The chapter establishes the role of context in an analysis. This is done by defining context, presenting a context continuum that can be used to understand an object of study, and introducing the types of conditions that shape understandings of discourse. Six different approaches to studying context are discussed in this chapter: systemic functional linguistics, the SPEAKING model, frames, indexicality, contextualization cues, and next-turn proof procedure. After reading this chapter, readers will understand what context is and why it is important; be able to study context using different models and constructs; and know how discourse and context work together to create meaning.

What are the politics of choosing specific frames? This chapter is anchored on this question and finds a marked difference between frames employed at the field level and those by subfields in each country. It finds, for example, that the Kenyan national subfield’s favored frame resembled those selected by fields in the Global North. Concomitantly, it finds an ambivalence in using the genocide frame to talk about the atrocities in Darfur, arguing that this ambivalence is due to perceptions of how the frame would affect peace negotiations and the posture taken by transnational organizations such as the ICC, UN, and AU.

Chapter 4 explores the nature of anti-Ben Ali politics from afar. It focusses on the field of homeland politics by investigating the modalities, frames and repertoires of action used by activists who fought the authoritarian regime. The chapter highlights the ambivalent logic underlying the use of human rights, which became the main frame of contention for the various actors. For pro-regime actors, the human rights frame was paradoxically a way of legitimising the regime abroad; for Islamists, the activation of a discourse on human rights appeared as a way of circumventing the distrust to which they were habitually subjected in France; and for leftists, human rights stood as a rallying point, because fighting the Ben Ali regime during this period meant embracing the Islamists as a matter of necessity, as they were main victims of repression. The chapter goes on to investigate two further lines of cleavage that are crucial to the full understanding of long-distance Tunisian opposition politics. These lines offer a framework that determined means of action in terms of relationships with the Islamists and the degree of rupture with the Tunisian authoritarian regime.

There is a tendency to treat African journalism fields as insignificant to scholarship unless the scholarly focus is on “improving” or “modernizing” them. This chapter argues against this tendency by arguing that African journalism is engaged in knowledge production and all its attendant politics. It argues that by taking a conflict such as Darfur as a locus, scholars can excavate the multiple discursive struggles over questions such as the role of African journalism, the place of African news organizations in global narrative construction about Africa, and the politics of belonging in which African journalists debate what it means to be African. Relying on field theory, postcolonial theory, and the sociology of knowledge, this chapter argues for a de-Westernization of journalism studies while cogently locating the origins of field theory in Algeria; thus connecting it not just to the colonial project but specifically locating field theory with a larger discourse of postcoloniality.

Many applications require solving a system of linear equations 𝑨𝒙 = 𝒚 for 𝒙 given 𝑨 and 𝒚. In practice, often there is no exact solution for 𝒙, so one seeks an approximate solution. This chapter focuses on least-squares formulations of this type of problem. It briefly reviews the 𝑨𝒙 = 𝒚 case and then motivates the more general 𝑨𝒙 ≈ 𝒚 cases. It then focuses on the over-determined case where 𝑨 is tall, emphasizing the insights offered by the SVD of 𝑨. It introduces the pseudoinverse, which is especially important for the under-determined case where 𝑨 is wide. It describes alternative approaches for the under-determined case such as Tikhonov regularization. It introduces frames, a generalization of unitary matrices. It uses the SVD analysis of this chapter to describe projection onto a subspace, completing the subspace-based classification ideas introduced in the previous chapter, and also introduces a least-squares approach to binary classifier design. It introduces recursive least-squares methods that are important for streaming data.

In this chapter, the geometric description of generic branes in Yang–Mills matrix model is elaborated, and structures familiar from gravity are identified. The dynamics resulting from the classical model is interpreted as pre-gravity.

This chapter examines how the refugee crisis was framed and portrayed by right-wing actors. Its main puzzle is how the initially sentimental, humanitarian approach to the coverage of the refugee crisis was gradually transformed to present refugees as an existential threat to European societies. We track the frames and themes utilized by mainstream and radical right parties in their official speeches, documenting that utilizing a framework focusing on security and identity, they slowly managed to shift the perceptions on immigrants arriving at European shores. Furthermore, their rhetoric aimed at actively downplaying the humanitarian element, claiming instead that the search and rescue operations had perverse effects, motivating immigrants to make the crossings into the EU and worsening the refugee crisis. Therefore, in Hirschman’s terms, a rhetoric of jeopardy and perversity dominated the right's reaction to the refugee crisis, slowly eroding sympathy toward migrants.

