ABSTRACT. In this talk I look at what kind of model of multimodality best works for the purposes of Critical Discourse Studies, particularly for those who want to carry out more systematic forms of empirical discourse analysis. Multimodality is now a broad and fragmented field which grew out of a particular strand of linguistics, offering the promise of allowing more detailed and predictive models of analysis for different forms of communication. Not all of the sub fields which have developed, however, provide suitable models for asking and answering the kinds of research questions that tend to lie at the heart of CDS relating to how instances of communication carry ideologies and power interests.

Some kinds of multimodality trend, arguably, to excessive modelling and labelling, in the fashion of linguistics itself, with a view to describing grammars. Using a number of examples from my own research I look at some of the key ideas for MCDA, a multimodality aligned with the interests of CDS. This is a form of multimodality that foregrounds clear research questions and which is able to understand all instances of communication as infused into material culture, which is loaded with specific ideological interests and as already rooted in, and shaping, existing social practices.

ABSTRACT. This research examines the use of discursive resources in tweets related to political TV shows about the Chilean pensions crisis to explore citizens’ constructions of themselves and the Chilean state (and associated social actors) in a time of socio-political upheaval. In 2016, numerous Chileans started to protest against a pensions system that they saw as breaching their social rights. While these protests were also manifested as physical demonstrations on the streets, this study focusses primarily on digital activism and democratic engagement that use TV shows as a focus for digitally mediated public debate and protest (Chadwick, O’Loughlin & Vaccari 2017).

A two-stage qualitative investigation incorporating principles from critical discourse studies, and specifically the discourse-historical approach (Reisigl & Wodak 2016), allows the identification and categorization of semiotic resources employed by Twitter users to present their political views and debate in relation to the pension crisis. Previous studies (KhosraviNik & Unger 2016; KhosraviNik & Zia 2014; KhosraviNik and Sarkhoh 2017) have suggested that critical discourse studies can be a useful framework to explore the discursive strategies and linguistic resources involved in political discourse on social media as part of broader media ecologies.

In this study, we collected a dataset of 20,000 tweets using the hashtags of five Chilean political TV shows that encourage audience participation. These were broadcast in 2016, and contain a subset of 2755 tweets about pensions. The analysis shows that in tweets on this topic, the viewers use the affordances of Twitter to directly address diverse public figures in their tweets, with different purposes (interaction, attacks, etc.), draw on multimodal resources (infographics, images and videos) and links as a form of “evidence” by using topoi (argumentative shortcuts) related to numbers and authority. Ultimately this form of analysis allows a more nuanced exploration of interrelations between media as part of a hybrid media system (Chadwick 2013). It highlights their role in the public sphere and leads to an understanding of how representations of social issues (such as pensions) and associated social actors in broadcast TV are recontextualised and contested in social media within particular technological and social affordances and constraints.

ABSTRACT. Drawing on the insights from the recent research on the media representation of migration within the European space (Baker et al 2008, Musolff 2014, 2015), the present paper examines the construction of migrants in online discourses. Given the dynamics and potential offered by the Internet and, in particular, social media (KhosraviNik 2014, 2017), we take under scrutiny their role in promoting and perpetuating negative messages concerning the Other - in this case migrants and refugees. Being sanctioned by law, hate speech, understood as incitement to violence against a specific community, is rarely seen in the mainstream press articles. Hence, social media discourses become an attractive site for spreading and appropriation of hateful messages and ‘othering’ processes. Greek Cypriot social media, for example, have been analysed as a platform for extreme right partisans’ messages (Baider and Constantinou 2017). Yet, additionally, we identified numerous instanced of what we call 'covert hate speech' (similar to 'covert sexism'), i.e. utterances which may have the same perlocutionary effect (call for violence) as 'overt hate speech'. The present study is an analysis of a 91000 word corpus of mainstream articles published and circulated online and Internet users’ comments, collected in the framework of the EU program C.O.N.T.A.C.T. reportinghate.eu (2015 - 2016), in terms of both types of hate speech. The data has been analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. We have employed corpus linguistic methods and tools to retrieve the most frequent word co-occurrence patterns within the lexical field of migration and the lexical field of LGBTQI. Working on the assumption that frequency is key to the concept of salience (Bednarek 2008, Giora 2003) we also assume that in turn salient concepts allow for shared inferences, necessary to co-construct certain representation and, ultimately, approve any future pre-emptive actions against the targeted community. While analysing the co-text of the keywords, we found the entailments of several conceptual metaphors, including that of PARASITE for both lexical fields. We will demonstrate how such entailments, drawing on social prejudice and threats, are used as vehicles for covert speech act and marginalisation, potentially resulting in the escalation of both verbal and physical violence.

ABSTRACT. Within the last decade, social network sites (SNSs) have come to play an increasingly important role in relation to both everyday and political life in Europe and North America. This gives rise to new forms of cultural and political participation, but also new modalities of manipulation. This paper explores how disguised propaganda on SNSs can be studied methodologically and analytically by combining multi-sited online ethnography (Hine, 2015; Marcus, 1998) and social media critical discourse studies (SM-CDS) (Khosravinik, 2017; Unger, Wodak, & KhosraviNik, 2016; Reisigl & Wodak, 2001). As numerous scholars have argued, SNSs should not simply be viewed as transparent or static platforms on which sociality unfolds (Langlois & Elmer, 2013; van Dijck, 2013). Rather, they represent contingent online spaces continuously shaped through the intermesh between social and technological processes. Political discourses on SNSs consequently require researchers to critically examine, not only how discourses are constructed within texts, but also how they arise through socio-technical discursive practices and processes. Based on a six-month multi-sited online ethnography, the paper discusses how participant-observational fieldwork and SM-CDS can be applied in conjunction to study the (re-)production and proliferation of racist discourses through fake SNS profiles. The study revolves around 11 Danish Facebook pages using fake Muslim identities to provoke Danish Facebook users. According to the pages, Muslims in Denmark are part of a conspiracy to take over the country, killing and raping non-Muslim Danes in the process (Farkas et al., 2017). In total, the pages received more than 20,000 comments, a majority of which expressed belief in the proclaimed authorship and aggression towards the pages and Muslims in general. The paper explores the socio-technical construction, maintenance, negotiation and contestation of racist discourses on these Facebook pages. Additionally, the paper discusses the methodological and analytical challenges of studying this type of online phenomenon. The paper concludes by arguing that multi-sited online ethnography can complement and enhance SM-CDS, although more scholarly work is urgently needed on this topic.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to deconstruct the complex relations between youth culture, social media discourses and religious rituals in Iran; the world’s largest Shi'a Muslim nation. While religion has been labelled as the most important pillar of Iranian national identity after the 1979 Islamic Revolution (Aghaie, 2004), this study intends to explore how global contemporary trends of popular culture (Hip-Hop and Rap) may contribute in social changes of Iranian identity discourses via religious ritual texts. Following the Discourse-Historical Approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001) to CDA, I examine discursive strategies employed by a celebrated young Iranian Hip-Hop singer, Hossein Tohi, in his recent performance of a religious Eulogy. Religious Eulogies are devoutional poetic prayers during Shi'a public collective ritualistic mourning in remembrance of the Shi’a Imams who suffered 'persecution' in early years of Islam. The Eulogy performed by Tohi (hereby called as non-traditional) is religious in essence, however, this analysis demonstrates how the juxtaposition of new contexts of Pop lyrics and Hip-Hop rhythms and historical religious contents has provided discursive opportunities for Tohi and other young religious performers to express their version of national/cultural identity within global contemporary trends of popular culture. The religious elites would consider these new trends of Eulogy performances an invasion of Western cultures in Iran, leading to de-legitimisation of the long existing national/cultural Iranians’ 'Shi'a Muslim' identity (Ghaffari, 2017). Nonetheless, the discursive space provided by the interactive social media, specifically Instagram in Iran, has facilitated the access to the bottom-up language practices of ordinary users/fans (non-elite) regarding these non-traditional religious Eulogies. By employing an emerging model for CDA on Social Media (KhosraviNik, 2017), I analyse more than 2,500 user-generated comments attached to Tohi's Instagram post on his participation in this ritualistic mourning. The analysis illustrates that the majority of Tohi's followers are in favour of incorporating global trends such as Hip-Hop in order to re-define the stereotypical views of Iranian identity grounded in religion, and move towards a less marginal and more global discourses of Self-identity.

ABSTRACT. Core values – presented as freestanding lexical units – are a defining feature of ‘platform of values’, a rapidly developing genre in Swedish public administration in which the existence of a text, often labeled ‘platform of values’ is of vital importance. But why do Swedish public authorities spend time and money on formulating core values, when most of them seem to end up with rather vague and semantically ‘empty’ core value words? The aim of the paper is to contribute to a critical understanding of how the choice of human related core value words may be understood as part of the ethical and managerial practice that is ‘platform of values’. Thus, it contributes to the rapidly developing field of organizational (critical) discourse studies. In an ongoing research project, the full range of ‘platform of values’ text from all Swedish administrative authorities have been analyzed. A key result is that the three most popular core value words are open, respectful and committed. Even though words from other semantic domains would have been expected, such as words from the legal-administrative domain or words related to the authority’s activity, words related to human qualities and with fuzzy semantic boundaries seem to be preferred. In the paper, the framework of critical genre analysis (CGA) (cf. Bhatia, 2017) is employed, allowing for the choice of core value words to be related to an analysis of the social practices in which the texts are embedded. Further, the concept of affordance (Gibson, 1979; Machin, 2016) is applied in the analysis of visual and verbal resources in the texts. The paper discusses how the semantically vague adjectives function as prompts for conversations at the workplace, conversations that revolve around the meaning of the words. According to results from a focus group discussion and a questionnaire related to ‘platforms of values’ within the public administration such conversations are a desired effect of introducing and using ‘platforms of values’. The paper ends with the discussion of the fact that the core value words describe qualities that are more often perceived as qualities of human beings rather than of administrative entities.

ABSTRACT. “Language should be tortured to tell the truth” (Jelinek cited in Zizek, 2012: 871) In 2006, HSBC launched their ‘Points of View’ advertising campaign across print, television and signboards. Central to the advertisements is the juxtaposition of words and images to communicate the value of social diversity and to capitliase on the bank’s existing brand (Koller, 2007). The campaign presents images with words superimposed. In one advertisement four frames show: an image of a cat tagged with ‘love’, a dog tagged ‘loathe’; the same image of a cat is then shown with ‘loathe’; while the dog is shown with ‘love’. In addition to these image/text hybrids, captions are included that suggest that difference and different points of view are to be valued. At first glance, the campaign seems to celebrate difference and endorse a positive form of cultural relativism. Using Barthes’ Rhetoric of the Image (1977 [1964]), I analyse the various instantiations of the signboard campaign in order to demonstrate that rather than celebrating difference, the campaign turns ‘social diversity’ into a proliferation of floating signifiers. For the image/text hybrid to be understood, viewers need to draw on the cultural discourses they index. Further, for the relationship between these images and final linguistic message about difference to be understood, a viewer must access yet another (more abstract perhaps) discourse about values and the value of difference. The textual components of the campaign then become strategically deployable shifters, “terms [that] tend to have no fixed meaning so that they can become polysemic and multi-functional” (Morrish, 2017: 150). Similar to nested narratives - the inclusion of one narrative inside another (Galloway, 1979) - I suggest that it may be productive to analyse this process in terms of ‘nested indexicalities’. I suggest that the campaign capitalizes on nested indexicalities in order to ‘short circuit’ any critical interpretation of the campaign. This has the potential to condition the viewer to be completely uncritical of and absolutely trusting in HSBC. Because of the nested indexicalities, the reader is made complicit in this conditioning.

ABSTRACT. Many organisations are strategically committed to fostering a particular workplace culture to ensure the achievement of organisational goals (Alvesson & Willmott 2002). To do so, they may design and apply ‘appropriate structures, procedures, measures and targets’ (ibid: 621), assuming that this will lead to the desired behaviour of organisational members. However, studies suggest that the regulation of members’ behaviour is rarely accomplished through organisational structures and designs, but is frequently the result of members’ self-positioning and identification with (dominant) organisational discourses and narratives (Alvesson & Willmott 2002; Frandsen et al. 2017). This perspective forms the background of the paper, which will analyse and discuss middle managers’ negotiation with dominant understandings of workplace culture in a Danish bank and building society. The analysis will take its starting point in discourse as narrative action (Bamberg & Andrews 2004), which focuses on the constitutive force of discourse and narrative, e.g. in relation to organisational change (Frandsen et al. 2017). Of particular concern is the concept of counter-narrative as an alternate version to dominant or authoritative narratives, attracting attention to the struggles over meanings, values and identities that consistently take place in organisations (Mumby 1987). In the bank, these struggles are exemplified through the discursive construction of recruitment policies and practices, with managers both subscribing to dominant narratives and constructing counter-narratives that challenge the very meaning of these as well as invite questions of the relationship between self and the social (Bamberg & Andrews 2004). The paper analyses seventeen semi-structured interviews with middle managers, using a combination of discourse and narrative analysis, which allows for a critical perspective on managers’ constructions of recruitment including the (fragmented) narratives used to establish self and the organisation (Alvesson & Kärreman 2011; Grant & Iedema 2005; Humle & Frandsen 2017). The analysis shows that despite efforts to implement a master discourse and narrative, narratives may exist that contest and yet exist peacefully alongside it. This, it appears, is partly the result of individual experience in local contexts where well-established workplace practices prevail.

ABSTRACT. Although contemporary CDA places an emphasis on triangulation, and different means of triangulation have been developed, experimental methods are not normally a feature of CDA research. In this paper, we offer a framework for empirically assessing the influence of trust-building strategies in corporate discourse that is based in experimental methods. Specifically, we use a scenario-based experiment to test the effects of trust-building strategies, realised in attitudinal and intersubjective stance-taking acts, which a previous corpus-based study found to be salient features of stakeholder-facing corporate communication (Fuoli 2017). The experiment relies on a between-subjects design in which a target group of subjects are exposed to trust-building strategies while another control group are not. The effects of exposure to the discursive strategies are then measured by comparing the responses of subjects in both conditions to a second stimulus text. We apply this paradigm to corporate discourse in the form of an About Us webpage produced by a fictitious multinational pharmaceutical company that has been accused by a whistleblower of corporate misconduct. The scenarios is based on the scandal that hit the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi in 2014. In line with the basic commitments of CDA, then, we proceed from (i) a real-world situation type which we consider to pose a significant social problem and (ii) attested discourse practices identified as characteristic of texts produced in that context. The results of the study, which involved 297 subjects, show that these strategies are indeed effective in fostering trust in the company. In addition, the trust-building strategies have an indirect positive effect on the perceived credibility of the company’s denial in response to the allegations made by the whistleblower. Therefore, the trust-building strategies under investigation may not only help companies to gain the trust of stakeholders, but also to avoid blame and protect their legitimacy against accusations of malpractice. The implications of this study for research on corporate communication and for CDA in general are discussed.

References Fuoli, M. (2017). Building a trustworthy corporate identity: A corpus-based analysis of stance in annual and corporate social responsibility reports. Applied Linguistics. DOI: 10.1093/applin/amw058

ABSTRACT. The presentation highlights semantic, syntactic, and functional features of two novel slurs that have entered the Russian and Ukrainian languages as a result of the current crisis. The words ukrop (dill) and vata (cotton wool) underwent a semantic shift and acquired new negative meanings which can now be used to refer to the opposing groups in hostile communication.

The project is grounded in the Critical Discourse Analysis framework which views discourse as an embodiment of social practices and underscores the conscious and strategic character of linguistic acts (e.g., Fairclough 1995; van Dijk, 2009) as well as modern research into linguistic creativity (Harris 1980; Carter 2004). It also relies on the Deliberate Metaphor Theory, which combines cognitive-linguistic and pragmatic approaches in the study of metaphors when they are used “to change the addressee’s perspective on the referent or topic…of the metaphor” (Steen 2008, p. 222).

The presentation highlights semantic aspects of the words ukrop and vata that make them particularly suitable for use in dehumanizing metaphors. In their non-slurring senses, they denote a plant (dill) or a material (cotton wool). By using these slurs, speakers metaphorically move their opponents lower on the Great Chain of Being (Lakoff & Turner, 1989) where humans occupy a privileged position above animals, plants, and inanimate objects. The presentation includes examples of cross-domain mappings and emergent structures of metaphorical uses of ukrop and vata and discusses such discursive strategies as sweeping generalizations and dehumanization that these novel slurs are used for. The presentation highlights the grammatical features of ukrop and vata (both are uncountable, mass, inanimate nouns), which make them particularly suitable to fulfill these strategies.

It also provides examples of the emergence of unconventional uses of ukrop as a countable noun when referring to groups of people, illustrates non-standard subject-verb agreement in utterances containing vata, and describes the cases when the word ukrop, which traditionally functioned as a grammatically inanimate noun, functions as an animate noun when used as a slur. This information leads to a discussion of intrinsic connections between the linguistic changes these words are undergoing and extralinguistic context of their use.

ABSTRACT. The present paper analyzes current discursive practices in a number of Ukrainian social media networks, specifically those that have emerged in Ukraine since 2014, the Revolution of Dignity, or the Maidan Revolution. The focus is on current developments and transformations in the language and how political unrest and invasion of the country trigger linguistic change, innovation, and ideological expression via social media.

The analysis focuses on popular social media sites that are devoted specifically to language issues. These sites are viewed as cultural and societal constructs and as “ideological sites” (Silverstein 1979; Philips 2000) that drive and portray social, linguistic and ideological tendencies in a specific community. Social media texts, that contain a set of social meanings, ideologies, and values are analyzed as active campaigners for language innovations and change in contemporary Ukrainian. These texts represent examples of a new social media sociolinguistic culture, which cultivates shifts in status, value and form of contemporary Ukrainian through the various movements promoted by social media networks. These movements are classified into: language popularization, language restoration, language legitimization, and language creativity and crowdsourcing. An analysis of discursive practices representing these movements allows for a focus on language, linguistic innovations and language ideologies in particular. The analysis is situated within the “language ideologies” framework, problematizing “speakers’ consciousness of their language and discourse as well as their positionality … in shaping beliefs, proclamations, and evaluations of linguistic forms and discursive practices.” (Kroskrity 2000a: 192) By drawing on some prominent frameworks (Silverstein 1979; Woolard 1992; Woolard and Schieffelin 1994) and also on recent theoretical developments in the study of language ideologies (Kroskrity 2000a, b; Daily o’Cain 2017), the aim is to discuss how linguistic forms and discursive practices in social media contribute to the (re)production of language ideologies, how these ideologies are being created and negotiated by their speakers, and how the processes studied signal a language-ideological shift in contemporary Ukrainian society.

