ABSTRACT. Over the last few years, the scale of the socio-ecological crisis (or crises) has become increasingly apparent with climate change epitomizing a range of other problems linked to energy production and uses, mobility, modes of material consumption, food practices, waste generation, etc. The impacts of climate change have intensified around the world in the form of heatwaves, droughts, flooding, extreme weather events, and a range of other manifestations with strongly disruptive effects, especially among poorer countries and social groups. Scientific projections show that those impacts will worsen significantly unless measures are put in place for a drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, which requires fundamental transformations at various economic, social and political levels in ‘developed’ countries. This much has been known for decades. Yet, there has been little substantive progress. Recently, however, there has also been a rapidly emerging worldwide movement of contestation of climate-related practices.

At a time when the perils of the socio-ecological crisis become ever more evident, bringing to the fore the contingent and contestable nature of the discourses that sustain the status quo, as well as cultivating openings for change is a major responsibility for social and human scientists. As technocratic and managerial approaches reinforce their hegemony, alternatives are suppressed, and many sectors of society are impeded from shaping the meaning of climate-related issues and co-constructing the future, several scholars have been calling attention to the post-political condition of climate change (e.g. Hammond, 2018; Kenis and Lievens, 2014; Pepermans and Maeseele, 2014; Swyngedouw, 2010, 2013). I will review those crucial contributions and discuss discourse-analytical opportunities to build on that work. Based on various examples, I will make the case for more political critique in discourse analysis to help analyse and advance forms of politicisation, as potentially present in the climate justice and energy democracy movements.

ABSTRACT. The participatory web has created new spaces of identity politics expression while impacting the repertoire of available data and communicative content for CDA. In its aspiration to connect traditions in CDA to the technological characteristics of discursive practice in new digital contexts, Social Media CDS approach has been defined as a socially oriented, textually focused, problem oriented, critical analysis of communicative content and practices on participatory web platforms (KhosraviNik 2017, 2018 forthcoming). Within the general rubric of CDA (Fairclough and Wodak 1997), following on guidelines proposed by the Discourse-Historical Approach (Reisigl and Wodak 2009, KhosraviNik 2010), together with incorporating insights from online ethnography (Androutsopoulos 2008) and Computer mediated discourse analysis (Herring 2004), the present presentation reports on two major case studies of extreme national identity discourses in the Middle East, specifically the discursive contention between the ‘Persian vs. Arab’ identity (KhosraviNik & Zia 2014, KhosraviNik & Sarkhoh 2017). Away from the common concentration of critical discourse studies on institutionally produced texts (e.g. KhosraviNik 2015), these studies solely concentrate on ordinary users discursive practices around this identity standoff i.e. user-generated communicative content on Facebook, YouTube and online articles across a period of 12 months. The study aims to scrutinise a. what constitutes the grand discourse of Self-identity as the Persians and how it is juxtaposed with top-down state-enforced identity, b. what constitutes the grand discourse of (pan) Arabism on participatory web and how it is positioned in contrast to the Persian identity and c. how and in what way the affordances of digital media have been appropriated in propagating positive Self and negative Other presentation in these online discourses. The results indicate that while the Iranian community strongly opposes the perceived invasion of the Arabic ‘Other’ as the subject matter of the current contention, on the periphery, it seeks to promote a Persian identity away from the officially enforced Islamic identity. On the other hand, by emphasising the fault lines of language and religion, Arabism discourse substantially draws on historical regional power struggles within a contemporary frame of a political standoff between a Shiite (Persian) Iran and a Sunni ‘Arab world’.

ABSTRACT. When on the wave of the 2011 Arab Spring unarmed civilians took to the streets in Syria to demand dignity and freedom, President Bashar al-Asad immediately othered protestors as foreign infiltrators with seditious intents. In this paper, I analyze the discursive practices enacted by a group of Syrian dissidents in online spaces and their anchors to offline realities to challenge this narrative and to legitimate their identity as real Syrians in the diaspora. I do so by applying the notions of multimodality and language hybridity. The data for this paper come from a larger ethnography of Syrian dissidents’ linguistic practices between 2011 and 2014 across a variety of online and offline platforms, including blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and radio programs. My methodology, informed by Androutsoupoulos’s (2008) Discourse-Centred Online Ethnography (DCOE), by KhosraviNik and Zia’s (2014) and by KhosraviNik’s (2017) Social-Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS), integrates systematic observation and text analysis with ethnographic tools, including interviews with the text authors and participant observation. Sustained interaction with the text authors was important to locate their practices in the offline, “thick” context (Spitulnik 2010; Couldry 2012) of the Syrian conflict and to elicit the motivations underlying their linguistic choices. The analysis of the authors’ practices revealed the presence of a plethora of genres, such as political metaphors on Facebook, YouTube video parodies, radio soap operas and talk shows on historical and recent political events. These multimodal texts are characterized by the use of a hybrid linguistic variety, containing Modern Standard Arabic, Syrian vernacular and creative features. These practices index the presence of persistent dissident identities, which, anchored in the offline context of the ongoing Syrian conflict, have been constructed uninterruptedly since 2011 and gained visibility across a mixture of social and traditional media. This paper contributes to the literature on online discourse analysis by arguing for further linkage between practices occurring on online and offline platforms and reinforcing the SM-CDS argument for a socially oriented online critical discourse analysis grounded in the offline context. Additionally, it sheds light on the affordances of new and old media for the construction of political identities.

ABSTRACT. In March 2003, American and British troops invaded Iraq. The decision by Turkey’s Justice and Development (AKP) government to participate in the war effort caused a split between public opinion and politicians. Music was part of the protest against this decision, including pop star Bariş Akarsu’s 2004 “Kimdir O”. Since this time, AKP has continued governing Turkey, being accused of growing authoritarianism. This time has also corresponded with a rise in the prevalence of social media, it used not only for entertainment but also for political purposes (Vatikiotis 2014). Opinions on the role social media play in politics range from the optimistic (Howard and Hussain 2011) to the more pessimistic, including the observation that YouTube comments tend to not focus on analysis of situations but rather in terms of pre-existing personal and social interests or prejudices (Lindgren 2010). In this presentation, I examine how fans’ YouTube comments in 2016 recontextualise the politics of “Kimdir O”, a video which critiques America’s and Turkey’s involvement in the Iraq war. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, I analyse how comments recontextualise the war and the video in order to articulate discourses of populism (van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999). Leaning on populist notions of ‘a despotic elite opposed to the people’, in comments we find ‘leaders’ and ‘the people’ become empty signifiers, occupied by more recent and personalised ideas of who and what these signify. Fuelled by political and social events of 2016, including a surge in terrorist activities, an attempted coup and President Erdogan’s persistent goal of obtaining a presidential system, this case study highlights how politics expressed in music from a different time can be used by audiences as a springboard for articulating politics and policies which affect them personally. Though on the surface, this shows promise in terms of music and social media as a source of political debate, closer examination exposes a lack of dialogue and articulation of policies and criticisms, fans opting for superficial articulations of what it is to be a good citizen.

ABSTRACT. One hundred years after the “ten days that shook the world” (to use John Reed’s famous phrase), the October Revolution is still the subject of intense academic and popular debate, holding a unique place in our collective imagination. Whether celebratory, apologetic or critical, public attitudes towards the value and legacy of the October Revolution form an evolving memoryscape (Muzaini & Yeoh 2016) in which the historical memory of the event is constantly de- and re-contextualised to articulate contingent demands and concerns (Heer, Manoschek, Pollak & Wodak 2008). In this paper, we seek to outline the distinct trajectory of the October Revolution memoryscape in the Italian context. We focus on the editorials published in three major Italian newspapers in conjunction with key anniversaries (1977, 1987, 1997, 2007 and 2017) to investigate how the cultural memory and popular history of the Revolution were strategically reframed to support specific arguments and viewpoints. The analysis of salient argumentative topoi (Reisigl 2014) in a diachronic perspective shows how the end of historical communism in 1989 produced a dramatic discursive rupture: while in previous decades the Soviet experience was largely debated in reference to its (contested) ideological and political value, in the past twenty years its has not only lost much of its intellectual appeal, but also become increasingly trivialised, being often used as nothing more than a pretext to attack or ridicule political opponents and their ideas.

***

Heer, H., Manoschek, W., Pollak, A., & Wodak, R. (2008). The discursive construction of history. Remembering the Wehrmacht’s war of annihilation. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Muzaini, H., & Yeoh, B. S. (2016). Contested Memoryscapes: The Politics of Second World War Commemoration in Singapore. London: Routledge.

Reisigl, M. (2014). Argumentation analysis and the discourse-historical approach: A methodological framework. In C. Hart & P. Cap (Eds.), Contemporary critical discourse studies (pp. 67–96). London, UK: Bloomsbury.

