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This introductory chapter describes the book's aim to attempt to recognize food and agriculture as significant factors in Britain during the 1930s, not as elements standing apart from identified major issues. They also deserve to be part of the historical discourse. The relationship between food, agriculture and rearmament should be analysed as important in its own right because it provides additional insights into the decade. The end goal is to add to the understanding of the relationship between food production, processing, distribution, and consumption on the one hand, and rearmament as broadly conceived on the other. Knowing how the government planned to handle food and agriculture if war should break out as well as the extent to which the public was informed about these plans, should broaden the appreciation of many issues Britain faced in the 1930s.

This chapter sets out the central theoretical frameworks that form the basis of this study. The concept of discourse is firstly enumerated with an explanation of why this concept is potentially so fruitful for a study of Russian-speaking identities in contemporary Latvia. Specific attention is paid to the question of how and why discourses change over time and the implications of these changes. This section also highlights the link between memory and national identity formation. Drawing on the work of a number of memory scholars, it is argued that memories can form an important link between the past and the present and that memories can possess power to create strong group identities.Centrally important to this research is a discourse-historical approach to studying discourse. Consequently, this chapter provides a set of theoretical, conceptual, and methodological justifications for this approach. It is argued that contemporary discourses should not be studied in isolation. Instead they should be contextualised by analysis of their temporality and how they evolve through time.

Though public discussions of climate change are recent, they draw on older discourses. In the last decade or two, climate change impacts have been presented as a pressing concern in some places, while in others they seem less urgent. We examine the discussions of place-based climate impacts in four different regions (the Arctic, islands, deserts, and mountains) and emphasize two characteristics of this conversation. First, we see it as an extension of earlier conversations—some of them from previous centuries—about the nature of places and the nature of the earth. Second, we find that these discourses are not the product of the representatives of powerful nations alone, but also represent the engagement of weak, often disenfranchised, speakers from regions distant from centers of power.

This chapter examines various genres of the historical Islamic discourse on religious difference—including the apologetic, polemical, exegetical, juridical, and Sufi—in an effort to highlight the complex and diverse processes of self-identification, boundary creation, and Othering that are woven throughout Islamic history. In these diverse genres, this chapter highlights a number of recurring themes, including the role of divine ontology (e.g., divine oneness and mercy) in assessing the human Other; the depiction of created anthropology (e.g., the status of humans without revelation and the purpose of humanity); the relationship between various revelations and prophets (e.g., issues of taḥrīf, supersession, completion, and the necessity of affirming Muḥammad); and the legal and soteriological explication of Qurʾānic categories (e.g., definition of threshold criteria and internal composition of categories such as īmān, islām, and kufr).

This chapter discusses salient concepts of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) in respect of analyzing organizational communication and discourse with a focus on decision-making. More specifically, this chapter juxtaposes Process Theory with the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) in CDS. The chapter claims that these two approaches complement each other well and that systematic linguistic analysis could contribute to a more macro-oriented process approach. Some key patterns of interaction in meetings and some discursive strategies which are highly influential in decision-making are illustrated while drawing on the range of meeting data from EU organizations from ethnography and fieldwork. Finally, in the conclusion, the salient implications of such an integrated approach are discussed.

This chapter demonstrates the role of the heroic personality in history that entered the historical discourse of the nineteenth century. It analyzes the popular debate in connection with the publication of Thomas Carlyle's famous book in 1840. It also reviews the distinction between archaeological truth and the historical truth of the heroic personality which is formed in the popular imagination and becomes an active force in history. The chapter mentions Ahad Ha'am and his attempt to capture the impact of the mythical personality of Moses, whose concrete existence virtually has no retrievable evidence at all. It describes Ahad Ha'am's framework of interpretation that is designed to cope with the state of the evidence on Moses.

This chapter explores how movies function as “memory-making films” and the way an individual film is transposed into cultural memory. Offering a reading of Flags of Our Fathers (2006), it considers the impact of Clint Eastwood’s film on historical discourse. It argues that Flags of Our Fathers shows a process of translation and negotiation where the remediation of the battle of Iwo Jima turns truth into myth and raises the question of whether it is possible to represent the past as it was. It also considers the role played by historical truth when eruptive and erratic traumatic memories meet memory politics. The chapter suggests that a polyphonous and multi-vocal fiction film may be the closest thing we find to something that can provoke the public into thinking critically about the past.