ABSTRACT. This study investigates how repetition across different modalities is used as creative insurgency, a combination of activism and artistry (Kraidy, 2016), in the context of Russian-Ukrainian geopolitical conflict. I suggest that the escalating tension between the two countries has created a situation of “reasonable hostility” (Tracy, 2008) and prompted an upsurge in online conflict discourse, often punctuated by sarcasm and irony (Knoblock, 2016). Such discourse, drawing on recognizable cultural resources, also indexes the divergent framing of the past, and present, by the former “brotherly” states: While Russia nostalgically venerates Soviet symbols and rituals (Ryazanova-Clarke, 2016), Ukraine mythologizes pre-Soviet times, especially the period of independent, egalitarian, and democratic brotherhood of Zaporizhian Cossacks (Sysyn, 1991). To elucidate the complexity of online conflict discourse, I analyze a YouTube video in which Ukrainian soldiers (re)create a well-known painting that depicts Zaporizhian Cossacks writing an insulting reply to the Turkish sultan, but the YouTube version is adapted to show Putin and his allies as the addressees and a derogatory anti-Putin song-chant serves as a post scriptum. In my analysis, I draw on frames theory, especially how it has been developed and applied in sociolinguistics (e.g., Gordon, 2009; Tannen, 2006), the notions of dialogicality and intertextuality, and prior work on the interrelationship between texts and images (e.g., Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). My analysis shows how by drawing on multimodal resources, the soldiers situate their (re)enactment in multiple embedded and overlapping frames that simultaneously refer to past and present actions and events, and in so doing create what I identify as intertextuality in action, or when “texts” (including visual and auditory) become actions. Specifically, by deploying multimodal repetition, stylization, lexical choices, and a deliberate use of Ukrainian--Bakhtin’s (1981) “heteroglossia with awareness”--Ukrainian soldiers collaboratively perform an insult, or “reasonable hostility” against Russian policies toward Ukraine. This work adds to our understanding of the relationship between discourse and action by demonstrating how social actors mobilize multimodal resources to engage in creative insurgency online.

ABSTRACT. The study of discourse is a valuable strategy that can shed light on such matters as the role of emotion in shaping both individual attitudes and international policies. My project aims to reveal the emotions driving the contemporary revival of the Cold War ideologies. I use different corpora of newspapers (German, US, 1990 – 2017) and social-media posts (Twitter, Facebook). Both have their strengths and weaknesses. Tweets of only 140 characters are difficult to analyze with traditional corpus linguistic tools. For this reason, I use existing and self-written software and technics to detect sentiments and emotions which help mapping the emotional genealogy of the Ukraine crisis. The newspaper corpus serves to describe the archaeology of the discourse by analyzing the use of expressions or stories over the years. From a CDA perspective however it is important to always link linguistic patterns back to question of power relations, knowledge and its production. I argue that knowledge also is related to what we feel is true. Emotions are often referred to as being only negative or not researchable. By focusing on them I want to emphasize their complexity. The concept of Cold War is back as a general geopolitical narrative and is being used to explain present situations while containing new features. The New Cold War seems to be only taking place through Russian actions. Instead of being part of the conflict, the West is the unmarked center. Additionally, the image of Russia as the Soviet Union is still powerful. My argument is that emotions connected to past power-relations have revived in the form of single stories, dominated by fear and contempt. The discourse analysis I want to present therefore targets these basic emotions to explore their impact on the Crisis in Ukraine and to power-knowledge-systems. With this research, I hope to contribute to a general understanding of how emotions affect the perception of concrete events, which in turn influences ideologies and world views. It also contributes to the development of helpful corpus linguistic techniques for the identification and analysis of emotions – both in traditional sources and social media.

ABSTRACT. 'Identity' is a prominent topic in 21st century research in applied linguistics (Norton & Toohey, 2011; Preece 2016), matching a more general interest in the academic community and in politics.

The initial aim of this presentation is to query the multiple meanings of identity and describe its most common patterns in applied linguistics discourse, based on an analysis of a corpus of over 300 applied linguistics journal articles published on identity between 1995 and 2015. Corpus analysis reveals a prevalence of post-structural definitions of identity, emphasising the enacted nature of an ever-shifting, socially-constructed, multi-dimensional concept.

More importantly, the presentation probes the reasons for the ascendancy of identity in the discipline. Critical approaches from cognate fields (e.g. Rouse, 1995; Skeggs, 2008) have tended to implicate identity in the homogenisation of groups and communities to further powerful interests in gaining the assent of populations in those neo-liberal societies where identity has become a keyword. Yet, there has been no discussion of the motivations behind identity gaining prominence in applied linguistics discourse. This lack of reflexivity, combined with the polysemous nature of identity and a dependence on relativistic post-structural perspectives may leave applied linguists open to the charge of complicity in disenfranchising the very communities that they seek to legitimise and empower.

The presentation will conclude with an approach to identity informed by an immanent critique (Herzog, 2016; O'Regan, 2014), exemplified by cases from the same corpus of journal articles, to propose a transformational discourse of identity.

References Herzog, B. (2016). Discourse Analysis as Social Critique. London: Palgrave Macmillan Norton, B. & Toohey, K. (2011). Identity, language learning, and social change. Language Teaching 44(4), 412-446 O'Regan, J.P. (2014). English as a Lingua Franca: An Immanent Critique. Applied Linguistics 35(5), 533-552 Preece, S. (Ed.) (2016). The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity. London: Routledge Rouse, R. (1995). Questions of Identity. Critique of Anthropology, 15(4), 351-380 Skeggs, B. (2008). The problem with identity. In Lin, A.M.Y. (Ed.) Problematizing Identity. New York, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp11-32

ABSTRACT. Rap, as the origin of hip-hop culture, has long been used by people who are from the margins of society as a way to construct identity and ideology (Campbell, 2005; Ibrahim, 1999). Over the past few decades, there has been a considerable amount of research on rap and hip-hop, yet, little has employed the critical discourse approach, which is specifically designed to uncover the inter-relationship among language, identity and ideology. The present study employs a modified three-dimensional model of Fairclough’s (1989) to find out how an Asian American rapper constructs his identity and establishes his ideology through his lyrics, and how his construction of identity and ideology reflect the social and cultural values in American society.

As a member of the marginalized group and as the first and only Asian who claimed a seven-time victory on Freestyle Friday on Black Entertainment Television (BET), Jin Au-Yeung has received a noticeable amount of attention. At the same time, he has faced a lot of unfavourable experience as an Asian rapper in American society. In the study, fifteen songs, approximately 9,800 words, written by Jin are chosen for analysis according to the three interrelated stages in CDA: description, interpretation and explanation.

The preliminary results show that Jin constructs his personal identities as a professional rapper and as a Chinese American and establishes his ideology of having one human nation despite the difference in races through his rap lyrics. These are achieved through the co-occurrence of ‘I’ and ‘to be’, and promoted through the use of rhyming and code-switching. It is also found that Jin’s personal identities and ideology are shaped through the social ideology on Asian Americans, which is probably reflected through the social and cultural values in American society.

References: Campbell, K. (2005). Gettin' our groove on : rhetoric, language, and literacy for the hip hop generation. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. UK: Person Education Limited Ibrahim, A.E.K.M. (1999). Becoming black: rap and hip-hop, race, gender, identity, and the politics of ESL learning. TESOL Quarterly, 33(3), 349-369

ABSTRACT. The author focuses on quantitatively examining the linguistic othering in printed media discourse in the Czech Republic, using the Czech National Corpus. Currently, the subcorpus includes news papers and magazines from 1989 to 2015. The method used so far has been a corpus-based discourse analysis based first on the adjectives preceding the keywords for each part of the project, now moving on to reporting verbs surrounding them. The theoretical starting point is that power relations in a society are reflected in that society’s mainstream media, and that the language usage in these media contributes to the worldview of its recipients, in some cases even helps to construct it. Frequent but widely dispersed stereotypical and negative phrases and collocations are examples of a power language that may not be visible at once, but slowly enters the general discourse in a society. This project aims to survey these linguistic othering phrases in the Czech media discourse, as comprehensively as possible, and shed some light on their appearance over time. At the time of writing, minorities and gender differentiation have been in focus, respectively.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates gendered discourse in online representations and evaluations of Eastern European migrants to the UK. We are looking at the Mail Online, the most popular online newspaper in the UK (comScore.com), during the time period around the lifting of transitional restrictions for Bulgarian and Romanian workers on 1st January 2014. Specifically we have selected articles on the three most prevalent topics discussed online in this time period in relation to Eastern European migration, namely the topics of ‘Welfare Tourism’, crime and (un)employment. We argue that it is important to look at immigration discourse from an intersectional perspective, as it is heavily gendered in a number of ways (Wodak, 2015). The analysis consists of identifying gendered discourses focusing discursive features such as the representation of social actors (van Leeuwen, 1996), transitivity (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 1981/2003) and presupposition. We are also looking at the accompanying In addition, we are looking at the recontextualisation of the discourses in the online articles and their elaboration, endorsement or contestation in the accompanying online comments. A lot of the discussion on migration is gendered in that masculinity is taken as the norm and discussion about female migrants is marked. Women are focused on mainly as reproductive machines thus evoking nationalist fears about immigrant overpopulation, or as victims of their male compatriots, which is used as an excuse for racist rhetoric towards the ‘default male migrant’, without necessarily any real concern for the welfare of the women involved. Visuals often represent female migrants as Roma women wearing traditional Roma headscarves, thus othering them further by associating them with an even more stigmatized group. References: Halliday, M.A.K. & Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. (2004) An Introduction to Functional Grammar. (3rd ed.)London: Hodder Arnold. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (2003) Metaphors We Live By. (2nd ed.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. van Leeuwen, T. (1996): The representation of social actors. In Caldas-Coulthard, C.R. & Coulthard, M. (eds) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge. Wodak, R. (2015) The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage.

ABSTRACT. This paper will draw on recent theories of governmentality and biopolitics in order to consider the way in which national security is constructed though language and discourse within the UK. Governmentality is a dispersed means of articulating power upon populations, informed by political economy and articulated through security apparatuses (Foucault, 2007). Two bodies of work have built on Foucault's concept of governmentality. The first (e.g. Agamben, 2005) develops a philosophical theory which undertakes a historico-legal analysis of the relationship between the ‘power of the sovereign’ and the legal constitution of the nation state in the light of recent emergency legislation in Europe and elsewhere; while the second (e.g. Bigo, 2008) draws on the sociological investigation of security agencies which problematizes the current ‘dispositif’ of surveillance and bordering practices across Europe. Against this theoretical backdrop, my paper will draw use corpus tools to analyse both qualitatively and quantitively the language and discourse deployed in a corpus of recent documents drawn up by prominent UK government departments. The corpus was assembled from documents produced between January 2012 and December 2016 in order to capture the recent discursive constitution of internal security in the UK. This period embraces the main period of the UK Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government and the short exclusive premiership of David Cameron. During this period, there was a surge in the concept of ‘integration’ in government policy in the wake of the UK Premier’s (2011) ‘Death of Multiculturalism’ speech. The talk will conclude by considering to what extent the language and discourse of these documents realise a discourse of ‘exceptionalism’ (after Agamben, 2005), and/or that of ‘illiberalism’ (Bigo, 2008).

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bigo, Didier. 2008. “Globalised Insecurity: the Field and the Ban-opticon”. In Terror, Insecurity and Liberty : Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes after 9/11. (Ed. Didier Bigo and A. Tsoukala) Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 10-49. Cameron, D. 2011. PM's speech at Munich Security Conference. Available at: http://www.number10.gov.uk/. Foucault, Michel. (2007). Security, territory, population; lectures at the College de France, 1977-78 (trans. G. Burchell). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

ABSTRACT. Critical Discourse Analysis may be used as a theorethical and methodological resource to face the ideological intricacies of the public debate on a specific aspect of migrant people labeled as “brain exit”. The relevance of brain drain (Docquier & Rapoport 2012) has been explored on several levels (social, economic, political), but our study aims at focussing on its significance also for Discursive Psychology. Indeed, this phenomenon exhibits a "personal/interpersonal dimension" that can be traced back to the sphere of meaning with which every subjectivity is defined and programmed. Our research hypothesis foresees that the public discourse on brain drain is fueled by two socio-epistemic rhetoric (Berlin 1993) able to legitimize different evaluation guidelines, which can be translated into conflicting political choices, because Italy is losing more and more skilled workers who in some cases do not know how to replace, while politics is in great difficulty because it does not know how to handle this emerging phenomenon. The survey was carried out by combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies, starting with various sources of textual data (such as video of interviews, television program services and comments in social networks). Considering these data as “diatexts” (Mininni & Manuti, 2017), our research aims to investigate the emotional involvement of the fleeing brains and their families, as well as the discourses of politicians to fight this emergent phenomenon, answering the research question about how the speech is represented their social goals and how large their area of influence can be, assuming that the brain drain also has a significant impact on the host country. To meet these goals, a Sentiment Analysis (Pang & Lee, 2008) as quantitative methodology and analysis of framing of enunciations (such as metaphors and metadiscursive cues) and mitigation strategies for qualitative research will be carried out to evaluate which are the difficulties of this displacement, doubts and victories, assuming that this courageous choice depends on a high motivation of the worker who sets aside his affections for work satisfaction: not by chance, in English in the binomial “brain drain” and “drain heart”, the heart is almost moved to the background.

ABSTRACT. One challenging social and political issues of our time is the ongoing European refugee crisis. The motivation for refugees to embark on perilous journeys in search of a better life exposes a significant disparity between the lives of those within Europe and those beyond its borders. Hence, it is vital for research to provide insight into how European citizens are reacting to this position of privilege and power, and its affective consequence. This study examined the remit of sympathetic discourses and the capacity for these repertoires to extend to calls of inclusive political solidarity with the refugees. The analysis was grounded in critical discursive psychology (Wetherell, 1998; Wetherell & Potter, 1992) and also drew on the concept of affective–discursive practice (Wetherell, 2015). Data was retrieved from “liveline”, a phone‐in program on Irish national RTE radio, over a 6-month period from the 1st August 2015 when the debate was at its height. Phone-in programmes provide an important insight into people’s unrehearsed rhetorical response to the refugee crisis in front of a large national audience. Findings indicate that sympathetic repertoires are readily available and deployed effortlessly, but primarily focus on the speaker’s culturally recognisable normative emotional response to the plight of the refugees. Whilst it appears problematic for these same speakers to further this shared sympathy and present explicit, unambiguous, and unconditional calls of inclusive political solidarity with the refugees that advocate increased asylum provision in Ireland. These findings are discussed in light of the hostile affective–discursive environment towards refugees (Lynn & Lea, 2003; Souter, 2011) and the universally accepted commonsense understanding that nation states have the moral right to exclude (Billig, 1995), which constrains the sympathetic talk to a position of ambivalent paternalism. Whilst it is easy to deploy recognisable affective talk to achieve consensus about human tragedy, it is much more difficult to capitalise on that discursively shared affect to call for specific political action. These findings add support to the notion that liberal humanitarian ideologies are potentially limited in their persuasiveness for those advocating on behalf of refugees, (Every & Augoustinos, 2008) particularly when anchored in sympathy.

ABSTRACT. Despite increases in breastfeeding initiation, breastfeeding duration rates in the US lag behind other countries and fail to reach the six months minimum recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics (UNICEF, 2017). Several scholars have investigated communication’s role, including how messages challenge or reinforce existing perceptions, attitudes, and ideologies. However, despite a large body of breastfeeding research claiming discourse/textual analysis as an approach (e.g., Foss, 2010, 2013), none make use of corpus data. Corpus-based CDA has, however, been used to study language in relation to ideology. Similarly, this study analyzed a corpus of magazine articles to answer 1) what keywords appear in BabyTalk articles referencing infant feeding published 1998-2012, and 2) how do articles’ keywords serve to establish or further infant feeding ideologies?

AntConc 3.4.4 (Anthony, 2014) was used to identify articles’ top 25 keywords, with the Corpus of Contemporary American English's general magazine article sub-type as reference corpus (Davies, 2008). Subsequent qualitative analysis of KWIC lines revealed a large portion of neutral utterances (i.e., practical, judgment-free advice). However, deeper analysis uncovered the presence of clearly (and hidden) evaluative, ideological statements. That is, despite not once denouncing formula feeding as bad or wrong, BabyTalk did construct ideologically charged infant feeding representations. Breastfeeding often appeared as better, healthier, and entirely possible despite challenges, whereas depictions of formula feeding often communicated understandings of formula as deficient, “best in combination,” or an “only when necessary” alternative. Rarely did it appear as optimal, explicitly praised, or as better than breastfeeding. Importantly, ideologies often co-occurred in articles, further necessitating contextual analysis.

Notably, BabyTalk’s inclusion of neutral statements and its reluctance to take an overtly negative stance on formula may be due to magazine publication as a for-profit enterprise and a desire not to offend large portions of the audience by printing pieces that exclude or disagree with them. Finally, the inclusion of ideology may be overt or subtle, intentional or unintentional, allowing the possibility that writers remain unaware of their perpetuating such infant feeding ideologies. Identifying and deciphering ideological constructions requires more than comprehension; readers must themselves analyze texts to understand how language promulgates ideology.

ABSTRACT. The present study aims to investigate the construction of the discourse around Iran’s nuclear deal in selected Iranian, American, and British press in the period leading to and following the agreement between Iran and EU3+3, publicly known as Iran deal, to resolve concerns over Iran’s nuclear plans and lifting the sanctions on Iran. The study, performed in a two-level analysis, designs and applies a theoretical framework joining Corpus linguistics with Critical Discourse Studies (CDS). On the first level, the entire corpus compiled from the newspapers’ political segments in Farsi and English, is analysed with the help of CL tools (Baker et al., 2008) (keywords analysis, collocations, concordances, etc.) to present a picture of the most frequent trends (Baker et al., 2013). Based on this analysis, representative sample of texts of various opinion oriented genres (commentaries, editorials, op-eds) are selected and qualitatively analysed (Wodak 2013). On this second level of analysis, argumentative aspects (e.g. types of arguments and speech act types, argumentative topoi, etc.) of the texts are identified and pragmatic aspects of their use in media discourse are investigated (KhosraviNik 2015). The study is carried out under the general rubrics of critical discourse studies, specifically Discourse-Historical Approach, and draws on textual analytic techniques at the micro-analysis levels and makes an interdisciplinary stretch to political communications, international politics, and middle eastern and journalism studies in the contextualization of its findings. It is revealed that the use of specific arguments and speech act types, topoi, and fallacies in the texts, is not only linked to a broad ideological differentiation between the two negotiation parties, i.e. between “the Western” (the UK and the US in this papers) and “the Iranian”, but also depends on the newspapers’ differing ideological positions within each side of the conflict. The qualitative analysis -conducted on the three levels of content, discursive strategies, and linguistic features (Reisigl 2014, Wodak et al., 2013) highlights that the newspapers draw upon several diverse discourses on the nuclear deal, (i.e. topos of history, security, national identity and international law) and manifest themselves based on their political and ideological orientations.

