Journal of Language and Politics: Most Cited Articles http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/15699862?TRACK=RSS Please follow the links to view the content. A corpus-based approach to discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in UN and newspaper texts http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jlp.4.2.04bak?TRACK=RSS A corpus-based analysis of discourses of refugees and asylum seekers was carried out on data taken from a range of British newspapers and texts from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees website, both published in 2003. Concordances of the terms refugee(s) and asylum seeker(s) were examined and grouped along patterns which revealed linguistic traces of discourses. Discourses which framed refugees as packages, invaders, pests or water were found in newspaper texts, although there were also cases of negative discourses found in the UNHCR texts, revealing how difficult it is to disregard dominant discourses. Lexical choice was found to be an essential aspect of maintaining discourses of asylum seekers — collocational analyses of terms like failed vs. rejected revealed the underlying attitudes of the writers towards the subject. Paul Baker and Tony McEnery Mon Feb 11 21:42:51 UTC 2013Z The representation of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in British newspapers: A critical discourse analysis http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jlp.9.1.01kho?TRACK=RSS The paper is a CDA investigation on discursive strategies employed by various British newspapers between 1996–2006 in the ways they represent refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants. The period covers several world events which have impacted such representation, creating a large number of articles on and/or about these groups. A combination of quantitative and qualitative down-sampling technique is then devised to restrict the number of articles to a sensitive sample which takes into account the newspapers’ ideological stands; conservative/liberal, their types; quality/tabloid and the relevant world events. The paper discusses some of the salient issues in the ways these groups of people are represented in British newspapers during these 10 years and shows that despite differences — arising from differences in ideological viewpoints and their types — in some important ways all the newspapers contribute to construct refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in similar ways. Majid KhosraviNik Mon Feb 11 23:36:46 UTC 2013Z Radical right-wing parties in Europe http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jlp.17024.ryd?TRACK=RSS In this paper I discuss, critically, the literature on populism and the extent to which it applies to the contemporary radical right-wing parties in Europe. These parties are often – and increasingly – referred to as populist parties. I argue that it is misleading to label these parties ‘populist parties’, since populism is not the most pertinent feature of this party family. These parties are mainly defined by ethnic nationalism, and not a populist ideology. In their discourse they are primarily preoccupied with questions pertaining to national identity and national security – and their ‘negative’ doubles immigration, multiculturalism, Islamist threat – and they consistently pit ‘the people’ mainly against elites that they view as responsible for a cultural and political threat against their idealized image of their nation state. The ethnic nationalism of European radical right-wing parties is more important for their discourse and tends to influence the populist elements. Jens Rydgren Mon Jun 12 13:07:00 UTC 2017Z Right-wing populism in Europe & USA http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jlp.17042.krz?TRACK=RSS In recent years and months, new information about the rise of right-wing populist parties (RWPs) in Europe and the USA has dominated the news and caused an election scare among mainstream institutions and politicians. The unpredictable successes of populists (e.g. Donald Trump in the USA in 2016) have by now transformed anxieties into legitimate apprehension and fear. This Special Issue addresses the recent sudden upsurge of right-wing populism. It responds to many recent challenges and a variety of 'discursive shifts' and wider dynamics of media and public discourses that have taken place as a result of the upswing of right-wing populism (RWP) across Europe and beyond. We examine not only the nature or the state-of-the-art of contemporary RWP but also point to its ontology within and beyond the field of politics and argue that the rise and success of RWP is certainly not a recent or a momentary phenomenon. Ruth Wodak and Michał Krzyżanowski Thu Sep 14 13:05:19 UTC 2017Z The “Tweet Politics” of President Trump http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jlp.17032.kre?TRACK=RSS This study explores how U.S. President Donald Trump employs Twitter as a strategic instrument of power politics to disseminate his right-wing populist discourse. Applying the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis, this article analyzes the meaning and function of Trump’s discursive strategies on Twitter. The data consists of over 200 tweets collected from his personal account between his inauguration on January 20, 2017 and his first address to Congress on February 28, 2017. The findings show how Trump uses an informal, direct, and provoking communication style to construct and reinforce the concept of a homogeneous people and a homeland threatened by the dangerous other. Moreover, Trump employs positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation to further his agenda via social media. This study demonstrates how his top-down use of Twitter may lead to the normalization of right-wing populist discourses, and thus aims to contribute to the understanding of right-wing populist discourse online. Ramona Kreis Mon Jun 12 13:07:06 UTC 2017Z Uncivility on the web http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jlp.17028.krz?TRACK=RSS This paper explores the connection between the rise of new types of online uncivil discourses and the recent success of populism. While discussions on the upsurge of populism have centred on institutionalised politics and politicians, only limited attention has been paid to how the success of the former and the latter was propelled by developments outside of the political realm narrowly conceived. Our interest is therefore in the rise of uncivil society, especially