitimized through authoritative performance and visibility. An interview given by the notorious conspiracy theorist David Icke, in which he associates the pandemic with 5G technology, was used as a case study because it was widely consumed and reproduced as ‘truth’, leading media companies to take unprecedented action against conspiracy theories. Besides contributing to existing debates on conspiracy theories, this paper offers new directions for the critical analysis of legitimation and power, acknowledging the fluid and diffuse nature of power in network societies and illuminating how meanings, beliefs, and affects have been manipulated by multiple actors to achieve consent and motivate collaborative authorship. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Social Epistemology is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
ABSTRACT
In this article we introduce our special issue of the Journal of Language & Politics on the (de)legitimisation of Europe. We start by outlining the rationale and research that led us to the special issue. In Section 2 we set out the contextual framing of the contributions, i.e., the crisis of legitimacy that European institutions and indeed the entire European project, have faced for the last decade and a half;crises that have been brought about by different events and actors and have resulted in centrifugal and centripetal processes. Next, we outline our theoretical approach to legitimation, which combines politico-sociological perspectives with discursive and communicative ones. This is followed by Section 4, which introduces and weaves together the contributions to the special issue. Finally, in Section 5 we briefly discuss the findings with regard to the aims and goals of the issue and also suggest potential next research steps.