I ask in this chapter how embodied memories of violence and survival are captured through the various sensory reconstructions of war as a sensuous world of bodily transgressions. War affects a person’s sensibilities through the engendering of a shift in sense perception owing to unexpected turns of events. I consider how a repertoire of different genres of social texts about war and violence – from songs, letters, and poetry, to autobiographies, oral histories and others – form rich and sensuous repositories. These texts undergird how multiple facets and first-hand experiences of horror and disbelief are enacted through sensory modalities that either work individually or intersectionally. As much as the sensory provide vital clues for what might happen next – in one’s home, in the prison, or at a concentration centre – the sensory also strikes fear and anxiety on what the next course of action might be. By drawing upon ontological security theory, I show how these transpire within possible or potential recourse in differing contexts of precariousness. The senses therefore serve as a potent catalyst as they both incite fear and insecurity, but also latently security and some stability as they provide cues and information for social actors.

To counter the dominant anthropocentric and synergistic framing of the relationship between environmental protection and human rights, this chapter focuses on the conflicting dimension of this relation. It maps the main types of conflicts induced from a case-law analysis of regional human rights courts. Conflicts between nature conservation policies (through the creation of protected areas) and the rights of indigenous peoples or cultural minorities living on such lands have been deplored for long, as also instantiated through the numerous cases decided by the Inter-American and African human rights Courts and Commissions. Less has been said, however, about conflicts between animal welfare concerns and cultural or religious freedoms of certain communities; conflicts between landscape preservation policies and land ownership, including by vulnerable groups such as Roma people; and conflicts between energy policies and the rights to adequate living conditions and to property. Strasbourg and Luxembourg judges are increasingly occupied with such issues. This innovative typology of normative conflicts between environmental protection laws and human rights offers new empirical, theoretical and doctrinal insights to understand the nature and the extent of the conflicting dimension of the relationship between environmental protection and human rights.

In the introduction we describe the “wicked” global property problem of homeless squatting on empty land or in empty properties and outline some key themes explored in the book. We reflect on the nature of squatting as a property problem; and introduce the concept of “scale,” which we deploy throughout the book to describe the dynamic nature of state responses to squatting. We outline the importance of seeing “the state” in the analyses of squatting and other property problems, through its interactions with individuals, interactions with other state-bodies, and interactions with its territory, and interactions with its own institutions. Finally, we set out the structure and approach followed in the book, including reference to five primary jurisdictions: the USA, Ireland, Spain, South Africa and England and Wales.

Our knowledge of dementia stigma is still fairly limited, especially in comparison to stigma relating to mental illnesses. This chapter surveys existing scholarship and explores the historical roots of the concept of stigma and of the way different conceptions (biomedical, biopsychosocial, sociocultural and relational) of dementia generate and/or address stigma. It further identifies language, media and sociocultural structures as mechanisms that perpetuate public dementia stigma, before it turns to a number of domains in which dementia stigma can be addressed. In the domain of literature, destigmatizing efforts have attempted to generate empathy, an appreciation of complexity and insight into the condition of people living with dementia. Apart from contact-based and educational interventions, the chapter asserts that it is especially the development of 'counter-frames' that has the potential to unsettle negative perceptions of dementia. The chapter concludes by recognizing a number of methodological, conceptual and strategic challenges that complicate our evaluation of such strategies, or indeed our understanding of the complex phenomenon of dementia stigma itself.

This chapter critically compares how the concepts of activity type and genre tend to be used within the field of pragmatics. Both concepts are broadly concerned with the way in which we categorize our experiences, and develop thereby expectations about communicative behaviour within a given context. In spite of these similarities, they have very different conceptual histories. Activity types were introduced into pragmatics by Levinson (1979), having been inspired by Wittgenstein’s (1958) notion of language games. Genres can be traced back to ancient Greek literature, and have since been applied within multiple disciplines, including art and art criticism, literary studies, rhetoric, sociology, linguistics and, more specifically, pragmatics (Bazerman, 1997; Mayes, 2003). The focus of the chapter is on mapping the development and usage of these terms within the pragmatics (or a concomitant) discipline. We also comment upon concepts that seem to share "a considerable family resemblance" (Linell, 2010: 42) with activity types and/or genres. They include footing, frames (and framing), speech events, speech activities, schemas, scripts, and prototypes.

This chapter analyzes President Trump’s remarks at the 2017 Black History Month Listening Session, in particular his repeated discussion of the seemingly irrelevant subject of “fake news.” Through a framing analysis (Goffman 1974) of Trump’s language, we make sense of Trump’s seemingly non-sequitur topic shifts and illustrate how the actions he takes through these shifts function as strategic attempts to build relationships with African American participants in the session. Our analysis illustrates how Trump strives to build relationships with his African American interlocutors through first praising well-known African American figures and then shifting frames to commiserate about the news media. While praising such figures functions as Trump’s direct attempt to align with the broader African American community, making disparaging remarks about news media functions to indirectly align Trump with the politically conservative African Americans in this interaction, sometimes through their laughter at his jokes. Like many politicians, Trump elicits support as much from his implicit relational messages as from the content of what he says.