ABSTRACT. Disasters especially those cause considerable casualties are not only newsworthy events that have a strong tendency to inflame emotions but also symbolic moments that inspire reflection on fundamental societal values. News coverage of disasters generally unfolds along three lines of emotion code, namely sympathy towards victims, hatred towards villains, and pride in heroes. These emotions are fundamental for audience engagement in political and public life especially in late modernity and indispensible for ultimately (re)constructing an affective community by creating solidarity among people. However, that the issues of risk and responsibilities are central to news coverage of disasters opens up a space for flows of feelings to unify as well as to divide. The event of the Bangkok blast is such a case in point where emotions in news fail to eventually unify the society but instead operate to turn the event into a blame game. To probe more fully into the nuanced rhetorical power of journalistic attitudinal positioning in news coverage of this event, this article utilizes the appraisal framework to examine how the Bangkok Post and the New York Times present and represent attitude of different news actors therein. Corpus findings suggest that while public grieving and mourning serve as attempts to unify the society, insufficiently mediated public hatred towards the villains, complete absence of heroes, and heightened judgement of incapacity upon Thai government serve to divide Thailand in the aftermath of the Bangkok Blast. Cultural variability in attitudinal positioning of different news actors has also been registered in the corpus. The findings are explained in relation to divergent social and ideological positioning in news production, as well as the need to attend to diversified readership.

ABSTRACT. While the importance of journalism in memory studies has traditionally been overlooked in academic scholarship, media discourses provide a record of events created around narratives and testimonies which contribute to the construction of memory in current and future generations. For this reason journalism has been called “memory’s precondition” (Zelizer 2014). Applying the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to memory studies, this research explores the relationship between counter-journalism and counter-memories as a response to and rejection of the “echo chamber” (Feitlowitz 2011) of authoritarian discourse which dominated the mainstream media and promoted official memory during Argentina’s last dictatorship. The methodological approach of the study is mixed combining qualitative Synchronic-Diachronic Text Analysis (SDTA) (Pardo 2008, 2010) with corpus tools to trace strategies of counter-discourse in two newspapers which opposed the dictatorship. The motivations of their editor-journalists for challenging official discourse and institutional memory in the climate of state terrorism are framed in the context of Margalit’s (2004) “moral witnessing.”

References: Feitlowitz M (2011) A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Margalit A (2004) The Ethics of Memory, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press

Pardo L (2010) Latin American discourse studies: state of the art and new perspectives. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 5(3), 183-192

Pardo ML (2008) Una metodología para la investigación lingüística del discurso. In: Pardo ML (ed) El discurso de la pobreza en América Latina. Estudio de la Red Latinoamericana de Análisis Crítico del Discurso, Santiago: Frasis, 55-78

Zelizer B (2014) Memory as foreground, journalism as background, In: Zelizer B and Tenenboim-Weinblatt K (eds) Journalism and Memory, London: Palgrave Macmillan

ABSTRACT. Today woman couldn’t have equal opportunity to participate education, policy, working life or organizations as men. In this respect women’s relation with unions which are patriarchal structures has always been limited. Unions are not viewed as organizations that will fight for the demands and interests of working class women, just as much as those of working class men. While the disadvantages that gender inequality creates keep women out of unions, the masculine mentality of unions ignores the problem or denies responsibility and takes up an accusatory approach towards women. But how aware are unionist women of this circumstance? Are they aware of the gender discrimination in unions? What do they think about their own positions at the union? This study aims to reveal the relation the unionist women build with unions, in the context of gender equality awareness. From this point of view, in order to provide data for the research, the semi-structured interview technique was used to interview unionist women face to face and have been surveyed to experience of women’s unionism as a women and articulation style of this experiences. The methodology of this research is discourse analyses. When we discuss how the unionist women carries out a discourse about their presence in the trade unions in terms of gender awareness, it is seen that ideological differences are extremely determinant for them. In this respect for female unionists, whose ideological differences are determinant for them, it is seen that women's relation with the unions and their assessment regarding their own presence are quite different from one another. Women from right-wing unions defined unions as "male unionists' territory" and consider this situation normal and seem to have accepted the idea. These women don’t have any awareness about the gender equality and they defined themselves in terms of sexist judgment. As for women from left-wing unions have awareness about gender inequality. We may say that the women of left-wing unions are fighting against the patriarchal structure of unions. Note: This work was supported by Ahi Evran University Scientific Research Coordination Unit. Project number: FEF.A4.18.001

ABSTRACT. Sport as a traditional male territory continues to be one of the most crucial sites where gender ideologies and power relations are actively constructed and contested (Messner, 2013). This is greatly accentuated by the seemingly objective, yet highly subjective media frames. To date, entrenched gender biases have largely remained in terms of both quantitative and qualitative representations of athletes in mediated sport (Bruce, 2013). Female athletes are almost always rendered invisible and their athleticism is often overshadowed by traditional gender roles with the use of gender-specific descriptors. Such findings have been consistently reported over the last few decades from the plethora of mediasport enquiries, which focus mainly on print and televised media. There is thus a need to connect the dots by attending to the opportunities introduced by the new media, particularly in relation to the perspectives of athletes, audiences and sports institutions (Bruce, 2016; Wenner, 2015).

This study aims to investigate representations of female and male professional tennis players on social media. Voices of three groups of participants are explored: a) tennis associations; b) tennis players; and c) spectators. Data are collected from three social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram during the tennis season in 2018. Posts published by the Women’s Tennis Association, Association of Tennis Professionals, female and male players ranked in the top ten, as well as the corresponding comments below are compiled. The analytical framework of this study draws on Fairclough’s (1995, 2003) sociocultural approach to Critical Discourse Analysis. Dialectical relationships between text, discourse practice and social context are examined. Moreover, several tools of Corpus Linguistics including frequency lists, keywords, concordances and collocations are utilized.

While tennis is considered as a more gender-appropriate sport (Koivula, 2001), earlier findings suggest that gender biases are persistent in online sports news, even on tournament organizers’ websites (Yip, 2016). The current study further explores how hegemonic masculinity is reinforced and contested on social media through triangulating gender representations from multiple perspectives. The complexities in the co-representations of female and male athletes by various agents in view of the changing mediascape are also discussed.

ABSTRACT. There are differences and complexities among diverse cultures, traditions and ethnic groups in Ghana regarding the social practices of traditional family systems, especially, among the two dominant inheritance systems along the female and male lines of the family - matrilineal and patrilineal systems (Nukunya, 2016). Traditionally, the social structure of Ghana is highly gendered, so to speak, because inheritances systems are based on male and female lines. In fact, male and female identities are not just biological or essential social categories, but they are discursively produced in discourses and gendered performances in the context of the traditional social structure of Ghana. The positioning of men and women is embedded in the lineage systems and the family as a model for structuring and directing the actions and practices of men and women for the common good of family members, but it reifies the social practices and performances of men and women themselves (Baxter, 2016; Butler, 1988; McIlvenny, 2002) in traditional social settings. Also, western discourses and governing practices have been introduced into the traditional social structure to direct the conduct of populations – men and women along a governmental rationality – biopolitics (Cisney & Morar, 2016; Foucault, 2002).

This paper aims at investigating how men and women discursively identify and position themselves(Harré, 1991) in the intersecting and contradictory of lineage systems and regulatory power technologies discourses in the context of the Asante matrilineal society of Ghana. The paper is also interested in how men women strategically mobilize and utilize discursive resources in negotiating and contesting gendered identities in the context of the Asante matrilineal society. Theoretically, it combines Foucault’s notion of power with gender discourses from a critical discourse studies perspective focusing on gendered power relations (Lazar, 2005), and embraces a mix of conversation analysis and ethnographic approach for a context-specific analysis (Goffman, 1959; Gumperz, 1982; Moerman, 1988). It makes use of data from multiple ethnographic interviews in the Ejisu district, Ashanti Region-Ghana.

ABSTRACT. Parliamentary questions in Western parliaments have been scrutinised by a number of discourse analysts like Chilton (2004), Pérez de Ayala (2001), Bird (2005), Sivenkova (2008), Ilie (2010,2015) . What these studies have in common is their focus on sessions which are dedicated to asking questions of ministers. The Saudi Shura Council – an appointed body containing 120 men and 30 women – operates under very different norms and procedures and as such there are no dedicated question periods. However, that does not mean that questions are wholly absent. In this talk, I will outline the ways in which questions are used in the five minutes of talk time allocated to members of the Council. While exploring how Saudi females present themselves for the first time on a political platform.

I will show that questions are an important rhetorical device drawn on by Saudi parliamentarians. The questions which are posed within their speeches vary in how prototypical they are. Questions for information may also function as a rebuke to a committee chair in the case that the information sought should already have been brought to the chamber. Rhetorical questions are utilised as a means of underlining an argument. Hypophora – the act of posing and immediately answering a question – may be viewed as a reaction to the lack of dialogicity in the council, a matter which I will explore in more detail in this question. Indirect questioning – the use of forms like I wonder and I would like to know – are also common and I will discuss the relationship of these forms with the gender of the speaker, given what has been said about indirectness and gender in the West “Lakoff (1972) Coats (2013)”.

As well as outlining the (social and political) function of these question types in the Shura Council, I will discuss the methodological difficulties which arise when categorizing these questions because of the lack of response or uptake to them.

ABSTRACT. The austerity discourse is usually analysed as an academic as well as a policy discourse on current European reform processes. This presentation explores how the austerity concept is used by different economic expert discourses to create identity images in the European political economy. Starting from an economic sociology as well as social studies of science perspective, the analysis investigates how three different expert discourses produce certain identity images of the “me” and the “other”. An analysis of identity images is essential to understand how roles for actors in the political economy are constructed. Whereas the “me” image points to the speaker of a certain discourse, the image of the “other” always relates to ways how the speaker interprets and perceives other actors. These images as role models appear in different political, media and economic contexts as means in social struggle over hegemony. Thus, austerity discourses contribute to the cultural and discursive formation of the European political economy. The analysis takes three examples to illustrate the diversity of the current discursive struggles over the present and future form of Europe: ordoliberal “law-and-order” economist’s discourses develop a “resolute” me-perspective, the economic experts from the Keynesian camp constitute the discursive “me” as a “critical” discourse position, and the pragmatists from the ECB take a “moderate” position.

ABSTRACT. Economic imaginaries are constructed discursively in debates that speak to what economic arrangements must, can and should exist (as well as in those silences which convey the impossibility of certain economic alternatives). While hegemonic economic discourses often operate to avert critique and render alternatives illegitimate/invisible, these understandings of economic necessity and possibility are often disrupted by economic crisis.

Economic crisis may motivate questions that produce fissures in justificatory discourses as the frailties and contradictions of hegemonic economic understandings may be exposed. The economic and financial crisis of 2008 provided an opportunity for the consideration of previously marginalized economic alternatives, and it produced a defensive reaction on the part of neoliberal economic theory to consolidate its narrative in order to encourage the rejection of economic alternatives which destabilize the neoliberal economic imaginary.

This article examines several technical economic analyses that rose to immense prominence following 2008. These texts, largely authored or co-authored by the immensely influential Harvard economist Alberto Alesina, were widely cited as governments imposed austerity measures in the early 2010s. The analysis focuses on the depiction of economic dynamics in deterministic terms in these texts, and the ways in which the discursive construction of these texts serves to foreclose critical scrutiny of both the causes of the crisis and the possibility of economic responses that reject central tenants of neoliberal economic theory.

ABSTRACT. The 2007 American subprime crisis soon expanded to the EU, which entered in years of recessions. According to some scholars the origin and propagation of the European sovereign debt crisis can be attributed to the flawed original design of the Euro and its rigid rules (Lane 2012). For others tax and spending cuts were the policies more likely to reduce deficits and debt over GDP ratios. Most proposed solutions were policies of austerity, i.e. reduction in the public spending and increase in Tax revenues. Most CDA approaches to austerity have mainly focused on media reporting of the financial crisis and the resulting austerity measures in Europe (Olson and Nord 2015). Multidisciplinary approaches have shown how “austerity is, crucially, a ‘morality tale’ that exists partially detached from the pure economics” (Kelsey et al 2015: 5). In this paper, we will focus on the official speeches delivered by the President of the European Central Bank, a key actor in EU economic policies. The most relevant speeches, delivered by Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi starting from 2008, were selected from the official website of the European Central Bank. The speeches will be analysed following a Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis perspective. The discursive analysis of the narratives of austerity will be related with the Economic models that the ECB uses to implement its policy, and will be integrated and complemented with the outcomes of Political Economic analysis of the scenarios the speeches draw from. Our multidisciplinary approach will allow us, among other things, to follow the evolution of the European Debt Crisis from the relevant perspective of one of the main European institutions and a leading stakeholder that has influenced economic policies of European institutions and countries alike. References Kelsey D., Mueller F., Whittle, A. and KhosraviNik M. (2015). Financial crisis and austerity: interdisciplinary concerns in critical discourse studies. Critical Discourse Studies, 1-19. Lane, P. R. (2012). The European Sovereign Debt Crisis. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 26 (3), 49-68. Olson, E. K., & Nord, L. W. (2015). Paving the way for crisis exploitation: The role of journalistic styles and standards. Journalism. 16 (3), 341-358.

ABSTRACT. June 2015 saw thousands of UK citizens join ‘anti-austerity’ protests. People in other European countries have also campaigned against the prevailing political ideology that asserts that ‘we’ need to ‘balance the books’. The very existence of a protest movement defining itself by opposition to ‘austerity’ suggests the status of austerity as a socio-political keyword. The socio-political keyword is inspired by Williams (1983 [1976]), who used a list of words to characterise and sometimes challenge the ideology of the post-war years. Significant power can be wielded in political discourse by word-forms, which may connote a whole complex of meaning subtly different from the everyday usage of the same word and work as a kind of shorthand for a whole ideological stance. We will delineate and clarify the meaning of austerity in a socio-political context by reporting on research that analyses the use of austerity in a 2.3 billion word corpus of Hansard reports (1803-2003), using a combination of corpus tools and critical stylistics (Jeffries 2010). Combining critical linguistics with corpus linguistics is becoming established as a way of identifying and analysing ideologically important language patterns in large sets of data. Jeffries and Walker (2012; in press) demonstrate that corpus techniques can facilitate rigorous linguistic research into socio-political keywords, and show that political keywords acquire a specific set of semantic features, while, paradoxically, becoming empty of meaning. One effect of this is that the electorate may be persuaded to accept an ideologically controversial concept as something more benign or naturalised as an absolute good. The paper will outline the methodology for data collection and analysis, report on patterns of usage in the data and draw conclusions about the status of austerity as a socio-political keyword.

References Jeffries, L (2010) Critical Stylistics London: Palgrave Jeffries, L. & Walker, B. (2012) Keywords in the press: A critical corpus-assisted analysis of ideology in the Blair years (1998–2007). English Text Construction 5 (2), 208–229. Jeffries, L. & Walker, B. (in press) Keywords in the press: The New Labour Years (1998–2007). London: Bloomsbury Williams, R. (1983), Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana.

ABSTRACT. The new technologies of the participatory web have been embraced as an empowering tool to increase and facilitate women’s participation in political and institutional processes, allowing them to bypass the much-criticised gendered frames in ‘traditional’ media and to achieve a greater degree of visibility. At the same time, digital media affordances have opened up new channels for the proliferation of misogynous hate (Mantilla 2015; Jane 2017), especially against those women advancing in the public and political spheres and maintaining a strong social media visibility. This paper investigates the main multimodal, discursive and rhetorical strategies of online discourses of misogyny in targeting female public figures on the participatory web or “Social Media Interface” (KhosraviNik 2017:583).

An ever-burgeoning phenomenon, online hate has been approached from a large range of disciplinary perspectives but has only been partially mapped at the interface of content and new media technology. We aim to mark an advance from the state of the art by investigating online misogyny from the point of view of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS), a recent theoretical development combining tenets from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with approaches in media and technology and Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) (KhosraviNik & Zia 2014; Unger, Wodak, and KhosraviNik 2016). Perceiving discourse as social practice, and refusing to treat the ‘online’ and the ‘offline’ as separate and independent realms, our SM-CDS approach steers clear of any trivialization of cyberhate as a ‘recreational’ internet phenomenon. More specifically, we start from the assumption that online forms of misogyny replicate and extend the gender and power relations that pre-exist digital communications technologies.

The current case-study focuses on Youtube as a social media space, exploring instantiations of gender-based hate speech, rape threats and image-based harassment (Powell and Henry 2017) against Laura Boldrini, the current president of the Italian parliament's lower house. By means of a critical, context-dependent discourse analysis of such social media data, our SM-CDS perspective aims at unveiling and problematizing the existing link between the misogynous discursive practices proliferating online and the socio-political context of the offline world and its gendered power relations.

ABSTRACT. In media studies it has been argued that on social media platforms it is affect which is the driver of engagement (Papacharissi, 2015) and that affective alignments appear to even override the task or topic-based nature of a social media community (Bortoluzzi, 2017). In the broader field of discourse studies too it has been argued that since sharing and disagreeing are a central part of social media, evaluation and affect are key to understanding its discourses (Zappavigna, 2017). These observations are of significance for both Journalism Studies and CDA. News has become integrated with social media as regards sourcing and distribution, resulting in the deterioration of the role of the journalist in story framing and verification (Shapiro et al, 2013). For CDA, this also has huge consequences for how we account for the way that ideologies are disseminated from a top down model to one that involves complexities of interconnectivity and user communities (Bouvier, 2017; KhosraviNik, 2017). And it raises the challenge that we understand and theorise the ways that affect and emotion play such important roles in these processes. In this paper I use MCDA (Machin & Mayr, 2012) to analyse the language, use of emoticons and images in one Twitter event, relating to the public and political debate about abortion, which was used as the basis for a story by many international news outlets. The Twitter feed itself, I show, was used in news stories to frame the story and was unverified by the journalists. In fact, the feed comprised only one narrow perspective on the events to which it related. Analysis shows: 1. the coherence in the feed is at the level of evaluation and emotional alignment, rather than in any coherent or shared point of view; 2. it is this affective level that helped it to be taken up by mainstream news outlets uncritically. This links with work in Journalism Studies regarding how news now must align with the personalized culture of social media (Beckett & Deuze, 2016).