ABSTRACT. The role of news translation in Russian politics: Crimea On March 18, 2014, Vladimir Putin addressed State Duma deputies and Federation Council members, asking them to approve acceptance of Crimea and Sevastopol as part of Russia. Two days earlier, Crimeans had voted in a much-discussed referendum to join the Russian Federation. In his speech, president Putin recalled a “shared history and pride” to justify the peninsula’s entry into Russia as a “historical rectification”. This paper will demonstrate how, around the same time, a similar narrative is promoted on the Russian news translation website InoSMI (http://inosmi.ru/), a media project affiliated with RIA Novosti news agency that monitors and translates foreign press into Russian. In the field of translation studies, it has been effectively argued that translation is never neutral nor transparent – a clean copy of the original – but rather “untidy and partial” (Hermans 2002, 11). Translation is not politically or ideologically innocent, whether it serves the establishment or consolidation of dominant power structures/discourses, or the activist resistance against such powers. InoSMI may claim to “just” translate “everything worth translating”, the website in fact reframes the original news discourse through selective appropriation of source material, and subtle, but effective translation shifts. If Western newspapers mainly focus on the illegal status of the referendum and condemn the annexation of Crimea, InoSMI manages to put the events in an entirely different perspective. I will focus on two basic ingredients of the Kremlin’s narrative that are echoed on InoSMI: (1) the place of Crimea in Russian imagination (insistence on “blood ties” and frequent use of family metaphors), and (2) positive references to “Greater Russia”, in particular to the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. An argumentative thread can be deduced from this: if Crimea has always been part of Russia, and Russians are nostalgic about the lost glory of a Greater Russia, then the annexation of Crimea is legitimate.

ABSTRACT. Couched within the cognitive studies of religion (CSR) and linguistics, the paper scrutinizes the interface between religion, language and social cognition, attending to the notion of distance between the believers and spiritual reality as it is mediated by religious institutions and the media. The underlying assumption here is that their function and intention is firstly, to proximize (bring epistemically and affectively closer) such spiritual reality to believers through preaching, prayers and rituals, and, secondly to create a community of the faithful. To explain the role which language plays in mediating religious experience and transforming the notion of sacred space, sacred time and a sense of communion (based on collective emotion) we will apply Deictic Space Theory (Chilton 2014; Chilton and Cram 2018 forthcoming) and the Media Proximization Approach (Kopytowska 2015 and 2018 forthcoming), both of which ground linguistic meaning in spatial cognition. In order to explicate the nature of religious experience, along with its time-space embedding and conditioning, cognitive-affective aspects as well as its axiological dimension, we will analyse the ritual of the “Eucharist” or “mass”, best known in the Catholic variant of Christianity in both its traditional and mass-mediated form (radio and TV live broadcasts). We will discuss possible cognitive and emotional effects brought about by the interaction among linguistic formulae (including deixis, speech acts, and metaphors) and other features of this ritual.

References:

Chilton, Paul. 2014. Language, space and mind: the conceptual geometry of linguistic meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chilton, Paul and David Cram. 2018. forthcoming. Hoc est corpus: Deixis and the Integration of Ritual Space. In Paul Chilton and Monika Kopytowska (eds.), Religion, language and human mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Kopytowska, Monika. 2015. Mediating identity, ideology and values in the public sphere: towards a new model of (constructed) social reality. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 11(2). 133–156. Kopytowska, Monika. 2018. forthcoming. The televisualization of ritual: spirituality, spatiality and co-presence in religious broadcasting. In Paul Chilton and Monika Kopytowska (eds.), Religion, language and human mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

ABSTRACT. In cognitive linguistics, language use is approached from the perspective of the experiential grounding of meaning. Linguistic constructions in a text invoke the knowledge of the discourse participants, while, at the same time, these constructions perspectivize conceptual content in some way (for example, Langacker, 2008). Cognitive CDA has investigated how processes of perspectivization proffer ideologically loaded representations of social reality (for example, Cap, 2013; Chilton, 2004; Hart, 2014; Kaal, 2012). In this paper, I argue that in addition to describing the conceptual structures underpinning the production and reproduction of ideological representations, cognitive frameworks are uniquely suited to modelling the processes involved in critical reception – the manner in which audiences evaluate the representations proffered by speakers and writers. From this cognitive perspective, critical reception is the product of a clash between the proffered representation and the participant’s preferred conceptualization of the event or situation being represented (Browse, forthcoming 2018). Conversely, where proffered representations cohere with or approximate this preferred conceptualisation, one might instead expect a more sympathetic or accepting response from audiences. I suggest that the potential for critical reception is an inherent feature of all discourses because meaning construction is predicated on the experiential knowledge that audiences “bring” to the communicative event. Indeed, from this perspective, audiences are not the passive consumers of discourse, but active participants who draw on their knowledge in order to construct meaning. I illustrate this model of critical reception and the active audience with responses to a speech by the Conservative British Prime Minister, Theresa May. The data was collected from ‘The Walkley Corbyn Supporters’, vocal proponents of the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

ABSTRACT. YouTube can be currently considered another example of mass media (Biagi 2017) whose wide use and impact in the world cannot be neglected (Benson 2017). However, very few studies have been done on the semiotic relationship between the three communicative modes that characterize any Youtube video: textual – referring to the actual utterance -, visual and musical – understood as any accompanying sound. For this reason, in this paper, we intend to explore the validity of Discouse Space Theory and its applicability not only to the linguistic analysis of a text, but also to other semiotic modes. To explore this semiotic relation, we have selected one of the videos released by the UKIP during the Brexit campaign in 2016. This video, entitled “We’re better off out,” is textually and visually characterized by the existence of two main strategies: the textual construction of an opposition between “us” and “them,” and the visual and metaphorical characterization of each of those participants. These two strategies together have been widely identified in political discourse and are related to the transmission of an “ideological square” (Van Dijk 1997, 1998). With this in mind, this paper seeks to answer two research questions. On the one hand, we intend to build further bridges between two recent trends within Critical Discourse Studies as exemplified by cognitive linguistics and multimodality (cf. Filardo-Llamas 2015). Thus, the postulates of spatial cognition will be followed to analyse how a unitary discursive construction stems from the conceptual and semiotic blending (Fauconnier & Turner 2004) between three communicative modes: text, images and sound. To do this, we will combine in the analysis tools taken from five approaches: Text-world Theory (Gavins 2007, Werth 1999), Discourse Space Theory (Chilton 2004, 2005), Conceptual Metaphor (Kövecses 2002), Proximization (Cap 2010) and Multimodality (Kress & Van Leeuwen 1996). On the other hand, we also intend to explain the relationship between the multimodal blended discourse world identified in the analysed video and the discursive construction of the empty semantic notion “the people,” which is frequently found in populist discourses (Aalberg & de Vreese 2016; Wodak 2015).

ABSTRACT. The LGBTI movement in the so-called west is coming to terms with what seems to be an irresolvable tension between assimilation in the mainstream and rejection of heteronormativity. While the achievement of hard-fought rights (e.g. equal marriage) was reason of celebration for many, entering the mainstream via legal recognition by nation-states necessarily implied a renegotiation of the critique that sexual minorities have historically moved towards heteronormative institutions (indeed like marriage). In the face of this tension, the concept of homonormativity has gained currency to describe the process through which the boundaries of social acceptability have recently expanded to accommodate some non-heterosexual lifestyles.

This paper aims at exploring the tension between homonormativity and queer subversion through a discourse analysis of the narratives circulated on Twitter by two LGBTI umbrella activist groups operating respectively at the EU level and at the Italian national level, and namely ILGA Europe (@ILGAEurope) and Arcigay (@arcigay). Analysis will take into account contextual elements gathered through systematic screen-based observations as well as through two semi-structured interviews with the social media officers managing the two Twitter handles under consideration.

Preliminary findings are as follows. Both organizations put forward a narrative that attempts to balance short-term political objectives with longer term visions of what “equality” for LGBTI people would mean. Give the differences between the political spaces in which the two institutions operate, the articulation of short-term political priorities in terms of support for legislation/political initiatives is, unsurprisingly, more concrete at the national level. Long term visions are substantially overlapping in their goals but somewhat differently framed, with ILGA’s claims tied to a narrative of “LGBTI rights as human rights” and Arcigay’s narrative framed in terms of a less legalistic “right to visibility” for sexual minorities. Overall, both ILGA Europe and Arcigay seem to have adopted a strategic form of communication that aims at further expanding the boundaries of the mainstream to be ever more inclusive towards sexual minorities rather than aiming for a subversion of said mainstream.

The research question is devoted to investigate on how LGBT people are discursively presented to each nation via the official channels where Prime Ministers can deliver their speeches. Subsequently, the study presents a contrastive analysis focused on revealing points in common and in contrast between the UK and Italy.

The study draws on the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) followed by the practical resources offered by corpus-assisted analysis, though cross-disciplinary fertilization is always sought. 

