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Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture
<p>The editors invite contributions that investigate political, social and cultural processes from a linguistic/discourse-analytic point of view. The aim is to publish monographs and edited volumes which combine language-based approaches with disciplines concerned essentially with human interaction — disciplines such as political science, international relations, social psychology, social anthropology, sociology, economics, and gender studies.</p>
21 - 40 of 103 results
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The Discourse of Europe
Editor(s): Sharon Millar and John WilsonPublication Date October 2007More LessIn this volume we approach the question of what it is to be European by considering the way in which citizens talk about their everyday lives, as they are perceived against the background of Europe and European issues. Hence, the volume will offer insights into the rarely glimpsed micro political world of ordinary talk and explore the way in which such talk in social interaction and other spheres might help us understand what Europe means to a range of its citizens. Using a range of broadly discursive approaches we will touch on, inter alia, issues of identity, youth, borders, ethnicity, local politics, and minority languages. In the end, we suggest, it is a common sense view of pragmatic utility that centres what it is to be European, and this is something which is continually fluid and shifting within ever changing social, historical and political circumstances.
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Discourse Studies in Public Communication
Editor(s): Eliecer Crespo-FernándezPublication Date April 2021More LessThe collection of articles in Discourse Studies in Public Communication illustrates that public communication is a fascinating, evidence-based storehouse for research in discourse analysis. The contributions to this volume — in the spheres of political rhetoric, gender and sexuality, and corporate and academic communication — provide good evidence of contemporary social structure, social phenomena, and social issues. In this way, following the parameters of different analytical frameworks (critical discourse analysis, cognitive metaphor theory, appraisal theory, multimodality, etc.), the contributors address not only the linguistic aspects of texts but also, and more importantly, the cultural and cognitive dimensions of public communication in a range of real life communicative contexts and kinds of discourse. Although the volume is addressed, first and foremost, to readers with diverse interests in English linguistics, it may also prove valuable to scholars in other non-linguistic research fields like communication studies, social theory, political science, or psychology.
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Discourse, Identity and Legitimacy
Author(s): Majid KhosraviNikPublication Date September 2015More LessThis book is a critical study of the ways that discourses of the (national) Self and Other are invoked and reflected in the reporting of a major international political conflict. Taking Iran’s nuclear programme as a case study, this book offers extensive textual analysis, comparative investigation and socio-political contextualisation of national identity in newspaper reporting. In addition to providing comprehensive accounts of theory and methodology in Critical Discourse Analysis, the book provides a valuable extensive discussion of journalistic practice in Iranian and British contexts, as well as offering insights into historical development of ‘discourses in place’ in Iran. Across four separate chapters, major national and influential newspapers from both countries are critically analysed in terms of their micro-linguistic and macro-discoursal content and strategies. The book is a vital source for interdisciplinary scholarship and will appeal to students and researchers across the critical social sciences, particularly those in linguistics, media and communication studies, journalism and international politics.
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Discourse, Politics and Media in Contemporary China
Editor(s): Qing Cao, Hailong Tian and Paul ChiltonPublication Date April 2014More LessAfter three and a half decades of economic reforms, radical changes have occurred in all aspects of life in China. In an authoritarian society, these changes are mediated significantly through the power of language, carefully controlled by the political elites. Discourse, as a way of speaking and doing things, has become an indispensable instrument for the authority to manage a fluid, increasingly fragmented, but highly dynamic and yet fragile society. Written by an international team of leading scholars, this volume examines socio-political transformations of contemporary Chinese society through a systematic account, analysis and assessment of its salient discourses and their production, circulation, negotiation, and consequences. In particular, the volume focuses on the interplay of politics and media. The book’s intended readership is academics and students of Chinese studies, language and discourse, and media and communication studies.
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Discourse, Politics and Women as Global Leaders
Editor(s): John Wilson and Diana BoxerPublication Date October 2015More LessDiscourse, Politics and Women as Global Leaders focuses on the discourse practices of women in global political leadership. It provides a series of discursive studies of women in positions of political leadership. ‘Political leadership’ is defined as achieving a senior position within a political organization and will often indicate a senior role in government or opposition. The volume draws on a diverse collection of studies from across the globe, reflecting a variety of cultures and distinct polities. The primary aim is to consider in what way(s) discursive practice underpins, reflects, or is appropriated in terms of women’s political success and achievements within politics. The chapters employ differing theoretical approaches all bound by the discursive insights they provide, and in terms of their contribution to understanding the role of language and discourse in the construction of gendered identities within political contexts.