ABSTRACT. Few occupations have remained safe from what Boltanksi and Chiapello (2007) call the ‘new spirit’ of capitalism; photography is no exception. As photographic technology has become cheaper and more available, the professional boundaries in this field have eroded, and the rules commissioning and remunerating photographical work have become ambiguous. Spicer and Bohm (2007) highlight the importance of paying attention to new forms of extra workplace resistance, such as the online communities who instruct aspiring photographers to ‘stop working for free’. The rise of social network sites provides spaces which can be used to collectively puzzle the evolving ‘rules of the game’ in charging for work. These sites provide a window into the deliberations of market participants which has been difficult to access (Mautner, 2005) and which allows us to understand and analyse web discourses as ‘socially influential’ forms of social practice which are shaped by and shape the social structures that photographers’ work is embedded in. (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997: 258). This research draws on methods from the discourse historical approach (Reisigl and Wodak 2009) to examine posts about client transactions shared by photographers within a Facebook group. Our corpus is composed of all the threads related to photography posted in September 2017 on a Facebook group dedicated to ‘withdrawing unpaid labour from the creative and media industries’ and consists of 20 threads (19476 words). Through analysis of the threads, we identify the conventions that commenters develop and draw upon in justifying their proposed actions. We analyse how the factors affecting whether the conventions are reinforced, maintained, or disrupted in each case are constructed discursively, including for example the economic status of the client (e.g. profit/non-profit) or the terms of the license under which the creative content was originally produced. We explore how photographers co-construct, reproduce, and contest discourses concerning the value of photographic work, the value of images, and the (commercial) relationships between photographers and their clients. While social movements in this area have seen some attention, the micro-political actions of less co-ordinated groups are another important mechanism for resistance which is less explored (Spicer and Bohm, 2007).

ABSTRACT. The last decades have seen major changes in the culture of higher education, ones characterised by Marginson and Considine (2000) as a shift to a new ‘enterprise’ form of university. A key element of this shift has been a growing level of central administrative control, along with a corresponding loss of authority and esteem among the disciplines. These new organisational configurations have produced (and are also constituted by) new discursive forms, ones that not only describe the condition of the contemporary university, but which are also deployed to get things done in it.

In this paper I wish to consider one term that arguably has become integral to these new university discourses - this is the word ‘strategy’. The paper will consider a number of aspects of the term. I will look at the origins of the term's uses in the academy, and its interdiscursive relations with military, business and sporting discourses. Also considered will be the grammatical and semantic characteristics of the term, including the interesting rhetorical effect of it not having a readily useable ‘verb’ form. The paper will draw on data from a number of universities in Australia, looking at samples of public documents produced during times of structural change. I argue that the use of the term ‘strategy’ and the larger discourses of which it is a part help to reveal the major and quite radical cultural changes underway within universities, ones that, for many, constitute a challenge to key academic values. The paper will draw on some of the methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, but also consider an earlier form of critical language studies found in the writings of Raymond Williams.

ABSTRACT. It is traditionally assumed that legal texts are dominated by the demonstration of factual evidence, formal logical reasoning, and highly structured argumentation according to pre-established rules. This simplistic product-based understanding of legal texts is recently confronted by researches focusing on the process aspects of legal texts, i.e. the production, circulation, and consumption of legal texts in specified situational and cultural contexts. Taking a much broad ethnographic and contextual perspective, these researches (Bhatia 2010; 2012; Candlin 2006; Candlin and Maley 1997; Conley and O’Barr 1990; D’hondt and van der Houwen 2014; Eades 2010; Han 2011a; 2011b; Maryns 2014; Sally 1990) show that legal texts are venues for the operation and mixing of a number of heterogeneous and even contradicting discursive values, i.e. legal, moral, politics, therapeutic, etc..The present study attempts to explore such hybridity and heterogeneity of legal texts in the context of Mainland China. The case genre examined is defense lawyers’ written opinions submitted to Chinese courts, which is one essential litigation document ensuring a fair and justice trial for the defendant. Both textual (lexico-grammatical features, structural patterns, and rhetorical strategies) and contextual (insider interviewing, policy document analysis) investigation are conducted in order to investigate what discursive resources are invoked in Chinese lawyers’ writing of legal opinions, and how these discourses are linguistically constructed for the general purpose of justifying or mitigating the defendant’s accused action.

ABSTRACT. This paper analyses similarities and differences in English and Russian texts about refugees and Internally Displaced Persons. Investigations by Musolff (2012, 2016, 2017), KosraviNick, Krzyzanovsky, and Wodak (2012), Pohl and Wodak (2012) and Van Dijk (2012) provided samples of recurrent presentations of migrants in the European press. They include metaphoric scenarios 'masses of water/catastrophe', and 'parasite/scrounge'. The set of frequent topoi are represented by topoi of 'threat', 'danger', 'burden', and 'figures and numbers'. A 200 000 words corpus of Russophone texts from the mainstream Russian and Ukrainian press and also from online debates between Russians and Ukrainians between April 2014 and April 2016 has been compiled. The comparison of semantic vectors of texts about migrants in English and Russian reveals the following. Russian and Ukrainian official media develop an optimistic metaphor scenario (Musolff 2017) of ‘filling the container with masses of water’. The topoi of 'figures and numbers' do not necessarily trigger a perception of 'danger' or 'threat'. Russo-Ukrainian debates accommodate 'parasite'- and 'scrounge'-terminologies for a specific pragmatic function i.e. to alert the reader to peculiarities of migrant behaviour which can be viewed as modes of sabotage and destabilisation. There are also similarities and differences between portraits of refugees in Russian and English and between the texts about refugees from Russian and Ukrainian media. New dysphemisms have been coined during the conflict and they are being used for representation of ideological opponents. In some instances and predominantly in online debates, Ukrainian migrants were also perceived as enemies and aggressors rather than victims and hostages in the conflict. There are also unique topics in Russo-Ukrainian debates, e.g. 'Good Samaritans'. The paper concludes that there is qualitative difference between the use of some discursive strategies for representation of migrants in the British, and Russian and Ukrainian official media. The main ideology of support to ‘brothers’ from the conflict zone and glorification of the host community which permeates official Russian and Ukrainian publications triggered unexpected renditions of, and inferences to, popular modes of portraying migrants in Europe.

ABSTRACT. Metaphor has been long recognized as a cognitive mechanism, performing a number of rhetorical functions in political discourse. From cognitive perspective, metaphor provides a coherent system of structuring our experience (Lakoff & Johnson 1980/2003, 1999), whereas from rhetorical perspective metaphor is viewed as an argumentative tool aimed at communicating attitudes, arousing emotions and persuading the audience (Chilton 2004; Charteris-Black 2015; Hart 2014; Musolff 2016, etc.). Accordingly, this paper explores how systematic usage of metaphors contribute to performing predicative, i.e. conveying positive and negative attitudes, and empathetic, i.e. triggering emotions, functions while depicting the Ukrainian crisis in Lithuanian media. A corpus of media texts on Ukraine comprising around 50, 000 words was constructed. The choice of texts was limited to opinion articles and commentaries because they present not only factual information but also offer an attitudinal perspective. The study was carried out within the framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) (Charteris-Black, 2004), which suggests a three-step metaphor analysis procedure: first, metaphors were identified by employing an adapted MIPVU (a metaphor identification procedure suggested by Steen et al.(2010)) (a linguistic level); next, metaphors were interpreted by relating them to conceptual metaphors they were motivated by (cognitive level); finally and most importantly, metaphors were analysed from a rhetorical perspective, which means that it was looked into how metaphors communicate attitudes and emotions towards the events happening in Ukraine (a rhetorical level). The findings indicate that the media metaphorically constructs Lithuania and Ukraine as HUMAN BEINGS and emphasizes the scenario of FRIENDSHIP. This scenario contains metaphors ranging from complete support to Ukrainian government and people solving the crisis to some disillusionment because of high level of corruption in the country. Other metaphorical scenarios such as JOURNEY, ILLNESS, FORCE contribute significantly to the development of the FRIENDSHIP scenario. The paper analyses how the mentioned metaphors perform the functions of communicating diverse attitudes and attempting to trigger the reader’s emotions towards the crisis in Ukraine. This study emphasizes the cognitive and rhetorical role of metaphor in political discourse and is expected to contribute to the field of Critical Discourse Analysis as well as Cognitive metaphor studies.

ABSTRACT. This article explores contested discourses on homosexuality and nation in the Ukrainian public sphere in 2013-2015. The article focuses on a corpus of 468 texts taken from the five most popular Ukrainian online media that address inclusion of sexual orientation into Ukrainian anti-discrimination law under requirements of the Visa Liberalization and the Association agreements between Ukraine and the EU. The data is analyzed with the use of discourse-theoretical analysis (Carpentier, 2010) and post-foundational discourse analysis (Cederström & Spicer, 2013; Marttila, 2015). Theoretical model of the study is derived from Laclau’s (1990) concept of ‘myth’ which is applied to contested visions of Ukrainian social space and its relations to Europe. I examine representations of actors, relations among actors, and their arguments to identify discursive coalitions of actors involved in the controversy, key signifiers or nodal points of the controversy, and chains of equivalence and difference between homosexuality and sexual rights and those nodal points which signify social entities and social order (e.g. “state”, “people”, “nation”, “tradition”). I conclude that before Euromaidan three competing myths of the Ukrainian social space circulated in the mainstream Ukrainian media. The myths sponsored by the Ukrainian nationalist and the pro-Russian actors relied on strict heteronormativity and excluded homosexuality as external (Western influence) and internal threat to biological and social reproduction of the nation/people united on the grounds of ethnicity. LGBT-, human rights, and the pro-European civil society organizations promoted a myth of Ukraine as a political community based on citizenship, which embraced homosexuals as well as other minorities. After Euromaidan, a myth of Ukraine as a European political nation in which homosexual minority is granted equal rights became hegemonic in the public sphere. Inclusion of homosexuality into Ukrainian social space served as a mark of Ukraine’s difference from the antagonistic Russian political project. Therefore, Ukrainian opponents of sexual equality developed new nominalisation and argumentation strategies in order to avoid being associated with the Russian influence.

ABSTRACT. Starting from the meta-theoretical foundations of Critical Realism in general and Cultural Political Economy (CPE) in particular, this contribution develops a corpus-assisted multimodal critical realist discourse analysis that will be used to study austerity in the United Kingdom. For this purpose, CPE will be enriched by thoughts about multimodality, subjectivation processes and methodological concerns. In respect to multimodality, CPE is well equipped to study the interdependencies between semiotic systems and material social structures in general but it is usually used to analyze textual material only. This is surprising as the central role of imaginaries already cries for a consideration of images. By transferring the idea of the semiotic triangle to visual materials, this presentation will highlight the role of referents for an explanatory critique of both texts and images that is missing in usual multimodal analyses. In respect to subjectivation processes, CPE is combined with the materialist social psychology of Erich Fromm. From the perspective of CPE, the forces behind discourses are grounded in economic structures. Fromm’s insights about different modes existence advance this relationship as they offer a link between economic structures and discourses by explaining why some discourses provide not only material but also psychological gains and why people, therefore, get attached to certain economic structures. Of central importance here is the difference between the having mode of existence that is based on competition, antagonism as well as fear and the being mode of existence that is based on solidarity and love. The latter mode shall be enhanced by critical social science. In respect to methodological reflections, these theoretical goals will be pursued in conversation with quantitative and qualitative analyses of 287 multimodal articles from the left-leaning Guardian and the right-leaning Daily Telegraph for the time between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2016. Semiotic regularities will be detected with the help of keyword and collocation analyses (for textual material) and with an image type analysis (for visual material). These regularities will then be analyzed qualitatively in order to offer an explanatory critique in the service of human emancipation.

ABSTRACT. The Eurozone crisis brought about a new form of party political opposition in Europe that is deeply critical of the current institutional setting of the EU and the EU’s approach to crisis management while, at the same time, generally supporting the European project. This paper investigates discourse practices employed by such ‘euroalternativist opposition’ (Fitzgibbon 2013), drawing on the example of statements (press releases, speeches and interviews) on EU crisis management addressed to international audiences by SYRIZA between the years 2009-2014. The main purpose is to find out how representatives of SYRIZA construct plausible policy alternatives discursively. To do so, we adopt the assumption developed in Interpretive Policy Analysis that scenarios for political action are mobilized through narration. By enacting a certain sequence and by ascribing causation and responsibility narratives suggest how a problem is to be defined, where to place the burden of adjustment and whom to empower as a fixer (Stone 1989). Moreover, such policy narratives tend to crystallize in dominant and counter narratives in public debate that are relationally constituted (Roe 1992). Following up on earlier work on crisis discourse (Kutter 2013), the paper investigates what type of counter narrative was mobilized by Syriza. Using computer-aided qualitative content analysis, we look into specific elements of crisis narrations, such as the highlighted phenomenon of crisis, the causes identified, the solutions proposed and actors blamed for failure or enthroned as game changers. We show that SYRIZA develops a counter narrative by shifting the emphasis in these elements of crisis narration. Instead of on sovereign debt, excessive government spending and austerity as a solution, the focus of dominant crisis narratives at that time, they focus on epic recession and social decline, identify austerity as a policy failure and cause and cast the vision of a union of solidarity in terms of redistributive justice and democratic renewal.

ABSTRACT. Significant power can be wielded in political discourse by word-forms, which may connote a whole complex of meaning, subtly different from the everyday usage of the same word and work as a kind of shorthand for a whole ideological stance. The word austerity has strong connections with 1940s and 1950s Britain, when the consumption of food and clothing and other goods was regulated and reduced via rationing and controls on pricing. Jeffries and Walker (forthcoming) show that austerity was frequently used in parliamentary discourse in the House of Commons during the 1940s, and then re-emerged as a socio-political keyword during the build-up to the 2009 general election when David Cameron (and George Osborne), perhaps in an attempt to evoke past days of national unity, repeatedly used and reused the word. Cameron’s use of austerity, probably as a vague evocation of 1940s/50s Britain with everyone pulling together, meant that those trying to discredit public spending cuts as a solution to the financial crisis found they had to argue against an essentially unclear idea of what it is that is being discredited (i.e. austerity). This paper presents a critical stylistic analysis of Cameron’s keynote speech at the Conservative Party spring conference, April 26, 2009, which was the first of his speeches to mention austerity. The paper will discuss Cameron’s presentation of the UK economic landscape and his proposal for ‘balancing the books’, which in fact meant the permanent shrinking of public services. The paper will outline the methodology for the systematic analysis of this fairly large text, report on linguistic patterns in the data, and finish by drawing conclusions about the status of austerity as a socio-political keyword.

References Jeffries and Walker (in press) Austerity in the Commons: A corpus critical analysis of austerity and its surrounding grammatical context in Hansard (1803-2015). In K. Power and T. Ali (Eds.) Austerity Discourses: an interdisciplinary critical analysis.

ABSTRACT. While climate change has gradually and crucially become a ‘defining symbol of our collective relationship with the environment’ (Boycoff 2011: 1), an investigation of its role and in complex, multi-causal phenomena of human mobility has emerged as a salient policy-making issue only in the latest years (e.g. Bettini et al. 2016, Bettini 2017, McAdam 2008). According to Nash (2017), the period between the Cancun negotiations of the UNFCCC in 2010 and the 2015 Paris negotiations is seen to represent a crucial moment in policy making as regards the climate change and migration nexus. The purpose of the paper is to explore representations of migration and displacement in the context of anthropogenic climate change in newspaper discourse through a diachronic corpus-assisted discourse analytical perspective (Baker et al. 2008, Partington et al. 2014, Bevitori 2010, 2014). Media, in fact, play a pivotal role in shaping public perception and opinion (Baker et al 2013) and in spite of the increasing role of social media, the role of traditional media is still crucial in shaping public understanding of science, policies and institutional actors. For the purpose of this study, a diachronic, domain specific corpus of newspaper articles from a selection of UK and US broadsheets has been gathered through the Nexis online searchable database. The corpus comprises all the articles containing the search words: ‘climate change’ AND ‘migra*’ (thus including migration or migrants) OR ‘refugee*’ in three distinct ‘critical’ periods: 1) from Cancun to Paris, thus covering a span of time of five years, between November 2010-2015; 2) from Paris to Marrakech – 1 year from November 2015-2016 and, finally, 3) from Marrakech to the present day (again 1 year between 2016-2017). Particular attention will be placed on whether any significant discursive shifts may be identified in newspaper discourse over the periods concerned to coincide with a change in focus from ‘climate refugees’ to migration as adaptation (Bettini et al 2016, Methmann and Oels 2015, Bose 2016) with wider implications for problematic issues concerned with risk (e.g. Rolfe 2017, Johnson 2014).(336 words)

ABSTRACT. The role of the press in perpetuating negative stereotypes of certain groups of migrants is well known. However, this is not a new phenomenon; within Australia, negative framing of non-white migrants began almost contemporaneously with such migration itself. This paper focuses on articles about Chinese migration in three major Australian newspapers between 1855 and 1900, and examines the ways in which the migrants were represented. In particular, it focuses on the use of metaphors, often appearing in clusters within negatively framed articles, as one of the linguistic devices through which difference was depicted. Migrants were metaphorically presented as invaders, barbarians, floods and animals, often simultaneously, drawing on and compounding negative stereotypes of the Chinese as both threatening and inferior. However, such categorizations were not constant; they appeared with greatly increased frequency and intensity at times of immigration restriction legislation. Over the 50-year period covered by the paper, migration restriction emerged as a key factor in the campaign for Federation and the establishment of Australia as an independent nation. This was bound up with the articulation of a specific form of Australian nationalism, manifested in the White Australia policy, one of the foundational actions of the new Australian nation. Using a critical discourse analysis approach, the paper examines the use of metaphor to frame racialized discourses of belonging and exclusion. It shows how such negative categorizations were mobilised for the legitimation of restrictive measures against migrants, and highlights the crucial role this played in the inculcation of a white Australian national identity.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we examine the role of language testing in managing mobility. Language tests have been routinely used as gatekeeping devices to prevent mobility by restricting access to visas for those from outside the EU who wish to live, work or study in the United Kingdom. In parallel to the UK government’s stated goal of reducing net migration, which currently includes non-EU international students, the notion of “security” has emerged as a significant feature in the discourse of politicians, official documentation on UK Home Office websites, and subsequently in the news media. This paper will report on a project which adapts the discourse-historical approach (Reisigl & Wodak 2016) to this particular research context. Documents provided in the 2014 tender round for selecting Secure English Language Tests (acquired through the Freedom of Information Act) were analysed to map salient topics and identify the discursive strategies, in particular nomination and predication strategies used to construct “security. Our findings show that security is a prominent topic in the tender; prospective bidders are required to meet detailed security requirements and to police sub-contractors, and social actors, spaces, objects, policies and procedures are routinely described in securitized terms. We will argue that the proximity of questions of language test security with broader issues of national security in government discourse suggests that “security” is functioning as a topos (i.e. a generalised warrant) to support claims about immigration policy more broadly, and that this implies that we must seek to understand the role of language tests within broader securitization processes. We will also argue for the value of a CDS approach to investigate language assessment policies and practices as well as their ethical dimensions in the context of immigration, social integration and mobility.

