Search Results (772)

This article analyses how three leading female figures of the European far right—Marine Le Pen (France), Giorgia Meloni (Italy), and Alice Weidel (Germany)—construct populist discourse on X (formerly Twitter) during recent high-stakes election campaigns. The analysis is based on a corpus of 1053 posts published in the month preceding the 2022 French presidential elections, the 2022 Italian general elections, and the 2025 German federal elections. Methodologically, it combines content analysis (operationalised through a codebook developed in Atlas.ti v23), Critical Discourse Analysis, and comparative analysis to identify dominant issues, campaign strategies, and underlying discursive structures. Adopting a corpus-pragmatic perspective, the study undertakes a pragmatic examination of implicit meaning—presupposition, implication, and implicature—to show how meaning is conveyed in authentic, digitally mediated political data. The findings reveal a shared populist communicative matrix centred on polarisation, simplification, and emotional mobilisation, alongside important national variations. Le Pen and Meloni primarily construct an “internal traitor” among political elites, linking economic and social grievances to elite failure. In contrast, Weidel recentres migration and security, portraying migrants as a direct threat and mainstream parties as responsible for citizens’ insecurity. The article highlights the need for further research on gender and leadership in the contemporary European far right. Full article

Rhetorical theology, a term coined by Andre E. Johnson, is religious rhetoric grounded in the context of lived experience that produces constructs of God concerned with the practical implications of religious doctrine. For example, Johnson argues that Henry McNeal Turner’s rhetoric, “God is a Negro,” takes seriously the harmful psychological implications of the Black community serving a white God, thus illustrating how theology emerges from the lived consequences of belief. Building on Johnson’s framework, this paper proposes rhetorical theology as a pedagogical approach to build bridges of understanding when engaging with contentious topics of sex and sexuality in higher education. Students are assigned a rhetorical theology paper on a topic, such as gender roles, transgender identity, homosexuality, masturbation, or polyamory. Students argue two contradictory perspectives of the topic by applying rhetorical theology’s four key assumptions to each position: faithful persuasion, implications of doctrine, contextuality, and the invitation of the rhetor. The process develops critical thinking by examining the theological claims, socio-political contextual realities, and the practical implications of each position, regardless of the students’ personal convictions. This pedagogical practice fosters bridge-building across divergent perspectives while equipping students to engage in conversations about sex and sexuality with greater nuance, understanding, and awareness of theology’s social and political consequences. Full article

Early identification of depression risk from social media text can support large-scale screening and timely follow-up. However, posts are often emotionally complex and linguistically ambiguous, which makes robust detection challenging. This paper proposes RST-DS (Rhetorical Structure Theory-based Depression Scanning), a discourse-aware framework that integrates Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) signals with lexical evidence for classifying posts as Depressed/Non-Depressed (D/ND). Using Reddit posts, we compute an RST-derived score capturing rhetorical relationships and coherence and fuse it with lexical features represented via Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency using two strategies: feature addition (+) and feature concatenation ($\left|\right|$). We evaluate K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Logistic Regression (LR), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), along with a soft-voting ensemble model named MLPBoostReg (an ensemble of LR, XGBoost, and MLP). Using a 5-fold cross validation, the concatenation strategy consistently outperforms the addition strategy across accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The best-performing configuration, MLPBoostReg$\left|\right|$ achieves the highest accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score of 0.970, indicating a strong balance between identifying depression-related content and limiting false alarms. These findings suggest that combining rhetorical structure with lexical evidence improves depression detection from social media text, while noting that social-media labels do not substitute for clinical diagnosis. Full article