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Discourse, War and Terrorism
Editor(s): Adam Hodges and Chad NilepPublication Date April 2007More LessDiscourse since September 11, 2001 has constrained and shaped public discussion and debate surrounding terrorism worldwide. Social actors in the Americas, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere employ the language of the “war on terror” to explain, react to, justify and understand a broad range of political, economic and social phenomena. Discourse, War and Terrorism explores the discursive production of identities, the shaping of ideologies, and the formation of collective understandings in response to 9/11 in the United States and around the world. At issue are how enemies are defined and identified, how political leaders and citizens react, and how members of societies understand their position in the world in relation to terrorism. Contributors to this volume represent diverse sub-fields involved in the critical study of language, including perspectives from sociocultural linguistics, communication, media, cultural and political studies.
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Discourses on Language and Integration
Editor(s): Gabrielle Hogan-Brun, Clare Mar-Molinero and Patrick StevensonPublication Date March 2009More LessOne of the most pressing issues in contemporary European societies is the need to promote integration and social inclusion in the context of rapidly increasing migration. A particular challenge confronting national governments is how to accommodate speakers of an ever-increasing number of languages within what in most cases are still perceived as monolingual indigenous populations. This has given rise to public debates in many countries on controversial policies imposing a requirement of competence in a ‘national’ language and culture as a condition for acquiring citizenship. However, these debates are frequently conducted almost entirely at a national level within each state, with little if any attention paid to the broader European context. At the same time, further EU enlargement and the ongoing rise in the rate of migration into and across Europe suggest that the salience of these issues is likely to continue to grow. This volume offers a critical analysis of these debates and emerging discourses on integration and challenges the assumptions underlying the new ‘language testing regimes’.
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The Discursive Construction of Class and Lifestyle
Author(s): Ana TomincPublication Date November 2017More LessThis book discusses transformations in the construction of culinary taste, lifestyle and class through cookbook language style in post-socialist Slovenia. Using a critical discourse studies approach it demonstrates how the representation of culinary advice in standard and celebrity cookbooks has changed in recent decades as a result of general social transformations such as postmodernity and globalization. It argues that compared to the standard cookbooks, where nutritionist ideology is at the forefront, the celebrity cookbooks reflect the conversational, hybrid nature of the genre, through which they promote global foodie discourse, while at the same time localizing the global trends to the Slovene context.
The book lays at the intersection of discourse analysis, sociology, food, cultural, communication and media studies and (post-) socialism and should be of interest to those interested in celebrities, food media, socialism and post-socialism, cookbooks, globalization and discourse change.
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The Discursive Construction of Identities On- and Offline
Editor(s): Birte Bös, Sonja Kleinke, Sandra Mollin and Nuria HernándezPublication Date July 2018More LessThis volume explores linguistic identity construction across online and offline contexts. The contributors focus on ‘clusivity’ as an overarching aspect and offer a multifaceted operationalisation of the linguistic processes of identity construction. The studies address three major strands of human identity, each of which can be thought of as an aggregative abstraction with its own complexities: personal identity, group identity and collective identity. The contributions pay special attention to the interplay between the public and private dimensions of the interactions and audiences, as well as the potential impact of social and technical affordances of different communicative settings and online and offline modes of identity construction. The volume is aimed at all researchers concerned with the complex notion of identity, both in linguistics and in neighbouring disciplines.
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The Discursive Construction of the Scots Language
Author(s): Johann Wolfgang UngerPublication Date October 2013More LessThis monograph is about how the Scots language is discursively constructed, both from ‘above’ (through texts such as educational policies, debates in parliament and official websites) and from ‘below’ (in focus group discussions among Scottish people). It uses the interdisciplinary discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis to examine what discursive strategies are used in different texts, and also to investigate salient features of context. This allows a broader discussion of the role of this language in Scotland, and how different ways of constructing a language can percolate through society, appearing in both important, elite texts and discussions among ordinary people. It thus contributes to the body of knowledge about contemporary Scots, but also expands the range of possible applications for critical discourse analysis approaches.
