Journal of Language and Politics - Online First

This article examines the 2016 British EU referendum and the domestic debates through citizens’ voices in the media, specifically on the emotions and narratives, on The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Express, the week before the referendum. British citizens felt, in their words, “bullied because of [their] political correctness” and pointed their anger and dissatisfaction against the EU (and Merkel’s) “obsession for open borders”. The analysis underlines that these emotions and narratives, combining immigration and sovereignty, have remained embedded in the post-Brexit days, and go back not just to Billig’s banal nationalism (1995), but show that voting Leave represented respect towards true British values, the “core country” as conceptualised by Taggart (2000) . Powellism ( Hampshire 2018 ) and Wright’s “encroanchment” of Englishness ( 2017 ), and the analysis on the immigration narrative explain how anti-immigration and sovereignty discourse is persisting and is influencing the social and political relation of Britain with Europe.

Migration has been a defining topic in the discourse in Germany since the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015. This corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis systematically reconstructs the discourse about migration in two influential German newspapers, thereby emphasizing the construction of different subject positions for people migrating to Germany. Mass media are an important arena for the fight for hegemony between discursive coalitions of culturalization regimes that are based on openness and closure respectively. The discursive space of the German discourse about migration offers multiple opportunities in this regard. In the left-leaning taz, we detect a general trend to support an open society although some (but often contested) elements of closure are detected in this medium as well. Die Welt leans much more towards closure and the problematization of migration although it also offers a diverse array of interpellations that depend on the usefulness or threating character of people coming to Germany.

This article considers the sonic construction of place in English folk music recordings. Recent shifts in the political context have stimulated renewed interest in English identity within folk music culture. Symbolic struggles over folk’s political significance highlight both the contested nature of English identity and music’s semantic ambiguity, with texts being interpolated into discourses of both ethnic purity and multiculturalism. Following research in popular music, sound studies and multimodal communication this article explores the use of field recording to explore questions of place and Englishness in the work of contemporary folk artists. A multimodal analysis of Stick in the Wheel’s From Here: English Folk Field Recordings ( 2017 ) suggests that a multimodal approach to musical texts that attends to the semantic affordances of sound recording can provide insight into folk music’s role in debates over the nature of English identity.

Although the UK has a centuries-old history of subversive singing, since the election of a Conservative-led government in 2010 and imposition of austerity-based economic and social policies, the number of choirs with a political philosophy and mission has grown. The website CampaignChoirs lists around thirty political choirs committed to a left-wing, green or anarchist agenda, which is reflected in the music and related actions. This paper takes as its case study the Leeds-based Commoners Choir and considers how its musical decisions enable it to communicate protest politics. Using critical discourse analysis, this study adds to the dialogue on musical discourse by focusing on the speech acts contained within the lyrics; the social impact of the Commoners’ performances; and the use of dialect to root the works within a distinctly northern culture. It concludes that careful consideration of discourse can demonstrate a more measurable authenticity in an artistic act of protest.

This paper deconstructs how religious musical eulogies, as the most important discursive practices of Shi’a rituals ( Ghaffari 2019 ), were used as “war songs” serving to construct the Iranian national identity during the 1980–1988 Iraq-Iran war. These musical practices (in)formed the wider ideological and persuasive rhetoric of Iranians. In this paper, I analyse the textual and musical features of the audio-recorded versions of ten well-known war songs. The Discourse-Historical Approach ( Reisigl and Wodak 2016 ) is used to analyse the discursive strategies and persuasive rhetorical tools within the lyrics. I draw on Machin (2010) , Machin and Richardson (2012) and van Leeuwen (1999) to analyse various features of voice and the modality of sounds. This paper concludes that, by reflecting the power of religious discourse in the non-religious and highly nationalistic occasion of war, Iranian war songs were inspired by the religious eulogies in encouraging the Iranian nation to attend the war fronts.

While Singapore’s education system claims to implement meritocratic ideals, official statistics indicate that Malay students in Singapore have been underperforming when compared to other ethnic groups (MOE 2012). This statistical representation raises the possibility of a politically induced, systemic inequality as a point of investigation. To investigate this seeming contradiction between the rhetoric and practice of equal educational opportunity, this paper proposes a philosophical and analytical synthesis for examining the 1979 policy report that provides the fundamental basis for Singapore’s streaming education system. In examining this policy development, the analysis draws upon a combination of Foucault’s archaeological method and Critical Discourse Analysis as a way of understanding conditions that made possible the continuous re-construction of new but unequal representation of learners. The findings suggest that complex relations between capability identification, justice, and ethics set the conditions for the appearance and transformation of subject positions necessary to legitimise unequal structural access.