This chapter questions to what extent our imagination of Europe depends upon our imagination of politics. How can we re-imagine Europe and its Union through re-imaging its politics? The chapter offers a critical reflection of the meaning of politics as practiced within the European Parliament. Applying a discourse-historical approach (DHA), Ruth Wodak defines politics from within an inclusive ontology; sets out discourse-analytic tools to study political communication; and makes the case for the salience of research which distinguishes between spaces of ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ politics and the interactions between the two. She then illustrates her arguments through a DHA analysis of different types of conversation held by an MEP (Hans) during one day. A central argument made throughout is that many of the communities of practice where Hans implements his strategies and pushes his agenda are ‘backstage’ and hence are potentially invisible practices. Rendering these micro-processes of politics more visible is thus one important contribution which an inclusive ontology of the EU can make to on-going discussions on European democracy.

Historical discourse in the late twentieth century was dominated by a succession of ideas and theoretical frameworks. For most of the last seventy-five years of the twentieth century, ideologies such as socialism, fascism, existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, conservatism vied with one another in both politics and academic conferences. But it was not always so. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholarship was dominated not by big ideas but by methodological refinement and disciplinary consolidation. This chapter suggests that we are at a similar moment of change, that we are entering a new phase of scholarship dominated not by ideas but once again by organizing activities, in terms of both organizing knowledge and organizing ourselves and our work. The Internet has shifted the work of a growing number of scholars away from thinking big thoughts to forging new tools, methods, materials, techniques, and modes or work that will enable us to harness the still unwieldy, but obviously game-changing, information technologies now sitting on our desktops and in our pockets.

This chapter focuses on the representation of women’s educational attainment as a development paradox in Jordan and the Middle East. The paradox is in keeping with a larger industry of defining Arab Muslim women in terms of development problems to be addressed through the expertise of development institutions. It is also clearly linked to a persistent and historical discourse about the Middle East, which characterizes its women as oppressed and powerless victims and its culture as retrograde. The global preoccupation with education in the region has figured strongly in such representations, with the state of education being linked to extremism, cultural backwardness, and even violence. Despite the important contributions of scholars studying women in the region over the past few decades, the popular image of Arab Muslim women continues to be that they are oppressed, weak, and passive victims.

Unlike Laurence Sterne's use of handwriting, who signed copies of the first edition of Tristram Shandy to keep it from being pirated, the miscellanies used such invitations to handwriting, not to authorize the printed book, but instead to frame the book as a shared space, either between one reader and another or between readers and authors. The singular identity of the hand in Sterne's Tristram Shandy—whether it was the author's autograph or those famous wavy lines that is discussed in this chapter—starkly contrasted with the commonality of hands in the miscellany, often captured in the familiar miscellany subtitle, “by several hands.” Sterne's own wavy line was itself a citation, or parody, of Hogarth's notion of the serpentine line as the line of beauty from the Analysis of Beauty and was thus integrally tied to eighteenth- century debates about the relationship between lines, the visual arts, and social distinction. More importantly, the wavy line marked a fundamental threshold between visual and linguistic signs. The wavy line as epigraph was in some sense the image of the interaction between text and image, an expression of an increasingly sophisticated intermedial sensibility that was emerging in romantic readers and writers.

Using Louis Althusser’s question, “What is it to read?” this chapter suggests that through multiple re-engagements with a text, readers can find “new-born the experience of a reading.” For Althusser, this newly born experience is the catalyst that urges readers to continue with a second reading, a guilty reading, which will nudge them further and deeper into contemplation and reflection. To be guilty of reading Methods, one must have a better understanding both of how the “principles that guide its implementation” came to be chosen among all others and what it is that Methods does to us. To read Methods as text is to read them as ideological, products of historical discourses that have been entered and understood differently at various times. It is to struggle to break free of structures that oppress both teacher/student and teaching/learning and to situate and challenge their historical conception as simple arrival and expansion.