Reference: Reisigl, M. and R. Wodak. 2016. ‘The discourse-historical approach (DHA)’ in Wodak, R. and M Meyer (eds.): Methods of Critical Discourse Studies. Sage.

ABSTRACT. In the wide domain of Critical Discourse Analysis, Diatextual Analysis (Mininni, Manuti, 2017) is a psycho-discursive practice that enables to understand the organization of messages in order to convey meanings and values as well as to sway individual attitudes and behaviors through both psycho-semiotic (bottom-up) and stylistic-rhetoric (top-down) pathways. In the current flexible and uncertain oscillation between reality and virtuality, the study of cultural and psychosocial dynamics has to increasingly encompass the processes of meaning and value construction. Social representations offered by media actively contribute to these processes (De Rosa, 2006; Gergen, 2009; Contarello e Mazzara, 2002). In particular, if traditionally social research about media violence has mainly dealt with effects of TV shows on viewers (Bandura, 1971; Gerbner et al., 1986), the analysis of media discourses and rhetoric can be essential to understand these socially relevant matters. As the main focus of Critical Discourse Analysis is “on the role of discourse in the (re)production and challenge of dominance” (Van Dijk, 1993, 249) as well as on the different ‘modes’ of discourse-power relations, this work aims to analyze the particular discursive structures, strategies and properties of the communicative events of the tv shows dealing with crime news and violent events. We propose the study of an Italian case of wicked violence, the homicide of a 20 years old guy acted by a boy gang in the territory of Rome in 2016. In particular, our main objects are: 1) to examine how different social epistemic rhetoric (Berlin, 1993) are discursively constructed and conveyed across several positioning; 2) to investigate how these rhetoric can support dominant and shared models about the origin of violence, its effects and possible solutions. In order to understand the several narratives and texts that both cultivate meanings and propose defined ways of comprehension of social reality, several TV shows dealing with the presented homicide were analyzed through psycho-semiotic and psycho-stylistic markers (Caffi, 2009). Ranging from psycho-sociological matters and political-judicial domains, the different professional and public positioning are mainly organized around the emotionally charged (certain) rhetoric of the “bunch” and the (uncertain) rhetoric of the “transparency of sentences”.

ABSTRACT. Reportage on the EU Referendum dominated UK media in the summer of 2016. While previous work has focussed on the leave-leaning press focus and representations of politicians within the debate (see Levy et al, 2016), little attention has thus far been paid to social actor representation. While geography, education, and gender impact voting behaviour, in this paper, we explore representations of a demographic identity publically scrutinised in the weeks following the Brexit result: voter age.

For this work, we collected a specialised corpus of texts from UK National Newspapers in the two weeks following the EU referendum. Topicality of articles was determined through the headlines, which must contain “(brexit OR referendum OR leave OR remain) AND (vote* OR voting)”; salience was strengthened by indicating that articles themselves must also contain “age* OR young* OR old* OR ageing OR youth*”. This resulted in a corpus of 436 articles from UK National Newspapers, comprised of 503,670 words.

Our analysis is based on collocation of lexis indicating both older and younger voters. Both sets of voters appear with similar frequency, though constructions are in sharp contrast. Collocates of older voters have a semantic preference for betrayal/blame, ill health, prejudice, and lack of education. Collocates of younger voters were marginally more positive, with semantic preference for education and political engagement. Both younger and older groups are homogenised, stereotyped, and contrasted: intergenerational conflict and division between age groups is a common theme in concordance analysis. Unlike previous research (Mautner, 2007), the younger group is depicted as vulnerable and victimised, with their futures ‘compromised’ by ‘the elderly and less educated’.

This indicates a return to ageist scapegoating identified in the 1990s (Binstock, 2005), where US media outlets portrayed older people as selfish and politically powerful. While the senior-power model persists in the media, this does not neatly align with actual voting behaviour. Journalistic representations are overly simplified and stereotyping, which risks alienation of older voters and disengagement of younger voters (Dermody, Hanmer-Lloyd & Scullion, 2010), while obscuring nuances of ideological affiliation and characterising a lack of care in exploring political platforms.

ABSTRACT. The way news texts are structured schematically and thematically has been a central topic in the critical discourse studies of journalistic texts. Not only does textual structure of media texts represent the cognitive structure of the producers’ mind and provides us with insights about cognitive processing of news texts by news consumers, but also it has social implications. Studies of news texts’ schematic structure has shown that journalists (including editors) structure news events following an inverted-pyramid structure and that the inverted-pyramid style is the dominant structure in western journalistic texts even though other styles have (re)entered news writing. Such studies consider two different criteria for recognizing the discourse structure of news texts: temporal and relevance. The former regards the ordering of events based on when they occurred in the real world and the latter based on their newsworthiness. Studies in the area of contrastive rhetoric have shown how texts produced by native speakers from different cultures differ in their style and use of language. Following from this, it is reasonable to expect that texts produced and consumed in two societies with different socio-cultural as well as socio-political norms vary significantly. The cross-cultural dominance of inverted pyramid in present-day news texts has remained a question. Critical discourse analysis provides invaluable insights into the analysis of this issue for the equal attention it pay to both text and its relevant context. In this research, we will present the results of a comparative study of Iranian and Dutch culture to answer two questions: first, to what extent do textual structures produced in two different contexts differ and how does this relate to the relevant contextual factors? Interestingly, we show that the discourse structure vary across cultures regarding temporal criteria. Moreover, applying a reliable and appropriate methodology, we found a news structure which is new to western eyes. These differences, we argue, relate to contextual differences between the two cultures. Second, do the textual structures vary regarding relevance criteria as well?

ABSTRACT. The act of blaming a political actor has been defined in ethical and epideictic terms, as a moral judgment, both cognitive and social, which regulates social behavior (Malle et. al, 2014). However, little research has been conducted regarding the ethical framework upon which moral blame scripts rest. Furthermore, as media framing examines the promotion of “a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or treatment recommendation” (Entman, 1993: 52) – we propose that framing is an apt approach for understanding the media representation of moral blame scripts. This study examines the ethical basis of blame and its media and discursive framing within the context of failed negotiations in protracted conflict. Through two Middle East based case studies, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Syrian Civil War, this study contributes to generic news frames literature by providing an analysis of strategic news that focuses on the language of war, games and competition following negotiations failure. Our study reveals three ethical approaches upon which blame is based: action-based blame, which explicitly casts blame upon acts that an actor has committed; virtue-based blame, which casts blame on the personality traits of the actor; and conflict-essence based blame, a meta-discourse critical of the assumption that rational, right action or virtue based on a universal “good” have the potential to solve an intrinsically intractable conflict. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, our study found that episodic framing is exclusively utilized when presenting action-based blame, while thematic framing can be utilized to present action-based blame, virtue-based blame, and conflict-essence-based blame. This finding challenges the dichotomy of episodic framing/conflict escalation coverage versus thematic framing/conflict de-escalation in the case of blame, as the thematically-presented ethical categories are found to be more destructive for future relations between the actors.

References

Entman R.M. (1993) Framing: Towards Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm. Journal of Communication. 43(4): 51-58. Malle, B.F., Guglielmo S., Monroe A.E. (2014). A Theory of Blame. Psychological Inquiry. 25: 147-186.

ABSTRACT. The present paper looks at the language employed by American newspapers to reflect upon the US-Russia tensions of the Cold War and the imminent threat of an all-out nuclear war. Theoretically grounded in the most recent proposals in cognitive linguistic CDS, and based upon the premise that media discourse exerts a powerful influence on the way events are processed by the audience, this paper aims to analyze news media discourse to understand the role it may have played in the framing of nuclear affairs. This paper employs a corpus composed of 250 articles covering a period that goes from 1945 until 1991, divided into five main periods. These articles were extracted from five top American newspapers: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. At the core of the analysis we place the study of those metaphors employed by journalists to describe nuclear affairs. This work focuses on the analysis of movement metaphors. More specifically, we study JOURNEY, PATH and RACE metaphors. Based on the assumption that these metaphors were employed in service to ideological manipulation, our purpose is to see how linguistic decisions may have triggered a particular interpretation of the events. In order to examine this interpretative stage, this paper goes beyond the analysis of discourse at the level of production and ideological organization to study how the public received and interpreted nuclear discourse. To understand receivers’ position in the matter, and after an exhaustive research of public polls regarding nuclear affairs, we look at the most recent theories of Evolutionary Psychology to understand the reception of these texts.

ABSTRACT. Protest placards are complex multimodal objects composed of text and of visual elements such as symbols or drawings. As a genre, the discourse of protests uses persuasive devices such as direct addresses, emphasis or emotional elicitation, which entail functional slots for the protesters and their audience. I rely on cognitive and discursive approaches to intersubjectivity and on the growing field of multimodality, including Mediated Discourse Analysis to show how the visual aspects of placards fully contribute to this intersubjective dynamics, thus building up the protesters’ collective stance. I gathered an audio-visual corpus composed of 130 screenshots and five video extracts from recordings of post-Brexit protests organized by pro-European citizens in the summer of 2016 in London. Thanks to a bottom-up approach, I carried out a broad inventory of placards so as to identify recurring functions for the multimodal combinations under study. The three main functions identified were complementarity, repetition and multi-layering; they were then refined through detailed qualitative analyses. The initial hypothesis was that visual elements were used to complement the fragmented syntax due to the boundedness of the placard, and to provide clues for referent-tracking. However, the analyses revealed much more complex interactions between the modes. Indeed, even when used as complements to a text, visual designs can express empathy, antipathy or subversion in their own way. Moreover, many visual forms have discursive functions such as emphasis or cohesion which are usually studied through verbal markers and seen as essential to the analysis of a text. Finally, in specific conditions the visual and verbal syntaxes cross-fertilize each other, creating multiple layers of meaning. These elements indicate that the visual mode is not subordinated to the textual mode: both equally participate in the complex construction of meaning. Protesters can explore and make the best use of the specificities of each mode to actively construct a collective stance.

ABSTRACT. This paper challenges deeply rooted stereotypes and misconceptions related to power distribution and execution within the realm of institutional discourse practices in the Arabian Gulf. Due to the lack of differentiation between social and institutional settings hosting conversational interactions as well as the impact of essentialist approaches on communication studies, such social categories as gender, status and identity are heavily loaded with wrong assumptions and dangerously misinterpreted by the communities residing outside the Middle East. They are perceived as fixed and culture-biased categories. By applying the tenets of social constructionist approach to a meeting held in a professional context in an educational institution in Oman, the paper strives to demonstrate that culturally assigned to gender, social status and identity meanings and expectations do not always hold true, but are constructed according to the goals and aims of the participants in the conversation.

ABSTRACT. Despite formal equality in Western societies, gender remains one of the main forces in shaping the ways people live. While in most areas of society women and girls as a group relative to men and boys are seen as disadvantaged, in education it seems to be the opposite case. Statistics and empirical studies show that boys are falling behind girls on many important indicators of school success (Clark et al. 2008; Lingard et al. 2002; Frank et al. 2003).

Due to that, research in Germany, like in many other industrial countries, has come to focus on the state of male students in education (Stamm 2008; Latsch & Hannover 2014). Though looking at the same data or issue in the first place, perspectives on relevance or underlying causes vary decisively (Weaver-Hightower 2003; Foster et al 2001). The research field on gender and education over the past few years has evolved into a discursive arena staging argumentative battles. This may be the reason why research has not come any closer in reasoning and solving boys’ school problems so far. On the contrary, it seems as if solving the actual problem has become a side issue. Instead, much effort is spent on forcing through a specific knowledge to exclude actors with varying positions.

By using the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) as research program (Keller 2012; Keller 2011), a critical perspective on knowledge making processes in academic discourse(s) on gender and education is applied. At this, discourses are understood as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault 2002, 54). Some analytical strategies like coding as proposed by Grounded Theory (Strauss 1987) have been adjusted to SKAD, allowing for a structured analysis of interpretative patterns and discursive formations.

The specific approach makes it possible to identify and compare the different positions existing. By exposing strategies and power networks, it also sensitises for the “Truth Games” (Foucault 1972, 34-78) shaping and directing the ongoing discussion. This may create a chance for other researchers to avoid the discursive battlefield and to refocus on boys’ underachievement at school.

ABSTRACT. In everyday life it is now common to find our actions linked to sound, especially using technology, such as when we use mobile devices, or operate more recently manufactured cars, technology in the workplace or simply in an elevator. While we may attend little to these noises, like any semiotic resource, they can communicate very specific meanings and carry ideologies. In this talk, using multimodal critical discourse analysis, drawing on the principles of MCDA (Machin and Mayr, 2012) and sound semiotics of Van Leeuwen (1999) and Machin (2013), I analyse the sounds and music in two proto-games that are played on mobile devices: Genie Palace Divine and Dragon Island Race. The analysis looks at what kinds of actions in the games produce sounds and which do not. It analyses what kinds of sounds these are, whether they are naturalistic or not; what kinds of qualities of actions become foregrounded and backgrounded. While visually the two games are highly gendered, an investigation of the sounds players can make during gameplay reveals very specific insights into the ways that sound positions players in the world. The analysis shows that sound can be used to signal the personal and impersonal and specific kinds of social relations which is highly gendered. It can also signal priorities, ideas and values, which in both cases, relate to a world where there is simply no time to stop and think.

ABSTRACT. Performing music is an integral part of promoting the sales of popular music CDs, downloads and other consumables. It is also spectacle and entertainment, a time when fans can experience a sense of community based around common interests, beliefs and even politics (Auslander 2015). Though there is long history of research which examines relations between popular music and politics, this is an under-examined area in critical discourse analysis (with notable exceptions, see van Leeuwen 1999; Machin 2010; Way and McKerrell 2017). This lack of research is even more pronounced in examining political discourses and live musical performance. In this presentation, I consider the limits and potential of musical performance in articulating political discourses, leaning on Multimodal Discourse Studies and Musicology. I examine lyrics, visuals and musical sounds, modes used in the analysis of discourses in music (Machin 2010; Way 2017). I also analyse modes unique to live performance such as spoken word, body movement, performance space and dance in determining ‘how’ live performances articulate politics. There have been a string of recent political events in Turkey, including an attempted coup, governance through presidential decrees and a state of emergency, growing authoritarianism and a number of terrorist attacks. Issues around these politics are represented multimodally in a number of performances by Turkish music groups who are known as ‘political’. These make up my sample. The bands and performances chosen express a variety of views on the tumultuous politics Turkey has experienced and span a number of musical genres, such as hardcore punk, folk and protest music. This variety of politics and music genres aid in determining common strategies used in performance to articulate politics. My analysis also uncovers how discourses which help shift units are articulated, such as authenticating musicians and creating a ‘community of resistance’. It is in this detailed multimodal analysis that I unearth both the political potential of politically engaged performance, but also the limits of an event designed to entertain and promote sales.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, a comparative analysis of alternative and mainstream European mass media on the phenomenon of populism is conducted. The present study explores differences between both types of media from a CDA perspective through an investigation of texts referred to populist parties. In addition, a cognitive linguistics analysis is also adopted to determine the textual occurrence of metaphor or metonymy. I mainly concentrate on salient wording and expressions chosen by the media, whether literal (purely descriptive expressions) or figurative (metaphor or metonymy) to refer to various political parties. Therefore, the main aim is to examine how European alternative and mainstream media actually deal with the phenomenon of populism by having created a specific discourse in terms of wording, lexical choice, syntactic arrangement, implicit concepts and metaphor use. Special interest is placed on lexicon use as a reflection of the media that chooses to highlight certain linguistic elements. The analysis is focused on four political parties that play a relevant role in their respective countries, including Syriza in Greece and three others: Front National in France, PVV in the Netherlands and Podemos (‘we can’) in Spain. The method involved compiling two parallel corpora taken from mainstream and alternative digital media: (i) a 52,000 word corpus from on-line mainstream press (e.g. The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, El País, Reuters and Efe news agencies) and (ii) a 48,000 word corpus from alternative media (e.g. Libertad Digital, El Confidencial, Eldiario.es, EurActiv, RT).The study covers news headlines and lead paragraphs, both of them are usually inserted after the headlines in block letters, since these sections subsume the main information of the article news (van Dijk 1988a). As an initial hypothesis, I assumed that the media would adapt their wording according to their editorial line and political preference related to these parties. Results show, nonetheless, that there are significant variations motivated by characteristic stylistic features pertaining to media typology (alternative or mainstream).

ABSTRACT. In this chapter I propose to explore the discourse representation of the main actors in the Spanish eviction crisis in the newsbites published in El País, one of the most prestigious and influential broadsheets in the country, during the years of the economic crisis (2008-2014). In this critical period, soaring unemployment and the housing bubble burst caused a surge in evictions as many borrowers were unable to pay their mortages. In 2014, 38.961 families from different backgrounds were reportedly evicted, according to the Back of Spain Statistical Bulletin Report. Drawing on Appraisal Theory (Martin 2000; Martin and White 2005) and the transitivity distinctions made in Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday and Matthiesen 2014), 139 newsbites tagged with “desahucios” (“forced evictions”) and published in the online version of El País during the years of economic crisis were analysed (http://elpais.com/tag/desahucios/a/). First identified and studied by Knox (2007), newsbites are a specific kind of news stories that can be found mainly on online newspapers homepages but also in other kinds of webpages. As for the results, data show that newspapers trigger emotional responses from their audience by representing social actors in the eviction crisis either as very emotional suffering victims, as anonymous heroes or as very wicked financial and political villains. I believe these results of this study can be of interest to discourse analysts and media researchers.

