Making the grade: infrastructural semiotics and derivative market outcomes on the Chicago Board of Trade and New Orleans Cotton Exchange, 1856–1909

This paper contributes to a socio-technical analysis of derivatives by offering an infrastructural explanation of divergent outcomes on two early American futures markets. It takes as the starting-point of analysis the classification systems by which these futures markets were constitutively linked to underlying markets in agricultural commodities. Despite the formal similarity of these systems, their contrasting implementation – i.e. how grading was accomplished and integrated into practice – produced classifications with dissimilar semiotic qualities. This semiotic distinction is shown to have promoted divergent economic behaviours and outcomes on the two markets: high-risk speculation and volatility on the Chicago Board of Trade, low-risk hedging and stability on the New Orleans Cotton Exchange. The paper thus argues that treating classifications in their semiotic capacity yields an analysis that can connect foundational infrastructures and market-level outcomes in meaningful, non-deterministic ways.     

The Dole “Godless Americans” advert: representations of the unfaithful,disloyal villains

Using a rhetorical analytic methodology, this study examines the representations constructed in the “Godless Americans” advert from the North Carolina 2008 US Senate race between incumbent Republican Elizabeth Dole and Democratic challenger Kay Hagan. Bringing to consciousness ideologies that influence messages is important because they are often taken at face value without understanding of their underlying meaning. Religious faith, morality and trustworthiness are values conveyed in this advert through the devices of framing, coded language and propaganda techniques. Non-linguistic elements are effectively coordinated to perpetuate the code of disloyal villains, activating cognitive networks of fear and anger toward atheists. By marginalizing atheists, an ideology that runs counter to the US Constitution is exposed coming from a lawmaker entrusted to uphold it.     

Representing teachers as criminals in the news: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of the Atlanta schools’ “Cheating Scandal”

On 1 April 2015, 11 Atlanta teachers accused of changing answers on their students’ standardized tests were convicted of racketeering and sentenced to 5–20 years in prison. Despite ample news coverage, few sources investigated teachers’ motivations for altering students’ responses or explored what the consequences would have been if student scores had not been changed to passing. Moreover, the fact that the teachers’ actions resulted from systemic problems associated with working within a high-stakes testing environment is glossed over and all but lost in the reporting of the “Cheating Scandal” events. The authors conduct a critical multimodal analysis of how semiotic resources were used to represent teachers in the Atlanta “Cheating Scandal” and show how the media's framing of teachers both reflects and conceals specific interests of the powerful educational reform movement and the corporations that benefit from it, such as Pearson, Inc. Data sources included four online news sources from April 2015 that covered the teachers’ sentencing, and the authors analyzed the visual and verbal transformations that occurred during the process of recontextualization. Analysis revealed the construction of a moral narrative that depicted the teachers as selfish and incompetent, reinforcing the dominant paradigm driving school reform in the USA. The authors conclude by calling for more counter-narratives that expose how dominant representations reify negative public perceptions of teachers.