The growing influence of artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping religious communication, including Islamic preaching. However, little is known about how AI-mediated preaching transforms religious authority, particularly in post-Soviet Muslim contexts such as Kazakhstan. This study addresses this gap by examining how AI reshapes the foundations of religious authority in Kazakhstan. It aims to conceptualize emerging forms of authority and to compare communicative patterns across AI-generated, hybrid, and human-led preaching. The qualitative comparative design was employed, analyzing 90 social media posts from six accounts across various social media platforms. The study integrates digital discourse analysis, rhetorical analysis (ethos, pathos, logos), and audience engagement analysis to examine content structure, authority construction, and interaction patterns. The findings reveal the emergence of algorithmic religious authority, grounded in visibility, consistency, and platform alignment rather than traditional scholarly legitimacy. AI-generated preaching demonstrates high standardization, simulated credibility, and passive engagement, while hybrid preaching combines algorithmic optimization with human contextualization. Human-led preaching retains interpretive depth, relational authority, and stronger dialogical interaction. Together, these forms create a stratified and pluralized system of authority. The study concludes that AI is not merely a tool but a structuring force that redefines the epistemic foundations of religious authority, introducing conditions of “authority without accountability” in digitally mediated Islamic preaching. Full article

This paper conducts a comprehensive empirical evaluation of macroeconomic outcomes under two competing policy paradigms that have governed the United States since the end of World War II: the Keynesian-inflected New Deal Order (1946–1980), rooted in John Maynard Keynes’s theory of aggregate demand management, and the Neoliberal Order (1981–2024), shaped by the price mechanism epistemics of Friedrich A. Hayek and the monetarist counter-revolution of Milton Friedman. Drawing on the historiographical frameworks we operationalize the 1981 policy transition as a natural experiment and apply a fourteen-component analytical pipeline to an annual panel of fifteen Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) series spanning 1946–2024. Our methods include: Pruned Exact Linear Time (PELT) structural break detection; normality-adaptive hypothesis testing with Cohen’s d effect sizes; Principal Component Analysis (PCA); a gradient-boosted XGBoost classifier with SHAP interpretability; static and rolling Phillips curve estimation; bootstrapped fiscal multiplier analysis using the corrected Federal Surplus/Deficit ratio; Composite Macroeconomic Performance Index (CMPI) construction; Pearson correlation structure comparison; regime-stratified Okun’s Law analysis; real federal fund rate and yield curve decomposition; M2 velocity and monetary transmission analysis; k-means sub-period temporal clustering; and government debt trajectory with decade-level performance benchmarking. The Keynesian era produced significantly higher mean real GDP growth (3.7% vs. 2.7%), lower structural unemployment (5.0% vs. 6.2%), and a functioning Phillips curve trade-off that collapsed entirely under neoliberalism ($\widehat{\beta }\approx 0$, $p=0.94$). The real federal fund rate averaged negative under the Keynesian regime and turned persistently positive after the Volcker shock. M2 velocity declined sharply in the neoliberal era, refuting the stable quantity theory link central to monetarist policy prescriptions. Temporal clustering recovers five distinct macroeconomic epochs that only partially align with the 1981 historiographical boundary, revealing substantial heterogeneity within each broad regime. The Reagan-era debt expansion, made visible by the corrected debt/GDP trajectory, constitutes a striking empirical contradiction to neoliberal fiscal rhetoric. Together, these results support the interpretation that the two policy regimes represent genuinely distinct macroeconomic equilibria with persistent and measurable consequences for growth, employment, price stability, monetary transmission, and fiscal sustainability. A battery of robustness checks addressing confounding structural shocks, alternative regime boundaries, policy endogeneity, model complexity, and index-construction sensitivity confirms that the core findings are not artifacts of the 1981 periodization, and a cluster-validity analysis formally supports a five-epoch, rather than strictly binary, characterization of the postwar policy landscape. Full article

