This article examines how everyday language deals with topics that feel difficult to name directly, especially those related to death, sex, the body, and desire. It shows how euphemism and metaphor are not simply decorative figures of speech, but central tools societies use to manage what feels uncomfortable or unspeakable. By combining familiar examples with a brief historical perspective, the piece illustrates how both words and silences reveal values, fears, and assumptions a culture might have. The article introduces key ideas from the humanities in an accessible way, inviting young readers to reflect on the language they use and hear every day, and to consider how those linguistic choices shape the way people imagine the world and relate to one another.

Civil–military relations scholars generally assume that senior military leaders (SMLs) tend to resist domestic policing tasks because they consider them an inappropriate role for the armed forces. However, evidence also shows that SMLs sometimes pragmatically support these duties to secure resources. This article proposes a theoretical framework that combines pragmatic considerations with military role conceptions to account for SMLs’ reactions to political demands for domestic policing missions. The framework suggests that SMLs approach these demands as part of a strategy to preserve organisational survival. Survival depends on maintaining a positive organisational equilibrium – the balance between what the organisation provides to its members and clients and what it demands of them. SMLs support domestic policing when it strengthens this equilibrium and resist it when it undermines it. The article tests this argument by examining Italian SMLs’ approach to operation Strade Sicure between 2008 and 2024, drawing primarily on qualitative discourse analysis of parliamentary hearings, official documents, and public statements, complemented by interviews with retired SMLs. The findings show that military support for domestic policing is conditional and reversible: it expands when such missions help stabilise organisational equilibrium under resource pressure and contracts once the personnel costs outweigh the political and financial benefits.

This article examines how artificial intelligence (AI) became framed as a critical node of U.S.–China strategic competition between 2015 and 2023, arguing that “hybrid epistemic experts” – figures who straddle technical expertise, corporate leadership and policy influence – played a decisive role in shaping elite understanding of AI. Through a critical review of policy documents, news media, public statements and institutional developments, this article examines how the “U.S.–China AI Race” narrative did not emerge along the usual pathways of state-driven, top-down bureaucratic processes or traditional lobbying but was actively constructed and amplified by figures like former Google executive Eric Schmidt. Schmidt’s role as a hybrid actor allowed him to translate AI from a narrow technological domain into an existential competition requiring massive policy investment. This overarching capability was driven by AI’s speculative, technically complex and general-purpose nature, which has concentrated knowledge production in private hands, enabling hybrid actors to achieve disproportionate influence over AI policy discourse. This phenomenon raises concerns about democratic governance, the collapse of independent expertise and the self-reinforcing dynamics between private power and public policymaking in emerging technologies.

Drawing on Agamben’s notion of “bare life” and Fassin’s critique of “humanitarian reason,” this article asks when refugees become recognizable as fully human in Turkish news discourse. It analyzes a simple random sample of 2,285 migration-related news items published in eight national newspapers between 2011 and 2020 through qualitative content analysis, and complements this with a close reading of sixty items that cluster around positive/humanitarian storytelling. Overall coverage is largely massifying and predominantly negative in tone; framing is dominated by threat–security–control (40 percent) alongside a substantial humanitarian–moral frame (32 percent). The paper’s main contribution is to identify and theorize three recurring “good refugee” figures: (1) the vulnerable woman/child; (2) the heroic young man; and (3) the talented/entrepreneurial refugee whose exceptional skills and achievements are foregrounded. The paper argues that these figures do not merely individualize refugees; they also function as privileged sites where Turkish nationhood is narrated as compassionate, modern, and sovereign – while “ordinary” refugees remain outside the horizon of unconditional humanity and rights. The article argues that humanization strategies may backfire, ultimately eliminating individual subjectivity and agency. The article critiques the news items’ compassionate, patronizing, and moralizing tone, highlighting the urgent need to politicize and historicize the issue.

This paper examines the 2016 trial of Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi by the International Criminal Court (ICC) through the lenses of discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology, with a focus on how trial actors navigated legitimacy challenges. Al Mahdi, a member of Ansar Dine, was charged with the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against religious and historic buildings in Timbuktu, which were UNESCO World Heritage sites. This paper argues that the trial actors used a rhetorical “local-to-global parallelism” which sought to consolidate a global range of constituencies and legitimate the ICC’s actions both normatively and sociologically. The local-to-global parallelism served to “talk into existence” a broad-based victimhood, which reinforced the court’s symbolic authority and its claims to jurisdiction. It also relied heavily on intertextual connections between the ICC and UNESCO, thereby legitimating the prosecution of cultural heritage destruction as a grave international crime.

The purpose of the seminar was to bring together scholars from within linguistics and disciplines such as psychology to explore what short-form social media is, how we might practically and ethically collect and analyse short-form social media data, and what analytic possibilities are on offer for a linguist interested in examining this type of data. The seminar, held at the University of Nottingham on 11th September 2024, was well-attended, with around twenty people joining in-person or online. It ran for a single day and was split into a morning of plenaries and lightning talks about personal research interests, and an afternoon of interactive sessions which sought synergies between those research interests.