The practical investigation incorporates qualitative and quantitative methodology offered both by CDA and corpus studies. For each ad-hoc corpus built, textual, intertextual and discursive elements are considered and contrastively analysed with the end of delivering a fine-grained analysis from which productive discussion could be raised.

Carmen Serena Santonocito is a PhD student attending the second year of the doctoral course in “Euro-languages and Specialized Terminology” at the University of Naples “Parthenope”. She holds an MA in Languages and International Communication from the University of Turin. Her research interests include political and institutional discourse, gender studies, corpus linguistics and discourse analysis.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents research carried out as part of the project Linguistic Dimensions of Sexual Normativity. It presents a corpus-based case study of the linguistic representation of Latino pop star Ricky Martin in media texts (Rivera Santana et al. 2010). Drawing on a corpus of English-language newspaper and magazine articles, the study seeks to investigate whether and how the language used to write about Ricky Martin in the media has changed after his public coming out as a gay man in 2010. For this purpose, two subcorpora (pre-2010, post-2010) are compared and various types of quantitative and qualitative analysis are carried out (Baker 2004, Rayson 2008). A keyword analysis highlights word-forms that occur unusually frequently in one of the corpora when compared to the other. A semantic keyness analysis identifies semantic fields that are overrepresented in either of the two corpora. Concordance and collocation analyses of salient forms complement the picture. The findings are discussed in relation to the theorisation of normativity in language and sexuality studies (Motschenbacher 2014).

References Baker, Paul (2004): Querying keywords: Questions of difference, frequency, and sense in keywords analysis. In Journal of English Linguistics 32 (4), pp. 346–359. Motschenbacher, Heiko (2014): Focusing on normativity in language and sexuality studies. Insights from conversations on objectophilia. In Critical Discourse Studies 11 (1), pp. 49–70. Rayson, Paul (2008): From key words to key semantic domains. In International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13 (4), pp. 519–549. Rivera Santana, Carlos; Vélez Agosto, Nicole M.; Benozzo, Angelo; Colón de la Rosa, Samuel (2014): Creative (critical) discourse analysis of Tiziano Ferro and Ricky Martin 'coming out'. In Qualitative Inquiry 20 (2), pp. 183–192.

ABSTRACT. The ways in which mental health is talked about has important implications for how individuals experience distress and whether or not they decide to seek help. Critical discursive psychology (Wetherell, 1998, Edley 2001), with its focus on both micro-interactions of communication and broader cultural and ideological repertoires of understanding, offers a unique way to examine the role of language and power in mental health help-seeking. This paper is based on the analysis of 19 archived transcripts of synchronous on-line interactions (or ‘live’ one-to-one chats) that took place on an on-line counselling service for adolescents aged between 11 and 18. I will present a discourse analysis of selected chat transcripts, focusing on how counsellors respond to a disclosure of self-harm, in order to highlight taken-for-granted, naturalised aspects of counselling interactions. More specifically, the analysis will show how repertoires of ‘talk about talk’, ‘talk about coping’, ‘talk about the self’ and ‘readiness to talk’ may emerge in counselling interactions in ways that have particular implications for whether or not a young person seeks help and what they seek help for. By identifying patterns of interaction and specific techniques through which talk about self-harm is produced, by both counsellors and adolescents, the analysis provides new ways of looking at on-line counselling practices. The findings of the study have the potential to contribute to the existing knowledge about on-line services for vulnerable young people who are seeking support for their mental health.

Edley, N., 2001. Analysing masculinity: interpretatative repertoires, subject positions and ideological dilemmas. In: M. Wetherell, S. Taylor and S.J. Yates, eds., Discourse as data: a guide to analysis. London: Sage and the Open University, pp. 189-228

Wetherell, M. (1998). Positioning and interpretative repertoires: Conversation analysis and post-structuralism in dialogue. Discourse and Society, 9 (3), 387-412.

ABSTRACT. The extralingual circumstances that influenced the creation of some blog texts in the Net are rooted in the demolishing of the idea of a friendly and closely-related neighbouring Russia. In post-Maidan and in war time Ukraine there appeared an ontological lacuna in the perception of Russia. On the one hand, the country that leads an undeclared war is an enemy which possesses the features of a monster bearing all attributes of treacherousness, wickedness; on the other, its otherness is not obvious as this subject is well-known. Scholars who study the expression of threat and fear in media (P. Cap) or conflict expression there (L. Filardo Llamas) perform their research through the prism of cognitive metaphor that allows distinguishing Us and Them. The hypotheses is that in Ukrainian post-Maidan and war-time reality the perception of the fearful subject of conflict (Russia) is not Them that is absolutely different from Us. The analysis of the text material of blogs from a website Рєпкаабошонеясно (клуб бойового суржика) shows that mainly this fearful subject is metaphorically viewed as a patient seriously mentally and physically ill, a simpleton or a boring and naughty neighbor who we have to live side by side (руські сусіди, or, for example, about Russian polititians – сєльский недоумок, миршавий пацієнт, пічальна лошадь, etc.). Moreover, to show former close relations the language of the bloggers is mostly surzhik (eastern Ukrainian dialect) that has similarity with Russian (обідилися, ітересуєцця, шо, с льогкостью небувалою, etc.), not to mention abusive lexis. All this helps minimize fearful features of the subject and add humour to the perception of the dramatic events of our history. 1. Cap Piotr. www.academia.edu/33126490/Aspects_of_Threat_Construction_in_the_Polish_Anti-immigration_Discourse 2. Filardo Llamas, Laura. 2010. Discourse Worlds in Northern Ireland: The Legitimisation of the 1998 Agreement. In Political Discourse and Conflict Resolution. Debating Peace in Northern Ireland, Katy Hayward and Catherine O’Donnell (eds), 62-76. London: Routledge. 3. http://repka.club/blogs

ABSTRACT. Since the financial crisis emerged in 2007, many projects and publications have been launched that discourse-analyse representations of crisis and crisis management in communications by various groups and organisations. This research has generated insights in recurrent features of crisis discourse, such as blame games, claims for extraordinary authority, or trends of normalisation. Crisis itself, however, is usually taken for granted and rarely subjected to theoretical consideration. The present paper suggests that theories of crisis that borrow from Marxist thought help to gain an understanding of crisis as a catalyst of social change and to conceptually focus analyses of crisis and its discursive construction. The paper introduces concepts such as Gramsci’s notion of ‘organic crisis’ and ‘passive revolution’ and Polanyi’s theorem of the ‘double movement’. They draw our attention to specific drivers of crisis and change in capitalist societies, such as the formation of new concepts and their co-optation by those in power or the mutual penetration of the market logic and the logic of social protection in political and business administration. Using examples from a study on communications by EU institutions and financial journalists, the paper shows how these crisis theories can guide textual analysis. A discourse-analytical strategy is suggested that conceptualises the research subject from the macro-theoretical view of crisis theories and brings middle range concepts from discursive political studies, including hegemonic articulation and governmentality, in dialogue with categories from critical discourse analysis.

ABSTRACT. Critical discourse analysts have long studied discourses by utilising categories from, e.g., argumentation analysis and cognition research (see Flowerdew and Richardson 2017; Hart and Cap 2014). Amongst others, the reconstruction of arguments and the perspective of cognitive metaphor studies have thus been prominent in the field. In contrast – and although one cannot argue that the concept of 'narrative’ has been ignored (e.g. Reisigl 2014; Heer et al. 2009; Wodak et al. 2008) – the narrative form, and especially its analysis from a structural perspective (narratology), has not always played a similarly prominent role in the field. This surprises, given that narrative has long been viewed as THE form through which humans create meaning and locate themselves in time (Ricoeur 1984; Barthes 1977). Indeed, it is through narrative that not only do we represent the world, but that we position ourselves (and are positioned).

In this presentation, I, first, offer a review of the uses of ‘narrative’ in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), especially in one of its most popular approaches: the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA). Second, I introduce the conceptual particularities of the narrative form in general and the theory of archetypical 'narrative genres' (romance, tragedy, comedy, irony/satire) in particular (Frye 1957). Narrative genres do not only offer new analytical categories for critical discourse analysts which can be interwoven with CDS’s fine-grained analysis; moreover, they enable a revised foundation for CDS’s critical impetus. Thus, the third part of this presentation focuses on how CDS’s and, especially, DHA’s critical agenda (e.g. Forchtner 2011; Wodak and Reisigl 2001) can be meaningfully understood within the framework of such a narrative-oriented study of language and power. Linking Habermas’ approach to communication and the counterfactual rules which govern it to the aforementioned narrative genres, while moving away from Habermas’ overly rationalist vision of deliberation/argumentation, I suggest a sociologically robust foundation for CDS’s critical stance.

In sum, the presentation proposes the substantive incorporation of narrative theory into CDS and outlines how this move can contribute to CDS’s critical agenda. Examples from the area of collective memory studies and texts by the far-right will illustrate the arguments made.

