The research focused on the Oral Proficiency Interview, or OPI, a widely used assessment in which trained raters assign learners a speaking level based on a recorded conversation. Rather than simply counting how often learners said um or ah, the study treated each filler type as a distinct category with its own potential function in discourse. Using a Cumulative Link Mixed Model, a statistical technique suited to ordered outcomes such as proficiency ratings, the analysis examined whether the frequency of particular filler groups predicted the OPI level a learner received. The mixed model framework also allowed the researcher to account for variation across individual speakers, a crucial step when dealing with naturally messy conversational data.

The results split the filler inventory into two strikingly different camps. Fillers from the i-group, the u-group, the ano-group, and the eeto-group showed no significant association with proficiency at all. No matter how often learners produced these sounds, their OPI ratings did not systematically rise or fall. These are the fillers that many learners acquire early and use habitually, often as automatic hesitation devices that plug pauses in speech without adding much structure to the discourse. Their ubiquity across all proficiency levels apparently renders them useless as markers of advancement.

In sharp contrast, four other groups told a very different story. The a-group, the e-group, the o-group, and the n-group fillers were significantly negatively associated with higher proficiency, meaning that learners who used them more frequently tended to receive lower OPI ratings. These short, vowel-like or nasal fillers appear to function as signs of struggle, cropping up when speakers grope for words or lose their thread mid-sentence. Their persistence at lower proficiency levels and relative disappearance at higher ones suggests they mark the disfluency that raters implicitly penalize.

The most intriguing findings concerned the maa-group and the sono-group, which were significantly positively associated with higher proficiency. Learners who used these fillers more often tended to earn higher OPI ratings, a pattern that demanded deeper explanation. Why would one pair of fillers track proficiency upward while another pair remained neutral? The answer, the study suggests, lies not in the sounds themselves but in the discourse work they perform.

To probe this question, the researcher analyzed maa and sono according to their functions and discourse roles. The analysis revealed that certain uses of these fillers require at least two clauses to be produced. A turn-internal maa, for example, typically appears when a speaker is connecting ideas across a stretch of extended talk, signaling a shift or elaboration within a multi-clause utterance. Similarly, an inferential or re-presenting use of sono involves referring back to or reasoning from something said earlier, which presupposes that the speaker has already built up enough linguistic material to reason about. In other words, these particular filler functions are only available to speakers who can sustain paragraph-level production, producing connected discourse rather than isolated sentences.

This connection to paragraph-level language production is significant because it maps directly onto one of the official criteria of OPI assessment, the Text Type dimension. Raters at higher proficiency levels explicitly evaluate whether candidates can handle extended, connected discourse, weaving clauses together into coherent paragraphs of speech. The study’s finding that fillers performing these discourse-linking functions are significantly positively associated with higher proficiency therefore makes mechanical sense: learners who can deploy maa and sono in these sophisticated ways are, almost by definition, speakers who have crossed the threshold into paragraph-level production, and raters reward exactly that ability.

By contrast, the analysis confirmed that fillers such as ano and eeto, as well as maa used within adjacency pairs, the tightly patterned question-answer or greeting-response sequences that structure everyday conversation, showed no significant increase with proficiency. These uses do not require multi-clause production. A learner can drop an ano before a single word or deploy maa in a ritualized exchange without ever constructing extended discourse. Their frequency therefore remains flat across proficiency levels, confirming that not all filler use is created equal and that the discourse role of a filler matters more than its raw frequency.

The broader implication is that fillers can be considered one of the key linguistic factors helping to explain the relationship between spontaneous speech habits and the development of oral language proficiency. For language teachers, the study hints that filler use could serve as a diagnostic window into a learner’s underlying discourse competence, revealing whether a student is stringing together clauses into paragraphs or still speaking in short, disconnected bursts. For assessment researchers, it suggests that the micro-structure of hesitation, which sounds a speaker chooses and in what discourse position, carries measurable information about proficiency that coarse counts of disfluency would miss. For learners, the message is unexpectedly encouraging: the path to sounding more proficient in Japanese may run not through eliminating hesitation altogether, but through learning to hesitate in ways that organize and connect extended thought.

Subject of Research: The relationship between Japanese filler word use and oral proficiency levels as assessed by the OPI

Article Title: The relationship between the use of fillers and Japanese proficiency: Focusing on OPI level assessment

Article References: Chen, Z. (2026). The relationship between the use of fillers and Japanese proficiency: Focusing on OPI level assessment. PLOS One, 21(10), e0360747. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0360747

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0360747

Keywords: Japanese language learning, filler words, oral proficiency interview, second language acquisition, discourse analysis, speech fluency, linguistics, language assessment, pragmatics, statistical modeling, relationship, between

Nehl frames cultural policymaking as infrastructuring, a concept borrowed from infrastructure theory that foregrounds the invisible, overlooked and taken-for-granted structures facilitating smooth everyday experiences. Infrastructures are never simply there; they are made and held stable through continuous work and changing ways of connecting people and things in socio-material relations. Cultural infrastructure, in this reading, includes buildings, facilities, spaces, practices, funding and legal frameworks, personal and institutional networks as well as social media sites. Nehl adds cultural policy itself to this list, since policy prescribes and shapes cultural practices and thus forms part of infrastructuring as both product and process. The availability of infrastructure components like a discursive policy framework, a building or a social network alone does not turn into supporting infrastructure without the continuous labour of cultural actors that enables involvement in policymaking in the first place.

The study situates CCSC within the architecture of EU cultural governance, where the subsidiary principle has always limited the EU’s role in culture. The Maastricht treaty of 1992 made culture a competency, and the Lisbon treaty of 2007 recognised the cultural and creative industries as a competitive economic factor, legitimising soft intervention through recommendations, guidelines and best practices rather than binding law. Funding programmes like Kaleidoscope, Culture 2000 and, most prominently, Creative Europe support these soft policy tools, with cultural networks acting as intermediaries that connect local actors to the transnational policy level. Policy coordination mechanisms like structured dialogues and the open method of coordination allow more strategic involvement in the cultural sphere, while broad and flexible concepts like creativity accommodate both commercial and non-commercial activity, aligning with the Lisbon agenda.

Yet the agency of cultural actors within these processes remains contested. Independent cultural actors, and especially smaller-scale, alternative actors, identify a tension between their situated perspectives and broader policy framings that risk marginalising the needs of art and cultural production. Policies uninformed by the realities of cultural small-scale producers or less central venues are perceived as ill-fitting, producing irritation and suspicion and ultimately hindering the collaboration that policymakers themselves seek. Research has further traced how networks, initially envisioned as tools for enhancing participatory policymaking, have paradoxically contributed to a form of standardisation that mutes dissent, complicating the political essence of cultural dialogues within the EU.

CCSC was composed of a consortium of eleven non-profit and public organisations, led by Trans Europe Halles, one of the oldest European cultural networks, established in 1983. The project partners included the University of Antwerp, the European Cultural Foundation and Timelab Gent. The methodology was built on the idea of local urban labs, where participating actors define, develop and test new methods and tools. Cultural centres Hablarenarte in Madrid, Ambasada in Timisoara, Kaapeli in Helsinki, the social innovation lab Coboi Lab in Sant Boi de Llobregat, Creative Industries in Kosice, and the public administration City of Lund as well as the cultural administration of the Scania region joined the project. During the three years, the local labs worked on their challenges through twenty-one workshops between May and December 2019, organised traineeships and urban explorations, and exchanged knowledge in policymaking events and a digital conference in early 2021.