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Discursive Strategies and Political Hegemony
Author(s): Can KüçükaliPublication Date October 2015More LessWith the help of critical discourse analysis (CDA), this book approaches Turkish politics from an interdisciplinary perspective in order to deepen our understanding of political power and discourse. This study re-conceptualizes discursive strategies as hegemonic projects and thirteen governmental speeches are analyzed accordingly. It also provides readers with a theoretical discussion on the nature of political discourse through references to deliberative, agonistic and critical realistic approaches.
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Doing Politics
Editor(s): Michael Kranert and Geraldine HoranPublication Date December 2018More LessThis edited volume explores the discursive, performative and mediated dimensions of contemporary political discourse. The strengths of the volume are manifold: it contains cutting edge interdisciplinary research on political discourses by international authors (UK, USA, Italy, Germany, Austria, Denmark) in political science, discourse linguistic and social interaction research. The contributions represent a wide range of methodological approaches to political discourse, analyzing a broad variety of genres, some of which have been less analyzed to-date, for example Wikipedia articles in combination with their discussion pages or the interaction between politicians and voters in the constituency office of a British Member of Parliament. The contributions also focus on political discourses of high and relevant topicality, such as EU membership of Britain, populism, migration and xenophobia, terrorism and narratives in international relations.
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Editorials and the Power of Media
Author(s): Élisabeth LePublication Date January 2010More LessEditorials define at a given time how media construct their socio-cultural environment and where they position themselves in it. In this sense, they are snapshots of media socio-cultural identities whose study is crucial for the understanding of media actions and interactions on the political stage. This book contributes to the study of media roles in politics with a methodological “discursive communication identity framework” and its application to a corpus of editorials. This allows for the definition of editorials as a genre, and it reveals that, thanks to a very adroit interweaving of their socio-cultural identities, news media can play a much more active role on the political stage than studies on framing and agenda setting have hitherto shown. The place of media in political communication models might therefore need to be reviewed. This book is intended for all those interested in media and politics whatever their academic specializations.
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European Parliaments under Scrutiny
Editor(s): Cornelia IliePublication Date July 2010More LessIn the European tradition, parliaments are central political institutions that play a crucial role in the development of democratic societies. No other institution regularly offers a public arena for open deliberation and dissent, for discussing opposite points of view and for reaching compromise solutions between political adversaries. However, in spite of the growing visibility of modern parliaments, the study of parliamentary language use, interaction practices and discourse strategies has long been under-researched. Based on extensive parliamentary data, this book integrates a rich variety of innovative analytical approaches that explore the far-reaching impacts of parliamentary practices and linguistic strategies on current political action and interaction. Individual chapters problematise and re-evaluate the discourse-shaped identities and roles of Members of Parliament, the structure and functions of parliamentary discourse genres, interpersonal behaviour and intertextual meaning co-construction in post-Communist parliaments. They offer broad cross-cultural perspectives on parliamentary discursive psychology and argumentation. The book provides essential reading for scholars and students of language and linguistics, rhetoric, political and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in language and politics.
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Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion
Editor(s): Tope Omoniyi and Joshua A. FishmanPublication Date August 2006More LessThe Sociology of Language and Religion (SLR) is still in its infancy as a sub-discipline in the macrosociolinguistic tradition. It is therefore no coincidence that the editorial collaboration to produce its first definitive text Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion has involved Joshua A. Fishman, often cited in the literature as one of the founders of the Sociology of Language. Tope Omoniyi brings to the collaboration an insightful and incisive critical eye for engaging with diversity in the treatment of language and religion. Together as editors they have successfully midwived the birth of SLR. The studies and debates contained in this volume revisit those themes that both of the contributory disciplines of Sociology of Language and Religion have common interest in. The contributing authors explore new methodologies and paradigms of analysis that they deem appropriate for this interesting and complex interface in an attempt to demonstrate how the shared interests of these disciplines impact social practices in various communities around the world. The ultimate objective of the discussions is to fashion tools for creating a body of new knowledge that supports the emergence of a better society. Towards this end, the authors have harnessed resources from varied geographical, cultural, linguistic and religious constituencies without compromising analytical depth. In the process, they have opened up new areas of sociolinguistic inquiry. The volume is thus presented as a highly useful reference resource both for undergraduate and postgraduate scholarship.