ABSTRACT. The objective behind the present paper is to explore the terrorist threat perception in Poland, along with the pragma-semiotic potential of cyberspace and the role of social media in constructing/mediating terrorism as social reality (Nacos 2007). On the theoretical and methodological level, it demonstrates how a new interdisciplinary approach - Media Proximization Approach (MPA) (Kopytowska 2013, 2015, Kopytowska and Grabowski 2017) - to mediated construction of social reality based on the notions of distance, mediated experience, and Self/Other or Us/Them dichotomy, can be applied in the context of social media ‘prosumption’ dynamics (KhosraviNik 2014, 2017). On the thematic level, it examines online discourses revolving around recent terrorist attacks in Europe and their interfaces with discourses concerning current refugee crisis. Poland is interesting case as it has not been directly affected either by terrorism or by the 2015 migrant crisis; yet, opinion polls conducted in 2016 indicate that 59% of Poles believe there exists a real threat of terrorism. The main questions addressed in the paper are as follows: 1) How is terrorism brought closer to Polish audiences in and through social media and how is proximization of the threat enabled by the semiotic properties of the Internet medium? 2) How is the representation of terrorism, linked to the construction of the (Other as) enemy, manifested in keywords and word co-occurrence patterns? The data analysed includes online articles (from onet.pl, wp.pl and interia.pl) on terrorist attacks in Europe in 2015, 2016 and 2017 along with accompanying comments. Both qualitative (proximizing strategies at the level of lexis, syntax, imagery and pragma-rhetoric, as well as visual techniques) and quantitative (keyness, concordances, word sketches ) methods are employed. Based on the results on our analysis we will show how, by appealing to existing stereotypes and cultural/national values, and exploiting the interactive and intertextual potential of cyberspace, media texts producers and commenters have managed to create a sense of axiological urgency and arouse strong negative emotions, thus possibly bonding the in-group and legitimizing pre-emptive measures directed at the out-group perceived as a source of potential threat and the enemy.

ABSTRACT. The terrorist group the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) has long leveraged upon the power of social media platforms in order to disseminate and legitimize its terrorist ideology. Despite its recent setbacks in Iraq and Syria, ISIS’s use of social media is still sophisticated and extensive. This paper explores the ways in which the Self-Other schemata (Chilton, 2004; van Dijk, 2006; Wodak & Reisigl 2001; KhosraviNik, 2010) is evident in the textual and visual representation of social actors in selected ISIS-produced online propaganda materials that are shared through its preferred social media platform, Telegram. Telegram, a social media platform for communication, offers the advantages of longevity, security and accessibility, all of which have significant appeal for jihadists. Al Khouri and Kessire (2016) argue that the affordances of Telegram are the very reason it has become the preferred social media platform for ISIS. Telegram enables ISIS jihadists to engage in extensive communications both uni-directionally through channels as well as multi-directionally through chat rooms, to interact with each other and share information, and ISIS related materials. However, as a platform for jihadist communication, it is still not researched extensively enough (Bloom et al, 2017).

Examining ISIS’s jihadist communication on Telegram, this study focuses upon the Self-Other representation of social actors, employing a multidisciplinary approach that includes critical discourse analysis, multimodal analysis (Metz, 1974; Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2004; van Leeuwen 2008), and terrorism studies (Farwell, 2014;Matusitz, 2014). The paper argues that the self and other representation by ISIS in its Telegram communications (e.g. Nashir, Khilafah News, Rumiyah) is not just a simple polarization of social actors into in-groups and out-groups that legitimizes ISIS while delegitimizing others. More importantly, the Self-Other schemata presented through, by and in Telegram, serves as a strategy to construct a legitimatising narrative for ISIS. Telegram enables ISIS to present a meaning-making system for its perception of the world, while justifying its existence, and building credibility for its radicalizing ideology. ISIS’s use of Telegram reveals a narrative which while based upon the binaries of Self-Other, also presents multiple ideologically laden discourses which intersect in complex ways.

ABSTRACT. Affordances made available through growth, development and accessibility of social media platforms have helped terrorist, extremist, and Islamist movements to spread their messages to a wide range of audiences (Aly, et. al. 2016). Terrorism studies have concentrated on Jihadist/Islamist movements, their supporters and recruiters as one of the main foci of extremism and radicalisation in contemporary contexts (Al Raffie, 2013).

This paper presents an empirical analysis of Islamic State IS’s videos on social media. It pursues two objectives: 1) to analyse the IS’s technological and media practices on social media in disseminating/reinforcing its propaganda content to mobilise and recruit European Jihadis; 2) to examine and identify prevailing discourse practices i.e. strategies of Self and Other representation emerging from critical discourse analysis of the content.

The paper follows on guidelines on CDA research on collective identities in discourse (Wodak and Meyer, 2016) and maintains that CDA involves “any theory concerned with critique of ideology” (Fairclough, 1995:20). “CDA involves an analysis of how discourse (language [and any other semiotic content] in use) relates to and is implicated in the (re)production of social relations” (Richardson 2007:42). In Multimodal CDA, the interest is to show how “images, photographs, diagrams and graphics […] work to create meaning, in each case describing the choices made by the author” (Machin and Mayr, 2012:9).

The study is positioned at the intersection of social media, terrorism studies and critical discourse studies (KhosraviNik, 2015, 2017) to lay the foundation for a social media critical discourse analysis of the ways terrorist propaganda machine appropriates the digital participatory spaces. The corpus consists of 30 IS’s video clips. The average length of these videos is 5-7 minutes.

The study moves to critically contextualise the findings with socio-political and cultural-religious dimensions of the ensemble of discourses that frame Islamic extremism generally, and IS particularly. Through an innovative interdisciplinary approach, the paper attends to the dynamic of social media use and Islamic ideologicalisation while maintaining a board textual focus. The analysis shows that IS incorporates vital Islamic texts into their videos to foster their claims, and relies heavily on visual as opposed to text-based propaganda.

ABSTRACT. Despite being known for their brutal actions, the militant group under investigation (not named here for safety reasons) have successfully expanded their influence through digitally mediated texts that are viewed as “slick” to attract and recruit followers from all over the world (Farwell, 2014; Greene, 2015). Due to the concern over their use of digital technologies as a recruitment channel, this research aims to shed light on this group’s efforts by examining the ways they promote their cause through their online recruitment materials: videos and magazines that are hosted on and disseminated via various digital platforms. Monaci (2017) describes the exploitation of the different platforms as part of the group’s transmedia strategy to enhance their messages. The analytical framework involves integrating several different approaches from critical discourse studies (CDS) and social semiotics, specifically Wodak’s (2016) discourse historical approach (DHA), De Saussure’s (2011) signification theory and Kress and van Leuween’s (2006) grammar of visual design. In addition to analysing the materials and categorising them in terms of these frameworks, I also attempt to summarise reasons for radicalisation based on past scholarly work which include finding solutions to personal, social and economic crises (see King & Taylor, 2011; el-Said and Barrett, 2017). The initial detailed qualitative semiotic analysis of 3 videos from the group leads to a taxonomy of semiotic elements (including social actors e.g. the group and their perceived enemies, intertextual references e.g. online news articles, symbols e.g. enemies’ country flags, music e.g. recitation of holy texts, and non-English verbal elements e.g. labels of enemies) used in recruitment materials that I juxtapose with existing radicalisation models. Relevant findings include the group positioning themselves as the victim of war and what they have to do to “save” themselves (e.g. by responding with violence such as massacres), and the use of intertexts to justify their violent actions (e.g. through verses from holy texts). Ultimately, this research aims to further a detailed understanding of digitally mediated recruitment processes which may help to reduce the risk of radicalisation among vulnerable groups and inform public policy.

ABSTRACT. Academic careers are social processes which involve many members of large populations over long periods of time. This paper outlines a discursive perspective which looks into valuation practices of academics, i.e. how they value others and how they are valued by others in France, Germany, the UK and the U.S. I put special emphasis on the role of social categories in the valuation of academics. While many such categories are negotiated in citation practices and everyday encounters, some become relevant for institutional decision-making and a few are crucial for recruitment and promotion processes. Yet not everybody has the same chance to attract the categories needed to establish an academic subject position. In discursive dynamics involving many academics, valuable categories produced by the many are typically attributed to the few. To flesh out this mechanism (‘discursive capitalism’), I will draw on data produced in the ERC DISCONEX project at Warwick and EHESS, namely expert interviews with academic specialists and (institutional) CVs of professors. By comparing ‘spontaneous’ as well as institutional categorization practices across countries, this paper will account for the discursive construction of prestige hierarchies in increasingly managerialized academic systems. References: Angermuller, J. (2013). "How to become an academic philosopher. Academic discourse as a multileveled positioning practice." Sociología histórica 3: 263-289. Angermuller, J. (2017). "Academic careers and the valuation of academics. A discursive perspective on status categories and academic salaries in France as compared to the U.S., Germany and Great Britain." Higher Education 73: 963-980. Hyland, K. and G. Diani, Eds. (2009). Academic Evaluation. Review Genres in University Settings. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Musselin, C. (2009). The Market for Academics. London, Routledge.

