Insights into the construction of cultural realities: Foreign newspaper discourses about the burkini ban in France
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The burkini ban introduced by several French coastal cities in August 2016 caused a great stir in France and abroad. Discussions were mostly articulated around the topics of secularism, religion, and national identity and values. This study examines foreign perspectives on the burkini ban in France to gain insights into the construction of cultural realities. Informed by Cultural Studies and Critical intercultural communication, this study approaches the construction of cultural realities by investigating the articulation of similarities and differences. A thematic analysis of newspaper articles ( N = 167) from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland was conducted to identify the categories evoked to construct similarities and differences. Findings indicated subtle shifts between old and refined commonalities. Throughout the data, France was cast away and represented as “the deviant other” while Muslims and Islam were associated with representations of “us.” However, underlying tensions indicated ambivalence in the redefinition of symbolic differences and similarities. Specifically, the figure of the Western Muslim and the construction of the burkini as “appropriate difference” suggested the persistence of hierarchical relations between “us” and “them.” Cultural realities therefore appeared to be both liquid and solid. In addition, findings underlined the dialogic construction of cultural realities as differences and similarities were constructed at different levels (national and transnational) that became meaningful through their interactions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".