To unpack the different stakeholders’ problem representations, Nehl draws on Carol Bacchi’s critical policy methodology entitled What’s the problem represented to be? The WPR approach conceptualises policy not as pregiven problems but as a set of problematisations, addressed through six guiding questions that foreground how power, knowledge and discourse are simultaneously shaped by, and productive of, social worlds. Policy documents are understood as purposefully produced artefacts through which actors seek to represent problems, solutions and roles. Combined with interpretive policy analysis, the approach is sensitive to the perspectives and interpretive frameworks of both analysts and stakeholders, foregrounding the interlinked knowing and doing and advocating for a practice-orientation attentive to how policymakers and administrators act in complex, unpredictable situations. Nehl applied the first, second, fifth and sixth questions primarily, with the fourth question engaged to a smaller but significant degree in the concluding discussion.

The analytical process was an infrastructuring-informed, software-supported abductive coding process. The first rounds of descriptive coding provided an overview and captured all participating actors, revealing actor constellation changes like the P2P foundation leaving for Timelab, a makerspace brought in to assist the methodological aspects of the project. In later coding, closely linked to the WPR questions, the in vivo code art versus system, found in an agenda-setting document from the first CCSC meeting in Brussels, shaped the inquiry. Based on this strong binary construction in the early project data, Nehl continued with versus coding, which serves policy studies attending to conflicts between individuals, groups, social systems, organisations, phenomena, concepts or processes. The coding was further sensitised by actors’ needs to unpack what the different CCSC stakeholders considered infrastructural.

The results reveal that the disconnect between cultural actors and administrative bodies in CCSC is articulated as a gap that occurs between different stakeholders and levels of governance. Whether at the urban, regional or EU level, a gap is palpable between public authorities and local cultural initiatives. Cultural actors report a feeling of distance from the EU institutions, and the lived experience of this distance between policy recommendations and real actions underlines the need for revised methods to include cultural stakeholders in policymaking. The project charter asserted that the gap between citizens and institutions can be narrowed and democratic legitimacy strengthened, positioning the urban labs as spatial solutions to address this widely experienced disconnect. The labs were framed as spaces of encounter where interactive policymaking practices are often the first instance where people who share a particular space actually meet.

However, the analysis exposes how bottom-up demands reverberate around problem formulations of a structural gap while the CCSC project simultaneously highlights a disconnect between EU-level framings of empowerment and the infrastructural needs exemplified by local cultural actors seeking recognition and systemic support for the work they already do. The project recommendations warned that neglecting social rights, precarisation, marginalisation and lack of security in many sectors, including the cultural sector, is a major barrier for participation. Participation was framed as proper labour but without remuneration, and the recommendations cautioned of exclusions affecting people and places lacking political recognition, financial stability or temporal resources, summarised as the cost of participation. In Timisoara, relations with the municipality were described as antagonistic and far from being based on principles of co-creation and participation, while in Sweden two public administration-led labs aimed to strengthen bottom-up participation, facing a reversed dilemma where non-participation was problematised as a lack of space of encounter and empowerment.

The study concludes that future EU cultural policy should more explicitly recognise and support the infrastructural labour that enables soft governance. The discursive sidelining of Trans Europe Halles’ central role as facilitating intermediary and advocate of participating cultural actors raises critical questions about what responsibilities fall on networks acting as intermediaries and what resources they require to fulfil their role as versatile intermediaries. Within the infrastructuring heuristic, it is perhaps not surprising that the work of facilitation remains invisible, especially in officially published reports. Yet the networks’ needs, as well as the risks and benefits entangled in the interdependency of cultural networks with large EU-funded projects, call for attention in further scholarly work, especially since Creative Europe, the most important funding body for networks, can no longer be taken for granted as it is being integrated into the new AgoraEU funding programme for 2028 to 2034. Sustaining bottom-up cultural engagement and democratic participation requires more than empowering EU policy; it calls for enabling frameworks that integrate implicit cultural needs into explicitly social cultural policy frameworks, moving beyond temporary arenas to improve structural conditions for participation, recognition and care.

Subject of Research: Cultural Policy Research

Article Title: Infrastructuring cultural policy: the case of Creative Europe’s “Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities”

Article References: Nehl, M. (2026). Infrastructuring cultural policy: the case of Creative Europe’s “Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities”. European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 16, Article 15478. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2026.15478

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2026.15478

Keywords: cultural policy, Creative Europe, cultural networks, infrastructuring, soft governance, participation, precarity, Trans Europe Halles, discourse analysis, EU policymaking, cultural, policy

Researchers Yidan Luo of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Pengfei Bao of the National University of Defense Technology published the analysis in Frontiers in Communication, combining corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis with computational word-embedding methods. They compiled two specialized English-language corpora spanning 2006 to 2023: one drawn from white papers, annual reports, and press releases issued by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, the Korean Immigration Service, and the Ministry of Education, and the other from 608 articles retrieved from the Korea JoongAng Daily and The Korea Times, two English-language newspapers with conservative to centrist editorial stances. The government corpus totaled roughly 135,500 words across 48 documents; the media corpus about 128,000 words. The team split both corpora into three periods anchored to policy milestones, beginning with the 2008 Multicultural Families Support Act.

The analytical pipeline was deliberately layered. Using LancsBox 6.0, the researchers identified statistically salient collocates of the node multicultural famil within a five-word span, applying a Mutual Information threshold of at least 3 and a minimum raw frequency of 5. Collocates were then inductively grouped into five semantic categories: Support/Welfare, Integration/Empowerment, Deficit/Vulnerability, Policy/Management, and Conflict/Discrimination. Two trained coders independently annotated samples of concordance lines, reaching a Cohen’s kappa of 0.87 for category membership and 0.82 for semantic prosody valence. To quantify conceptual proximity, the team trained period-specific skip-gram Word2Vec models in Gensim, with 200-dimensional vectors, a window of 5, and 50 epochs, and computed the cosine similarity between the bigram tokens multicultural_family and korean_family, bootstrapping each subcorpus 1,000 times to derive 95 percent confidence intervals.

The collocational results reveal a striking asymmetry. In government texts, the phrase multicultural family is persistently surrounded by support, assistance, welfare, and education, with support recording the highest association strength in every time slice. Yet the official lexicon visibly modernized: integration and rights entered the collocate set in the second period, and empowerment, diversity, inclusion, and global appeared by the third. The media corpus tells a different story. In the first period, newspapers linked multicultural family to marriage, foreign, problem, and victim; by the second, discrimination and abuse intensified; and by the third, hate speech, failure, and conflict dominated. A chi-square test comparing the semantic category distributions between the two corpora was significant in every period, with effect sizes rising from Cramér’s V of 0.42 to 0.51, indicating that the discursive divergence between state and press widened over time rather than narrowing.

Semantic prosody analysis sharpened the contrast. Government texts enveloped multicultural family in a predominantly positive aura, with 65 to 70 percent of concordance lines coded as positive and the negative share falling from 10 to 5 percent by the final period. Media texts produced the mirror image: roughly two-thirds of contexts carried negative evaluative meaning, a pattern stable across all seventeen years. The qualitative reading shows what the positivity conceals. Government lines such as the Ministry will provide comprehensive support for multicultural families to help them settle in Korean society construct the state as an active giver and the family as a passive beneficiary whose success is measured by adaptation. Even the term rights is framed differently: in government texts rights are granted by a protective state, while in the press they are demanded from below by migrant wives denied them by an indifferent system.

The word-embedding analysis produced what the authors call a scissor effect. In the government corpus, the cosine similarity between multicultural_family and korean_family rose monotonically from 0.31 in the first period to 0.43 in the second and 0.54 in the third, with non-overlapping confidence intervals indicating a statistically significant increase. In the media corpus, similarity barely moved, from 0.25 to 0.32, with overlapping intervals between the later periods signaling no reliable change. The researchers are careful about what this metric means: cosine similarity indexes overlapping discursive environments, not semantic equivalence or social closeness. A benchmark comparison makes the limits clear. The similarity between korean_family and a composite average_family vector, built from neutral terms like household and home, reached 0.79 in the government’s final period, well above the 0.54 achieved for multicultural families. The marked category remains a satellite orbiting the normative core, not a member of it.