The Arabic–Persian quatrain (Pers. robāʿī; Ar. rubāʿī/dūbayt) has long been approached primarily through a prosodic lens, often discussed within debates on the autonomy or dependence of Persian and Arabic metrical systems. This article argues that this perspective obscures a more consequential development: the gradual transformation of the quatrain from a metrically codified structure in Persian into a conceptually and rhetorically flexible poetic form within Arabic literary discourse. Through philological, prosodic, and rhetorical analysis, the study examines the persistent terminological ambiguity between rubāʿī and dūbayt, the instability of its assimilation into the Khalīlian metrical system, and its broader conceptual reconfiguration across linguistic and literary contexts. Rather than a simple instance of formal borrowing, the quatrain emerges as a mobile poetic structure circulating across a multilingual Islamic literary sphere in which poetic authority and form were continually renegotiated. By foregrounding these dynamics, the article proposes a reassessment of the quatrain as a literary form shaped by interliterary exchange and, more broadly, invites a reconsideration of premodern literary entanglements beyond modern system-based models of world literature. Full article

Business process reengineering (BPR) is usually remembered as one of the most visible management fashions of the 1990s. It rose rapidly, promised radical redesign and major performance gains, and later lost legitimacy as many implementations failed to match the rhetoric and became associated with disruption, downsizing, and managerial overreach. Yet the organizational problem to which BPR responded never disappeared: how should organizations redesign processes when new technologies alter what is possible? This paper revisits BPR in light of recent developments in generative and agentic artificial intelligence. This perspective article develops a conceptual interpretation rather than a systematic review or empirical test. Its purpose is to clarify an emerging pattern in management discourse and process-management research: the possible reactivation of BPR-style redesign logic under new technological and discursive conditions. Using management fashion theory as the main lens, it suggests that AI may be creating conditions under which elements of BPR’s underlying redesign logic become newly relevant. The argument is not that the BPR label has simply returned. Rather, aspects of its core ambition appear to be rearticulated through adjacent and more legitimate vocabularies such as business process management, AI-augmented business process management systems, Large Process Models, and agentic BPM. To capture this pattern, the paper introduces the concept of translated resurgence, referring to the renewed relevance of an older management idea through relabeling, reinterpretation, and mutation. The paper further argues that AI may alter the technical feasibility of radical process redesign while leaving many classic BPR risks intact. The result is best understood not as a simple revival, but as an emerging and still unsettled phase in the longer afterlife of a once-prominent management idea. Full article

Large language models are part of everyday scholarly writing, but their influence may not always appear as obvious AI authorship. More often, it may appear through gradual changes in academic style. This study examines whether biomedical abstracts show measurable signs of LLM-associated “same-ification” after the public release of ChatGPT. Instead of classifying individual abstracts as AI-written, our study analyses population-level changes across 28,415 PubMed abstracts published between 2018 and 2025. A strict dictionary of LLM-associated stylistic markers was used alongside a control vocabulary, lexical diversity, semantic similarity, interrupted time-series modelling, journal-level heterogeneity analysis, and a study-specific validation framework called SAME-ML. The findings show a clear post-2022 stylistic shift. Mean strict marker use increased from 4.995 to 11.658 markers per 1000 words, representing a 133.4% rise, while the control vocabulary slightly declined. This increase was strongest in 2024 and 2025 and was mainly driven by markers linked to value framing, contribution signalling, connective phrasing, improvement rhetoric, and problem-solution positioning. SAME-ML further showed that the post-ChatGPT period contained a learnable stylistic signal that remained visible after topic-masked and matched-sample validation. Overall, the findings show a corpus-level rhetorical shift and provide a reproducible approach for tracking stylistic change in scholarly communication over time. Full article