ABSTRACT. In the context of increasingly globalised competition between higher education institutions, a web presence for both institutions and scholars has become a sine qua non. Personal and institutional web pages respond to the imperative of “visibility”, which is a catchword of the entrepreneurial university just like “evaluation” and “impact”. Academics today, therefore, have one profile on the website of their academic institution as well as other presentations on different online supports, which all together form a heterotopic space (Foucault 1984). In line with what Foucault designated as a “dispositif” (or apparatus), academics find themselves within a sociotechnical arrangement of heterogeneous elements (discourses, institutions, architecture, technology, symbols…). The dispositif is not neutral and organizes the flow of power. Following “lines of subjectivation” (Deleuze 1989), it produces and normalises the subjects, whose heteronomous discourses are guided by the principles of power mechanisms such as the market. In as much as they work for their legitimation as academic subjects, the autonomy they gain is again likely to be reclaimed by the dispositif. My paper aims at mapping the construction of “academic subjects” by focusing on the different categories (self-presentations, descriptions including pictures with and without legend…). I will look into researchers’ web presentations in accordance with the institutional standards and norms which may differ slightly according to the universities’ “brand ethos” (Maingueneau 2016). I will analyse the linguistic and iconic “inscriptions” (Latour 1989) mobilised by professors of sociology and linguistics in 20 academic institutions In France and UK. In this way, I hope to provide some shared elements that constitute normalised “academic subjects” shaped by the dispositif and the different ways in which they use the dispositif for in order to gain some autonomy within heteronomy. Selected bibliography Deleuze G. 1989, « Qu'est-ce qu'un dispositif ? », Michel Foucault philosophe, Seuil. Foucault M., 1977/1984, “Des espaces autres”, Dits et Écrits t.4, Gallimard, 752-762. Latour B., 1989, La science en action, Gallimard. Maingueneau D., 2016, « L'ethos discursif et le défi du Web », Itinéraires, http://journals.openedition.org/itineraires/3000

ABSTRACT. Within the last decades, the academic world has changed. Critiques address the turning of academic institutions into entrepreneurial organizations (Kehm 2012; Weber 2013). New Public Management shifts academia into a market economic system (Meier 2009). Within this, academic autonomy is questioned and a heteronomic position becoming likely. At the same time, academic voices are raised favouring an autonomous critique position, arguing for heterotopic practices (Foucault 2005) as a potential and promise for concrete and already lived ´utopias´-in-practice. Within this shift in paradigm and potentials of alternative practice, universities are asked to act, position and constitute themselves within scientific, academic as well as political debates and discourses. Universities are to be analyzed regarding their positioning practices at the crossroad of discourses. How do they position themselves at the crossroads of the politically enforced programs such as German ´Excellence Initiative´, the ´affirmative action programmes for female Professorships? How do they position themselves in the discursive field of academic excellence and gender equality? Based on the research project “Excellence and Gender: Universities at the crossroad” (funded by the German Ministry of Hesse for Art and Research), the paper presents institutional programmatics and organizational strategies of academic institutions and the way they relate the two dominant discourses of gender equality and academic excellence at one point of encounter: the discursive construction of the subject position of the ‘junior’ or ‘emerging’ researcher – and the inclined subjectivations between heteronomia and heterotopia. Based on Foucault’s archeological methodology (1976), the discourse at the ‘surface of their appearance’ will be analyzed by taking into account three multimodal ‘surfaces’ (Weber 2016) being triangulated: websites, interviews and videographies taken with organizational representatives. Gender equality and excellent researchers´ discourse is being related to subject positions of junior researchers and the organizational politics of truth (Weber 2013) as epistemic practice of organizing the two discourses. Presenting discursive interconnections between gender and excellence and the subjectivations of ‘excellent young researchers’, general embeddings of academia between heteronomia and heterotopia will be addressed.

ABSTRACT. Over the last decades, higher education has been transformed by processes of marketisation and internationalization, which, in turn, have resulted in changes in educational discourse and in teacher and student roles. While recent studies have mainly focused on educational policy documents (Fairclough, 2007; Laing and Laing, 2016; Solly, 2007; Thomas, 2005; Wodak and Fairclough, 2010), the present paper examines the way advertising discourse constructs this new educational reality by adopting a critical cognitive perspective that combines the tools of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Cognitive Linguistics (CL). Specifically, it addresses the following research questions: i) how are universities and academic actors linguistically and visually represented?; ii) what cognitive mechanisms underlie the ideological construction of academic identities?. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of 20 advertisements for European universities from general audience magazines and university websites published between 2012 and 2017 reveals a complex scenario of hegemonic struggle where two conflicting discursive and cognitive representations coexist: on the one hand, the discourse of knowledge economy and internationalisation, in line with the EU policy documents setting the agenda for the modernization of higher education (European Commission, 2011); and, on the other hand, the self promotional discourse aiming to attract potential students. As a result, universities construct students as empowered consumers and agents of change, while positioning themselves as sources of knowledge (and power). Likewise, inclusive and exclusive discourses compete to meet the demands of global interconnectedness and a global competitive environment that seeks excellence.

ABSTRACT. National Identity and Discourse Space

National identity, it is assumed, is discursively constructed (Wodak et al. 2009) and following the theory of spatial cognition, is grounded in the primacy of spatial cognition (Levinson 2003). The meeting point between discourse and cognition is Discourse Space Theory (Chilton 2004), which holds that a discourse ontology is constructed through the mapping of referents onto a geometric, deictic model to visualise space, time and modality operations. This model has inspired political discourse analysts (e.g. Cap 2013, Kaal 2015). In my own research I have encountered the problem of how to account for such linguistic phenomena in a sufficiently rigorous manner. Furthermore, having investigated the construction of national identity in public discourse (e.g. political and media), I am interested in how private individuals conceptualise the issue. This study uses Cognitive Discourse Analysis (CODA, Tenbrink 2015) methodology to elicit and analyse controlled but unconstrained discourse between individuals on the subject of national identity. CODA has previously been used to investigate the relationship between language and thought by analysing mental representations at play in spatial-cognitive tasks in the physical domain. By incorporating DST and CODA and applying it to discourse related to the abstract domain of national identity, I hope to find a useful synergy between “elicited verbal description [that] reflects the speakers’ conceptualisation of a perceived scene or event” (Tenbink 2015:107) and “the spatial organising principle [that] provides a tangible ground for abstract worldview ontologies” (Kaal 2015). The aim of the study is to investigate spatial construal operations in the construction of national identity between private individuals.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I present a grammar of Point of View (PoV) and argue that this grammar provides meaning in linguistic as well as visual modes of communication. This amounts to a claim [1] that grammatical constructions are associated with ego-centric spatialized forms of mental representation and [2] that spatial values should perform similar functions in visual and linguistically engendered mental representations. I illustrate this argument using examples from media discourse – articulated in pictures and linguistic descriptions - on political protests. To evidence the claims expressed in [1] and [2] I report three experiments whose results are convergent with this line of reasoning. Addressing [1], Experiment 1 used a sentence-image matching task to show that four grammatical constructions (transitive active, transitive passive, reciprocal AB, reciprocal BA) typical of media reporting on political protests are associated with four contrasting PoVs. Results confirm this hypothesis.

The evaluative functions of these PoVs are then analysed from an embodied visual social semiotic perspective in which spatial values like LEFT, RIGHT, NEAR and FAR confer valence as a function of simulation and a metaphor-enriched social cognition. For example, according to this framework conceptual metaphors are subject to ‘feedback’. Thus, if stance is conceptualised in terms of position in space (as evidenced by linguistic expressions like taking sides, opposite views etc.), then position in space is suggestive of stance. This analysis provides a set of hypotheses concerning the evaluative functions of contrasting PoVs in images and analogous mental representations invoked by language. To address the claim in [2], then, Experiments 2 and 3 tested the effects of PoV in image and language respectively. Specifically, effects of PoV on blame assignment and perception of aggression were tested. PoVs were found to have the same (de)legitimating effects in images and analogous language usages.

The paper points to a modal (spatialized as opposed to propositional) format for meaning in language. It therefore suggests that visual social semiotics can be brought to bear in critically analysing language. Finally, the paper shows how CDS can benefit from mixed methods incorporating experimental research.