A supplementary finding crystallizes the media’s boundary work. The exact phrase ordinary Korean families appears 31 times in the newspaper corpus and never once in government texts, always in contrastive constructions such as while ordinary Korean families receive subsidies or unlike ordinary Korean families. In the Korean context, ordinary indexes conformity to unmarked social norms: Korean ethnicity, Korean-language competence, and conventional family structures. By describing the majority as ordinary, the press implicitly renders multicultural families extraordinary, and within an overwhelmingly negative prosody, that extraordinariness shades into deviance. The phrase is never defined, which is precisely its ideological power: it naturalizes the ethnic majority as the universal standard against which all other family forms are measured and found wanting.

From these converging patterns the authors derive their central theoretical contribution: discursive annexation. The term describes a governmental logic that is neither classical assimilation nor genuine inclusion. It is not assimilation because the state no longer explicitly demands cultural erasure; it is not inclusion because the normative center remains unchallenged. Instead, the state symbolically incorporates minority groups by extending the lexicon of recognition, diversity, empowerment, global citizen, while leaving institutional hierarchies untouched: residency precarity, employment discrimination, educational segregation. The researchers ground the concept in governmentality theory, arguing that the shift from welfare provision to empowerment reflects a neoliberal re-engineering in which families are called to become entrepreneurial selves responsible for their own integration. The narrowing semantic distance in government texts, they argue, reflects nation-branding for international audiences rather than a redistribution of symbolic or material power. The authors explicitly note that annexation is used in its governmental and lexicographic sense, not to invoke the 1910 Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty or equate governance of marriage migrants with colonial subjugation.

The study also reads the media’s crisis narrative through intercultural communication theory, and here the picture becomes more ambivalent. The conservative press performs a democratic watchdog function, exposing the gap between official rhetoric and structural marginalization, from hate speech that surged online with few prosecutions to government audits revealing budget execution below 40 percent. Yet the same framing traps multicultural families in subject positions as suffering victims or failed policy objects, denying positive face by casting them as objects of pity and negative face by presenting them as perpetually in need of intervention. Read through communication accommodation theory, the contrastive rhetoric constitutes divergent accommodation, accentuating intergroup salience to reassure ethnic Korean readers that the boundary between us and them remains intact. Crucially, the two ostensibly opposed discourses share a foundational assumption: neither ever deconstructs the category itself or imagines a social landscape where families are simply families. Collocates such as leader, contributor, expert, or neighbor are absent from both corpora.

The authors acknowledge the limits of their design with unusual candor. The English-language corpora capture international-facing discourse rather than domestic Korean-language policy debate, and the period-specific subcorpora of roughly 41,000 to 47,500 words are modest for embedding models, though sensitivity analyses varying vector dimensions from 100 to 300 and training epochs from 25 to 100 confirmed that the monotonic trajectory is robust. Transformer-based architectures would require corpora exceeding one million words, making them impractical here. The deeper point survives these caveats: even if the semantic convergence is merely lexical, the institutional performance of convergence carries constitutive effects, legitimizing the state as benevolent and framing integration as accomplished fact regardless of lived conditions. The Korean case thus offers a cautionary tale with resonance far beyond the peninsula: the language of diversity and empowerment can coexist with, and actively obscure, the preservation of symbolic hierarchies, demanding recognition that refuses to condition belonging on assimilation.

Subject of Research: Discursive construction of multicultural families in South Korean government and media discourse

Article Title: From assimilation to discursive annexation? Tracing ‘multicultural family’ in South Korean government and media discourses

Article References: Luo, Y., & Bao, P. (2026). From assimilation to discursive annexation? Tracing ‘multicultural family’ in South Korean government and media discourses. Frontiers in Communication, 11, Article 1962502. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1962502

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2026.1962502

Keywords: South Korea, multicultural family, discourse analysis, Word2Vec, semantic prosody, collocation, nation-branding, governmentality, intercultural communication, conservative media, integration, damunhwa

The study addresses what the authors describe as an urgent need in teacher education: preparing graduates with the knowledge, skills, and ethical dispositions required to confront pressing global challenges, particularly climate change. Teacher education programmes have traditionally treated sustainability as the domain of geography, biology, or environmental science courses, leaving mathematics largely untouched. But mathematics is deeply implicated in how climate information is produced, communicated, and contested. Rising temperature curves, carbon budget calculations, probability estimates of extreme weather events, and statistical summaries of biodiversity loss are all mathematical artefacts. A teacher who cannot help students read these artefacts critically leaves them ill-equipped to navigate public discourse about the climate.

To probe this gap, the researchers designed media-based learning activities within the undergraduate programme. Prospective teachers of mathematics engaged with climate-related media and then participated in structured reflection and dialogue focused on pedagogical approaches for integrating climate literacy into mathematics teaching. The method is deceptively simple: rather than lecturing future teachers about sustainability, the programme asked them to encounter media representations of the climate emergency, reflect in writing on what they saw, and discuss in groups how such material might be turned into mathematics lessons. The researchers then applied discourse analysis to the prospective teachers’ written reflections and group discussions, examining how the participants made sense of the climate emergency and of their roles as future educators.

The findings point to three powerful psychological and social mechanisms at work. First, the media-based reflections fostered shared attention. When a group of future teachers engages with the same piece of climate media, they develop a common object of focus, which makes collective discussion possible in a way that abstract lectures rarely achieve. Second, the activities produced emotional engagement. Climate media, by its nature, tends to evoke affective responses, and the study found that these responses were not obstacles to learning but resources for it, animating the prospective teachers’ sense that the issue mattered to them personally. Third, and perhaps most significantly, the reflections cultivated a sense of collective responsibility. Participants came to see responding to the climate emergency not as someone else’s job but as part of what it means to be a mathematics educator.

Beyond these mechanisms, the analysis revealed that participants articulated genuine shifts in perspective and envisaged concrete changes to their future mathematics teaching practices. The researchers organised these envisioned changes into three thematic areas, each of which maps onto a distinct strand of mathematical capability. The first theme is raising awareness of climate change through cultivating data literacy. Climate science rests on data: time series of global temperatures, measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, records of sea level rise, and inventories of greenhouse gas emissions. A mathematics teacher who equips students to interpret graphs, understand rates of change, and evaluate the reliability of data sources is, in effect, teaching climate awareness through the mathematics curriculum itself.

The second theme involves teaching environmental sustainability through mathematical modelling. Modelling is a cornerstone of both school mathematics reform and climate science. When students build a simple model of population growth, resource consumption, or carbon accumulation, they experience firsthand how mathematical assumptions translate into projections about the future. The prospective teachers in the study came to see modelling not merely as an abstract technique for satisfying curriculum requirements but as a vehicle through which students can explore sustainability questions, test scenarios, and appreciate the consequences of different policy and behavioural choices. This reframing turns the mathematics classroom into a space where environmental futures are not just described but actively explored.

The third theme centres on fostering critical evaluation of quantitative information and representations. This may be the most distinctive contribution of mathematics education to climate literacy. Public debates about climate change are saturated with numbers, charts, and statistics, and these can be manipulated, cherry-picked, or misleadingly scaled. A line graph with a truncated axis can make a steep warming trend look gentle; a percentage change without an absolute baseline can exaggerate or minimise an effect. The prospective teachers recognised that teaching students to interrogate such representations, to ask who produced a figure, how it was calculated, and what it leaves out, is a form of civic education that mathematics is uniquely positioned to deliver. Critical data literacy, in this view, is a defence against both misinformation and despair.

What makes the study methodologically interesting is its use of discourse analysis as the primary analytical lens. Rather than measuring climate literacy with a before-and-after test, the researchers examined the language prospective teachers used in their written reflections and group discussions, tracking how their sense-making evolved. Discourse analysis is well suited to capturing the subtle ways in which people negotiate identity and responsibility. When a future teacher shifts from describing climate change as a global problem to describing what she would do in her own classroom, that linguistic shift marks a genuine reorientation of professional identity, something a standardised questionnaire might miss entirely.

