Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture (vols. 1–65, 2002–2015)

This new book extends Teun A. van Dijk’s earlier research on discursive racism to the Latin world. He presents a first inventory of elite discourse and racism in Spain and Latin America by examining discursive reactions in Spain to recent immigration, as well as age-old racism and ethnicism in text and talk in Latin America (especially Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile). Through careful analysis of the media, political discourse, textbooks and other public discourses in these countries he shows that discursive euro-racism is ubiquitous also in countries outside Europe. Spain reproduces, but as yet in a less radical way, the kind of racist discourse we find elsewhere in Western Europe. In Latin America, ethnicism and racism against the indigenous peoples and against Afrolatins has prevailed in elite discourse since colonialism and slavery.

This is the first integrated study of discursive racism in the Latin world and provides a useful framework for similar research.

What actually happens in counselling interactions? How does counselling bring about change?

How do clients end up producing new and alternative stories of their lives and relationships?

By addressing these questions and others, Peter Muntigl explores the narrative counselling process in the context where it is enacted: the unfolding conversation between counsellor and clients. Through a transdisciplinary approach that combines conversation analysis and systemic functional linguistic theory, Muntigl demonstrates how language is used in couples counselling, how language use changes over the course of counselling, and how this process provides clients with new linguistic resources that help them change their social relationships.

This book will be a valuable resource not only for linguists and discourse analysts, but also for researchers and practitioners in the fields of counselling, psychotherapy, psychology, and medicine.

(Mis)Representing Islam explores and illustrates how élite broadsheet newspapers are implicated in the production and reproduction of anti-Muslim racism. The book approaches journalistic discourse as the inseparable combination of ‘social practices’, ‘discursive practices’ and the ‘texts’ themselves from a perspective which fuses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism. This framework enables Richardson to (re)contextualise élite journalism within its professional, political, economic, social and historic settings and present a critical and precise examination of not only the prevalence but also the form and potential effects of anti-Muslim racism. The book analyses the centrality of van Dijk’s ideological square and the significance and utility of stereotypical topoi in representing Islam and Muslims, focusing in particular on the reporting of Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Algeria, Iraq and Britain.
This timely book should interest researchers and students of racism, Islam, Journalism and Communication studies, Rhetoric, and (Critical) Discourse Analysis.

Re/reading the Past is concerned with the discourses of history, from the complementary perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The papers in the book stress the discursive construction of the past, focussing on the different social narratives which compete for official acknowledgement. Issues of collective and cultural memory are addressed, reflecting the "linguistic turn" in the Social Sciences. The book covers a range of discourses, interpreting texts from popular culture to academic discourse including the construction and evaluation of past events in a variety of places around the world. It is especially timely in its focus on the construction of time and value in a post-colonial world where history discourses are central to on-going processes of reconciliation, debates on war crimes, and the issues of amnesty and restitution. As such the book fills a significant gap in interdisciplinary debates as well as in register and genre analysis, and will be of general interest to historians, political scientists and discourse analysts as well as students and teachers of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) and EAP (English for Academic Purposes).

Silencing is not only a physically coercive act. It is also an act of language involving forms of selection, representation and compliance. Discourse and Silencing weaves together theories and examples of discourse from different disciplines in order to put forward a theory of silencing in language: that discursive systems filter, represent and displace types of knowledge into other forms of expression.

Each chapter of the book analyses examples of silencing through discourse in various social and political fields. The examples cover courtroom trials, government censorship, domestic violence, marital conversations, penal institutions, news media, and political rhetoric. They cover societies ranging from Eastern and Central Europe, Canada and the U.S. to New Zealand and Japan. The contributors clarify the difference between chosen silences and the silencing that, as a practice, seeks to limit, alter or de-legitimise another’s discourse. The book also examines the continuous resistances and shifts in discourse and silencing within the social and political frameworks in which interlocutors negotiate their relations to each other.

This book argues for a multidisciplinary approach to the study of the language of judges with respect to the issue of gender discrimination. Drawing its inspiration from Dell Hymes' socially constituted linguistics, the author examines the language of the judicial opinions of four U.S. Supreme Court cases addressing social and legal discrimination against women. Through a linguistic analysis that is informed by a Foucauldian and feminist perspective, this book addresses the complex issues of the power of judges and ideologies, the politics of language use, and feminist contributions to the subject of discrimination and women's rights. This book is most suitable for researchers and students in cultural studies, ethnography, feminist legal studies, forensic linguistics, gender studies, ideology research, pragmatics, semiotics, and social studies.

This book proposes an original policy framework for addressing hate speech. Gelber argues that a policy designed to provide support to affected groups and communities to enable them to speak back when hate speech occurs, is a more useful way of addressing the harms of hate speech than punitive measures. She suggests that “speaking back” allows the affected groups to contradict the messages contained in the words of the hate speakers, and to counteract the silencing, disempowering and marginalising effects of hate speech. Gelber’s argument uniquely synthesises the ideas of defending the importance of participating in speech, recognising the harms of hate speech and acknowledging that targeted groups may require assistance to respond.