ABSTRACT. Since the outbreak of the civil war in Syria in 2011, millions of people have fled from their country in search of asylum. However, it was in 2015 and 2016 when the number of Syrian refugees increased dramatically and large groups of displaced people reached Europe and applied for asylum. European countries apparently sympathized with refugees, but they put limits to their settlement and reinforced their borders. Media coverage reflected this contradiction, as they brought attention to their drama and the need to assist and host refugees, and at the same time presented them as a threat for European economies and welfare. Within this socio-historical context, this paper analyses the emergent metaphors and image schemas that conceptualize the displacement of refugees as WATER IN MOTION in Spanish mainstream newspapers. Based on Socio-Cognitive Linguistics previous work on metaphor in real discourse (Cameron et al. 2009; Kövecses 2005, 2015; Semino 2008; Steen 2011), as well as Critical Discourse Analysis approaches to metaphor in politics and media (Charteris-Black 2011, 2014; Hart 2008, 2010; Musolff 2012, Porto & Romano 2013, Soares et al. 2017), a corpus of over 1,400 samples of WATER IN MOTION metaphors was collected (flow, wave, tide, flood, trickle… of migrants), and studied quantitatively. Also, over 300 hundred samples of the MIGRANTS ARE A FLOW metaphor were further analysed qualitatively in order to identify the underlying image schemas. The results show that the image schemas of FORCE, PATH, CONTAINER and QUANTITY (UP/DOWN) are highly pervasive, a fact which reveals the conceptualization of the refugees as a threatening mass of water that must be controlled or contained, rather than a real humanitarian emergency or people in need as overtly stated in the media discourse.

ABSTRACT. With the threat of personal and organizational details being compromised through e.g. hacking, IT security is fast becoming a major concern in many organizations. In the presentation, the authors explore the potential of applying a discourse based methodological approach to the study and change of IT-security practices in Danish public organizations. The approach contributes to the field of Organizational Discourse Studies (ODS), in which discourse scholars are actively involved in dealing with local organizational challenges and fostering organizational change (cf. Grant & Iedema, 2005; Alvesson & Kärreman, 2011; Iedema, 2011). IT-security is traditionally studied in a technological context (Soomro et al., 2015) and from normative, linear, top-down oriented and rationalistic models and approaches (Allen, 2005; Hedstrøm et. al., 2011; Somroo et al., 2015) which, for instance, insist that rational employees should be regulated through bureaucracy and control (Hedstrøm et. al., 2011). Such studies tend to overlook tensions between organizational and political circumstances, on the one hand, and employees’ actual management of data in their everyday work lives, i.e. user behavior, on the other (Hedstrøm et. al., 2011; Kayworth & Witten, 2010). Through the adoption of a discourse activist approach, we aspire to re-situate local practices and user behavior in the conceptualization and theorizing on IT-security though bottom up and inductively oriented participatory research processes (Bager, 2015; Iedema, 2003; Nicolini, 2009, 2016). Furthermore, a discourse activist approach embraces organizational conflict, ambiguity and dissent and acknowledges employees as irrational subjects who do not always follow orders within bureaucratic control systems (Holmgreen, forthcoming). The methodology draws on aspects from diverse discourse approaches such as Nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2005; Nicolini, 2016) and ODS. We frame discourse as action encompassing material and multimodal aspects together with diverse ‘levels’ of (organizational) meaning making - discourse co-emerges with materiality and manifests a certain situated type of organizational life (Bager, 2015; Iedema, 2007). The presentation does not display empirical data and concrete analysis but invites discussion on the theoretical, philosophical and practical implications that the discourse methodology brings about.

ABSTRACT. Despite the growing percentage of women involved in the business sector (United States Department of Labor, 2016), women remain underrepresented in business media coverage, with negative consequences for their entrepreneurial aspirations (Eikhof, Summers, & Carter, 2013). Discourse studies scholars have evaluated how often women are featured in business media (Greenwald, 1990), how frequently they are cited (McShane, 1995), and the dominant discourses in terms of which they are represented (Lamsa & Tiensuu, 2002). Research has also explored depictions of female entrepreneurs in mainstream newspapers (Lang & Rybnikova, 2016), the use of “double-voiced discourse” by female executives (Baxter, 2011), self-representations by business women (Wagner & Wodak, 2006), and narrative identity constructions by female entrepreneurs (García & Welter, 2011). However, the discursive positioning of women in modern business media has yet to be examined using fine-grained linguistic analysis.

In this paper, therefore, we use van Leeuwen’s (1999) “social actor” analysis and Hallidayan (1994) transitivity analysis to document how three top-selling American business magazines (Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg Businessweek) represent women. First, the frequency with which men and women are mentioned will be compared across all articles published in these magazines between 2015 and 2017, with a view to determining any statistically significant variation. Second, the number of mentions of women per article will be identified in a representative sample of articles, in order to gauge the level of prominence assigned to women. This same sample will also be analyzed qualitatively, focusing on whether and how women are activated and/or passivated, and the process types in relation to which they are depicted. Drawing on current business studies scholarship (e.g., Poggesi, Mari, & De Vita, 2016), this paper will also critically evaluate and situate media depictions of women within 21st century Western business culture, bringing an interdisciplinary approach to questions of gender equality in business. In doing so, this paper will contribute to a growing literature on media representations of powerful women (e.g., Power, 2017); it will also provide gender equality advocates with valuable information concerning the extent to which business media representations of women accurately reflect women’s contemporary position within the Western business world.

ABSTRACT. This research takes a multimodal discourse analysis approach to compare medieval manuscripts and modern-day digital texts to consider the complex connection between the aesthetic and the functional to do semiotic work. Assuming the communicative modes of language, medium, typography, and images within digital and print texts to be inherently multimodal (Norris, 2004), we look to gain insight about production and consumption practices across time, exploring how audiences interact with their texts and analyzing how these texts are consumed and received by their respective readers. Initial research suggests that multimodality recovers the qualities of medieval texts, creating fluid, contingent and participatory spaces for writers and audiences. With a focus on orthographic and typographic elements (font, colour, rubrication) and orientating features (marginalia, links, page structure), this paper identifies parallels existing between scribe and digital editor, and argues that visual rhetoric is the defining feature of both medieval and digital texts with linguistic and non-linguistic features serving as speech-acts that communicate meaning potential (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996; Machin, 2007). We demonstrate how affordances of digital media supplant many of the syntax norms that mark the print age, in ways reminiscent of medieval textual practice. By applying multimodal discourse analysis to compare medieval print-based and contemporary digitally-mediated writing practices, with attention to the mode and medium (LeVine & Scollon, 2004), we look to show that practices, rather than being innovations of the digital age, signal a return to the textual practices of the past, specifically manuscript culture.

References: Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading images: the grammar of visual design (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. LeVine, P., & Scollon, R. (Eds.). (2004). Discourse and Technology: Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Washington, D.C: Georgetown University Press. Machin, D. (2007). Introduction to multimodal analysis. New York: Oxford University Press. Norris, S. (2004). Analyzing Multimodal Interaction: A Methodological Framework. London ; New York: Routledge. Retrieved from https://www.routledge.com/Analyzing-Multimodal-Interaction-A-Methodological-Framework/Norris/p/book/9780203379493

ABSTRACT. The Hill District is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s oldest Black neighbourhood, best known for its past cultural vibrancy in African-American lives. As Pittsburgh’s steel industry soared the first phase of gentrification came with the building of the Pittsburgh Penguin’s hockey arena (The Civic Arena), which displaced over 8,000 people and 400 businesses from the Hill District area leaving the remaining residents cut off from many basic amenities. However, more recently investors like Pittsburgh City Council and the Pittsburgh Penguins team have announced transformational plans to redevelop the former Civic Arena site in an attempt to revitalise the community and its economy. With both commercial and residential change happening in this area, Hill District residents are concerned about gentrification.

Just as news media can mould the way the public is subjected to information, the author of the news can influence what people think about events in their communities. This project draws upon the Hill District ‘transformation’ in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and analyses news articles using Martin and White’s Appraisal Theory and intertextuality. Appraisal Theory is used to analyse how the writer’s values the entities (people and things) within the text that they produce (Martin 2005; 92), while intertexuality involves taking some part or aspect from a text and placing it within another, changing context and in some cases the meaning of the utterance.

This analysis exposes that the authors’ intertextual recontextualizations tend to give great prominence to ‘official voices’ ‘that help to frame the ‘transformation’ attitudinally positive, while there is a relative dearth of ‘community voices’ found in the articles. This way of speaking appears to be a way of speaking about the Hill District transformation to legitimise gentrification. Additionally, it shows that the authors’ values carry an unequal weight of the positive and negatives of the ‘transformation’, and in most cases, the authors share the values with those in power over lower income/less powerful individuals.

References: Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. (2005). The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

ABSTRACT. On 24 March 2016, Israeli soldier Elor Azaria shot and killed a Palestinian assailant who had attacked another Israeli soldier and was lying incapacitated after already having been shot. The killing was captured on video and sparked controversy in Israel, where it became one of the most covered news stories of the year. Azaria was eventually convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment. In this paper I examine media discourses concerning the Azaria affair, focusing on the complex interactions between verbal and visual coverage patterns. Employing multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996; Machin & Mayr, 2012), I demonstrate how media texts dialectically constructed Azaria as simultaneously villain and hero, perpetrator and victim, unique celebrity and ordinary person, thus feeding upon discourses of the "scandalous celebrity" (Simkin, 2014) in ways that strategically constituted the case as an ideological fault line representative of the polarization of Israeli society. At the same time, visual means emphasized Azaria's heroic, victimized, and authentic qualities, interpellating audiences to identify with him and view him as emblematic of Israel's eternally threatened, victimized condition. Thus, Azaria was commonly shown from a frontal angle staring at viewers, creating a "demand" image requiring viewers' involvement and presenting him as being of their world (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996). In addition, many images strategically deployed potent cultural symbols associated with masculinity, military, and family to construct Azaria's status as hero and facilitate audience identification. The findings expand theoretical knowledge on the ways in which texts and images combine in news discourse dealing with "difficult topics" (Wagner-Pacifici & Schwartz, 1991) While much research has examined how verbal and visual modes anchor, complement, expand, or sometimes contradict one another (e.g., Liu & O'Halloran, 2009), the ways in which potential tensions between words and images are strategically employed by journalists to convey controversial ideological meanings has remained relatively underexplored. I consider the implications of this use as reflecting news journalists' need to simultaneously attend to different cultural norms regarding their profession, including the occupational expectation that they be critical and the economically-motivated expectation that they be perceived as patriotic.

ABSTRACT. So far, the existence of a gap separating the religious rhetoric of the American Republican Party from that produced by the Democratic Party has largely been taken as an article of faith derived from the broader God gap theory which posits that a higher degree of religiosity correlates with a higher voting preference for the GOP. My research seeks to evaluate how much of a gap there actually is in campaign rhetoric. By means of corpus linguistics techniques enabling in-depth explorations of a large corpus of presidential campaign speeches (1952-2008), I track down actual traces of this “rhetorical God gap”. All in all, this research demonstrates that – instead of being a clearly defined polarity between an all religious GOP and a religiously voiceless Democratic Party – the rhetorical God gap is a complex patchwork of party-, time- and candidate-specific rhetorical features. Likewise, my research provides evidence against some all-the-rage theories presenting today’s rhetorical usages of religion in American politics as unprecedented. Not only does this corpus linguistics approach help get a fairer understanding of the religious rhetoric employed by U.S. presidential candidates, but it also returns some highly counterintuitive findings that – to my knowledge – have never been spotted out before. Among these, several specific traces of biblical language almost exclusively in the Democratic Party camp is a case in point. Ultimately, the aim of this paper is threefold. Quite obviously, it aims to present important findings regarding the entanglement of religion and politics in America. Another important goal is to demonstrate how the methods employed can set the course into uncharted waters, initiate quantitative and qualitative investigations into corpus data and ultimately help confirm, question, redefine or else refute some tenets of this widespread belief in a rhetorical God gap. Last but certainly not least, this paper aims to communicate about an effective and transferable methodology – i.e. corpus linguistics – and what it can bring to other branches – notably those within the American studies tradition – having an interest in political discourse.

ABSTRACT. This lecture discusses the rhetorical strategies of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) and the politician and Israeli parliament member, Ahmed Tibi, with regard to Holocaust remembrance. The lecture compares the rhetorical strategies which these writers use to express a message linked to the Holocaust. The main question examined in the article is: How may we characterize the construction of the ethos and different types of topos in their rhetoric and is there a difference between their rhetorical strategies in the context of Holocaust remembrance, bearing in mind that both are considered anti-Zionists? The lecture presents a rhetorical and linguistic analysis of the speech by the politician and Israeli Palestinian member of parliament, Ahmed Tibi, and the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, when referring to the Holocaust. We believe that the anti-Zionist positions of Tibi and Darwish justifies special attention to the rhetoric of their utterances regarding the Holocaust. One would expect to see a rhetorical conflict or persuasive challenge of some kind. One would especially expect this in the rhetoric of Darwish who has harsh criticism for those Arabs and Palestinians who accept the Holocaust as an criterion for many of their political, cultural, and artistic decisions and repeat "Zionist lies in order to win world sympathy" by describing the suffering of the Palestinian people in the terms invented by the Jews, such as "Holocaust", "slaughter", "victims", "Diaspora", and "memory". Darwish believes that the adoption of these metaphoric images is a reflection of Israeli’s success in controlling the Palestinian identity.

ABSTRACT. Throughout the years street art has evolved from graffiti into an artistic movement conveying social and political messages accessible to all. It has been frequently used in recent protest movements such as in the 2008 riots in Athens and the 2011-2013 Egyptian uprising transforming the cities in open air platforms for dialogue and negotiation. At the same time, nowadays street art cannot be considered only as an instrument of protest for the oppressed, but it is more and more being used by institutional forces such as governments and companies as a means of propaganda or advertising. Using a multimodal critical discourse analysis approach (Machin 2013; van Leeuwen 2013), this study will investigate a sample of street artists’ works located in different cities/towns, places in which street art has been deliberately deployed as a vehicle of political dissent, for example in Athens, or as a means to develop tourism in politically unstable countries such as Banky’s works in the Palestinian territories or in gentrified areas (Shoreditch in East London) becoming for increasing tourist groups “an object of their travelling gaze” (Pennycook 2010: 137). The analysis will look at verbal and visual metaphoric language and how notions of place, performance, dialogue and subjects are (re)negotiated in order to verify to what extent “as an illicit practice [street art] is losing its ideological primacy, giving way to perspectives that encourage a coexistence with institutional forces such as government and the market” (Borghini et al 2010). In addition, the study will try to demonstrate whether a multimodal critical framework can help have a new insight in street art and verify whether the presence of intertextual elements are crucial in transforming public space as a place of meaning making, becoming instruments of political commitment or institutional promotion. Due to the birth of a street art marketplace and the commodification and mediatisation of many street artists, the paper will point out this shift of street art’s social implications, from its well-known purpose to challenge political and cultural hegemony to a co-opted and thus depoliticized practice by powerful actors in order to promote and reinforce their ideologies.

ABSTRACT. Iraq has gone through different wars and conflicts in the past few decades and the stance of the US and the degree of its involvement in these wars varied from one war to another. Such changes of US policies have also influenced the US press stance toward Iraq through defining and redefining the courses of events keeping the preferred interpretation or through citing those who are in power due to the presumption that they have an access to accurate information than anyone else.

Therefore, the aim of this study is to examine the discourses of major American newspapers in the Iraq- Iran war and the 2003 US-led invasion on Iraq to see how the themes: Saddam, Iraqi people, Shiites, Halabja and the use of chemical weapons are constructed in these two wars and also whether there is a shift in the US press stance in reporting these wars through tracing the historical in the coverage these wars. The methodology used to achieve this aim is corpus linguistics in combination with critical discourse analysis represented by Discourse Historical Approach (DHA).

The results showed that there is a shift in reporting these themes. While Saddam was given a voice in the Iraq- Iran war, he was muted and demonized/ Hitlerized and Stalinized in the US press in the US-led invasion. In Iraq- Iran war, the historical and religious enmity between the two countries were used by Iraq to urge Iraqi people to continue the fight. Whereas, Iran used the religious theme (Shi'ism) exclusively to urge the Iraqi people to revolt and overthrow Saddam. On the hand, in the US-led invasion, Iraqi people were constructed differently as being victimized by Saddam to justify the US intervention and as liberated, benefited and empowered by/ from the invasion

The data also revealed some differences in reporting Halabja. One is that while there were references made during Iraq- Iran that the chemical weapon is used in a defensive manner against Iran, this incident was capitalized to show the criminal records of Saddam and use it to legitimize the war.

ABSTRACT. After the coup d’état, the Thai military government under the leadership of General Prayuth Chan-ocha has attempted to heal political division between the yellow-shirt and red-shirt movement which had fought against each other for more than a decade on the grounds of economic and social inequality. To achieve a peaceful and unified society, the reconciliation social contract was approved by the supreme committee on reform, reconciliation and national strategy in March 2017, with the primary focus on listening to many different social groups—political parties, civilians, and businesses. Additionally, the national reconciliation process is regarded as the military government’s plan to restore democracy in order to prepare the nation for the upcoming general election in 2018. Educating people towards their duties and boundary in a democratic space; resolving economic and social injustice; and instilling civic education and right thinking are also the core of national reconciliation process. The aim of this study is therefore to examine the Prime Minister General Prayuth Chan-ocha’s weekly addresses broadcast on national television channels on the issue of ‘national reconciliation’ in order to investigate how he has attempted to justify and persuade his audience by utilizing ideological discourse structures in his speeches. This paper also aims to uncover underlying ideologies of the Prime Minister in relation to the issue of ‘national reconciliation’. Van Dijk (2004, 2008)’s framework is utilized to analyze ideological strategies in the transcripts of the weekly addresses from March 2017 to December 2017. This is the period of time when the government has initiated a number of actions in promoting national reconciliation. All the Thai and English-translated version transcripts are taken from the official website of the Royal Thai Government. Drawing on Van Dijk’s (2004, 2008), the macro strategies including self positive-representation, other negative-representation, disclaimer, consensus, evidentiality, vagueness, national self-glorification, ideological polarization, victimization, etc. constitute a framework for analyzing the speeches. The results from my qualitative investigation will point towards insights into the role of discourse in the reproduction of ‘national reconciliation’ in the Thai socio-political context.

ABSTRACT. Gender and sexuality equality are seen as inherent to Nordic identities, and also often taken as missing from and threatened by the cultures and values of people with migrant backgrounds (e.g. Keskinen 2011; Tuori, 2007). Welfare nationalist discourses – in which the Nordic welfare model is built as egalitarian, exceptional and exportable – are also regularly drawn upon and deployed to separate Nordic identities from those of migrants (Keskinen 2016; Trägårdh 2002). The most recent trend in using equality to build Nordic identities involves deployments of homonationalist discourses: Idealised notions of sexuality equality have been used to, for example, construct colonialist rescue narratives in which the brown Muslim woman is positioned as being liberated by her Nordic counterpart (Jungar & Peltonen 2015). Nordic and Finnish identities are also embedded in concepts of ‘Whiteness’ and cultural homogeneity (Keskinen 2013; Häkkinen & Tervonen 2004). Thus the separation of ‘us and our values’ from ‘immigrants and theirs’ is often racially marked.

