Journal of Language and Politics - Online First

As a type of written discourse without guaranteed readership and response, protest graffiti nonetheless projects a participation framework in which protesters address different participants, including not only the government but also other potential ‘participants’ in the social/cultural/political context. This paper studies a dataset of graffiti associated with a protest movement in Macao, China. A survey of the longitudinal data reveals that the contents and visual representation of the graffiti have changed to reflect evolving participation frameworks which are in response to different stages of social movements. While graffiti in earlier stages tends to be more accusatory and anti-governmental, graffiti in later stages shows a shift of protesters’ position more in alignment with patriotism and allegiance to authority. Instead of presenting views competing with mainstream political discourse, our data, with their multimodal resources, draw heavily on Chinese cultural discourses which are supposedly shared among the protesters and addressees in this context.

This paper examines how, within the context of meritocracy, a highly differentiated education system can coexist with assertions of equal opportunity. Drawing on the example of Singapore’s education policy texts from 1991 to 2012, the paper exemplifies and expands the analytical potential of a micro-meso-macro movements framework with which to critically engage the discursive role of neo-liberal metaphors in ameliorating the tension of providing ‘equal opportunities’ between students who will undertake the university pathway and those who will have to undergo vocational training. Based on the interconnected discourses of opportunity-choice and opportunity-skills through a more flexible system, the analytical development of these two simultaneous sub micro-meso-macro movements demonstrates how the playing field is levelled, and competition for society’s occupations and academic progression is fair even for Vocational and Industrial Training Board Act (VITB) trainees.

This paper uses a Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) approach to analyse tweets from the Twitter accounts of Presidents Barack Obama (@Barack Obama) and Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump). The tweets were posted during the last nine months of President Obama’s effective presidency and the first nine months of President Trump’s presidency. The tweets are analysed using automated text analysis which is interpreted through an SF-MDA lens, supplemented by manual analysis. The analysis examines ideational and interpersonal emphasis in the tweets with the aim of showing how the composition and content construct a view of how each president and his presidency are presented to the public. The findings suggest marked contrasts in presidential style with President Trump foregrounding the interpersonal while President Obama foregrounds the ideational. Where President Trump presents as self-promoting, autocratic, opinionated and igniting discord in his tweets, President Obama presents as democratic, moderate, restrained and seeking social harmony.

This article sets out to explore the potential of journalistic attitudinal positioning in dis/aligning readers into different feeling and moral communities in traumatic news event. To do so, it utilises the appraisal framework to examine how the Bangkok Post and the New York Times present and represent ‘attitude’ of different news actors in the coverage of the Bangkok Blast. Analytical findings show that while journalistic attitudinal positioning constitutes a means of political empowerment through bringing in otherwise marginal and silenced voices, it also opens up a space for journalists to evaluate risks and negotiate responsibilities. News reports of the Bangkok Blast eventually construe the Thai society as divided by representing the event as a blame game. The findings also extend the conceptual scope of symbolic codes of victims, villain and hero by resorting to attitudinal resources.

Consistent with a populist script, evoking the people has been a nodal point in the discursive unfolding of Brexit and its legitimation. This paper focuses on the mediatization of the Brexit referendum campaign in a corpus of online British tabloids to address the critical question of how the people in whose name Brexit was (de)legitimised were discursively constructed and mobilized. The argument put forward is that the legitimation of Brexit was achieved through exclusionary definitions of the people and through strategies of fear, resentment and empowerment. This discursive framing points to the wider question of the instrumental role that a large section of the British tabloid press has had not simply in the contingency of referendum but also in the longer-term legitimation chain of Brexit and in its institutionalization and more generally in the historical priming of their readership with negative coverage of the UK/EU relationship.

This research incorporates Corpus Linguistic techniques with the socio-cognitive approach (SCA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) to analyse the discursive representation of the British Monarchy (BM) through the categorisation of its individual members within the Now Corpus from 2010–2020. Analysis concentrated on their categorisation around key events over the ten-year period, most notably the accusations that Prince Andrew had sexual relations with a minor and Prince Harry’s and Meghan Markle’s decision to relinquish their roles within the Monarchy. Significantly, the Royals were positively represented through the affixation of agency and active form to attach them to positive actions, for instance, performing work and charity related duties. Negativity was deemphasised via the removal of agency, passive use and a refocus onto less serious acts which distanced them, particularly the Queen and Prince Andrew, from scandal.

Human rights are essential pillars of democracies. But under populism, they are a proclaimed nemesis of political leaders who claim to represent the common people. This article argues that the discourses of strongman, patronage and fake news constitute three prominent right-wing populist ploys that erode human rights in Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines. It interrogates the communicative power of populism as a means of disfiguring free expression and press freedom. Drawing from human rights and media reports and interviews, the pro-human rights current is reformatted by strongman pronouncement in the war on drugs, unity of long-established blocs of power through patronage, and belligerent charge of fake news.