Cloud Atlas (2004) presents a process of religious genesis. This genesis is set against the backdrop of the retreat of stable institutions and recoverable origins, gradually taking shape at the far end of a broken transmission chain. Existing criticism has tended to examine this novel’s nested form separately from Sonmi~451’s posthumous sanctification. This article connects these lines of inquiry by reading the orison as a witness medium within a broken chain of narrative transmission. Along this chain, Ewing’s Pacific diary establishes a compromised model of institutional Christianity, in which faith gains public effectiveness from conversionist rhetoric. This damaged state of institutional religion constitutes a reverse baseline prior to the formation of Sonmi’s testimony as a witness medium. Sonmi’s interrogation in Nea So Copros records political speech as testimony, giving material form to a condemned voice and supporting it to survive beyond her execution at the end of her world. Zachry’s post-apocalyptic valley receives this damaged medium, whose legal grammar has vanished from local memory, but the loss of this grammar does not bring reception to an end. In this context, Meronym’s historical interpretation of Sonmi’s origin intensifies the pressure on devotional allegiance, with sacred use first persisting in prayer and ritual space, then entering the cradle-side oral narrative. The novel’s nested design allows the reader to move across separate storyworlds. Only in this cross-world position can the reader juxtapose the state-recorded testimony with its afterlife as an object of prayer. Thus, religion as a communal claim is formed under semantic loss and becomes clearly visible only from the reader’s cross-world position. Full article

The Spanish democratic transition inaugurated in 1977 an uninterrupted electoral cycle in which the campaign poster became the foremost propagandistic medium and the most immediate expression of the political culture of each moment. No longitudinal analysis has yet covered the full arc from the first democratic elections of 15 June 1977 to the general elections of 23 July 2023, nor has the transition from ideological propaganda to personalised political marketing and multiplatform communication been systematically examined across all sixteen electoral contests. This study analyses campaign posters from the Spanish general elections available in the Dipòsit Digital de Documents of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) through a mixed-methods longitudinal design that is explicitly framed as a qualitative historical–comparative interpretation supported by descriptive quantitative evidence, combining critical visual discourse analysis, semiotic image analysis, quantitative content analysis, and the historical–comparative method, applied to a representative corpus of posters from the main political parties in each contest. The findings reveal three major evolutionary stages characterised by shifts in partisan identity construction, leadership personalisation, and the progressive integration of poster imagery into multiplatform communication ecosystems. These results indicate that electoral poster design both reflects and actively shapes transformations in Spanish political culture, and that the poster retains significant strategic and symbolic relevance within contemporary digital campaign environments. Full article

This study presents a clear and reliable framework for classifying the intent behind scientific citations. It combines multi-model reasoning with concepts from social choice theory. Instead of using a single model, this framework employs three open Large Language Models Gemma, LLaMA, and Mistral. Additionally, we combine their ranked outputs using an exponentially weighted Borda method. By doing so, this approach increases agreement among high-confidence predictions, maintains ranking information, and produces stable, high-quality supervision signals. Consequently, it boosts reliability while remaining transparent. To create a strong experimental basis, we built a large, balanced dataset from the UnarXive corpus, which contains structured full-text scientific articles and citation networks. First, we automatically pulled citation contexts and organized them within a DuckDB-based analytical setup. Then, we rebalanced the dataset across rhetorical categories to enhance representativeness and minimize bias. Finally, we categorized each citation context into one of five roles: background, methodology, comparison, extension, or critique. As a result, the resulting dataset provides a robust foundation for training and evaluation. We trained a SciBERT classifier using these ensemble-generated annotations and tested it on a five-category citation intent classification task. The model achieved a macro F1-score of 0.83, an outstanding result for this type of classification. Indeed, this level of performance shows strong reliability given how challenging it is to differentiate closely related citation functions. Moreover, it demonstrates that combining multiple models produces valuable and distinct supervision signals, capturing subtle rhetorical and semantic patterns that single models often overlook. Furthermore, the framework enhances interpretability. Specifically, the explicit weighting system clarifies how each model contributes to the final outcome. In addition, the deterministic tie-breaking method ensures the outputs are consistent and reproducible. Taken together, these design choices maintain explainability without sacrificing effectiveness. Full article