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Follow-ups in Political Discourse
Editor(s): Elda Weizman and Anita FetzerPublication Date August 2015More LessThis book explores the various forms and functions of follow-ups in a range of political speech events. Follow-ups are conceptualized as communicative acts, in and through which a prior communicative act is accepted, challenged, or otherwise negotiated by ratified participants in the exchange or by third parties. The broad view suggested here accommodates a large variation in the functions of follow-ups, e.g. positioning, third-party involvement, evaluation and argumentation, ratification, support, challenge and attendance to face wants. These variations are explored in a range of cultural environments, such as the UK, The Netherlands, Israel and France. Inter-cultural exchanges are studied through the analysis of diplomatic discourse, interpreting and cross-cultural comparison.
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From Text to Political Positions
Editor(s): Bertie Kaal, Isa Maks and Annemarie van ElfrinkhofPublication Date May 2014More LessFrom Text to Political Positions addresses cross-disciplinary innovation in political text analysis for party positioning. Drawing on political science, computational methods and discourse analysis, it presents a diverse collection of analytical models including pure quantitative and qualitative approaches. By bringing together the prevailing text-analysis methods from each discipline the volume aims to alert researchers to new and exciting possibilities of text analyses across their own disciplinary boundary.
The volume builds on the fact that each of the disciplines has a common interest in extracting information from political texts. The focus on political texts thus facilitates interdisciplinary cross-overs. The volume also includes chapters combining methods as examples of cross-disciplinary endeavours. These chapters present an open discussion of the constraints and (dis)advantages of either quantitative or qualitative methods when evaluating the possibilities of combining analytic tools.
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Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis
Editor(s): Lia Litosseliti and Jane SunderlandPublication Date May 2002More LessGender and discourse interface in many more epistemological sites than can be represented in one collection. Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis therefore focuses on a principled diversity of key sites within four broad areas: the media, sexuality, education and parenthood. The different chapters together illustrate how taking a discourse perspective facilitates understanding of the complex and subtle ways in which gender is represented, constructed and contested through language.
The book engages critically with long-running and on-going debates, but also reflects and develops current understandings of gender, identity and discourse, particularly the shift from 'gender differences' to the discoursal shaping of gender. Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis thus offers not only insights and methodologies of new empirical studies but also careful theorisations, in particular of discourse, text, identity and gender.
The collection is a valuable resource for researchers, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates working in the area of gender and discourse.
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Gender, Language and Ideology
Author(s): Momoko NakamuraPublication Date December 2014More LessThe book examines women’s language as an ideological construct historically created by discourse. The aim is to demonstrate, by delineating a genealogy of Japanese women’s language, that, to deconstruct and denaturalize the relationships between gender and any language, and to account for why and how they are related as they are, we must consider history, discourse and ideology. The book analyzes multiple discourse examples spanning the premodern period of the thirteenth century to the immediate post-WWII years, mostly translated into English for the first time, locating them in political, social and academic developments and describing each historical period in a manner easily accessible for those readers not familiar with Japanese history. This is the first book that describes a comprehensive development of Japanese women’s language and will greatly interest students of Japanese language, gender and language studies, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and history, as well as women’s studies and sexuality studies.
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A Gender-based Approach to Parliamentary Discourse
Editor(s): Catalina Fuentes Rodríguez and Gloria Álvarez-BenitoPublication Date December 2016More LessDoes gender condition politicians’ discourse strategies in parliament? This is the question we try to answer in A Gender-based Approach to Parliamentary Discourse: The Andalusian Parliament. This book, written by experts in the field of discourse analysis, covers key aspects of political discourse such as gender, identity and verbal and nonverbal strategies: intensification, enumerative series, non-literal quotations, pseudo-desemantisation, lexical colloquialisation, emotion, eye contact and time management. It provides a large number of examples from a balanced gender parliament, the Andalusian Parliament, and it focuses mainly on argumentation, since parliamentary discourse is above all argumentative. This book will prove invaluable to students and teachers in the field of discourse analysis, and more specifically of political discourse, and will also be very useful to politicians and anyone interested in communication strategies.
As of January 2019, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
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