In this presentation I examine how social media users draw upon and use Finnish equality discourses in discussions on media texts to build cultural, societal, national and transnational identities for ‘us’ and asylum seekers. Using Fairclough’s (2003, pp. 39-61) tools for analysing dialogicality in texts, Martin and White’s (2005) APPRAISAL framework, and Wetherell’s (2012, 2013, 2015) critical discursive psychological approach to affective meaning making, the analytical focus is on the interplay in identity constructions between orientations to difference on one hand, and discursive constructions of affect on the other. I assess whether, how, and the extent to which particular formulations and uses of equality promote thinking and acting with sociocultural and value differences, rather than simply against them, without falling into a relativist downward spiral (cf. Hall 2012, p. 29).

Hall, S. (2012). Avtar Brah's cartographies: moment, method, meaning. Feminist Review, 100(1), 27-38.

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Oxon: Routledge.

Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wetherell, M. (2013). Affect and discourse – what’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice. Subjectivity, 6(4), 349–368.

ABSTRACT. Portuguese media covered the Brexit referendum (23-25 June 2016) with special interest. This subject was highlighted on the covers of newspapers, drawing the attention of its readers. In a broad perspective Brexit was presented as a factor of division and disruption, not only for the UK but also for the European Union. Sometimes it appears as the cause of division, other times as its consequence. In this paper I analyse and contrast the media coverage on the Brexit referendum by a mainstream daily newspaper (Público) and a tabloid (Correio da Manhã) in Portugal.

The primary goal is to map the identity discourses used to represent ‘the British people’ and the ‘Europeans’. The discursive construction of national identities – or supranational, in the case of EU – is at the centre of this analysis. What do they tell us about nationalisms in contemporary Europe? What are the most frequent representations articulated by/through media?

After the death of nationalism has been declared (Hobsbawm), we seem to witness its revival – like a bad zombie movie, still popular these days. But is it a revival of the old nationalisms, or are we facing something new? What are the discourses of these so-called new nationalisms? Can we understand current nationalistic discourses using the old framework offered by traditional theories on nationalism, or should we redesign it?

Globalization and its discontents, multiculturalism and the way it challenges supposedly fixed and homogeneous identities, migrations and xenophobia are some of the issues to be addressed. They constitute the background against which the discourses on (new) nationalisms have developed today in public debate, media discourses included.

The theoretical and methodological framework adopted in this paper relies upon Cultural and Identity Studies (Stuart Hall and others), and Critical Discourse Studies (Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, among others).

ABSTRACT. ‘National anthems’ or ‘national hymns’ are usually patriotic musical compositions that evoke the history, traditions, struggles of a nation, and their resistance (Cerulo, 1993). Moreover, such anthems encapsulate national self-awareness and collective self-images of the nations (Daughtry,2003; Barker, 2009). National anthems are of significance as they also aspire ideologies, values, and identities they communicate to the world (Cerulo, 1993; Machin, 2018). Such elements not only constitute a nation’s identity but also they project the image of that nation by their leaders both to the insiders and to the outsiders and the world at large. This paper aims to show how national anthems can shape the identities of nations to outsiders via lyrics and melodies through a critical discourse study. I also show how these identities are constructed via texts and paralinguistic means. In particular, this research focuses on the perception of the US and Russian national anthems based on Public Opinion Research Centres in both countries as well as considering Youtube comments. The national anthem of the United States of America also known as ‘The Star Spangled-Banner’ was written in 1814 by Francis Scott Key, and the State Anthem of the Russian Federation is recontextualised with newly written lyrics by Sergey Mikhalkov in 2000. The melody of the latter was adopted from the old State Anthem of the Soviet Union written originally in 1943 during the Second World War. The findings of this study suggest how recontextualisation and production of a well-crafted lyrics considering the current status-quo, helped to revive a demised nation’s self-confidence and pride at the world stage.

ABSTRACT. Football and music are both ubiquitous in contemporary society, and similarly ubiquitously devalued in the humanities and social sciences. This rests upon both their very vernacular omnipresence in our culture, but also is the result of deeper shared connection to our somatic presence in the world. The practice of sport is fundamentally a somatic practice, as much as music is a sonic practice; both set apart from the dominant linguistic and textual currency of multimodal analyses. Part of the power of football and its songs, chants and tunes is in its double-sided agency to construct social belonging and division. The power of gendered, racial, ethnic and political constructions of Self and Other do not simply emerge in text and talk but for football and music, are deeply embedded in our somatic sense of Self and the visceral connection to others. This emerges in multimodal metaphors sung and chanted at or around football matches. In this paper I focus in on the metaphorical use of somatic or embodied multimodal musical texts which reveals some important connections between our embodied Self, and crucially, how we construct social distance between our Selves and Others. I argue that this attention to the metaphorical and somatic discourse of songs, chants and tunes about football can help us to understand the deeply felt, visceral agency of our bodies and should that these sorts of everday cultural expressions of Self and Other should be at the centre of disciplinary understandings of society, gender, race, and politics both precisely because of their ubiquity but also because of what they reveal about our socially constructed embodied lives.

ABSTRACT. Recent interdisciplinary research has begun to explore music as a domain in which meaning is produced though a combination of musical, gestural, verbal and sonic components (van Leeuwen 1999; Machin 2010; Way and McKerrell 2016). This paper focusses on the latter, exploring the semantic contributions of sound recording within the discourse of the post-war British folk revival. The recent multimodal turn has increased scholarly interest in the ways in which music is mediated by supplementary technological practices. While scholars of traditional song are beginning to take an interest in aspects of print such as orthography, layout, visual paratext, and typography (Marsh 2015; Groom 2006), comparable research on the role of recorded sound is still in its early stages. Sound recording, like print, has certain semantic affordances, mediating meaningful aspects of musical performance including spatial relationships, timbre, texture, and tonal quality. With one or two exceptions (Moore 2014; van Leeuwen 1999; Machin 2010) these have been under explored, however, and such analyses that have been undertaken often lack a significant historical or contextual dimension. Building on the author’s doctoral research, this paper situates a discussion of recording’s semantic contribution to recorded song within the discursive context of the post-war British folk revival, arguing that sound recording played a crucial role in the realisation of revivalist discourse. The discussion focusses on two broad approaches to recording folk song, the textual and the social, both of which are related to wider cultural discourses. In textual approaches, recording techniques are used to creatively interpret or illustrate traditional texts. In social approaches, recording is used primarily to emphasize the social dimension of the music through the construction of interpersonal distance and connect with wider discourses of community and authenticity. This paper explores the case for applying discourse analytical techniques to questions of meaning in recorded song as discourse. It considers the usefulness of existing concepts from discourse analysis in capturing the specific character of sound recording, suggesting that any understanding of the communicative potential of recorded sound must be situated within a nuanced understanding of specific technological and discursive contexts

ABSTRACT. Songs can be considered socio-cultural discourses with a ludic and a communicative function: Through lyrics (and music), singers can establish a power/solidarity relationship with audiences (Halliday 2004; Van Leeuwen 2012: 322) while, at the same time, promoting a given view of reality. With this in mind, it can be argued that songs can also be understood as a useful multimodal and metaphorical site for remembering given socio-political events whose discursive interpretation may change throughout time. This is important to explain the re-contextualisation (Wodak & Fairclough 2010) process that has been undergone by two U2 songs: “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” (1983) and “Peace on Earth” (2000). These songs were originally written to respond to the violence of the Northern Irish conflict, but they were later used – and requested by the audience – to remember the victims in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The two cultural identities –Irish and American – which are recalled by these songs show how identities are not only grounded in the past, but can be also redefined by use in particular contexts of situation (Storey 2003: 86). We will analyse U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” and “Peace of Earth” according to the postulates of Text-World Theory (TWT) (Werth 1999, Gavins 2007), Discourse Space Theory (DST) (Chilton 2004, 2005), and Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Charteris-Black 2004, 2005). These will be applied to the study of the lyrics, and findings will be complemented with the analysis of multimodal features (Van Leeuwen 2012; Kress & Van Leeuwen 2006) related to the visual semiotic mode, including aspects such as angle, gaze, shoot or the use of colour, and the musical semiotic model, focusing particularly on the study of musical multimodal metaphors. The analysis will show how the text-worlds evoked by each of the songs may result in several different discourse worlds depending on the context in which the song has been used. These discourse worlds – which are arguably a blend (Fauconnier & Turner 2002) from text-worlds, musical worlds and visual worlds – help in making the songs become a metaphorical site which can be used both with a local and a global meaning.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the ways in which women engineers represent themselves in their own website, also known by the acronym WES, whose basic aim is “offering inspiration, support and professional development. Working in partnership, we support and inspire women to achieve as engineers, scientists and as leaders; we encourage the education of engineering; and we support companies with gender diversity and inclusion”. This website is perceived as peripheral to mainstream engineering discourse. In particular, the research question is: How do WES design their images, build relations and attract women engineers in this sample of ‘discourse in place’ (Scollon and Scollon 2003) and, in turn, what is understood and experienced as women in engineering companies? Gender is implicated in the cultures of organizations, and culture is also a part of organizational climates (Acker 1992:568)

The analytic method is based on Critical Discourse Analysis (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999, Fairclough 1989), and multimodal analysis (Jewitt and Kress, 2003; Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996). This exploratory study provides a detailed description and discussion of the visual and verbal features of this website, which constructs women engineers’ public identity (Martinec 2000) and helps other women engineers’ progress. This analysis also involves the interpretation and explanation of WES’s discourse practices (e.g. salience, framing, etc.) in their social contexts. Results reveal that written language is only one element in the website, and it has to be read together with other semiotic modes (e.g. color, photographs, typography, etc.) This attractive design combines these different modes to change socially constructed knowledge about women engineers into social action, which means avoiding “chilly climate”. Studies documenting a chilly climate for women pointed to biases in hiring processes, inequitable allocations of work responsibilities, and policies that penalize women’s greater role in managing work/family responsibilities (Armstrong and Jovanovic 2015). The final aim of this website is a form of advertising to persuade viewers of the important role women play in different engineering areas

ABSTRACT. Digital stories are a new narrative genre that is spreading fast and wide, especially for educational purposes (Alonso et al. 2015, De Fina 2016, Oskoz & Elola 2016). In this emerging discourse type, a narrative, usually dealing with personal experiences, is constructed through the combination of voice, images and sometimes music and the result is then uploaded onto the Internet. This practice raises interesting questions as for which discourse strategies, both verbal and non-verbal, must be applied in order to catch and maintain the attention of an unknown global audience towards this kind of individual, local stories. In the first place, they are mostly narrated in English, even by non-native speakers, as they are intended for an international audience. Secondly, the messages conveyed usually deal with universal topics and worries, although the stories are strongly localized both personally and culturally. However, the key element seems to be the expression of emotion at different linguistic levels (phonological, syntactic, semantic or pragmatic) and through different modes (textual, visual and acoustic). In order to verify this hypothesis, this paper presents the analysis of a small corpus of digital stories created by students of English as a foreign language. A multidisciplinary approach, functional-pragmatic and socio-cognitive, was followed, based on recent research on the role of emotion in language, persuasion and communication (Foolen et al. 2012, Cockroft & Cockroft 2014, Majid 2012), the difficulties for foreign speakers to express emotion (Dewaele 2013, 2015), as well as previous work on the multimodal discourse analysis of digital stories (Porto & Alonso Belmonte, 2014; Molina & Alonso Belmonte, 2016, Porto 2016). Furthermore, the results of the analysis were contrasted with the students’ own views, both as authors, in order to identify which multimodal resources were used intentionally, and as addressees, to check the actual effect of those resources on the audience. The conclusions confirm the previous assumption that emotion plays a leading role in the construction of universal significance out of individual stories, but also reveals how the interaction of modes help learners to overcome the difficulties of expressing emotion and searching for empathy in a foreign language.

ABSTRACT. The present paper explores the personal narratives of a group of experienced secondary teachers working at bilingual secondary schools across the region of Madrid. At present time, 112 English-Spanish bilingual secondary schools in the Madrid region offer from 30% to 50% of their studies in English. Content Language Integrated Learning (henceforth CLIL) has gathered momentum over the last ten years, being perceived as the long-awaited answer to the need to train European citizens who are competent in several languages in plurilingual Europe. Although there is a plethora of studies on the effectiveness of CLIL in different teaching contexts, some critical voices have also started to be heard in the academia regarding, for example, the lack of balance between language and content, the discrepancies between theory and real practice in the classroom or its inadequacy for attention to diversity (Harrop 2012; Bruton 2013; Pérez Cañado 2016). Very recently, the polemic has extended to both parents and teachers reaching the Spanish media. Thus, this paper’s main focus is to describe how both foreign language and subject content teachers position themselves in their narratives regarding the bilingual programmes. Drawing on Critical Discourse analysis, data is obtained from the transcription and annotation of a number of interviews (still being collected) with different experienced secondary teachers. In these interviews, based on a semi-structured questionnaire, teachers make a personal account of the learning/ teaching experiences they are involved in and offer their personal reflections regarding certain dimensions of CLIL teaching practice. Among the more interesting results, findings point to some existing tensions in reconciling their personal beliefs and professional motivations within the current organisational and political environment that imposes specific constraints on their professional practice. Results are discussed in relation to the most recent research on the development of the teachers’ “bilingual” identity (Fernández Barrera 2017) and on the contextual factors that promote it or hinder it.

ABSTRACT. The main goal of this presentation is to observe the role of metonymy in the discourse about the Deaf identity. Discourse understood as the product of collective cognition, socially conditioned and activity-driven (Bernárdez 2008) takes on metonymy to establish natural inference schemas that give access to underlying cultural based conceptualizations (Shariffa 2011, 2015; Langacker 1994, 2014) and trigger the meaning construction (Radden, Köpcke, Berg and Siemund 2007) of the concept of identity through the discourse shared by a speech community. In this case, we study the conceptualization of identity in a speech community considered a cultural, linguistic and ethnic minority from a sociocultural approach (van Cleve & Crouch 1989, Parasnis 1997, Parks 2009, Chen 2014). In this presentation, I show how metonymic constructs (Radden and Kövecses 1999, Barcelona 2005; 2007; 2008; 2011) trigger the meaning of the “Deaf identity” concept in three different languages. I analyze six videos, two in British Sign language; two in American Sign Language, and two in Spanish Sign Language. In the videos native sign language speakers deal with the concept of deaf identity using different macro-discourse strategies. We briefly observe those different macro-strategies, but we focus on the sub-concepts of Identity, Culture, School, Family and Sign language. These sub-concepts are part of the influential factors in defining Deaf Identity (Glickman and Carey 1993; 1996, Ban-Chava 2000, Chen 2014). We analyze the metonymic inbuilt of these concepts and their role in these discourses and in the different languages. The pragmatic inferences of the use of these concepts in discourse show the different experiential and culturally driven conceptualizations that form the foundation of the Deaf identity discourse in each language.

ABSTRACT. Our paper explores the connection between materialities, specific modes of reasoning and the clash between different disciplinary discourses of science and evidence. In May 2017, a one-day research colloquium was organised to bring together scholars and doctoral students from different disciplines and professions to critically discuss abductive reasoning as a methodological precept (articulated by Charles Peirce, 1955). In short, abduction is a plausible explanation for a surprising observation that is abducted from an existing ‘rule’ or knowledge about a wider context. To facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue, the event took place at a well-known archaeological site from the Viking era, which houses a museum and an outdoor area. A philosopher, two archaeologists, a psychoanalyst and two cultural psychologists were invited, with other scholars and students, to spend the morning in two separate groups touring alternately the museum and the physical site. They noted individually their interpretations that would require abductive inference, and then as a group they compared and discussed their reasoning and evidence. Afterwards, the two groups were led by a local archaeologist on a tour, and then in the afternoon they debated their visit so far in relation to the theories and practices of abductive reasoning. This event was recorded with multiple video cameras – both traditional and stereoscopic 360-degree – and multiple microphones – such as ambisonic and wireless – as well as GPS and volumetric capture, in order to trace the participants’ mobility and their talk across the site, as well as the artefacts and landscape features they focused on. In our approach to the empirical materials, we follow the methodological openness of nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon 2004), which approximates the abductive method that Alvesson & Kärreman (2007) recommend. Additionally, using multimodal conversation analysis, which is in contrast a primarily inductive methodology, we analyse how the discursive encounter of different disciplines with respect to modes of abductive reasoning is set off in relation to the materialities and scenography of the museum as a three-dimensional experience. Our presentation focuses on specific cases of how the different disciplines and professions reason about and contest what can and cannot be deduced, induced or abduced from walking over the site, from visual inspection, and from material traces and visual representations of what can be found under the earth, eg. from soil samples, stratigraphy and reconstructed artefacts.

References: Alvesson, M. & Kärreman, D. (2007). Constructing mystery: Empirical matters in theory development. The Academy of Management Review, 32(4), 1265-1281. Peirce, C.S. (1955). Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Edited by J. Buchler. New York: Dover. Scollon, R. & Scollon, S.W. (2004). Nexus Analysis. New York: Routledge.

ABSTRACT. With three richest people in the US owning more wealth that the poorest 50% of the US population (IPS 2017), and the Earth on a trajectory towards ecological devastation (GEO 2015, WI 2015), many people are questioning the fundamental discourses which industrial societies are based on. Neoliberalism, neoclassical economics, individualism, consumerism, patriarchy and human exceptionalism are among many ideologies that are being blamed for the current plight of humanity. Critical Discourse Analysists have been exposing and resisting the dominant, hegemonic discourses which convey these ideologies, and this is vital work. However, equally vital is the search for discourses which convey new stories to live by, ones which can contribute to more equal and sustainable societies. A recently emerging approach to discourse, Positive Discourse Analysis (Bartlett, 2012, Macgilchrist 2007, Martin 2004), offers potential to contribute to this endeavour, but has yet to be embraced by Critical Discourse Analysists since it remains under-theorised and there are too few examples of it being put to good effect in ways that differ from a CDA approach. This paper aims to contribute to the theoretical development of Positive Discourse Analysis with the help of Bahktin’s (1981) concept of centripetal and centrifugal forces, and give a clearer explanation of what makes a discourse ‘positive’. The theoretical framework is then put into practice in analysing a range of discourses, from Japanese poetry and Native American writings to the discourse of new economics. In this way, the paper aims to take a step towards developing Positive Discourse Analysis into a useful framework for contributing to the search for new stories to live by.

