Drawing on Judith Butler's theory of performativity and positioning approaches, this paper examines how asylum seekers actively assert agency in navigating and (re)constructing their subjectivities and identities within research interviews. The analysis explores the power dynamics inherent in the interview setting and broader public discourse,…

This paper deals with problems stemming from linguistic variation in children's literature in a pluricentric language such as Spanish. Specifically, a paradigmatic case of the tensions will be studied, namely a collection of children's books about the Canary Islands, "Leyendas Canarias" (2012-2021). The sociolinguistic setting is the…

Critique of citizenship education has suggested citizenship should be reconceived, not as a status, but as something that people continuously do: citizenship as practice. This article draws on a two-year ethnographic study of citizenship practices in a Scottish primary school examining how citizenship curriculum was distributed across children's…

The term "repair" refers to strategies deployed by language users to resolve breakdowns in communication. In this study, I ask what strategies for conversational repair are deployed, and who takes responsibility for their execution, when a language is used in a small local signing ecology. I focus on signers from a single family within a…

Character is a fundamental literary element and it is defined as the act of describing characters in literature, particularly their physical attributes as well as personal traits. In multimodal texts, the visual and textual sign systems are interlaced together to exemplify meaningful characters. In this study, two picture books were examined to…

While students' perspectives are crucial for international/transnational institutions' development, their preferences towards certain values should not be taken for granted, as the possibility of lived experience is confined by individuals' subjectivity, which derives from power and knowledge but does not depend on them (Deleuze;…

In this article, the central argument is that research on the semiotic repertoire should also focus on how repertoires are racialized, and race is evoked through the semiotic repertoire. The article uses data from the South African educational context to advance a position in which semiotic repertoires simultaneously give and restrict access,…

This article explores how female university students' abilities to present themselves as 'authentic' engineers are imbricated with discursive constructions of gender and gender equality. The empirical data comes from interviews and video diaries collected with three female engineering students. The analysis demonstrates the power of the Swedish…

Background: Within the multilingual context of KwaZulu Natal (KZN), learners in Grades 1-3 are taught in their native language which is isiZulu. From Grade 4, English or Afrikaans becomes the medium of instruction. Yet, many parents prefer that their children be taught in English. It is the assumption that young learners' self-concept and identity…

The portrayal of body shaming against women in films is a social critique of the act of body shaming. Hence, the study of body shaming in films is intriguing for future investigation. The objective of this research is to uncover the portrayal of body shaming towards women in films. The research data comprised of words and phrases that encompassed…

This paper explicates how statutes and case law (court cases) can be used as sources for discourse analysis when researching South African education reform through a complexity theory lens. Firstly, the law-making process is built on discourses at different levels. Secondly, discourses are manifested in case law because in order to resolve…

As governments and international organisations have pressured universities to demonstrate the value and effectiveness of tertiary education, universities have started to highlight graduate employability as a key driver and measure of university outcomes. This paper contributes to the underutilised "processual" employability studies by…

National internationalization strategies are produced by governments to frame and drive their internationalization agendas. They are relatively new, but growing in number. This paper contributes to an emerging strand of international education research: that of discursive policy analysis. We analyse the Australian Strategy for International…

This paper critically analyses and aims to denaturalise models of identity that circulate in discourse about vocational education in the Netherlands. It is argued that discourse about the vocational track is characterised by a pervasive focus on deficits, framing vocational education as unprestigious, and its students as unintelligent and…

In the age when environmental sustainability is among the chief concerns and goals of communities around the world, a number of linguistic studies have been conducted to illuminate the roles of language in protection and destruction of ecological systems. Most of the studies, however, focus on written and/or formal discourses. The present study…