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Purpose: After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Belarus began to develop a national policy on reproductive health, influenced by late Soviet policy, market relations, and international actors. The central question of this research is how the issues of reproduction and woman’s health are reconsidered in post-Soviet Belarus, in light of the influence of various social and political factors.

Methodology/approach: This chapter critically examines discourses of legal regulations of reproduction and how they promote certain understandings of national security and traditional values through reproduction. In particular, the study is based on the discourse-analysis of the official legislative documents on reproduction in Belarus between 1991 and 2015.

Findings: The transformation of the post-Soviet social protection system, reproductive health care, family policy, as well as specific configuration of public discourse legitimize one model (unified and homogenized normative body that is heterosexual, fertile, healthy, prosperous) and exclude others (non-normative bodies that are non-heterosexual, infertile, unhealthy, poor, and thus precarious for the nation) in favor of the interests of biopolitical governance, nation-building, and neoliberal ideology. Moreover, legal documents legalize new principles of social stratification and produce new ideas about responsible parenthood.

Social implications: Although there is some scholarship on reproduction in Belarus, a thorough analysis of the public discourse and the legal regulations of reproduction has yet to be conducted. Contributing to the debate about post-Soviet reproductive politics, this chapter explores the influence of the biopolitical dialogue and the panic around depopulation on social policies. In particular, this chapter offers more critical perspective toward the economic and social dynamics in Belarus, taking into account the variety of processes and configurations of discourses that influence official policy.

Two paradoxes constitute the discourse of human rights. One concerns the relationship between “the human” and “the political”; the other invokes the opposition between the universalist moral character of human rights and the practical, particular context in which they become manifest. This chapter argues how and why these paradoxes will not go away – a good thing, too – over and against classical and contemporary writers who have argued for the priority of one or the other. After elucidating the powerful and enduring character of these paradoxes in history and political theory, I argue that human rights discourse only makes sense in terms of the arguably more primary discourses of democracy, political virtue, and justice if it is to avoid being a deceptive, rhetorical cover for dubious political practices.

Across the Americas, public discussions of crime and penal practices have become increasingly punitive even as political struggles have resulted in a broad shift toward Constitutional democracy. In this chapter, we suggest that the spread of tough anti-crime talk and practice is, paradoxically, a response to efforts to expand and deepen democracy. Punitive crime talk is useful to political actors seeking to limit formal and social citizenship rights for several reasons. First, it ostensibly targets problematic behavior rather than particular social groups, and thus appears to be consistent with democratic norms. At the same time, crime talk often acquires coded meanings that enable those who mobilize it to tap into inter-group hostility, anxieties, and fear. In addition, the emphasis on the threat of crime and disorder offers those seeking to limit democratic expansion a way to legitimate truncated visions of the rights and entitlements of citizenship. Tough anti-crime rhetoric often resonates with those who have experienced or fear the loss of symbolic and/or material benefits as a result of democratic reform. In short, the broad shift toward hyper-penality is, at least in part, a consequence of struggles over political democracy, citizenship and governance across the Americas.

The decisive antidualism in Bourdieu’s thought permits searching for the complementary traits of his theory of symbolic social system and symbolic interactionism, rather than opposition. The theory of the symbolic social system, which is characterized by the double structure of meanings in the order of social relations and its symbolic representation in the narrower sense, has many convergent points of view with the symbolic interactionists’ perspective, starting with the category of habitus. Conceptual frameworks of structuralist constructivism and symbolic interactionism have one major difference – in Bourdieu’s theory the individual self is not inscribed. There are, however, strong common premises in terms of epistemology, theory of meaning and social ontology. Both epistemologies are antidualistic and relativistic (antiessentialism). Both approaches are based on a common theory of the social origin of meaning (anticognitivism). Both social ontologies are constructivist (social construction of reality). However, Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic struggle for control over the commonsense world-view introduces a new, political dimension to interpretive sociology.

In recent years, a great deal of work has emerged on eco-cities in China. Specifically, writers have discussed the role of the entrepreneurial state in the construction of eco-cities and have noted the role of these cities in the production of high-end real estate and new forms of capital accumulation and land acquisition. Whilst this chapter supports these arguments, we argue that the emergence of eco-cities in China is tied up with broader socioeconomic and cultural discourses and discourses of governance. We explore these ideas through a qualitative investigation of an eco-city known as the North Lake (Beihu) Ecological New Town (NLENT) located in the city of Jining, Shandong province. Specifically, this project, which involved the collection of documents, photographs and 20 semi-structured interviews, aims to understand the role that discourses of class, taste and consumption play in the fashioning of Chinese eco-cities. In exploring discourses of ‘green conduct’, this chapter also seeks to understand the role of eco-cities in the governmental fashioning of Chinese subjects and bodies. In this regard, this chapter suggests that whilst new forms of green development have played a part in urban expansion, new green real estate zones such as the NLENT have a powerful role to play in the construction and shaping of Chinese identity and behaviour.

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a social ontology pioneered by Dorothy Smith, the Canadian feminist-sociologist. Conceptualizing discourse as social relations that are organized by the activities of people and are empirically investigable, IE has been increasingly employed by researchers outside of sociology in fields such as education and health. The goal in these cases has often been to explicate the effects of power flowing through textually mediated discourses that work to reconfigure local practices to align with official policy mandates. Yet the discourse analysis performed in much IE to date has not paid close linguistic attention to the way specific actors utilize texts in an active appropriation of what Smith calls the “ruling relations” constituting official discourses. Using data from an IE of student equity practices in Australian higher education, this chapter illustrates how a Fairclough-inspired critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the “orders of discourse” assembled within a relay of university and government texts is able to provide useful analytical purchase on how equity policies are actively appropriated within a university outreach practice. It demonstrates how the accomplishment of student equity outreach involves the hybridizing of equity and excellence discourses in ways that bolster the dominant position of an Australian university. This working together of distinct IE and CDA approaches offers possibilities for more nuanced accounts of individual and collective agency in the process of semiotic and social change.

The author investigates and debates around authenticity in relation to the heritage communities of a Chinese intangible cultural heritage (ICH) item ‘Nüshu’. Nüshu is a monosyllabic phonetic system of writing created and used by women in the Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, in Southern China. Drawing on insights from both online and offline ethnographies, this study argues that in the field of ICH, disputes over heritage authenticity are fiercely negotiated by different stakeholders, including powerful state and supra-state actors. However, the emergence of digital platform has become a way for Nüshu participants to perform their identity and competence and lay claim to their own heritage authenticity.