The broader significance of the work lies in its argument about pedagogy. Media-based reflective pedagogies, the authors suggest, can support the development of climate literacy by strengthening prospective teachers’ capacity for critical reflection on sustainability issues and their pedagogical implications. This positions media not as a distraction from rigorous mathematics teaching but as a catalyst for it. News reports, documentary footage, and data visualisations provide authentic contexts that give mathematical content meaning, while the structured reflection ensures that emotional responses are channelled into professional planning rather than left as free-floating anxiety. The approach also aligns with international calls to embed education for sustainable development across teacher preparation, rather than confining it to specialist courses.

The study was conducted in accordance with the ethical principles of the Declaration of Helsinki, with ethical approval granted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Survey and Behavioural Research Ethics Committee, and it was fully supported by the Worldwide Universities Network Research Development Fund. Its implications extend well beyond Hong Kong. Mathematics teacher educators around the world face the same challenge: a generation of students who will live through intensifying climate impacts, taught by teachers who may feel that climate change belongs to someone else’s subject. This research offers a concrete, replicable pathway forward, one in which the humble tools of the mathematics classroom, graphs, models, and critical questions about numbers, become instruments of climate understanding. As the climate emergency deepens, the study suggests, the question is no longer whether mathematics teachers should engage with it, but how quickly teacher education programmes can prepare them to do so well.

Subject of Research: Media-based reflection activities for developing climate literacy among prospective mathematics teachers

Article Title: Media-based reflections to foster climate literacy in mathematics teacher education

Article References: Ng, O.-L., Wan, S. W.-Y., & Coles, A. (2026). Media-based reflections to foster climate literacy in mathematics teacher education. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09162-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09162-z

Keywords: climate literacy, mathematics education, teacher education, media-based reflection, prospective teachers, data literacy, mathematical modelling, sustainability education, discourse analysis, critical evaluation, Hong Kong, environmental sustainability

The research, conducted by Can Küçükali of Istanbul Rumeli University, applies a framework called Discursive Political Analysis (DPA) to sixteen official texts issued through the Japanese Prime Minister’s Office between October 2025 and May 2026. DPA is a critical discourse analysis method originally developed for studying domestic political hegemony, and its extension to foreign-policy securitisation is itself part of the study’s contribution. The analysis proceeds in three stages: a close reading of three monologic policy speeches to specify how an existential frame is built; a dynamic analysis tracing change, stability, and discrepancy across the whole corpus; and a political analysis that refers the discursive trajectory to its structural conditions.

The corpus was assembled on explicit criteria rather than opportunistically. The starting point is Takaichi’s inauguration on 21 October 2025, so that the unit of analysis is the discourse of the office-holder rather than the candidate. Every official text bearing on Japan’s posture toward China was admitted, while purely domestic texts with no China-relevant security content were excluded. Fifteen of the sixteen texts come from the Prime Minister’s Office in its official English provisional translations; the parliamentary exchange of 7 November 2025 that became the rupture point is drawn from the National Diet Library’s official record of proceedings. The three speeches selected for detailed analysis — the policy speeches of 24 October 2025 and 20 February 2026 and the foreign policy speech delivered in Hanoi on 2 May 2026 — are the monologic texts in which the leader speaks at length without interlocutors.

The October speech, delivered before the rupture, does what the study calls building the container. Its securitising work is embryonic: security is redefined from military defence into a comprehensive register bundling economic, food, energy, and health security under the heading of strategic investments that enhance resilience against potential crises. China appears only once, grouped with North Korea and Russia as a matter of grave concern, and is then repredicated a few lines later as an important neighbouring country with which a constructive and stable relationship is necessary. Crucially, the strongest aggressive phrase in the entire speech — the refusal to tolerate unilateral attempts to change the status quo by force — is reserved for Russia, not China. The vocabulary of aggressive predication already exists; what will change across the corpus is the target to which it is attached.

The February speech, delivered after a landslide election, fills that container. The threat is no longer diffuse. The speech opens its security section by declaring that Japan faces the most severe and complex security environment of the post-war era — a superlative that, the author’s check against the Japanese originals confirmed, is the verbatim formula of the December 2022 National Security Strategy, reactivated rather than invented. The central finding is a migration: the force-formula reserved for Russia in October now attaches to China, broadened by the addition of the words or coercion, which extends the charge from the military to the economic register. North Korea, Russia, and China are merged into one interlinked threat bloc, while the partnership pole contracts to a single ritual formula. The proposition expands from reinforcing defence to a comprehensive transformation: a space-capable reorganisation of the air force, liberalisation of arms exports, a screening mechanism for inbound investment, and a prime-ministerial intelligence council.

The May speech in Hanoi represents the apex of masking. Delivered to a foreign student audience, it never names China once. Instead, it organises an entire regional architecture around a threat it refuses to name, condemning excessive dependence on a single country and market-distorting practices and economic coercion without ever supplying an addressee. The speech routes the three bodies of water China most actively claims — the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and the East China Sea — through a four-hundred-year trade history, naturalising them as historically free routes of exchange. The most concrete containment instruments, patrol vessels and radar offered to front-line partners, sit between passages about semiconductors, lunar rovers, and popular culture. The author reads this indirection not as de-escalation but as audience-appropriate packaging: a Southeast Asian audience that trades heavily with China cannot be asked to endorse a named adversary, so Japan builds the encircling lattice precisely by leaving the name blank.

The dynamic analysis yields the study’s most striking finding, a divergence between two curves. Verbal aggressiveness is zero at the baseline, low and mitigated in October, and rises to its maximum at the November rupture, where the Prime Minister attached the statutory survival-threatening threshold — the legal term for the limited exercise of collective self-defence — to a Taiwan scenario. Disclosed answer materials show the prepared brief advised withholding an answer and did not contain the existential formulation, making the utterance an unscripted escalation. Yet after that peak, the verbal register recedes: by May, China is unnamed. The second curve — the escalation of policy and institutional commitment — rises without interruption across the whole period. The verbal pitch falls while the policy keeps climbing, which the author takes as the clearest evidence that the discourse is an instrument rather than the engine: once it has built the existential frame and manufactured consent for a harder posture, it can lower its voice, because the policy it cleared the way for no longer depends on it. The aggression does not recede; it changes form, passing from the verbal register into the material one, which is harder to reverse.

Three independent change-markers move in the same direction across same-genre texts by the same agent: the dual-track turns asymmetric, the aggression vocabulary migrates onto China and broadens, and the institutional proposition expands and accelerates. The one apparent counter-current — the early peak and later softening of verbal aggression — confirms rather than weakens the pattern reading, because the policy content keeps accelerating while the verbal surface is managed. The study also runs a calibration test against independent threat indicators. Air Self-Defense Force scrambles against Chinese aircraft declined in each of the four fiscal years since FY2021, from 722 to 366 in FY2025, and Chinese Coast Guard presence around the Senkaku Islands, though at a record in 2025, was the smooth continuation of a decade-long trend. Against this declining or continuously rising gradient, the posture moved in steps: the 2 percent spending level, scheduled for fiscal 2027, was pulled forward into fiscal 2025 within days of the inauguration, the revision of the three strategic documents was advanced by a year, and the arms-export principles were revised within six months. The discontinuity in posture matches the change of government, not any change in observable Chinese activity.

The political analysis then adjudicates the study’s central thesis: that the securitisation, voiced in the language of national interest and autonomy, functions as the linguistic instrument of an entrapment binding Japan into a multi-front confrontation serving the United States’ containment of China more than Japan’s own interest. The timing evidence is suggestive — the front-loading of defence spending was announced days before the first summit with the US president, and missile co-production, critical-minerals, and energy commitments were concluded at the Washington summit — while the summit records show commitments flowing in one direction, with no reassurance specific to Japan beyond a general affirmation of the alliance. The author acknowledges the strongest objection, that Japan is a deliberate and autonomous agent making a rational choice to align with a powerful ally. His answer is narrower: entrapment in the alliance-dilemma sense does not require a passive or duped state, only that deepening commitment raises the probability of being drawn into a conflict the state would not independently have chosen. A purely rational balancer would calibrate commitment to threat; the discourse instead maximises commitment on Taiwan, where ambiguity had served Japan, and hardens the posture on North Korea even while the same government pursues a summit with its leader.

