European civic integration programmes claim to provide newcomers with necessary tools for successful participation. Simultaneously, these programmes have been criticised for being restrictive, market-driven and for working towards an implicit goal of limiting migration. Authors have questioned how these programmes discursively construct an offensive image of the Other and how colonial histories are reproduced in the constructions seen today. The Dutch civic integration programme is considered a leading example of a restrictive programme within Europe. Research has critically questioned the discourses within its policies, yet limited research has moved beyond policy to focus on discourse in texts in practice. This study presents a critical discourse analysis of texts used in the civic integration programme and demonstrates that they participate in multiple discursive constructions: the construction of the Dutch nation-state and its citizens as inherently modern, the construction of the Other as Unmodern and thus a threat, and the construction of the hierarchical relationship between the two. The civic integration programme has been left out of discussions on decolonisation to date, contributing to it remaining a core practice of othering. This study applies post-colonial theories to understand the impacts of current discourse, and forwards possibilities for consideration of decolonised alternatives.
Growing research in sign language recognition, generation, and translation AI has been accompanied by calls for ethical development of such technologies. While these works are crucial to helping individual researchers do better, there is a notable lack of discussion of systemic biases or analysis of rhetoric that shape the research questions and methods in the field, especially as it remains dominated by hearing non-signing researchers. Therefore, we conduct a systematic review of 101 recent papers in sign language AI. Our analysis identifies significant biases in the current state of sign language AI research, including an overfocus on addressing perceived communication barriers, a lack of use of representative datasets, use of annotations lacking linguistic foundations, and development of methods that build on flawed models. We take the position that the field lacks meaningful input from Deaf stakeholders, and is instead driven by what decisions are the most convenient or perceived as important to hearing researchers. We end with a call to action: the field must make space for Deaf researchers to lead the conversation in sign language AI.
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This study aims at examining the ways people communicate about energy transition, by analyzing the discourse of different stakeholders in a case of a local initiative for renewable energy. When moving from traditional to renewable energy, social acceptance of new technologies is of central importance, as public opposition can have extremely negative consequences for transition projects (Wuestenhagen, Wolsink & Buerer 2007). In order to get insights into the frames used by citizens when talking about energy transition, we chose a successful case of a local energy initiative from the northern of the Netherlands committed to supporting citizens in generating their own energy. Drawing on a corpus of online data, we conducted a discourse analysis from a discursive socioconstructivist perspective (Edwards 1994; Potter 1996) in order to examine examples of active social engagement in which local initiatives and citizens contribute to sustainability by generating their own energy (Bosman et. al 2013; Schwenke 2012). The main aim was to identify the frames that play a role in the discourse about successful local energy initiatives and allow us to better grasp the dynamics behind this type of upstream social engagement movements. Our results stress out the need for local initiatives to develop a discursive strategy that specifically distances itself from centralist approaches by stressing out the local aspect of energy transition, in opposition to national government approaches, as well as the social aspect of jointly improving the environment. The frames found are thus aimed at establishing contrasts in relation to institutions and approaches in which the public has gained distrust, on the one hand, and at constructing new collective identities with a shared vision, on the other. These results shed a light to the ways in which energy transition can be framed in order to increase local acceptance for renewable energy projects.