ABSTRACT. This comparative approach is based on the triadic relation between space, time and attitude (STA) (Kaal 2017, inspired by Chilton 2014). It explores the spatial grounding of current constructions of public EU refugee crisis discourse and its effect on the logical emergence of stance and policy. Policies may sit uneasily with a prior, innate, human sense of fairness, equality and sympathy, or empathy (Tomasello 2016). Current discourse is compared with migration discourse of several decades ago to reveal shifts in EU stance as expressed in its EU Convention on Human Rights and the Rome and Lisbon treaties. The aim is to find out how framing people spatially legitimates restrictive and often inhumane EU immigration policy. Finding variation in national(istic) STA frames may inform interpretations of conflicts between EU member states that are rooted in cultural variation in points of view, frames of reference (Levinson 2003) and directions of fit (Searle 2010. The question is how morality and responsibility are packaged by an often implicit ground rationale of refugee discourse. I propose a discourse-anthropological way (Duranti 2015) to bring out into the open the origin of dissonance as well as a ground for collective intentions towards solutions to the crisis.

ABSTRACT. Epideictic speeches form part of the public speaking repertoire of almost any political leader in office, and typically comprises scripted speeches that are ceremonial or commemoratory. A leader may be expected to address the nation on the occasion of an important anniversary, during a state visit by another leader, on the death of a public figure, during a national crisis, or at the opening or closing of a major event such as an international economic forum. Epideixis is commonly defined as rhetoric that attributes praise or blame, and key to its rhetorical “success” is its ornamental “art for art’s sake” and performative power – both verbal and non-verbal. Speeches are crafted to appear uncontroversial and thereby appeal to the widest possible audience, but if they are to be persuasive in terms of effects, the genre demands a certain cultural uniformity of values within the target audience. The rhetoric of Donald Trump has attracted attention due to what is often described as its erratic nature with regard to many of the norms and rules of speechmaking in democracies. Opponents and supporters alike will agree that there are elements that are fundamentally anomalous about the 45th president’s performative style, pointing to intertextual signs and tropes found in, for example, reality TV and business dealmaking. My study aims to describe some of these and consider their implications for political rhetoric and the performance of speechmaking in general. The paper will compare some norms of presidential epideixis (using speeches by former presidents) with the forms that seem to typify Donald Trump’s performance within the same genre. I will analyse key textual features, in particular, euphemism and dysphemism. “Epideictic” Trump speeches so far include: Memorial Day 2017, the Boy Scout Jamboree speech and words spoken following the Charlottesville protests. It is possible to argue that contrasts here are a temporary idiosyncratic anomaly; however, perhaps it implies a wider shift towards more fragmented and atomized discourses in the United States. [323 words]

ABSTRACT. Much of the public knowledge of political actors' worldviews derives from the way their words are paraphrased by journalists in the form of reported speech, including the reporting of speech acts. Mediated speech acts inform citizens about political actors’ intentions, about actions needed to be taken in order to bring about a better future and therefore serve as a central journalistic resource for mediating speakers' stances vis-à-vis actions, events and other actors. This study takes the example of three reported speech acts – condemnation, congratulation and greeting – in order to examine the journalistic strategies of reporting on speech acts and the levels of adherence to speakers' intentions. The study presents an analysis of 133 news items reporting on 881 condemnation, congratulations and greeting towards Israel between 2010-2015, and compares them to the original statements in the official websites of the quoted sources. Condemnation, congratulations and greeting were chosen since they all consist of evaluative language, which allow pinpointing the "intentional work" journalists perform when meditating the words of others to the public at large. The findings reveal variations in the level of adherence to the original statements, ranging from adherence to the explicit speech acts performed by a political actor to cases in which journalists take the freedom to distance their reported speech act from the speaker's manifested intentions. We conclude by suggesting several possible reasons underlying reporters' interpretative "work" and discuss the professional stances assumed by journalist in their active role as mediators of intentions who are responsible for representing, framing and constructing social and political relationships in public discourse.

ABSTRACT. At 3pm on Christmas Day, the Queen’s Christmas Message is broadcast across the Commonwealth. This is a rare opportunity for the Queen to speak directly to the people, to give her own account of the main personal, national and international events of the year, and to reflect on the meaning of Christmas. The series of speeches is almost unbroken and chronicles the major social, political and cultural changes that have taken place in Britain and the Commonwealth since 1952, as seen from the Queen’s point of view. It thus permits examination of how the Queen has adapted her rhetoric in an effort to ensure the continuing relevance of the monarchy, given the increasing diversity of British society and Britain’s evolving relationship with the rest of the world.

Using Rhetorical Political Analysis (Finlayson 2007), the paper argues that the Queen’s Christmas Message is an example of epideictic rhetoric which performs three main ideological functions. First, it facilitates the continued existence of the monarchy by engendering identification (see Burke 1969) with the Royal Family; second, it establishes the Queen as a focal point for uniting both the nation and the Commonwealth; and third, it provides stability in times of change. The paper further contends that these functions are carried out through rhetorical appeals based on faith and family. This rhetoric is constructed primarily from personal anecdotes designed to represent the Royal Family as being just like ‘ordinary’ families; metaphors of ‘brotherhood‘ and ‘family’, which are invoked to describe the Commonwealth; and an emphasis on the supposedly timeless (but predominantly Christian) values that act as a constant in a rapidly changing world. The paper demonstrates that, by appealing to these ‘shared values’ in conjunction with cultural symbols and national myths, the Queen’s Christmas Message is intended to strengthen adherence to common norms while reinforcing her symbolic function as the embodiment of Britain.

References

Burke, K. (1969). A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Finlayson, A. (2007). From Beliefs to Arguments: Interpretive Methodology and Rhetorical Political Analysis. British Journal of Political and International Relations, 9(4), 545-563.

ABSTRACT. Witnessing has been identified as a central discursive practice in the work of human-rights organizations (Givoni 2016). While some NGOs engage in witnessing alongside material rescue efforts, others define their activist role in discursive terms, positioning themselves as collectors, custodians, and disseminators of testimonies relating to particular, historically-situated human-rights crises and abuses. The latter, which fall into the category of "witnessing organizations" (Frosh 2006), stand at the center of the present inquiry. My discussion will draw on testimonial discourses generated by two Israeli witnessing organizations – B'Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and Breaking the Silence, a veterans' organization devoted to collecting, circulating and archiving testimonies by former soldiers concerning their military service in the occupied Palestinian territories. This paper seeks to contribute to the scholarly discussion on moral witnessing in human rights organizations, which tends to focus on issues of factuality and narrative authority, by foregrounding the epideictic dimension of this discourse. I will do so by elaborating on the notion of "epistemic responsibility" (Linell & Rommetveit 1998) in an attempt to explore how claims to knowing and to making-known can become resources for value-centered rhetorical action. Of particular interest is the interplay between the speech activity of truth-telling and the epideictic of blame that underwrite human-rights discourses as exemplified in the strategy of "mobilizing shame" (Keenan 2004). I will argue that recognizing the epideictic framing of human rights discourses can help to shed light on the controversies surrounding their deployment, and on their mixed reception, in contemporary societies.

References

Frosh, P. (2006) “Telling presences: Witnessing, mass media, and the imagined lives of strangers.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23/ 4: 265-284.

Givoni, M. (2016) The Care of the Witness: A Contemporary History of Testimony in Crises. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Keenan, T. (2004) 'Mobilizing Shame,' The South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2/3), 435-449.

Linell, P. and Rommetveit, R. (1998) “The many facets of morality in dialogue,” Research on Language and Social Interaction, 31: 465-473.

ABSTRACT. As attitudes about online dating have become more positive over the last twenty years, the use of online venues to find love has correspondingly increased (Smith, 2016; Smith & Duggan, 2013). Success in the online dating world is often dependent on an individual’s ability to negotiate the affordances and constraints of the platform (Bucher & Helmond, 2017) while employing words and images that effectively express “who I am” and “what I am looking for” to potential partners. For the millions of Americans who ascribe to consensual non-monogamy (Haupert, Gesselman, Moors, Fisher, & Garcia, 2017), online profile creation within the confines of mainstream dating sites that privilege monogamy creates unique challenges. In response to user feedback to move beyond heteronormative constructions, one of the top five most popular dating sites in the U.S. has gained a reputation as friendly to sexual minorities. In 2013, OkCupid producers extensively expanded pre-set categories to more accurately represent gender and sexual identities of users. The following year the site reacted to user data that showed a decreasing commitment to monogamy and an increasing trend among users to be open to dating multiple people simultaneously by adding the option to self-identify as "non-monogamous". In 2016, OkCupid added a feature for couples who identify as "seeing someone," "married" or "in an open relationship" to link their profiles together (Grinberg, 2016), an affordance that allows users to create both an individual identity as well as a shared identity as a couple. Through a multimodal narrative analysis of OkCupid profiles, this research shows how non-monogamous daters construct virtual identities that simultaneously promote a solitary “me” and a unified “we” to potential partners through words, images, and social media affordances.