The implications reach beyond one government’s rhetoric. By the logic of the security dilemma, a harder posture can invite the very response it anticipates, and on Taiwan the effect is sharper because converting a question long governed by ambiguity into a public commitment narrows the room for crisis management and raises the risk of being drawn into confrontation by inadvertence rather than choice. The study notes its own limits — a seven-month window, a small qualitative corpus, official translations, and a single analyst — and proposes comparative work against the Abe and Kishida periods and cross-national designs with other front-line states. But its conclusion is pointed: the discursive conditions under which a Taiwan crisis could draw Japan, and through Japan the alliance, into a wider confrontation were built quickly and in plain view, and the security that the securitisation claims to defend is partly eroded by the very posture taken in its name.

Subject of Research: Discursive political analysis of Japan's securitisation of China under Prime Minister Takaichi

Article Title: Incident or pattern? A discursive political analysis of aggressive securitisation of China in Japan’s new leadership

Article References: Küçükali, C. (2026). Incident or pattern? A discursive political analysis of aggressive securitisation of China in Japan’s new leadership. Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 1919740. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1919740

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1919740

Keywords: Japan, China, securitisation, discourse analysis, Takaichi Sanae, Taiwan, alliance politics, entrapment, United States, foreign policy, critical discourse analysis, security dilemma

The review, led by Jiayi Xia of Shanghai Second Rehabilitation Hospital together with colleagues from Renji-affiliated rehabilitation centers and Huashan Hospital at Fudan University, synthesizes evidence on naturalistic language assessment, portable neuroimaging, and brain-network biomarkers. Its central claim is provocative: the same connected speech, narrative production, and conversational behaviors that clinicians observe informally can be converted into graded, multivariate neuropsychological profiles, and those profiles can be linked to measurable brain-network signatures that predict recovery and guide individualized therapy.

Conventional aphasia batteries such as the Western Aphasia Battery-Revised and the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination remain indispensable for diagnosis, syndrome classification, and severity grading. They provide a shared clinical language and allow outcomes to be compared across studies. But the authors point to a well-documented limitation in neuropsychological assessment: ecological validity. Tests often show only moderate associations with everyday functioning, and stronger links emerge only when the test and the outcome measure assess closely corresponding domains. If the clinical target is real-world communication, assessment must include tasks that approximate the cognitive-linguistic demands of real-world communication.

The review is careful to avoid a false dichotomy. Naturalistic tasks are not valuable because they contain processes absent from conventional testing; even a sentence-comprehension item recruits lexical, semantic, syntactic, memory, and executive processes simultaneously. The distinction is one of task constraint and observability. In an extended communicative episode, multiple linguistic and cognitive processes vary and interact, allowing clinicians to measure several sources of difficulty at once under conditions that resemble daily life. Spoken discourse has been described as a clinically meaningful naturalistic outcome precisely because it captures performance at the level of extended communication rather than isolated test items.

What makes this framework scientifically interesting is the evidence that naturalistic behaviors map onto neural mechanisms rather than serving as purely descriptive outcomes. Studies have linked discourse-level performance to lesion location, white matter integrity, structural connectivity, and functional activation. Impaired discourse informativeness has been associated with frontal white matter damage, suggesting that discourse production depends not only on classical perisylvian language regions but also on frontal systems involved in selection, organization, and control. Lesion-based studies of conversational speech production have shown that natural speech deficits arise from distributed lesion patterns rather than a single cortical region. Narrative speech studies have revealed that action and object representations during naturalistic production are supported by distinct neural systems, and that lexical diversity, lexical sophistication, informativeness, and coherence each relate to specific neuroanatomical structures.

The review organizes naturalistic language samples into interacting phenotype dimensions: lexical-semantic access, phonological encoding, grammatical organization, discourse-semantic processing, executive-predictive control, and speech-motor output. These dimensions are intentionally overlapping rather than modular. Recent work shows distributed sensitivity to syntax and semantics throughout the language network, and lesion-symptom mapping has demonstrated a double dissociation between agrammatism, associated more strongly with frontal damage, and paragrammatism, associated more strongly with posterior temporal damage. A single syntactic phenotype, the authors argue, should be decomposed into measurable error types whenever data allow. Predictive processing, indexed by word surprisal and contextual expectation, is treated as a cross-cutting feature that influences lexical access, structure building, and comprehension.

On the neural side, the review emphasizes that recovery is best understood as a distributed network process. Preserved or re-engaged left-hemisphere language regions remain essential, especially when residual tissue is available within core language networks. A systematic review of neuroplasticity in post-stroke aphasia found modest evidence for a return of function in left-hemisphere language regions over time, while evidence for large-scale reorganization into entirely new systems remains less compelling. Right-hemisphere recruitment is treated as conditional rather than uniformly beneficial: it may support recovery when left-hemisphere damage is extensive, but may reflect inefficient compensation when the left hemisphere retains substantial capacity. Domain-general medial prefrontal systems contribute to language recovery, and resting-state network modularity has been associated with improved narrative production during rehabilitation.

Portable technologies are central to making ecological assessment practical. EEG-based neural tracking of natural speech provides millisecond-level temporal information about how the brain follows continuous linguistic input and has been proposed as an ecologically valid biomarker for detecting aphasia at the individual level during story listening. fNIRS, by contrast, measures cortical hemodynamic responses with greater feasibility for repeated assessment during overt language tasks, bedside evaluation, and rehabilitation settings. The two modalities are complementary: EEG answers when linguistic information is processed, while fNIRS answers where task-related cortical responses occur. Neither should be treated as a stand-alone aphasia biomarker, and the review details the artifact sensitivity, lesion-aware localization challenges, and standardization gaps that must be addressed before clinical use.

The authors propose an operational ecological biomarker framework implemented through seven steps: define a real-world communication target, select a task that samples that target, extract a reproducible multilevel feature set, construct a graded multivariate patient profile, test whether neural measures add convergent, dissociable, or incremental information beyond behavioral severity and lesion burden, translate only validated combinations into prognosis or treatment hypotheses, and repeat measures longitudinally to test change and transfer. The framework is explicitly designed to complement, not replace, standardized aphasia assessment.

The clinical implications are substantial. For prognosis, early functional activation has been shown to predict language outcome after stroke, and structural connectivity modeling has been used to predict post-stroke language function from routinely acquired clinical MRI data. Resting-state functional connectivity may predict responsiveness to language therapy in chronic post-stroke aphasia. For neuromodulation, fNIRS-guided selective rTMS has shown that functional activation patterns can guide stimulation targets, and fNIRS-guided high-frequency rTMS over activated speech-related areas combined with speech therapy has been associated with improved language function and altered network connectivity. The review acknowledges that many existing studies demonstrate associations without testing whether ecological biomarkers improve prognosis, treatment selection, or outcome monitoring beyond conventional clinical variables. Prospective validation, cross-language adaptation of discourse metrics, and standardized reporting of elicitation methods, transcription procedures, and coding rules are identified as priorities. If those hurdles are cleared, the vision is a scalable pathway in which brief naturalistic language sampling combined with portable EEG or fNIRS helps clinicians answer practical questions: what type of language difficulty is most limiting this patient’s communication, which neural systems appear preserved or compensatory, which therapy target is most appropriate, and whether the patient is improving in ways that transfer to daily life.

