Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture

Hegemony, Discourse, and Political Strategy revisits a question that has long fascinated socialists, progressives, democrats, Greens, and Marxists – how do left-wing forces win at politics? Thirty-five years ago, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe tackled this puzzle in ground-breaking fashion, by drawing on a signature blend of linguistics, Marxist theory, and poststructuralism that came to be known as post-Marxist Discourse Theory (PDT). This book takes up the legacy of Laclau and Mouffe, and elaborates PDT into a full-fledged theory of political strategy for the first time. It argues that post-Marxism provides the foundations for a form of discourse analysis that can explain how political strategies play out as well as why they fail or succeed. Its empirical potential to illuminate the dynamics of hegemonic struggles is demonstrated through a case study focusing on the contestation and politicization of EU trade policy in the European Parliament.

This collection provides a kaleidoscopic view of a range of identity struggles in the workplace context. It features twenty-two case studies that present an eclectic mix of workplaces in different socio-cultural contexts. They include, among others, household workers in Peru and Hong Kong, female professionals in India and the UK, social workers in Botswana and on Canadian reserves, tourist guides in Europe and construction workers in New Zealand. The volume addresses important questions on professional competence, group membership, (sometimes competing) expectations, and identity boundaries. The chapters establish that identity struggles are a reflection of issues of knowledge, competing norms and attempts for social change.

The political landscape in Europe is currently going through a phase of rapid change. New actors and movements that claim to represent 'the will of the people' are attracting considerable public attention, with dramatic consequences for election outcomes. This volume explores the new political order with a particular focus on discursive constructions of 'the people' and the category of populism across the spectrum. It shows how a unitary representation of 'the people' is a central element in a vast range of very diverse political discourses today, acting to anchor identities and project antagonisms in a multitude of settings. The chapters in this book explore commonality and contrast in representations of ‘the people’ in both radical and mainstream political movements, looking in depth at recent political discourses in the European sphere. The authors draw on approaches ranging from Essex-style discourse theory over critical discourse studies, corpus analysis and linguistic pragmatics, to investigate how historically situated categories such as the people and populism become fixed through local linguistic, textual and narrative practices as well as through wider ideological and discursive patterns.

As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

Journalism is often thought of as the ‘fourth estate’ of democracy. This book suggests that journalism plays a more radical role in politics, and explores new ways of thinking about news media discourse. It develops an approach to investigating both hegemonic discourse and discursive fissures, inconsistencies and tensions. By analysing international news coverage of post-Soviet Russia, including the Beslan hostage-taking, Gazprom, Litvinenko and human rights issues, it demonstrates the (re)production of the ‘common-sense’ social order in which one particular area of the world is more developed, civilized and democratic than other areas. However, drawing on Laclau, Mouffe and other post-foundational thinkers, it also suggests that journalism is precisely the site where the instability of this global social order becomes visible. The book should be of interest to scholars of discourse analysis, journalism and communication studies, cultural studies and political science, and to anyone interested in ‘positive’ discourse analysis and practical counter-discursive strategies.

Language Policy in Business: Discourse, ideology and practice provides a critical sociolinguistic and discursive understanding of language policy in a minority language context. Focusing on Welsh-English bilingualism in private sector businesses in Wales, the book unpacks the circulating discourses, ideologies and practices of promoting bilingualism as a sociocultural and economic resource in the globalised knowledge economy. It sheds light on businesses as ideological sites for struggles over language revitalisation, which has been characterised by tensions and discursive shifts from essentialist ideologies about language, identity, nation and territory, to an increased commodification of bilingualism.

The book is premised on the understanding that language is a focal point for articulating and living out historical power relationships and inequalities, and that language policy processes are never apolitical. It adds to a body of literature about bilingualism in minority language contexts and, more broadly, about how the fields of politics, business and society are inextricably related.

This book discusses the historical record of the idea that language is associated with national identity, demonstrating that different applications of this idea have consistently produced certain types of results. Nationalist movements aimed at ‘unification’, based upon languages which vary greatly at the spoken level, e.g. German, Italian, Pan-Turkish and Arabic, have been associated with aggression, fascism and genocide, while those based upon relatively homogeneous spoken languages, e.g. Czech, Norwegian and Ukrainian, have resulted in national liberation and international stability. It is also shown that religion can be more important to national identity than language, but only for religious groups which were understood in premodern times to be national rather than universal or doctrinal, e.g. Jews, Armenians, Maronites, Serbs, Dutch and English; this is demonstrated with discussions of the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the civil war in Lebanon and the breakup of Yugoslavia, the United Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

This book offers a critical discourse analytical perspective on the phenomenon of men who voluntarily abstain from relationships with women. Based on a case study of the online Reddit community known as ‘Men Going Their Own Way’, the author engages in qualitative examination of the argumentative and discursive strategies used to justify and legitimise an antifeminist, male separatist ideology. Methodologically, the book draws on the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse studies and investigates how members of this online community represent themselves, relationships with women, and the broader gendered social order. It considers male separatism as part of the new antifeminist social media network known as the manosphere, as well as part of a broader legacy of backlash against feminism and women’s rights. Overall, the book contributes to the growing body of literature on the manosphere and should be of interest to scholars in discourse studies, feminist media studies, and digital communication.

While ideology has been treated widely in CDA-literature, the role played by the interaction of text and image in multiplying meaning and furthering ideological stances has not so far received a lot of attention. Mediating Ideology in Text and Image offers a number of approaches to such analysis, offering students and academics valuable tools for identifying possible discrepancies between the world and the way it is represented through various mediational means. The authors’ common aim is one of assisting the audience in reading between the lines, thus offering a variety of approaches that may contribute to a better understanding of how ideologies possibly work and how they may be denaturalised from text and image. The articles in part I look at rhetorical strategies used in meaning construction processes unfolding in various kinds of mass media. Part II focuses on the re-semiotization of meaning and looks at how analysing the combination of text and image may contribute to a better understanding of ideological processes brought about by multimodal resources. Foreword by Ruth Wodak.

The socio-discursive landscape surrounding the migration debate is characterised by a growing sense of crisis in both personal and collective identities. From this viewpoint, discourses about immigration are also always attempts at reconstructing the threatened ‘home identity’ of the respective host society. It is such attempts at reasserting identity-in-crisis (due to migration) that are the focus of the volume Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis. This four-part book explores the representational strategies used to frame current migration debates as crises of identity, collective and individual. It features fourteen case-studies of varying sets of data including print media texts, TV broadcasts, online forums, politicians’ speeches, legal and administrative texts, and oral narratives, drawn from discourses in a range of languages – Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Ukrainian – , and it employs different discourse-analytical methods, such as Argumentation and Metaphor Analysis, Gendered Language Studies, Corpus-assisted Semantics and Pragmatics, and Proximization Theory. Such a diverse range of sources, languages, and approaches provides innovative methodological and theoretical analysis on migration and identity which will be of interest to scholars, students, and policy makers working in the fields of migration studies, media studies, identity studies, and social and public policy.

As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.