ABSTRACT. As Jaworski and Thurlow (2010:258) argue, the expansion of tourism has ‘highlighted the significance of language commodification’. One result of this expansion has been the proliferation of tourist phrasebooks, which, arguably, are ‘transcultural texts’, i.e. ‘writings which help to establish popular understandings of the meanings of other cultures’ (Gilbert 1999:283). Building on Hallett’s (2017) analysis of Lonely Planet phrasebooks, this presentation employs Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Cultural Approach to Discourse (CAD) to the ‘Making Out’ series of tourist phrasebooks.

Tuttle Publishing, ‘a premiere publisher and seller of books rooted in Asian culture, language and history’ (http://www.tuttlepublishing.com/about-us, accessed 8/10/17), produces a series of ‘Making Out’ phrasebooks, e.g. Making Out in Korean, for 13 languages other than English (LOTE): Arabic, Burmese, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese. The double entendre in the book titles is intentional; the publisher appears to want tourists to fare well in LOTE, which may include having sexual encounters in these other languages and cultures. For example, each phrasebook contains a chapter on ‘Lovers’ Language’ that contains translations of phrases such as ‘You’re beautiful’, ‘If you don’t wear a condom, I won’t do it’, and ‘I’m afraid of getting pregnant’. Statements about the languacultures (Agar 1994) of the LOTE capitalize on sexual imagery and reductionism, e.g. ‘Burmese is just one of the hundred or so languages that make up Southeast Asia—a linguist’s wet dream by all accounts’.

To date, there have been some successful analyses of tourism texts using CDA (See Hallett 2015). To combat the perceived ‘Westcentrism’ of CDA (Shi-xu 2009, 2016; see also Gavriely-Nuri 2012), this presentation employs an analysis that is informed by not only Blommaert’s (2010) notion of a critical analysis of discourse (see Scollo 2011:3), but also Shi-xu’s (2005) CAD. Drawing on research in the areas of tourism, the sociolinguistics of mobility (Bloomaert 2010), and metrolingualism (Pennycook and Otsuji 2014), this presentation heeds Phillipson’s (2017:313) call for critical scholarship on the ‘conceptual myth-making promoting global English’. Analyses of the Making Out series reveal a concomitant exoticization and reductionism of non-Western languages and cultures.

ABSTRACT. In contemporary discourse analyses there is a widespread understanding according to which the social link that would bind us together - thereby constituting society - has weakened due to neoliberal values. This paper argues against such reasoning, showing that the social link has significantly changed, but has by no means weakened. Quite on the contrary, it seems to be rather strong. Analysing neoliberal discourse, Foucault (2008: 286) claimed that, for the neoliberals, ''economics must not be and there is no question that it can be the governmental rationality itself. [...] What will government be concerned with if the economic process, and the whole of the economic process, is not in principle its object? I think it is the theory of civil society.'' In addition to this overlooked claim, Foucault (2008: 301-304) argued that neoliberal (civil) society presents ''a distinct interplay of non-egoist, disinterested interests [...] a de facto bond which links different concrete individuals to each other'', thus exercising caution in reducing neoliberal discourse merely to economic egoism. In order to extend Foucault's analysis of neoliberal discourse, I engage with Lacanian psychoanalysis. Examining the big Other, nowadays basically represented by neoliberal symbolic order, Zupančić (2014: 53) claims that ''the existence of the multiplicity of individuals as solipsistic islands of enjoyment is precisely the form of existence of the contemporary social link.'' She explains such condition by the inability of neoliberal subjects to recognise a 'small' other as an instance of the big Other, as no concrete person is considered to be worthy of such respect, finally asking ''should we not see and recognize here a rather spectacular operation of saving the big Other?'' (Zupančić, 2014: 55). Thus, we, as neoliberal subjects, are bounded by maintaining neoliberal values and constitute a particular form of society, namely neoliberal society. Connecting Foucault's discourse analysis and psychoanalytic approaches to discourse, this paper makes further efforts in recognising the character of contemporary social link, emphasising the importance of reclaiming the notion of society in the field of discourse analysis.

ABSTRACT. At a time, when new right wing parties in Europe thrive and Donald Trump dominates the news, ‘populism’ has become a common keyword in politics, international news coverage as well as in academic disciplines observing political discourse. On the one hand, this is a highly contested political term, often used to stigmatise political opponents, on the other hand it is a theoretical label used to describe a political ideology (Taggart 2002; Müller 2016; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013), a political style of individual politicians (Moffitt 2016) or politics from a poststructuralist discourse theoretical perspective (Stavrakakis 2014, 2017). When analysing ‘populist’ discourse, linguistic discourse analysts normally refer to one of these theoretical conceptualisations from political science in order to describe, how populists do populism in discourse. This paper aims to start from the opposite perspective and asks empirically, how the press in Germany and the UK uses the term ‘populism’ to categorize politics and to structure the political discourse space, and which types of political discourse are delegitimised and excluded through the use of the term. Based on a German and British newspaper corpus between 2012 and 2017 and combining a corpus driven approach with tools from critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2003; van Leeuwen 2008; Baker et al. 2008) , I will demonstrate how political actors and political actions are construed as ‘populist’. A detailed comparative analysis of the representation of social actors and processes in this discourse will be the basis for discussing the differences in the use of the political key word in political meta-discourses in Germany and the UK and allow an insight into the influences of the political culture on the complex semiosis in national political cultures.

ABSTRACT. This research uses corpus linguistics to examine the way British newspapers presented the Egyptian Revolution in 2011. Using Nexus analysis, various right-wing and left-wing newspapers that cover the Egyptian Revolution are studied during 2011. According to Nisbet (2010), framing is an unavoidable reality of the public communication process. Therefore, the choice of a journalist is not whether to employ framing, but rather how to effectively frame a message for the audience, in relation to what ‘framing effects’ they want to obtain.

By comparing keywords, concordances, and collocations in news articles, I will show that the framing strategies used by left-wing and right-wing newspapers are quite different. It is clear from the number of articles published in 2011 about the subject that left-wing newspapers devoted more space to the Egyptian Revolution than right-wing ones. Taking a view of framing as 'essentially involv[ing] selection and salience' (Entman 2004), I show that most of the left-wing newspapers frame the revolution positively, by highlighting the role of protesters, activists, youth and social media. On the other hand, the majority of the right-wing newspapers seem to talk more negatively about the revolution using keywords like ‘crisis’, ‘threat to stability’ and ‘turmoil’, to name just a few.

It is important to clarify that British news providers were faced, in 2011, with two competing narratives of the events in Egypt, each struggling to prevail. On one hand, they had the official narrative of events in Egypt largely propagated by the Egyptian state-controlled media, which put a particular interpretation on the events. On the other hand, they had a robust alternative to this narrative, expressed by activists on the internet. Activists circulated written documents and audiovisual material, to contest mainstream domestic narratives. As professional news providers, British media outlets could not be neutral in their presentation of events, but had to adopt one of these two opposing narratives. The way British news organisations chose to frame the events was the main catalyst behind choosing which narrative to publicize. The study also investigates the affiliations of these newspapers in relation to the narrative which mostly informed their coverage.

ABSTRACT. Journalistic discourses that problematize growing income inequality often exist in contradictory tension with their frequent appeals to neoliberal economic logics that tend to legitimate growing income inequality. Our research explores this paradoxical condemnation and implicit justification of increasing income inequality by focusing on the discursive treatment of wages in print news media. Because long term wage stagnation has been an important contributor to growing income inequality in Canada (and elsewhere) since the 1970s, the (de)legitimation of worker wage demands has important implications for the pursuit of greater overall equality.

Our research examines editorials published in The Globe and Mail (Canada’s widest circulating newspaper) between 1970 and 2015 that address the wage demands of Canadian postal workers. As elite producers of discourse, editorialists produce explicitly persuasive interventions which advance normative claims. Our focus on postal workers and their union stems from their comparative effectiveness in advocating for wage increases and workers’ rights more generally in the Canadian context. To understand the ways in which these editorials convey (or challenge) neoliberal characterizations of wages, we examine these texts to consider how they frame the (de)legitimization of workers’ wage demands in terms of worker deservingness and entitlement (Feather 2015).

We find that editorial coverage of postal workers’ wage struggles portrays wage increases (and other worker demands) as illegitimate in virtually each instance of editorial coverage over 45-year time span of our study, thus suggesting that this legitimation of wage stagnation is complicit in the overall problem of rising inequality. Further, the ideologies of neoliberalism are maintained in the framing of workers themselves as unreasonable and morally suspect, and their wage and other demands as economically disruptive and unfeasible.