Subject of Research: Naturalistic language assessment and brain-network biomarkers for precision neurorehabilitation in post-stroke aphasia

Article Title: Naturalistic language assessment and brain-network biomarkers in post-stroke aphasia for precision neurorehabilitation

Article References: Xia, J., Pei, S., Zhou, S., & Bai, Y. (2026). Naturalistic language assessment and brain-network biomarkers in post-stroke aphasia for precision neurorehabilitation. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 20, Article 1966552. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2026.1966552

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2026.1966552

Keywords: post-stroke aphasia, naturalistic language assessment, brain-network biomarkers, connected speech, fNIRS, EEG, precision neurorehabilitation, ecological validity, discourse analysis, neuroimaging, Naturalistic, language

The research team focused their analysis on the Instagram page of tengrinewskz, one of Kazakhstan’s most widely followed news outlets. Instagram is an ideal laboratory for this kind of work because it compresses the entire news experience into a single screen: a headline, an image, a visible count of likes, and a comment section where readers argue, agree, and vent in real time. By scraping and analyzing the comments left under news posts, the researchers could measure not just how many people responded, but what emotional coloring their responses carried—positive, negative, or neutral.

Methodologically, the study leaned on two complementary tools. The first was TextBlob, a widely used Python library for natural language processing that assigns polarity and subjectivity scores to text. TextBlob works by looking up words in a pre-built lexicon where each term carries a sentiment weight, then aggregating those weights across a sentence or comment to produce an overall tonality score. The second tool was SPSS, the statistical software package that has anchored social science research for decades, which the authors used to run correlation analyses and compare responses across demographic groups. This pairing of lightweight computational linguistics with heavyweight statistical inference is becoming a template for media studies in the digital era.

The human side of the study came from a survey of 388 respondents—196 men and 192 women—aged between 18 and 40 years old. Participants were asked to evaluate news post headlines and express their preferences regarding how stories were presented. This sample size is large enough to detect moderate effects with reasonable statistical power, and the balanced gender split allowed the researchers to probe whether men and women read the same headlines differently. The age range deliberately targeted the demographic most active on social media platforms, the very population whose attention and reactions drive the visibility algorithms that determine which news spreads and which disappears.

The headline finding is both intuitive and nuanced. Posts whose headlines were rated positively tended to attract a higher volume of likes and comments, suggesting that audiences respond favorably to certain tonal qualities in how news is framed. Yet when the researchers formally tested the relationship between headline tone and comment count, the result fell just short of conventional statistical significance. The Spearman correlation coefficient came in at 0.42—a moderate positive association—but with a p-value of 0.064, it missed the traditional 0.05 threshold. In practical terms, this means the data hint at a real connection between how positive a headline feels and how much discussion it generates, but the evidence is not yet strong enough to rule out chance entirely.

This near-miss is itself scientifically interesting. Spearman’s rank correlation is a non-parametric measure, meaning it does not assume the data follow a normal distribution—an appropriate choice for comment counts, which are typically heavily skewed with a few posts attracting enormous attention while most gather modest engagement. A coefficient of 0.42 indicates that roughly 18 percent of the variance in engagement could be associated with headline tonality in a monotonic sense. The p-value of 0.064 suggests that with a larger sample or a more sensitive design, the relationship might well firm up into a statistically significant one. The authors are careful not to overclaim, and that restraint is worth noting in a field where sensational findings often outrun their evidence.

Beyond the aggregate statistics, the study dug into reactions to specific individual posts, and here the picture became messier and more human. Rather than responding uniformly, audiences displayed diverse emotional responses to the same content—some readers found a post alarming, others reassuring, others irrelevant. The researchers also identified meaningful differences in how respondents assessed particular characteristics of posts, the very features that individuals cited as pivotal in shaping their opinions about the events or phenomena being described. Most strikingly, certain indicators carried disparate meanings for people within the same demographic cohort. Two respondents of the same age and gender could look at the identical headline and walk away with entirely different impressions of its credibility, urgency, or fairness.

This intra-group variation is a quiet challenge to a common habit in media research: treating demographic categories as if they predictably determine reception. The findings suggest that even within a tightly defined cohort, the subjective interpretation of news design elements—word choice, framing, visual presentation—varies enough that any model of public opinion formation must account for individual-level heterogeneity. The authors frame this as groundwork for future research into why specific posting criteria, or news design in general, remain critical to audiences, and how individuals actually perceive them. In other words, the study opens a door rather than closing an argument.

The broader context makes this work timely. Media scholars have long debated whether news coverage mirrors public sentiment or molds it, a question that has grown urgent as social media platforms algorithmically amplify emotionally charged content. Previous studies have shown that headline format can influence how people evaluate environmental news even when it does not change whether they engage with it, and that sentiment expressed through emoji and text measurably affects post popularity. Sentiment analysis has become a standard instrument in brand management, political communication, and misinformation research. What the Kazakhstani team adds is a non-Western, non-English case study—a reminder that the dynamics of tone, engagement, and opinion are being measured and contested well beyond the Silicon Valley–centric literature.

For newsrooms, the practical implications are immediate. Editors choosing between a neutral and a positively framed headline are not just making a stylistic decision; they are making a measurable bet on engagement. The study’s evidence suggests positive tonality tends to travel further, attracting more likes and more comments, even if the statistical case is not yet airtight. But the finding that identical content provokes divergent emotional readings within the same audience warns against a purely mechanical approach. A headline optimized for maximum engagement may still be interpreted in ways the newsroom never intended, and those interpretations—visible in the comment section—become part of the story itself, shaping the opinions of everyone who scrolls past. As the authors and their funders at Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education continue this line of inquiry, the intersection of computational linguistics and media psychology promises to make the invisible mechanics of public opinion increasingly visible, one comment at a time.

Subject of Research: Statistical and sentiment analysis of news headline tone and audience reactions on social media

Article Title: Linguistic statistical analysis of content and tonality in media communication

Article References: Zhanzhigitov, S., Bakytzhanova, A., Sarsenbekov, N., Kenges, B., & Bismildina, D. (2026). Linguistic statistical analysis of content and tonality in media communication. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 530. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01754-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01754-5

Keywords: sentiment analysis, social media, news headlines, public opinion, TextBlob, SPSS, Instagram, media communication, audience engagement, tonality, Kazakhstan, discourse analysis

The study, conducted by Fareeha Aazam, Pei Soo Ang, and Noor Aqsa Nabila Mat Isa of the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics at Universiti Malaya, with Aazam also affiliated with the Department of English at the University of Wah in Pakistan, analyses an entire year of activity on X: 2,861 posts drawn from the accounts of the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), a government institution, and the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), a private university. These two institutions were chosen as leading representatives of Pakistan’s higher education landscape, and their contrasting ownership structures, public versus private, provided a natural comparison for the branding strategies each employs. Rather than treating posts as isolated bits of text, the researchers read them as coordinated bundles of words, images, and interactional moves that together perform an institutional identity.

The core theoretical contribution of the paper is the multimodal glocalisation approach itself. Glocalisation, a term long used in social science to describe the adaptation of global forms to local conditions, has often been studied in economics or media content. Here the authors integrate it with discourse-semiotic principles, which hold that meaning is made not only through what is said but through how it is said, what is shown alongside it, and how audiences are invited to respond. They then connect this to theories of glocal identity performance, the idea that institutions do not simply possess an identity but actively enact one, moment by moment, through their communicative choices. The result is a framework that asks a deceptively simple question of every post: how does this message align the communicative norms expected of a globally oriented university with cultural meanings grounded in Pakistani society?

Answering that question required a deliberately multi-method design, and the technical architecture of the study is one of its strengths. Content analysis provided a systematic census of what the two universities posted about, allowing the researchers to quantify the themes that dominate each account. Corpus-assisted discourse analysis then examined patterns of language across the full body of posts, identifying recurring vocabulary and framing choices that individual close reading might miss. Multimodal visual analysis extended the scrutiny to photographs, graphics, and other visual resources, asking how imagery contributes to the branding work that text alone cannot accomplish. Crucially, the researchers did not stop at the messages themselves. Questionnaires and interviews captured how audiences actually perceived these branding efforts, adding a reception dimension that much social media analysis lacks. The study received ethics approval from the Universiti Malaya Research Ethics Committee, and all participants gave informed consent before data collection, which took place between March and May 2024.

