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New statutory Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) guidance for schools in England was published in 2019. The RSE guidance was revised following heavy criticism, as well as a need for RSE to incorporate relevant legal changes in the UK such as the Same-Sex Marriage Act (2013) and the Equality Act (2010). One of the major revisions since the preceding version has been the new inclusion of LGBTQ+ identities and relationships. Some groups in the UK have recently mobilised against this inclusion of positive teaching about LGBTQ+ identities and relationships. Groups have, for example, held public protests outside schools in Birmingham. The protests suggest that although there is overwhelming support for the new guidance, there are still groups in society who are opposed to democratic teaching about this dimension of equality. This paper firstly analyses the key discursive strategies deployed by the anti-LGBTQ+ protest groups to distort progressive views of gender and sexuality within the UK school context. I conduct a discourse analysis of talk in some of the publicly-available video recordings of the protests, as well as associated press reporting of the protests. The discursive practices are analysed using Van Dijk's (1992) and Marlow's (2015) critical discourse analysis frameworks for analysing discriminatory discourse and denial strategies. I then compare the language used by the protest groups against the language used by other UK groups who support and continue to campaign for LGBTQ+ inclusion in RSE. The groups focused on are Schools Out (an education charity focused on making schools safe for LGBT communities) and Imaan LGBTQ (the UK's leading LGBTQ charity). Positive discourse analysis (Bartlett, 2012; Hughes, 2018; Martin, 2004), as a progressive dimension of critical discourse analysis, is used to examine how the language used by these groups functions to resist the discriminatory discourse used by the anti-LGBTQ+ groups analysed in the first part of the paper. Analysis of the discourse used by the two ...

ABSTRACT New statutory Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) guidance for schools in England was published in 2019. One of the major revisions since the preceding version has been the new inclusion of LGBTQ+ identities and relationships. Some groups in the UK have recently protested against this inclusion of positive teaching about LGBTQ+ identities and relationships, suggesting that, although there is overwhelming support for the new guidance, there are still groups in society who are opposed to democratic teaching about this dimension of equality. Focusing on publicly-available video recordings of the protests, this article firstly critically analyses the key discursive strategies deployed by the anti-LGBTQ+ protest groups to produce discrimination and denial. I then compare the language used by the protest groups against the language used by other UK groups who support and continue to campaign for LGBTQ+ inclusion in RSE. Positive discourse analysis, as a progressive dimension of critical discourse analysis, is used to examine how the language used by these groups functions to resist the discriminatory discourse used by the anti-LGBTQ+ groups analysed in the first part of the article. Analysis of the discourse used by the two sets of groups reveals conflicting discourses around what is perceived to constitute 'democracy' and 'equality' in the context of LGBTQ+ inclusion and schools, suggesting that these are fragile concepts in the current British political climate.

This volume serves as a critical examination of the discourses at play in the higher education system and the ways in which these discourses underpin the transmission of neoliberal values in 21st century universities. Situated within a Critical Discourse Analysis-based framework, the book also draws upon other linguistic approaches, including corpus linguistics and appraisal analysis, to unpack the construction and development of the management style known as managerialism, emergent in the 1990s US and UK higher education systems, and the social dynamics and power relations embedded within the discourses at the heart of managerialism in today's universities. Each chapter introduces a particular aspect of neoliberal discourse in higher education and uses these multiple linguistic approaches to analyze linguistic data in two case studies and demonstrate these principles at work. This multi-layered systematic linguistic framework allows for a nuanced exploration of neoliberal institutional discourse and its implications for academic labor, offering a critique of the managerial system in higher education but also a larger voice for alternative discursive narratives within the academic community. This important work is a key resource for students and scholars in applied linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, sociology, business and management studies, education, and cultural studies.

Presenting new and exciting data from lesbian and gay conversations, narratives, representations of lesbians in film and erotic fiction, and representations of prominent gay men in newspapers, this book looks at some of the ways lesbians and gay men construct identity from among the symbolic resources available within lesbian and gay communities.

AbstractIn an era of neoliberal reforms, academics in UK universities have become increasingly enmeshed in audit, particularly of research 'outputs'. Using the data of performance management and training documents, this paper analyses the role of discourse in redefining the meaning of research, and in colonizing a new kind of entrepreneurial, corporate academic. The new regime in universities is characterized by slippage between the audit and disciplinary functions of performance management. We conclude that academic freedom is unlikely to emerge from a system which demands compliance with a regime of unattainable targets and constant surveillance.

Sexual identity categories are often constructed in everyday discourse as relatively fixed and stable, but such constructions usually do not sit comfortably with people's lived experiences of their own and others' sexualities. This paper examines the tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz & Hall 2004) used in the discursive construction of sexual identities among members of a university women's football team. Using tactics of adequation/distinction, authentication/denaturalisation and authorisation/illegitimation, the women both construct and deconstruct boundaries as they seek to diminish the potential for conflict within the team. Instead, a tolerant and ludic attitude to sexuality is projected, and one which the speakers acknowledge arises from the university context, and at their particular life stage. We conclude that this community of practice has embraced 'queer temporality' (Halberstam 2005) — among the women, the possibility of temporary and contingent sexual identities is foregrounded, and these identities can be discursively signalled in various ways, including, but not co-extensive with, desire.

This article identifies a conceptual paradox between recent educational policy in England and a social-democratic understanding of critical literacy. Recent political events including Brexit, the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, and the Coronavirus Pandemic reiterate the need for pedagogies that equip students to critique information circulated online. After setting out critical literacy's genealogy as a democratic educational model, the authors situate these theoretical approaches within the context of English secondary education reform. The article then draws on teacher agency research to consider the practical barriers to implementing a critical literacy pedagogy capable of navigating the present political landscape. Addressing gaps within literary education and digital media research, the overall argument is that educational policy in England since 2010 has served the priorities of a neoliberal state system. In this context, enacting the democratic, social-justice orientated critical literacy demanded by the challenges of communicating in the twenty-first-century is both daunting and urgent.