In this chapter, we explore the ways in which media postpandemic responses communicate clearly the excessive entitlement reflected in the public discourse about teachers. During the pandemic, we noted many parent posts on social media lauding teachers. They expressed gratitude for the challenges teachers faced in teaching students on distance…

The paper reflects on public discourses about science and pseudoscience, proposing the same discursive structure for both--the Esperantist-Epideictic genre. This genre of discourse might bring together characteristics that we understand as constituents of the public discourse on science. It also enables us to depict the process by which to…

Bullying literature notes that aside from the dyadic relationship of target and perpetrator, there are other participant roles in the bullying process including those that reinforce the perpetrator and those that stand up for the target. Most examinations of bullying roles have relied on self-reported data, which suffer from key limitations such…

Conversations about 'fixed' or innate ability in relation to schools and education have generally considered - though not exclusively so - the psychological and sociological basis of ability, the practicalities and policy formulations. In this article, the author considers the emergent politics of ability and the culture war on social media which…

This article examines the popular journalistic discourses on the terroristic actions and ideological beliefs of Brenton Tarrant as a way to illuminate the problematic ways in which the notions of radicalization and extremism of rightism are framed. I argue that the journalistic discourses implicitly frame radicalization and extremism as isolated…

A wide range of Arabic language variation in form, code choice and orthographic script was wielded by Lebanese political protestors in their graffiti and political placards in Beirut in 2015. That summer, civil protests spilled out into the streets to critique the government inaction over waste management and overall corruption. I will focus on…

Open education aspires to democratize education, promote inclusion and effect change through social justice. These aspirations are difficult to realize in open, online environments, which enable multiple, and often conflicting, perspectives. This paper proposes a counter-narrative that surfaces certain operational norms of the internet and…

This paper analyses "Kongish Daily," a Facebook page that trans-scripts local news in Hong Kong into a creative and dynamic mix of Cantonese in traditional Chinese characters, Romanisation and made-up characters, simplified Chinese, pinyin, English, Hong Kong English, other phonetic symbols, emoji and other signs and images. We trace the…

Since 2016, there has been a proliferation of discourse around what has come to be called "post-truth." Much of this discourse references critical literacies as a proposed means by which to disrupt post-truth across educational policy, pedagogy, and methodology. In this paper, I highlight the paradoxical degree of overlap between…

With the increasing prominence of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in higher education, the number of programmes and studies integrating online peer interaction opportunities on social media, likewise, has surged. Nevertheless, little quantitative research has been performed on the ways in which learners interact with one another via these…

The hashtag #justsaying is one of Twitter's global stock hashtags. The hashtag is nontopical and appears to fulfil a complex range of metapragmatic framing functions. In this paper, I shall look at Dutch-language tweets in which the hashtag is being used as a fully enregistered 'translingual' framing device, and I will attempt an analysis focused…

Saussurean and Chomskyan "conduit" views of meaning in communication, dominant in much of expert and lay linguistic semantics, presuppose a simple, closed and linear system in which outcomes can be predicted and explained in terms of finite sets of rules. Summarizing critical traditions of scholarship, notably those driven by Bateson's…

"The Hunger Games" (S. Collins, 2008) is one of the best-selling fiction books for young people in the United States (Calta, 2014). Although classified as dystopian literature, "The Hunger Games" is situated within the larger literary category of science fiction, a genre often defined by the presence of strange, yet plausible,…

This paper examines recent political debates surrounding data disaggregation in education policy in one US state, and analyses the discourses taken up by supporters and opponents of these policies. Analysis suggests how discourses move across time and space, and focuses on how these discourses are contextualized and entextualized in social media,…

Etymologically, the word 'sarcasm' is derived from the Greek "sarkazein," meaning "to speak bitterly or sneer", or, more literally, "to tear flesh" ("sarcasm," 2014). Sarcasm, then, is far from a benign feature of language, and there appears to be an inherent acerbity, or even a note of provocation, located…