The findings reveal two sharply differentiated branding philosophies. NUST, the government institution, builds its identity around national development and research legitimacy. Its posts foreground the university’s contribution to the country’s scientific and technological advancement, presenting it as an engine of progress whose credibility rests on demonstrable research output. This is branding aimed at legitimacy: the message is that NUST matters because Pakistan’s future depends on institutions like it. The rhetorical and visual resources deployed in service of this narrative emphasize achievement, institutional authority, and alignment with national priorities, positioning the university as a trusted instrument of state-level ambition.

LUMS, by contrast, constructs its identity around the texture of student life. The private university’s posts foreground student experience, social advocacy, and community networks, portraying the institution as a vibrant, engaged, and socially conscious environment. Where NUST’s branding speaks in the register of national progress, LUMS speaks in the register of belonging and impact: the campus as a community, the student as a change-maker, the university as a node in networks of advocacy and civic engagement. Neither strategy is inherently superior, the study suggests; each is calibrated to the institution’s history, funding model, and the audiences it most needs to persuade, from prospective students and their families to international academic partners and policymakers.

The most striking result, however, is what the two universities share. Despite their different orientations, both institutions consistently embed Islamic and nationalistic cues in their messaging, anchoring globally oriented content within the Pakistani socio-cultural context. A post about an international research collaboration, a global ranking, or an English-language achievement is rarely allowed to float free of its local moorings. Instead, it is accompanied by visual and verbal markers, religious and patriotic, that remind the audience of where the university stands and whom it ultimately serves. This is glocalisation in action: the global vocabulary of higher education, with its emphasis on rankings, research, innovation, and international engagement, is deliberately interwoven with local symbols that guarantee cultural resonance at home.

The theoretical significance of this pattern is considerable. Much of the existing literature on university branding has been built on Western institutions operating in contexts where the global and the local align relatively comfortably. The Pakistani case demonstrates that in other settings the negotiation is far more delicate. A university that projected a purely cosmopolitan identity might risk appearing detached from the values of its society, while one that leaned entirely on local tradition might forfeit the international credibility it needs for partnerships, rankings, and global student recruitment. The multimodal glocalisation approach names and formalizes this balancing act, showing that it is accomplished not in grand strategic documents but in the cumulative, post-by-post coordination of language, imagery, and interaction. Each post is a small performance, and the institutional identity emerges from the pattern of thousands of such performances over time.

The methodological contribution is equally important for researchers. By combining corpus-assisted discourse analysis with multimodal visual analysis and audience research, the study offers a replicable template for anyone seeking to understand institutional branding on social media. The approach scales to other platforms and other countries, and it resists the common pitfall of analyzing text in isolation from visuals and reception. For practitioners, the implications are direct. University communications teams, particularly those in non-Western contexts, gain a vocabulary for thinking about how their global aspirations and local obligations can reinforce rather than undermine one another. The study suggests that the most effective branding does not choose between the global and the local but choreographs them, using each post to perform a hybrid identity that is culturally resonant at home and recognizably excellent abroad.

As universities everywhere compete for attention in crowded digital feeds, the lessons from Pakistan’s leading institutions travel well beyond their borders. The study’s authors present their framework as a step toward understanding how organizations of any kind craft identities that must satisfy multiple audiences at once, and the year of X posts they analyzed provides concrete evidence that the craft is both systematic and subtle. In an era when a university’s brand may be built one 280-character message at a time, the finding that identity is performed, coordinated, and glocalised in every post is a reminder that the smallest communicative choices can carry the largest institutional stakes.

Subject of Research: Multimodal glocalisation in university branding strategies on social media

Article Title: Multimodal glocalisation approach for analysing university branding strategies: the case of pakistan on X

Article References: Aazam, F., Ang, P. S., & Mat Isa, N. A. N. (2026). Multimodal glocalisation approach for analysing university branding strategies: the case of pakistan on X. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09382-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09382-3

Keywords: university branding, glocalisation, multimodality, social media, X platform, Pakistan, NUST, LUMS, discourse analysis, higher education, digital communication, identity performance

The study, conducted by Marcus Lauri of Mid Sweden University together with Anna-Karin Hurtig, Per E. Gustafsson and Ida Linander of Umeå University, set out to examine something that is rarely scrutinised despite its ubiquity: what equality actually means when it appears in healthcare policy. The researchers analysed two landmark governmental reform reports, SOU 2015:98 on highly specialised care and SOU 2020:19 on primary healthcare. These documents are not minor administrative texts; they are the blueprints through which the Swedish state frames, justifies and designs sweeping reforms of its healthcare system. By treating them as discursive artefacts, the team could map not only how often equality is discussed but, more importantly, what kind of equality is being imagined.

Methodologically, the research draws on discourse theory combined with conceptual discussions of equality from political philosophy. Discourse theory, associated with the Essex School of thought, treats language not as a neutral container for pre-existing ideas but as the very medium through which political meaning is produced and contested. Words like equality do not carry fixed definitions; they are articulated differently in different contexts, and each articulation carries assumptions about how the world works and how it should be organised. By tracing the logics that connect statements across hundreds of pages of policy text, the researchers could identify the dominant meanings of equality and consider what those meanings make possible, and what they render invisible.

The analysis identified three distinct meanings of equality in the reform reports, two of which dominated the texts. The first articulates equality as sameness and uniformity. In this framing, equality is achieved when care looks the same everywhere: when geographical access is evened out across the country, when coordination between different actors and locations functions seamlessly, and when care is standardised through shared knowledge production and exchange. This is a logic of removing difference. If a patient in a sparsely populated northern county receives the same standardised care as a patient in Stockholm, equality, in this view, has been achieved. The emphasis falls on the system’s uniformity rather than on whether different groups, with different starting points and different social circumstances, end up with comparable health outcomes.

The second dominant meaning frames equality as individual agency and patient responsibility. Here, equality is realised when patients become active co-creators of their own care, a vision operationalised through mechanisms such as individual care plans and patient contracts. The patient is imagined as an informed, autonomous actor who negotiates with the healthcare system, makes choices and takes ownership of their treatment. This articulation resonates strongly with liberal political thought, in which the free and responsible individual is the central unit of society. It also shifts a portion of the burden of achieving good care from the collective institutions of the welfare state onto the individual person, who is now expected to be engaged, articulate and self-directing.

The third meaning, responsiveness to healthcare needs, appears far less frequently in the reports. This is the articulation most closely aligned with classic egalitarian and distributive understandings of justice: the idea that resources should flow toward need, and that people facing unequal structural conditions, shaped by income, education, housing, employment and other social determinants of health, may require different and unequal inputs to achieve fair outcomes. The researchers found that this distributive logic occupies a marginal position in the two reform documents, overshadowed by the twin discourses of uniformity and individual responsibility.

The implications of this discursive shift are substantial. When equality is defined primarily as sameness of provision and as the empowerment of individual patients, the structural conditions that generate health inequalities in the first place drop out of the policy conversation. A policy framework that celebrates uniform access can coexist comfortably with widening gaps in health outcomes, because it never asks whether the same service delivered to a wealthy urban professional and to a low-income single parent in a declining rural municipality produces the same result. Similarly, a policy language that foregrounds patient responsibility can implicitly blame individuals who fail to navigate the system successfully, while remaining silent about the social resources, literacy, time and stability that successful navigation presupposes.

