Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 23, Issue 5, 2024

Abstract

This article outlines a framework for studying practices of boundary-making as pivotal to the various ways in which “rights” become objects of contention and sources of narrativization in contemporary constitutional democracies. Firstly, we reconsider the dynamics of boundary-making that underline polarization by drawing on the notion of “moral economy”. This concept is well-suited for making sense of how social groups draw lines of demarcation through the appropriation, circulation, and confrontation of values and emotions. However, we argue that the concept must be enriched by acknowledging the generative role of narratives. Hence, we introduce the notion of “narrative boundaries” for comprehending how moral economies are produced by storytelling practices. Based on this, we explore the paradoxical moral economy of constitutional struggles. While the discourse of rights pursues modes of inclusion, the struggles over their demarcation often result in narratives that build fences that reinforce the division between almost irreconcilable normative worlds.

Abstract

In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson overturned two precedents, thus ending American women’s 50-year-old constitutional right to abortion. Drawing on Van Leeuwen’s legitimation framework and Labov’s model of narrative structure, this study focuses on how justices (de)legitimate abortion rights in contrasting narratives in Dobbs through authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, and mythopoesis. Specifically, we propose a theoretical model of judicial narrative strata to deconstruct the language of justices and explain how judicial narratives set boundaries between two different moral economies around abortion and realize the transformation of a conceived right into a punishable crime. Furthermore, this study suggests that in the post-Dobbs era, the justices’ narrative reconfiguration of moral boundaries may turn into social boundaries and trigger more gender segregation, which might also have theoretical and practical implications for legislation and judicial practices in other jurisdictions.

Abstract

In the Colombian peace referendum, the 2016 accord with the FARC guerrilla, which sought to end fifty years of war, was rejected by 50.2% of voters. The referendum created new identity divides between ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ voters, product of political “narrative wars” which intersected with myriad pre-existing divisions: between left and right, urban and rural, rich and poor; and between interpretations of the conflict’s history. This article draws insights from the anthropology of politics together with polarisation studies to analyse the way that national politics like referendums affect and (re-)shape political identity boundaries. It uses the story of Camilo, a right-wing cattle-rancher from the conflict-torn region of Urabá who tries to build bridges across political divides, to conceptualise the way that national narratives ripple through different storied contexts as “reverberations” that act on the everyday lived experiences of identity boundaries.

Abstract

Within the fields of narratology, cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis, this article studies how “Vote Leave” – the “respectable” side of the pro-Brexit debate –, used storytelling to frame an exclusionary conception of the British nation. To do so, the article relies on a critical narrative analysis of the storytelling elements at the heart of a corpus of official documents from the 2016 campaign, and argues that those Brexit narratives were instrumental in the creation of a nativist conception of the British nation. The paper contributes to the rich literature on Brexit narratives by adopting an original approach focusing on what we call “enemy narratives” and on how this type of narratives helped construct a restrictive understanding of the British nation. The result will be correlated with the growing political polarization of post-Brexit British society and the emergence of what some researchers consider as a culture war

Abstract

In September 2022, Chileans overwhelmingly rejected the draft of a new constitution to replace the inherited from Pinochet’s dictatorship. Existing explanations attribute the failure to a mixture of ill-designed procedures, political dynamics, and ideological distortions and fake news. However, we argue for a different interpretation, emphasizing the collision of normative worlds in the struggle for demarcating rights. Through narrative analysis of social media stories during the referendum campaign, we investigate distinct moral economies around the constitutional debate on housing rights. These reveal a tension between divergent rights claims anchored in the value of “ownership” versus “dignity.” Within these almost irreconcilable normative universes, private property condenses meanings across narratives: the value of personal home-ownership effort and the collective aspiration for decent housing access. While not inherently incompatible, these narratives evolved into polarizing channels through which property became the defining moral boundary that underlies the stories shaping Chile’s constitutional struggle over rights.

Abstract

This paper analyzes how Hungarian constitutional court rulings subvert EU legal discourse. Drawing on legal studies and discourse studies, we examine how the Fidesz-KDNP regime leverages the Hungarian Constitutional Court to curtail the rights of asylum seekers and migrants within an evolving EU legal framework of identity recognition. We show how an illiberal agenda was enacted in a populist constitutional imaginary that, instead of outright rejecting established legal concepts, inflects these concepts with subversive new meanings. Our analysis reveals how the legal principles of the rule of law, human dignity, sincere cooperation and EU constitutional identity are recontextualized to legitimize a politically exclusionary agenda and redefine the moral boundaries of political inclusion and exclusion within the EU.

This article reviews War, Peace, and Populist Discourse in Ukraine9781032455358£ 39.19

This article reviews The Language of Employability: A Corpus-Based Analysis of UK University Websites

This article reviews Systemic Functional Insights on Language and Linguistics978-981-16-8712-9