ABSTRACT. We are currently experiencing the 6th mass extinction on Earth, rapidly exacerbated by human and industrial activity. Environmental disaster is looming (Maroun and Atkins, 2017) with the colossal insect loss estimated at 75%: “All signs point to ever more powerful assaults on biodiversity, painting a dismal picture of the future of life, including human life” (Ceballos et al., 2017, p.6095 in Maroun and Atkins, 2017, p. 3).

Ecolinguistics provides a framework for the critical questioning of the relationship between humans and other nonhuman animals, partially constructed by the language used to talk to and about them. Ecolinguistics plays a role in the reinvention of society along ecological lines by revealing and challenging the dominant and often destructive discourses which affect social cognition, and influence social and corporate activity.

The project examines the representations of animals in the Bayer corporation’s integrated reports adopting an ecolinguistic approach. For example, ideology and linguistic features used in the reports such as ‘natural resources’ frame the way insects and animals are thought of. Further, metaphors, evaluation, erasure (linguistic features which background or distort a particular domain), and salience will be used as lenses through which the reports will be examined. including critical discourse analysis of the representation of insects and other animals in the reports.

The discourses surrounding insects and animals will be analysed through two ecolinguistic foci: (a) discourses that have a significant impact not only on human relations but also on life sustaining larger ecological systems. (b) The discourses are analysed by showing how clusters of linguistic features combine to create certain worldviews or ‘cultural codes’. A cultural code is a compact package of shared values, norms, ethos and social beliefs[…]which constructs and reflects the community’s “common sense”.

My presentation will begin with a two-minute video underpinning the interconnectedness of life on Earth. Then, supported by slides, I will briefly outline the notion of accounting as a communicative practice and the power it holds in shaping practices that can ensure the survival of all life on Earth. Following this, I will demonstrate preliminary data and findings of an ecolinguistic analysis of Bayer’s reports.

ABSTRACT. This paper develops Kelsey's (2017) framework on affective mythologies by enhancing its critical, analytical approach to metaphor, multimodality and affective apparatus. In doing so, this psycho-discursive perspective allows us to understand how metaphor functions as an affective form of externalisation in social, political, religious and mystical discourse. By ideologically critiquing psychological tendencies to externalise neurological phenomena we see how cultural tensions arise through struggles between dualist and materialist notions of consciousness.

A series of multimodal texts will demonstrate how Critical Discourse Studies can be adopted and developed to engage in radical interdisciplinary debates around consciousness, metaphor and ideology. For example, The Secret (Byrne, 2006) has claimed to uncover a force (“the law of attraction”) that exists in the universe through which visualisation and positive thinking will attract (“magnetise”) good fortune. Some motivational speakers have used this myth to explain the socio-economic divisions between rich and poor whilst suppressing critical, systemic discourses of social class. However, in other examples, such as the mythology of Conor McGregor, we see arguably more positive cultural forms operating through this myth. My analysis will critique the law of attraction and The Secret before analysing other affective qualities in McGregor’s mythology.

As I show, these phenomena can be understood from cultural and psychological (materialist) standpoints as opposed to the mysticism and metaphysical dualism that the law of attraction adopts. I argue that visualisation is a powerful form of affective mythology in its metaphorical form: a psychological (internal/embodied) mechanism, as opposed to that of any external force, power or entity. In doing so, my concern focuses on the ideological operations of this myth, which can be used in different ways. By taking a non-reductive materialist position, a critical approach to affective mythologies enables us to understand how dualist and materialist notions of consciousness are used to construct ideologically driven narratives in society. Metaphor and ideology are not always negative, but how they function warrants critical attention form discourse analysts.

Kelsey, D. (2017) Media and Affective Mythologies: Discourse, Archetypes and Ideology in Contemporary Politics. London: Palgrave

Byrne, R. (2006) The Secret [DVD]

ABSTRACT. In 2015, amid concerns that fees collected for Halal food certification schemes were funding Islamic terrorism, the Australian Parliament conducted the “Senate Inquiry into Third Party Food Certification”. The public were invited to submit in writing their opinions on Halal certification under the neutral guise of “food certification”. The vast majority of the 1492 submissions were against Halal certification. Using Reisigl and Wodak’s (2001) Discourse-Historical Approach, the analysis sought to discursively deconstruct the reasons the submission writers gave for their opposition to Halal certification. This paper focuses on one of the main arguments used against Halal certification, namely that Islamic customs and traditions breach Australian laws. Anti-Halal proponents argue, on one hand, that Muslims in Australia are following Islamic instead of Australian laws, but on the other, assert that the Australian Government should prohibit Halal certification schemes, thus conceding that Halal certification is actually legal. Using the term ‘laws’ synonymously with ‘values’, ‘culture’, ‘ethics’ and ‘principles’ allows the supporters to claim that anything Islamic violates Australian laws. It also allows them to demarcate ‘Islamic’ from ‘Australian’ in order to argue that the latter is infinitely superior to the former without consideration of various overlaps and subjectivities. Finally, the anti-Halal proponents fabricate evidence to support their claims, from attributing qualities to Muslims or Islam that are untrue or exaggerated to adding the adjective ‘Halal’ to the front of many different terms in attempts to allege that Islam is dominating and overtaking Australia. This paper reveals the discursive techniques the submission writers used to portray their arguments as justified and reasonable. However, it ultimately exposes the irrational and unfounded hostility some members of the public currently hold against Muslims and Islam in Australia.

References Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. 2001, Discourse and Discrimination: rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism, Routledge, London.

ABSTRACT. As a staple of most societies, education is often viewed as a key to success, upward mobility, and to changing the world. What is taught in the classroom is dependent upon teaching practices, curricula, and educational policies, which are further influenced by societal values, social structures, and power relations (Kress, 2011; Westheimer, 2015, 2010). In other words, education is socially constructed and mediated, and is realised through texts and discourses (Lemke, 1995; Fairclough, 1989; Kress, 2011; Rogers, 2011). While much discourse analytic work regarding education has been done in contexts such as the US (Rogers, 2011; Pini, 2011; Woodside-Jiron, 2011), UK (Fairclough, 1993; Mulderrig, 2003, 2008, 2011, 2012), and Singapore (Lee, 2015; Lim, 2014; Zhang & O’Halloran, 2013), little work of this nature has been done in the Canadian context (Stack, 2016). To bridge this gap, my research aims to critically examine educational discourses to trace how they ultimately influence or impact the classroom level. As such, this two-phased study explored how education, students, and teachers are represented within and across a collection of educational texts (policies, reports, etc.) from the international, national, and provincial (Ontario) levels regarding education in Canada. For phase one, I compiled the small corpus (101,441 tokens) and adopted a corpus assisted discourse studies (CADS) approach (Mautner, 2009, 2014, 2016). For the second phase, I conducted a semi-structured focus group in which three participants read and discussed four excerpts from the policies and reports collected. The phases complemented one another and the findings suggest that these texts generally take on an authoritative approach, and position education as a vehicle to employment, students as passive consumers of knowledge, and teachers as in need of monitoring, which may be detrimental to education as a foundation for critical thinking and societal progress and betterment.

ABSTRACT. Following the concept of Knowledge Society, multi-actor settings increasingly become the mode of knowledge creation (Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons 2013; Carayannis, Campbell and Rehman 2016). According to political strategies the common European research agenda “Horizon 2020” shows that research and innovation programmes are set to promote innovation capacity in different fields like industrial leadership, societal challenges, and science (https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020). These tendencies demonstrate that Universities are no longer in demand as the only space of knowledge creation and their societal role is raised to question. Within the shift to (applied) research for innovation and the development of competencies for innovation and civic capacity new teaching and research designs and formats are like Innovation Labs are required. The purpose of the research is to reflect the role of higher education and education as academia in Innovation Labs. Within Innovation Labs as a specific form of “Living Labs” diverse stakeholders are included to develop solutions for specific goals during a co-creative process in real-life contexts. Besides different disciplinary perspectives to analyze Innovation Labs, for example innovation research (Leminen 2015), social-ecological approaches (Keyson, Guerra-Santin and Lockton 2017), and organizational education (Weber 2014; Schröer 2016, Weber & Wieners 2017), Innovation Labs are here addressed as space of power and knowledge production and co-creation, as well as the surface of discourses on political agendas for research and teaching in Higher Education. Analyzing the role of higher education in Innovation Labs, the project focus on the positions, positionings, and positionality of the different stakeholders. The methodological framework is oriented towards Wrana’s (2015) perspective on discursive practices and the situational analysis of Adele Clarke (2005) as a postmodern extension of the grounded theory methodology. This research is based on a case study of a one-day “Innovation Lab” on the topic of sustainable nutrition that was realized in 2015. The stakeholders were representatives of the university, local politics/ administration, as well as producer, suppliers, and users. The study can draw on 34 semi-structured interviews with participants and student-organizers.

ABSTRACT. Studies that attempt to provide insights into the way a visual artist creates an artwork are largely experimental and quantitative, located within the field of cognitive psychology, and motivated by a belief that creativity is a measurable, objective and external reality (Locher 2010). What is noticeably absent in such research is a focus on the interactional dimension of creativity. Visual artists do not work in an isolated vacuum, only drawing upon innate or divinely inspired abilities. Instead, they are in constant dialogue with a network of fellow artists, friends, dealers and other institutional representatives about their creative practice, its progress and directions; a process that for many begins when they enter arts education. Taking a view of creativity as historically and discursively constructed, and employing a range of different discourse-analytical methodologies including corpus analysis, metaphor analysis, discourse-historical analysis and ethnography, this presentation provides a critical examination of the way in which the creative practice of visual arts students is constructed though the flow of texts and interactions occurring in the tertiary studio environment. The paper focuses, in particular, on the discursive construction of student creativity as an idea, examining how ideas, co-jointly developed by tutors through the interaction of their meetings, are subsequently entextualised in the written project guidelines presented to students (the brief), and then metaphorically transferred through the students’ minds in tutorials to eventually emerge in the form of an original creative work. While giving a sense of order and intelligibility to the creative practices of students, the process is ultimately one of subordination and constraint. The student’s mind, for example, is metaphorically conceptualised as an object-container which can be opened and closed, and ideas deposited, at the direction of the tutors. Furthermore, the tutors strategically evoke a discourse of originality to reconstitute the ideas from their meetings as the students’ own. The presentation concludes by locating the construction of creativity as ideas within the context of twentieth century visual arts practice.

ABSTRACT. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most intractable conflicts in the Middle East. This conflict revolves around issues of land, borders and rights and has involved clashes between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza strip. In recent years, the conflict has centred on the Gaza Strip between Israel and the Palestinian movement Hamas and has included three rounds of violence, the most recent one occurring in 2014.

Societies embroiled in intractable conflicts often use the media to (re)produce and disseminate particular ideologies that, on the one hand, help those societies deal with the conflictual situation and, on the other hand, contribute to the conflict’s intractability (Bar-Tal, 1998). Media then has the power to influence audiences’ perceptions of the conflict’s causes, events, participants, and possibilities of resolution.

This paper, therefore, aims to explore how the 2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict is represented in Israeli, Arab and British news websites. To achieve this aim, it will investigate what underlying ideologies might be embedded in the news coverage by examining the language used in the news coverage. More specifically, this paper will explore what topics tend to recur (and what topics tend to be downplayed) in the coverage and how these topics are represented in each of the different news websites. The methodological framework the paper draws on is Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics methodology.

ABSTRACT. When the tourism industry is operatively organized by governmental institutions it seems that the destination is commofied in ways that are ideologically constructed so as to ‘educate’ the tourists to perceive them as having a historically different identity. This seems what happens when visiting the War Remnant Museum (WRM) in Vietnam. The WRM is a war museum in Ho Chi Min City containing exhibits related to the Vietnam and Indochina wars in a series of themed rooms including graphic photography, accompanied by wall-texts in English, Vietnamese and Japanese, covering the effects of such chemicals as Agent Orange or other defoliant sprays, the use of napalm and phosphorus bombs and other war atrocities. Since in some guidebooks we read for an international western audience, the Cold War is dealt with by looking at the US with a benevolent eye, there seems to be a dissonance between what the Cold War is, how it is described in guidebooks and what is told about the WRM. The purpose of this study is to analyse the discursive construction of the Vietnamese identity through the description of wars in the walltexts found in the WRM. More specifically, this study aims to investigate the way in which the WRM frames the Vietnamese identity construction and how this can be inscribed in the tourist experience. The corpus-based methodological approach (WordSmith Tools and WMatrix) is grounded in critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1989, 1992, 2001, 2006, 2014). What seems to emerge from this investigation is that the Vietnamese wars depicted by the WRM are not simply the other side of the coin. Reality is filtered through the ideological lens of the political interpretation given by the Vietnamese which frames the discursive processes and strategies establishing social orders and power relations useful in the construction of a strong national identity to be reproduced in the WRM wall texts. Such an analysis can provide useful insights about multifaceted aspects of the institutional discourse(s) related to the construction of a national identity and at the same time linked to the commodification of war.

ABSTRACT. The paper proposed argues for a relational perspective on legitimation arguments foregrounded by political elites when they engage in legitimation discourse. In order to methodologically combine the focus on discourse and relationality the paper conducts a discourse-network analysis of German government statements and parliamentary discussions from 1949 through 2014.

Legitimacy, as an “essentially contested concept” (Gallie 1956; Collier/Hidalgo/Maciuceanu 2006), is constantly disputed in political discourse. Political actors engaging in “legitimation policy” (see e.g. Reus-Smit 2007; Geis/Nullmeier/Daase 2012) are playing a crucial role not only in legitimizing themselves and their decisions but also in (de-)legitimizing the political system they represent.

Thus, they also shape the norms against which legitimacy is assessed and contribute to the construction of what is – or should be – considered legitimate and why. Despite a growing theoretical and empirical interest in the role of political elites in the discursive construction of legitimacy (e.g. Barker 2001; Biegoń/Gronau/Schmidtke 2013) and legitimation strategies applied by political actors (e.g. van Leeuwen 2007; Rojo/van Dijk 1997) only little research has paid attention to the norms and values employed to back legitimation claims so far.

Most importantly, it is the relationality of these norms, i.e. of legitimation arguments, which is often neglected (but cf. Haunss 2014). Due to the underestimation of the relationality of legitimation arguments it is mostly ignored that the attempt (by political actors) to construct (or deconstruct) legitimacy is not based on the foregrounding of isolated norms, but on specific ensembles of legitimation arguments, like efficacy, equality, transparency, and so on. Thus, the paper argues for taking seriously that legitimacy is ascribed by drawing on a plurality of norms and argues for a relational perspective on legitimation arguments.

To transpose this theoretical argument into a methodological design, the paper suggests a discourse-network-analytical approach. It combines the discourse analytical view on text and talk with a network analytical perspective on relations (cf. e.g. Leifeld/Haunss 2010; Haunss/Schneider 2013; Leifeld 2016) and permits to empirically capture the relationality of legitimation arguments. To illustrate the argument, the paper draws on empirical data from government statements and parliamentary discussions in Germany.

ABSTRACT. Communicating admiration and appreciation are two important tasks for social actors who wish to secure relationships (Holmes, 1986; Wolfson & Manes, 1980) and advance models for civic behavior (Hauser, 1999). In this study, we take the examples of compliments and praise, two understudied speech acts in public contexts, to demonstrate the role of solidarity-oriented actions (Kampf, 2016) in cultivating relationships in political discourse. Focusing on Israeli political discourse and its distinctive cultural speaking-style (Katriel, 1986), we ask what public actors compliment and praise each other about? How and why do public actors positively evaluate each other? In what types of political rituals are we more likely to find them? And how are power relations negotiated in compliment and praise events? On the basis of systematic keyword searches in the archive of Israeli popular news platforms between 2010 and 2015, we collected 241 instances of compliments (102) and praise (139). Our analysis took into account the lexical choices, the object of the compliments and praise, and the context in which the expressions were utilized. It allowed us to identify the topics, patterns, and functions of these speech acts and to discuss the processes and struggles they evoke in public discourse. Our findings suggest that political speakers positively evaluate the skills, performances, and personalities of their peers, while avoiding irrelevant or inappropriate compliments over appearances and possessions. Both acts maintain sociability in in a variety of political rituals (consent, inauguration, nomination, farewell, compensation, and triumph), and point out the appropriate competencies the complimenting actor envisions as a model for others. We also found that praise and compliments can aggravate relationships when perceived as flouting the maxim of quality by being flattering, undeserved, inappropriate to specific occasions, or diverting the democratic process from its route. In such cases, a discursive struggle erupts around the rules of proper speech in public settings and the appropriateness of the civic model the positive evaluation of others proposes. We conclude by discussing the role of positive evaluations in demarcating the boundaries of proper conduct in political communities.

ABSTRACT. Previous research has illustrated that a correlation between a politician's public posture and consistent values is deemed a positive trait (Feldman, 2003; Sniderman, 2000). However, the practice of being consistent – that is, conformity of behavior over time and space — is antithetical to the need to connect with multiple audiences. While previous studies focused on how political actors espouse to consistency (i.e. Duranti, 2006), other studies demonstrated how political actors create gaps between messages to cater to the demands of variant audiences (Friedman and Kampf, 2014). Managing consistent face thus poses a discursive dilemma for political actors: on one hand, it establishes a credible image in a post-ideological era (Thompson, 2000), on the other hand, it can create an image of political rigidity, resulting in an inability to connect to a particular audience's beliefs. This study aims to disentangle the challenge of consistency in the post-truth era. By analyzing 184 utterances from the years 2006-2017 in which political actors specifically employed the term "consistency" in their talk, our goal is to uncover how Israeli politicians utilize and understand the notion of consistency in a media discourse. We first classify performed consistency through its content, including a) consistent steadfastness to a particular ideological stance or b) consistent steadfastness to a particular political characteristic or practice. We then analyze performed consistency with respect to its perceived moral justifications and as a rhetorical tool used to advance self-image. We conclude by illustrating positive and negative attributes of consistency within political discourse. We illustrate how consistency is deemed a positive value and indicator of ideological strength, as well as the meta-pragmatic stance which argues that performed consistent speech has the power to alter diplomatic reality. Conversely, we illustrate how consistency is negatively perceived: across different national spaces, it can be perceived as a breach of diplomatic codes or even treason; while over time, consistency can be perceived to reflect rigidity. Finally, we discuss how the performed consistency of politicians representing ideological steadfastness presents a challenge to "pragmatic" mainstream politicians, who attempt to reach a range of publics.