The authors argue that the dominant articulations marginalise more egalitarian understandings of equality that would take social determinants of health and unequal structural conditions into account. In their conclusion, they suggest that while equality occupies a central position in Swedish healthcare policy, its meaning is increasingly shaped by liberal values rather than by commitments to social justice or redistribution. This matters not merely as a matter of semantics. Policy discourse shapes what reforms are designed to do, what indicators are used to measure success, and what problems are even recognised as problems. If the discursive space for need-based, distributive reasoning shrinks, the capacity of policy to address healthcare inequalities in practice is likely to erode alongside it.

The Swedish case carries lessons well beyond its borders. Healthcare systems across Europe and North America have embraced strikingly similar vocabularies in recent decades: patient choice, person-centred care, standardisation, quality registries, integrated care pathways and individual care plans. These instruments are not inherently problematic, and the Swedish study does not claim that uniform access or patient participation are undesirable goals. The point is subtler and more troubling: when these liberal and managerial framings become the dominant ways of talking about equality, they crowd out alternative understandings rather than complementing them. The word equality remains on every page, but its redistributive core is hollowed out, a phenomenon the researchers capture in the study’s title through the phrase insistent individualisation and eroding egalitarianism.

For researchers, policymakers and citizens invested in health equity, the study offers a methodological invitation as much as a substantive warning. Analysing the language of policy documents, the work suggests, can reveal shifts in political values that would remain invisible to purely quantitative monitoring of access or outcomes. A system can report uniformly high access scores while its policy discourse has quietly abandoned the distributive commitments needed to confront the social gradient in health. As Sweden and other nations continue to reform their healthcare systems in the name of equality, the study argues that paying close attention to what equality is being made to mean, and whose interests that meaning serves, is not an academic luxury but a prerequisite for policies capable of genuinely reducing healthcare inequalities.

Subject of Research: Discourses of equality in Swedish healthcare policy

Article Title: Insistent individualisation and eroding egalitarianism: Dominant discourses of equality in Swedish healthcare policy

Article References: Lauri, M., Hurtig, A.-K., Gustafsson, P. E., & Linander, I. (2026). Insistent individualisation and eroding egalitarianism: Dominant discourses of equality in Swedish healthcare policy. BMC Health Services Research. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-15824-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12913-026-15824-0

Keywords: equality, Swedish healthcare policy, healthcare reforms, discourse analysis, liberal equality, patient responsibility, individual agency, social determinants of health, healthcare inequalities, egalitarianism, primary healthcare, highly specialised care

The research team, led by Liam Ó Riada with Unai Pascual, Esther Turnhout and Julia Neidig, applied discourse analysis to the historical record of Spanish education policy. Discourse analysis, in this context, is a method for examining how language constructs reality: which concepts are elevated as self-evident truths, which are marginalized, and which actors are granted authority to define what education is for. Rather than treating policy texts as neutral descriptions of reform, the researchers read them as battlegrounds where different worldviews compete. This approach draws on political theory holding that dominant ideas are never permanent; they can be destabilized by crises and dislocations, creating openings for alternative visions to enter the mainstream.

The analysis identified three distinct periods in Spanish education policy. The first, spanning roughly 1975 to 1990, coincided with Spain’s transition to democracy after four decades of dictatorship. During this era, policy discourse was animated by emancipatory aspirations: education was framed as a vehicle for freedom, democratic citizenship and social justice. The legacy of authoritarian schooling made it politically urgent to imagine classrooms as spaces where critical thinking and participation could flourish. This period, the authors argue, contained genuine affinities with what scholars now call transformative sustainability education—an approach that emphasizes transdisciplinary learning, experiential and embodied pedagogies, and the capacity of learners to question and reshape the systems around them.

That emancipatory moment, however, did not last. From about 1990 to 2018, the study documents the consolidation of a neoliberal consensus in Spanish education policy, one heavily shaped by the discourse of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The OECD and similar actors have long promoted a human-capital framing of education, in which schools are evaluated primarily by their contribution to economic competitiveness and employability. Under this logic, the purpose of education narrows to generating human capital: measurable skills that can be fed into labor markets. Standardized assessment, international rankings and performance indicators became the dominant instruments of governance, and the creative, critical and transdisciplinary pedagogies that sustainability transformation requires were progressively marginalized.

The technical heart of the study lies in showing how this economistic framing operated discursively. Human-capital discourse did not merely coexist with other visions of education; it absorbed and reinterpreted them. Even concepts with emancipatory origins, such as lifelong learning or educational quality, were redefined in market-oriented terms. The researchers describe this as a hegemonic process, in which one worldview achieves such dominance that its assumptions become common sense, rendering alternatives difficult even to articulate. For advocates of sustainability education, this meant that arguments about ecological crisis, social justice or intergenerational responsibility struggled to find legitimate space within a policy conversation organized around productivity and competitiveness.

The third period begins in 2019 and continues to the present, and it is here that the analysis becomes most striking. A sequence of dislocatory events—including large-scale student climate mobilizations, growing public awareness of ecological breakdown and political turbulence within Spain—destabilized the previously settled consensus. Sustainability emerged as a central signifier in education policy, culminating in a new education law that explicitly legitimizes transdisciplinary, experiential and embodied pedagogies. For the first time in the country’s democratic history, the legal architecture of Spanish schooling formally recognizes that learning for sustainability must go beyond transmitting facts about the environment and instead engage students in transformative, experience-based practice.

The authors are careful, however, not to declare victory. Their analysis shows that the discursive opening of the recent period remains constrained by entrenched neoliberal governance. The market-oriented logics built into assessment regimes, funding structures and institutional incentives did not disappear when sustainability entered the policy vocabulary. This creates a real risk of co-optation: the possibility that sustainability itself will be reframed as another form of human capital—a set of green skills for a green economy—rather than as an invitation to question the economic assumptions that drove ecological crisis in the first place. The study suggests that whether the current opening leads to genuine transformation or to a rebranded version of the old consensus depends on struggles still underway.

One of the most consequential findings concerns how change actually happens. The researchers found that dislocatory events alone are insufficient; what matters is whether different struggles for educational reform can be linked together into a broader coalition. When movements for climate action, pedagogical innovation and democratic schooling connect their demands, they can collectively push elements of transformative sustainability education into law and policy. Conversely, when reform efforts remain fragmented, the resilient machinery of market-oriented governance tends to absorb or dilute them. This insight travels well beyond Spain: it offers a strategic lesson for educators and policymakers in other countries navigating similar tensions between economic and ecological imperatives in their school systems.

The Spanish case also illustrates a broader tension in global sustainability politics. International organizations have increasingly embraced education as a tool for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, yet the same institutions often promote the human-capital frameworks that the study identifies as a barrier to transformative pedagogy. The result is an ambivalence at the heart of international education policy: sustainability is celebrated in declarations while the governance instruments that shape classrooms daily continue to reward standardization and measurable economic outcomes. The Spanish experience shows that national politics can partially break from this pattern, but only when domestic coalitions are strong enough to translate crisis into legal and institutional change.

What emerges from this research is neither optimism nor fatalism, but a precise map of where leverage lies. The discursive history of Spanish education demonstrates that dominant framings are historically contingent rather than natural, that crises can crack them open, and that coalitions can push transformative visions into binding policy. At the same time, it warns that vocabulary is not victory: a law that mentions sustainability can still be implemented through competitive, market-driven governance that hollows out its meaning. For anyone concerned with how education systems might help societies navigate the ecological transition, the Spanish record offers both a warning and an invitation—the door to transformative education is open, but only sustained political struggle will keep it that way.

Subject of Research: Discourse analysis of Spanish education policy and openings for transformative sustainability education

Article Title: From generating human capital to transformative education: discursive struggles in Spanish education policy and openings for sustainability

Article References: Ó Riada, L., Pascual, U., Turnhout, E., & Neidig, J. (2026). From generating human capital to transformative education: discursive struggles in Spanish education policy and openings for sustainability. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(8), e0000267. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000267

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000267

Keywords: education policy, sustainability transformation, Spain, discourse analysis, human capital, OECD, neoliberalism, transformative education, climate crisis, pedagogy, PLOS, policy reform