ABSTRACT. While for many in the West, Russia under Putin has become associated with cyberattacks, fake news, corruption, suppression of dissent, and aggressive geopolitics, in Russia, Putin and his policies remain popular (Dimitrov, 2009; Hill, 2017). Such popularity can be explained by a widespread belief that it is vital for Russia to maintain “sociopolitical stability” (Chebankova, 2017). This paper considers how Komsomol'skaya Pravda (Komsomol Truth), Russia’s most read daily newspaper, covered the summer 2017 anti-corruption demonstrations organized via social media by the opposition leader Navalny. To do so, it integrates the lenses of critical discourse analysis (e.g., Fairclough, 2003; van Dijk, 2008; Wodak, 2011) and frames theory (Goffman, 1974) and adapts Bakhtin’s (1981, 1984) notion of polyphony (co-present diverse viewpoints). My analysis shows that in contrast to Soviet-era censorship (Lauk, 1999) when mass media silenced dissent, the Russian press—recognizing social media’s ability to spread information instantaneously--actively engage in (re)framing. Specifically, I introduce the notion of fake-polyphony to demonstrate how different writers from seemingly diverse points of view all frame the demonstrators as 1) selfish disruptors of a state holiday, 2) gullible youth duped by a provocateur, and 3) spoiled young people motivated by peer pressure and/or a teenage angst. By framing the demonstrators as inconveniences, rather than legitimate protesters, the writers collectively infantilize and delegitimize (Ross & Rivers, 2017) young protestors, their actions, identities, and beliefs. Furthermore, while all articles omit the demonstrations’ anti-corruption message, the newspaper issues in which they appear also contain articles about Putin’s opening up his office to student-visitors and an American filmmaker’s surprise at the modesty of Putin’s vacation home, thus framing Putin as an open and honest leader. This work adds to prior studies on framing in discourse (Bing & Lombardo, 1997; Tannen, 2006; Gordon, 2009) by showing how a set of articles not only frames the protestors negatively, but also creates a coherent message that is coming from deceptively diverse viewpoints (fake-polyphony) and in so doing perpetuates an overarching frame of the importance of maintaining the sociopolitical status quo in Putin’s Russia.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to study the cultural values activated in multilingual promotional campaigns run on the Facebook social media platform. The research focuses on the analysis of the branding discourse in a corpus of texts from the Facebook Summer/Autumn 2017 campaigns of several brands of consumer products. The cultural contexts in contact are the UK, Spain, and Italy. While the common goal of any marketing campaign, regardless of the language, is to eventually convince the consumers to buy the product, the strategies that brands choose to apply for an international distribution are likely to be affected by the cultures and consequently by the unique language systems of the intended markets (De Mooij, 2014). According to the consumer-psychology model, one way of designing a marketing strategy is by creating a vocabulary of values around the products in order to generate meaningful connections between the brand and the public (Schmitt, 2012). The promotional discourse continuously appeals to the general knowledge of the world that may be conceived as organised in frames (see, e.g. Goffman 1974, Van Dijk 1977:124). As we can expect, the latter are by no means universal but tend to vary according to the country, since they represent the expression of what is characteristic or typical in a certain culture. Among the post types identified in our corpus, product-related posts (Shen and Bissell, 2013) are expected to preserve in their multilingual versions much of the vocabulary related to features (taste, elegance, etc.). As regards posts making associations between the brand and the external world (festivities, conventional situations, cultural habits and routines), we expect to find some degrees of adaptation (Adab and Valdés, 2004:165). We analyse the macrostructure of the posts, including the relationship between picture and text, as well as microtextual aspects, namely the cultural references, the lexicon of values and the tone and mood of sentences in order to describe how brand values are activated in each language version. Findings may reveal the existence of new tendencies in the standardisation and adaptation approaches to the translation of promotional communication on social media.

ABSTRACT. Loneliness is a prevalent problem in our society and is associated with various health problems. Chronic loneliness has negative effects on mental health, leading to depression, among other things. With the Campaign to End Loneliness launched in 2011, the BBC documentary The Age of Loneliness (2016) and then the launch of Jo Cox's Commission on Loneliness in January 2017, dealing with loneliness is generating intense debate in the UK. The topic of loneliness has received some media attention and internet discussion forums have emerged which allow people suffering from loneliness the chance to seek support of mediate their experience. One of the key features of media discourse is that it privileges newsworthiness: news values thus affect the discursive construction of issues and events. This raises the question as to the extent to which news articles on loneliness accurately reflect people’s lived experience. The aim of this paper is to examine how far the discursive representation of loneliness in media articles resembles or differs from the representations of loneliness produced by contributors to an online forum. Taking a discourse analytical approach, this paper compares and contrasts the typical lexico-grammatical choices used to talk about loneliness in a small corpus of news articles on loneliness (from the BBC News, The Guardian, The Telegraph) with a corpus of discussion threads from the publicly available online forum A Lonely Life, https://www.alonelylife.com/forumdisplay. Initial findings indicate a discrepancy between how news media report on and interpret official data on loneliness and people’s understanding of it. While there are areas of similarity between the two sets of data, such as a focus on isolation and depression, news media are more likely to frame the topic of loneliness as a public health issue related to changes in society. Furthermore, news media discourse of loneliness is characterised by the use of evaluative expressions which serve to construe news values and thus help construct representations of loneliness which reflect the agenda of the news producer.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I examine how intergroup/interethnic difference between self-identified Poles and self-identified Silesians is discursively reduced/erased in online conversations.

According to the latest census (2011), Silesians represent the largest (about 2% of Poland’s population) yet legally unrecognized minority in contemporary Poland.

The 2011 results have spurred Silesian activists to promote the ideas of Silesian ethnicity and Silesian language, particularly in online comments under news articles on www.dziennikzachodni.pl, the online edition of the Western Daily, the largest regional newspaper in Upper Silesia.

Looking at selected examples from a corpus of over 1,000 posts collected from these discussions and adopting the ideas that discourse can deconstruct ‘the unsayable’ (Wodak, 2015), that language can sustain discriminatory practices (KhosraviNik, 2014), and that texts can exert social control (Fairclough, 1992), I investigate how Polish-oriented posters discursively link being Silesian with being German, reducing/erasing the difference between themselves and Silesians.

For instance, Silesians are in one post called “a subclass, a group [consisting] of a Volksdeutsch [a Nazi-era term used to denote people defined as Germans by race, regardless of citizenship] lumpenproletariat [the lowest stratum of the working class, including criminals] whose aspirations were reduced to being faithful servants to [their] German masters.”

Silesian identity undergoes further pejoration (Coupland, 2010) as Polish-oriented posters creatively employ German-origin neologisms to imply Silesians’ pro-German orientation (e.g., “szlezjery” ‘German-oriented Silesians’ [< Germ. Schlesier ‘resident of Silesia’] with a pejorative non-virile plural ending).

Consequently, Polish-oriented posters further develop a discourse initiated in a 2011 document by the right-wing Law and Justice political party where Silesians who reject a concurrent Polish identity were named “a camouflaged German option.”

I argue that Polish-oriented posters use their linguistic and discursive strategies to exert social control over members of the Silesian minority as they are discursively equaled with Germans, and the Polish/Silesian distinction is effectively erased.

I hope my paper contributes to the growing body of literature on discourse and Eastern Europe (cf. Krzyżanowski, 2017; Krzyżanowski & Wodak, 2009), especially that Slavic data in discourse studies are underrepresented (Grenoble, 2006) and that ethno-nationalist discourse represents a major genre in Polish media discourse (Grzymała-Kazłowska, 2009).

ABSTRACT. Discourses on migration are full of conflicts emerging from contradictory claims. These claims rely on diverging social, political, ideological, legal, religious and other norms articulated from different discourse positions. Discourse actors integrate the conflicting norms into field-specific topoi and fallacies. These topoi and fallacies are employed as argumentation schemes in order to justify claims in favour of migration and migrants or against migration and migrants. Up to now, Critical Discourse Analysts have primarily focussed on criticizing the norms behind claims discriminating against specific social groups of migrants, e.g. racist, ethnicist, xenophobic or islamophobic norms. Though this critique is an extremely important task, it does not contribute much to resolving the conflicts in question. In order to deal with the conflicts in a more constructive way, CDA could go a step further and also try to offer a model of problem-solving deliberation. It is the aim of my lecture to sketch such a model from the perspective of the Discourse-Historical Approach.

My lecture will focus on conflicting norms in dis­courses on migration in German speaking countries. It will concentrate on discourses capitalising on the so-called “European refugee crisis” in 2015. The analysis will focus both on discursive strategies of discrimination as well as anti-discrimination to be found in these discourses. It will be concerned with the normative critique of rightist racism, ethnicism, xenophobia and islamophobia, but also with the normative critique of fundamentalist religious, islamist and genderist discrimination. My multi-dimensional critique will be formulated on the normative basis of a deliberative model of argumentation that picks up Pragma-Dialectics and deals with philosophical concepts such as recognition, difference-sensitive inclusion, moral universalism and cosmopolitan federalism (see Habermas, Honneth, Frazer, Benhabib and others). I will propose to introduce a set of second order rules of deliberation in addition to the ten Pragma-Dialectical rules for critical discussion.