Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 23, Issue 2, 2024

Whoever intends to answer the question about how collective identities are articulated today in capitalist societies cannot ignore the task of conceptually and empirically articulating two differentiated issues: on the one hand, the anomic situations of disintegration, in which the individualizing logic of neoliberal ideology takes center stage; on the other, the emergence of new phenomena of social authoritarianism in different strata where the psycho-affective dynamics of community identifications become especially relevant. In this article I will analyze the mechanisms of communitarian subjectivation deployed by neoliberalism in the time of its crisis. For this purpose, I examine some oral narratives extracted from a qualitative study of Argentine society, in which the interlocutors thread hypotheses about issues of public significance such as social inequality, the role of the State in our crisis context and the rights of immigrants.

Studies have highlighted differences between right-wing populism in Western and Central Eastern Europe but suggested that discourses have been converging since the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015. This article examines this claim by focusing on right-wing populist frames and affective communication on migration in Austria and Slovenia. Taking a communication-centred approach, the study is based on a critical frame analysis of 70 speeches from far-right to centre-right parties in parliamentary debates on migration between 2015 and 2019. The results show that right-wing populist discourses in the two adjacent countries have aligned in appealing to affects, particularly to fear and in framing migration as a threat to security and culture. Despite differences in mobilizing affects, the findings indicate a mutual alignment of right-wing populism beyond borders, signalling a potential risk of a broader right-wing populist bloc unified by fear of migration.

Every ideology aims at constructing specific representations of reality that many people can easily adopt. In this paper, mental models described as cognitive representations of reality are used to explain how people come to their beliefs. Applying Johnson-Laird’s theoretical concept, I present mental models reconstructed by means of a qualitative analysis of key lexemes in the Crimean speech of Vladimir Putin held in 2014. This reconstruction reveals how the mental models in question target a shared social cognition among listeners using ideologically loaded references articulated in the speech. Furthermore, tracing ideological references allows a preliminary insight into how the speaker aims to affect the discourse formation process of the time. This reconstruction is indispensable to gain a better understanding of the Russian attack on Ukraine, eight years later.

European Union (EU) institutions are highly multilingual environments where international communication is very goal-oriented, as they produce and define policies and regulations applied to all member states. This paper aims at exploring how disagreements and conflicting opinions are conveyed in such contexts through the qualitative analysis of debates in recorded meetings of the European Parliament Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety. Two meetings from two different parliamentary terms (2014–2019 and 2019–2024) will be analyzed. The study will adopt a pragma-rhetorical approach, drawing on studies on politeness and conversation analysis techniques and focusing especially on the management of Face Threatening Acts in English turns. Attention will also be paid to language choice, codeswitching, and to the international use of English. Results show that conflict and overt disagreements in the data are very rare, with speakers displaying instead careful mitigation of the language used, especially when English is employed.

The article analyzes debut interviews of female Israeli politicians, in which the interviewees are faced with questions or statements that imply that their gender, ethnicity or background prevent them from fulfilling their function as politicians successfully, in accordance with the “Gendered mediation thesis” (GoodYear-Grant 2013). We focus on the interviewees’ responses to these questions, and particularly on how grammatically negative utterances are deployed in the service of coping with the presuppositions directed at them. The analysis indicates that the negative utterances do not carry the full weight of rejection of implied presuppositions. Moreover, in some cases negative utterances are used by the speakers as part of a hedging strategy. By describing the role of negation in debut interviews of female Israeli politicians, the paper aims to advance a more comprehensive understanding of linguistic patterns used by women, and other silenced groups, to cope with biased representation.

This paper examines protest language from the late Arab Spring uprisings, more specifically in Tunisia, Egypt and Iraq – identified as the “Facebook Upheavals”. It explores the discursive aspects of these processes through which social protest and dissent are constructed and different forms of communication and expression are mobilized. It also examines how the various modes of representation and dissemination contribute to shaping and influencing social movements and resistance within the Arab political context, individually and collectively. On the collective level, the paper explores the discursive construction of collective identities, the formation of alliances, and the negotiation of power relations within and between different protest movements. This is done by reporting how discourses are used to challenge dominant narratives, contest oppressive structures, and then to shape the political landscape in the Arab region.

This article addresses the socio-cognitive conceptualizations of the notion of ‘citizenship’ within the space of smart cities. It discusses how smart cities expos are endowed with ideological bearings that mark a shift in these conceptualizations. This ideological shift is explored in the policy releases of Barcelona expo media centre 2019/2020 as retrieved from the Smart City Expo World Congress website. The framework accounts for the socio-cognitive aspects that are brought to the smart expos’ discussions, reframing it within the paradigms of Posthumanism and neoliberal urbanism. It is found that citizenship within smart city discourse is characterized by series of subjugating conflations between biovalues and biometrics, the body, technology, and the city and the citizen. These subjugations are discovered by contesting the metaphors of CITIZEN-FOCUSED URBANISM, VULNERABLE CITIZENS, and TECHNOLOGICAL SOLUTIONISM with their reframed counterparts of BIOMETRIC CITIZEN, INFRASTRUCTURE CITIZENSHIP, and TECHNOLOGICAL PATERNALISM.