The Eastern Mediterranean has always been a space where religious traditions, geopolitical antagonisms, and migratory waves intersect, yet existing literature treats religious diplomacy, climate geopolitics, and the securitization of migration as separate fields, leaving a significant research gap for 2015–2025. Drawing on Appleby’s notion of the “ambivalence of the sacred,” this study proposes the Eastern Mediterranean as a “religious geopolitical zone”—a space in which Islamic and Christian institutions move simultaneously, rather than sequentially, between humanitarian dialogue and securitization under accelerating climate pressure. Combining Critical Geopolitics, Copenhagen School securitization theory, and Environmental Peacebuilding, it applies geopolitical discourse analysis to texts by the Vatican, Al-Azhar, the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Diyanet, and Sant’Egidio, together with UNHCR, IOM, and IPCC data. The analysis shows that religious rhetoric functions concurrently as a securitizing “speech-act” that legitimizes exclusionary policies through cultural nationalism and a foundation for humanitarian cooperation, as evidenced by the Sant’Egidio Humanitarian Corridors and the Vatican–Al-Azhar dialogue. Climate change likewise operates simultaneously as a material multiplier of tension and as a semiotic resource that either reinforces securitization or establishes a common moral basis for interfaith environmental action. The findings offer an analytical model that enriches securitization theory, Critical Geopolitics, and the religious diplomacy literature, with implications for actors seeking to move the region toward sustainable cooperation. Full article

The growing availability of large-scale online data has created new opportunities for analysing public discourse on climate change, although the reconstruction of structured social representations within digital environments remains methodologically challenging. This study proposes a computational framework for adapting the Hierarchical Evocation Method (HEM), grounded in Social Representation Theory, to large-scale social media discourse. Using a continuously updated Reddit dataset on climate change, the approach combines theory-informed lexical anchoring with data-driven semantic expansion to construct a renewable energy subcorpus comprising 91,817 comments published between 2018 and 2026. Representational structures are reconstructed through user-level lexical diffusion, positional salience, rhetorical foregrounding, and co-occurrence analysis, enabling the identification of central, peripheral, and contrastive components within online discourse. The results reveal a relatively stabilised representational core centred on climate transition, fossil dependency, renewable infrastructures, and socio-economic transformation, while peripheral zones display greater contextual variability and evaluative fragmentation. Longitudinal analyses further suggest a progressive consolidation of renewable energy discourse despite high user turnover and sustained growth in participation. The framework additionally highlights the relevance of affective and interactional dimensions, particularly through the widespread use of ironic and sceptical emoji configurations. Methodologically, the study provides a transparent and reproducible computational pipeline that extends classical evocation-based approaches to large-scale, dynamic corpora. More broadly, the findings contribute to sustainability communication research by showing how renewable energy is collectively framed and negotiated within English Reddit-based digital discussions. Full article

This article theorizes conscience as a political principle in the context of polarized democracy, examining its strategic articulation in the rhetoric of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu between 2010 and 2023. While existing scholarship on polarization and majoritarianism has focused primarily on identity politics and institutional erosion, less attention has been paid to the moral vocabularies through which opposition actors reconfigure democratic legitimacy. Drawing on conscience and theories of secularism, this study conceptualizes conscience as a mediating category that unsettles the binary between religious authority and secular reason. Through qualitative discourse analysis of parliamentary speeches, campaign addresses, and party documents, the article demonstrates how conscience is framed simultaneously as transcendent and universal—invoked as divinely resonant yet politically inclusive. I argue that this formulation constitutes a heterodox model of religion–politics relations that departs from both assertive secularism and majoritarianism. By privileging individual moral deliberation over collective identity claims, Kılıçdaroğlu articulates a liberal-pluralist alternative aimed at depolarizing democratic contestation. The findings contribute to political theory by advancing an account of conscience as a performative and strategic resource in democratic struggles. More broadly, the study offers a framework for understanding how moral rhetoric can be mobilized to foster democratic resilience in deeply divided societies, with implications extending beyond the Turkish case. Full article