This paper contributes to the literature on nonprofit social ventures and discourse studies by identifying discursive resources leveraged to craft the intended image of a nonprofit organization. The intended organizational image plays a central role in the way stakeholders, notably sponsors, perceive a nonprofit organization. Nonetheless, we have little research aimed at identifying the resources and tools that organizations mobilize to structure their intended image, especially at the discourse level. Drawing on the analysis of the discourses adopted by a Brazilian not-for-profit organization, we propose a typology of five discursive resources: distinctiveness, identification, justification, storytelling, and validation. These resources operate as discursive-rhetoric tools that allow the organization to assert its uniqueness and shared values, legitimize its mission, narrate impact, and demonstrate credibility. Our findings contribute to a discourse-based understanding of nonprofit image construction by offering a framework that complements existing work in branding and legitimacy. The study also provides practical insights for nonprofit managers seeking to communicate authentically and efficiently with key stakeholders.

This article explores the use of interpretive methodologies to study civil society networks within the field of third sector research. Interpretive methodologies situate reality as both socially constructed and negotiated and seek to understand meaning and meaning-making practices, which from a critical perspective act as forces of and derivatives of power relations. In particular, we develop the concept “interpretive engagement” to highlight a common but broadly defined focus of study in relation to civil society networks and use it as an illustrative example for highlighting the value of interpretive methods—specifically those that focus on discourses and discursive practices as forms of meaning-making—for advancing scholarship in the field of third sector research. Drawing on research in the field that employs interpretive methodologies and techniques to understand such practices, our interpretive engagement concept demonstrates how interpretive methods can address neglected areas of study in relation to the expressive functions of organized civil society.

Governance networks typically function in the absence of clearly defined constitutional rules. Network actors, therefore, have to develop a common understanding of the problem as well as build a basis for mutual trust. We suggest that discourse-analytical and dramaturgical concepts can be helpful instruments to analyse these dynamics of trust building in governance networks.

In this article, we investigate the changes in the legitimating accounts used by Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), in the context of spreading managerialism—one of the most powerful institutional practices of our time—in the Third Sector. We first introduce the concepts of legitimacy and legitimating account, before showing how managerialism manifests itself in CSOs and presenting three managerialist accounts used to legitimate such organizations: efficiency and effectiveness (E&E), stakeholder’s needs, and innovation. We then examine empirically how the use of these accounts changed between 1995 and 2008. In order to do so, we analyze quantitatively the contents of a sample of annual reports produced by Austrian CSOs over the stated period, and apply discourse analysis to a smaller group of reports to reveal more fine-grained developments. Our results show significant changes: of our chosen accounts, the one most tightly linked with managerialism, E&E, had come to be taken-for-granted by 2008, whereas the more generic and subtle concepts of stakeholder’s needs and innovation featured more strongly than in 1995.

How does the European Union integrate new values into the text of its treaties? A growing body of literature indicates that, in the past three decades, new norms and values have entered the EU's discourse, resulting in what is usually termed ‘normative power Europe’. Yet the research and knowledge to‐date about the EU's discursive assimilation of new values and norms is surprisingly poor. As any institutional change, such integration has the potential to undermine the coherence of the EU's identity and thus also its objective to ‘speak with one voice’. This article explores the EU's discursive management of the continuity‐versus‐change imperative by analysing the integration of new values into the text of its treaties. This issue is addressed based on a quantitative content analysis on the full texts of European founding treaties between the 1950s and 2009. Findings show that the distribution of the EU's values in the text is not uniform: while the language of market economy and democracy is pervasive, the values of peace, European identity, rights and social justice are mentioned less frequently and in restricted linguistic environments. To account for the differences in the integration of values into the EU's treaty discourse, the article develops the notion of a discursive mechanism of differentiated value integration (MDVI). This rationale echoes the logic of differentiation in policy implementation employed by the EU. It is claimed here that, applied in the European discursive arena, MDVI allows radically different readings of the same text. This helps the EU to maintain a coherent value identity while at the same time enabling change.

Different disciplinary, theoretical, and empirical lenses have contributed to a kaleidoscopic picture of the governance of civil society organizations (CSOs). Most of the time, CSO governance is contrasted with corporate governance in business organizations; only rarely is the broad variety of CSOs taken into account. To widen this perspective, we develop an empirically grounded typology of five discourses of organization in CSOs: managerialist, domestic, professionalist, grassroots, and civic discourse. We argue that each of these discourses gives specific answers to the three core questions of governance: To whom is the CSO accountable, i.e., who are the key actors who need to be protected by governance mechanisms? For what kind of performance is the CSO accountable? And which structures and processes are appropriate to ensure accountability? The way in which different discourses answer these questions provides us with a deeper understanding of the reasons behind the manifold notions of governance in CSOs.

This article summarises a part of the findings of a larger explorative research that investigates the way in which various representations of national political science(s)/studies tradition and community are negotiated and transformed through interaction, with a focus on the impact of international mobility on political science canon-building. Through a case study on Romania and mostly discourse analysis tools, it examines in particular the competing discourses on (1) what is considered prestigious and scientifically desirable for a national political science community, and (2) what a national political science tradition should be about in relation with the rest of the scholarly world.