on the web, and in its ‘borderline discourse’ at the verge of civil and uncivil ideas, ideologies and norms. Those discourses – showcased here on the example of the language on immigration/refugees in Austria and Sweden – have been using civil-to-uncivil shifts in the discursive representations of society and politics. They have progressively ‘normalised’ the anti-pluralist views across many European public spheres on a par with nativist and exclusionary views now widely propagated by right-wing populist politics in Europe and beyond. Michał Krzyżanowski and Per Ledin Mon Aug 07 12:05:28 UTC 2017Z Bringing Discourse Theory into Media Studies: The applicability of Discourse Theoretical Analysis (DTA) for the Study of media practises and discourses http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jlp.6.2.08car?TRACK=RSS When Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe published an elaborate version of their discourse theory in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), they were met with fierce resistance by a unified front of traditional Marxists and anti-poststructuralists. The debates on post-Marxism dominated much of the book’s reception. This focus, combined with discourse theory’s rather abstract nature, its lack of clear methodological guidelines, and its more natural habitat of Political Studies, caused discourse theory to remain confined to this realm of Political Studies, despite the broad ideological definition of the political preferred by the authors. This article aims to revisit discourse theory and bring it into the realm of Media Studies. A necessary condition to enhance discourse theory’s applicability in Media Studies is the re-articulation of discourse theory into discourse theoretical analysis (DTA). DTA’s claim for legitimacy is supported in this article by two lines of argument. Firstly, a comparison with Critical Discourse Analyses (CDA) at the textual and contextual level allow us to flesh out the similarities — and more importantly — the differences between CDA and DTA. Secondly, DTA’s applicability is demonstrated by putting it to work in a case study, which focuses on the articulation of audience participation through televisional practices. Both lines of argument aim to illustrate the potential, the adaptability and the legitimacy of DTA’s move into media studies. Nico Carpentier and Benjamin De Cleen Mon Feb 11 21:44:21 UTC 2013Z European identities and the revival of nationalism in the European Union: A discourse historical approach http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jlp.14.1.05wod?TRACK=RSS To date, the concept of ‘European identity’ remains quite vague and obscure. Who is European and who is not? What values do Europeans share, and who is included in or excluded from the European community? This paper deals with the renegotiation of European identity/ies and the simultaneous increase of discourses about national security and nationalism in Europe, especially during the financial crisis since 2008. We first discuss a range of theoretical approaches to European identity from an interdisciplinary perspective. In a second step, after summarising the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and especially the concept of topos, we illustrate the link between discursive constructions of European identities and cultural ‘Others’ via some recent examples of European and national debates on migration and economic issues. More specifically, we first analyse a speech by Geert Wilders on immigration and multiculturalism after the clashes in Tunisia in 2011 and the subsequent arrival of many refugees in Italy; secondly, we focus on a speech about British relations to the European Union in the 21st century by the British Prime Minister, David Cameron. It becomes apparent that debates about European identities – especially since the financial crisis of 2008 – have increasingly been accompanied by debates about both more traditional racialised cultural concerns and more recently, about economic security, leading to new distinctions between ‘Us’, the ‘real Europeans’, and ‘Them’, the ‘Others’. In this way, the socio-political unification of Europe is challenged – once again. Ruth Wodak and Salomi Boukala Tue May 26 08:05:22 UTC 2015Z War rhetoric of a little ally: Political implicatures and Aznar’s legitimatization of the war in Iraq http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jlp.4.1.04dij?TRACK=RSS In this paper we examine some of the properties of the speeches by former Prime Minister José María Aznar held in Spanish parliament in 2003 legitimating his support of the USA and the threatening war against Iraq. The theoretical framework for the analysis is a multidisciplinary CDA approach relating discursive, cognitive and sociopolitical aspects of parliamentary debates. It is argued that speeches in parliament should not only be defined in terms of their textual properties, but also in terms of a contextual analysis. Besides an analysis of the usual properties of ideological and political discourse, such as positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation and other rhetoric devices, special attention is paid to political implicatures defined as inferences based on general and particular political knowledge as well as on the context models of Aznar’s speeches. Teun A. van Dijk Mon Feb 11 21:46:39 UTC 2013Z Political Discourse Analysis from the point of view of Translation Studies http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jlp.3.1.09sch?TRACK=RSS Political discourse very often relies on translation. Political Discourse Analysis (PDA), however, has not yet taken full account of the phenomenon of translation. This paper argues that the disciplines of Translation Studies (TS) and PDA can benefit from closer cooperation. It starts by presenting examples of authentic translations of political texts, commenting on them from the point of view of TS. These examples concern political effects caused by specific translation solutions; the processes by which information is transferred via translation to another culture; and the structure and function of equally valid texts in their respective cultures. After a brief survey of the discipline of Translation Studies, the paper concludes with outlining scope for interdisciplinary cooperation between PDA and TS. This is illustrated with reference to an awareness of product features, multilingual texts, process analysis, and the politics of translation. Christina Schäffner Mon Feb 11 23:27:44 UTC 2013Z