Subject collection: Communication Studies (152 titles, 2000–2015)

Discourse, Politics and Women as Global Leaders focuses on the discourse practices of women in global political leadership. It provides a series of discursive studies of women in positions of political leadership. ‘Political leadership’ is defined as achieving a senior position within a political organization and will often indicate a senior role in government or opposition. The volume draws on a diverse collection of studies from across the globe, reflecting a variety of cultures and distinct polities. The primary aim is to consider in what way(s) discursive practice underpins, reflects, or is appropriated in terms of women’s political success and achievements within politics. The chapters employ differing theoretical approaches all bound by the discursive insights they provide, and in terms of their contribution to understanding the role of language and discourse in the construction of gendered identities within political contexts.

The discourses of the post-apartheid South Africa embody symbols of change and promises of new lessons in history. This is the first volume that brings together analyses of a variety of discourses produced in South Africa through which we follow the evolution of transitional processes in the country’s political institutions and in the opinions of its populace. The book offers to the reader a visit to the Parliament, a peek into the internet forums, analyses of the country's official papers and speeches, and the media accounts. Through all these discourses we see the burning questions – "Who Are We Now?" and "Who Do We Want To Be?" – being repetitively examined and identities cross-formed while the country deals with new, post-apartheid challenges, as well as successes.

With the help of critical discourse analysis (CDA), this book approaches Turkish politics from an interdisciplinary perspective in order to deepen our understanding of political power and discourse. This study re-conceptualizes discursive strategies as hegemonic projects and thirteen governmental speeches are analyzed accordingly. It also provides readers with a theoretical discussion on the nature of political discourse through references to deliberative, agonistic and critical realistic approaches.

Persuasive Games in Political and Professional Dialogue is about the rediscovery of humans as proficient users of language in the sense that – while involved in a dialogue – they listen, observe, discuss, reason, evaluate and conclude; in other words, speakers are no longer interested in defeating the other and proving him/her wrong, but in learning from the other.

The volume comprises 12 articles, distributed in two sections – Persuasion in Political Dialogue and Persuasive Strategies in Professional Dialogue – which approach the topic of persuasion as it unfolds from political and professional communication. The articles in the proposed volume depict relevant theoretical and practical issues related to persuasion in two communication sites: politics and workplace, and they are results of consistent research conducted by the contributors in various settings. The contributions provide critical, valuable insights into the dynamic process of creating and maintaining relationships at an individual and at a professional level.

This book is a critical study of the ways that discourses of the (national) Self and Other are invoked and reflected in the reporting of a major international political conflict. Taking Iran’s nuclear programme as a case study, this book offers extensive textual analysis, comparative investigation and socio-political contextualisation of national identity in newspaper reporting. In addition to providing comprehensive accounts of theory and methodology in Critical Discourse Analysis, the book provides a valuable extensive discussion of journalistic practice in Iranian and British contexts, as well as offering insights into historical development of ‘discourses in place’ in Iran. Across four separate chapters, major national and influential newspapers from both countries are critically analysed in terms of their micro-linguistic and macro-discoursal content and strategies. The book is a vital source for interdisciplinary scholarship and will appeal to students and researchers across the critical social sciences, particularly those in linguistics, media and communication studies, journalism and international politics.

This volume aims at contributing to an interpretive approach to writing and its dynamics. It offers a general scope on the process-product interface by multiplying the points of view on both the process and the product and their links. The book presents new findings and perspectives in the study of language and writing, both theoretical and methodological (e.g. dual process models of writing, pragmatics of writing, linguistic analysis of psycholinguistic units such as bursts of production). It also presents new tools for a longitudinal approach to the writing steps, key-stroke logging with integrated linguistic modules, and textometric analysis of written texts. The volume is composed of five sections that highlight different approaches to writing from the viewpoint of multiple disciplines: Anthropology, Cognitive Psycholinguistics, Communication Studies, Didactics (Applied Linguistics), Discourse Analysis, Literacy, Sociolinguistics and Text Genetics. This book will be relevant for scholars and students interested in writing, text analysis, literacy, learning and teaching.

As of January 2019, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

The articles in this volume examine historical, cultural, literary and political facets of translation in Turkey, a society in tortuous transformation since the 19th century from empire to nation-state. Some draw attention to tradition in Ottoman practices and agents of translation and interpreting, while others explore the republican period, starting in 1923, with the revolutionary change in script from Arabic to Roman coming in 1928, making a powerful impact on publication and translation practices. Areas covered include the German Jewish academic involvement in translation, traditional and current practices of translating from Kurdish into Turkish, censorship of translated literature, intralingual translations from Ottoman into modern Turkish, pseudotranslation, ideological manipulation and resistance in translation, imitativeness vs. originality and metonymics of literary reviewing.

This volume illustrates the process of conducting interdisciplinary, multi-cultural research into the relationship between patient language use and chronic disease management. The ten chapters in this book provide a model for interdisciplinary research in health discourse from start to finish. Part I describes in detail the conceptualization and design of a multi-year research project exploring language use among people living with diabetes. Part II offers a sampler of a variety of qualitative, quantitative, and contrastive methodologies that have considerable potential in the study of health discourse. Part III brings the research process full circle by discussing issues related to adapting research protocols to diverse cultural contexts, translating results into practice, and working in interdisciplinary teams.

This book examines the kinds of talk that service providers working in various settings (e.g. doctors, healthcare providers, helpline call takers, tourist officers) seek to avoid in their interactions with clients, when such talk may be expected or due in some way. The studies utilise Conversation Analysis to demonstrate how participants use the interactional practices of avoidance and withholding to construct specific activities as restricted. The various authors also show how, in contributing to the restricted character of certain activities, withholding and avoidance in turn contribute to both the accomplishment of the particular work of the specific organisations and to the construction of the specific institutional identities of the professionals. Overall, the collection offers an authoritative account of restriction and avoidance in workplace interaction.

What role do language and discourse play in the advancement of peace? What is the connection between a given society’s “peace language” and the repeated failure of peace initiatives involving it? At the heart of this book lie these basic questions and the attempt to shed light on them from new angles. The book focuses on an analysis of Israeli peace discourse and indicates the need for change in this discourse in order to promote a “culture of peace”. It presents the process of peace-estrangement, a set of linguistic, discursive and cultural devices intended for creating doubt regarding the positive meaning associated with the concept of peace. The approach adopted in this book is the Cultural Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CCDA). This approach aims at exposing the cultural codes embedded in the discourse, which contribute to reproducing abuses of social power. The analytic chapters focus on different historical periods, since the beginning of the 20th century to this day, and deal with various genres found in diverse corpora, such as Knesset records and school textbooks.