ABSTRACT. This presentation addresses the multiplicity of secrecy. It focuses on a formerly top secret weapons research site called Orford Ness. Located on the easternmost coast of Britain, Orford Ness was for nearly 80 years a place where key weapons, intelligence and surveillance technologies were tested and developed. In the 1950s and 1960s it became part of Britain’s atomic weapons research estate, performing stress testing on the early generations of the atomic bomb. Today much of the site is in ruins. It is managed by the environmental charity, National Trust, which manages the site as a place of environmental and historical significance.

Focusing on the past and present of this specific ‘prohibited place’ the presentation will argue for a polymorphous approach to secrecy, one attuned to the multiple registers, valences, logics, layers and meanings which secrecy can take on. Such an approach challenges the conventional view of secrecy as a subtraction or a mere quantity. It builds on important work that calls for a more qualitative understanding of state secrecy, one attuned to its varying depths and distributions (Pozen), temporalities (Swire, Thompson), energies and aura (Taussig), charms and allure (Dean, Simmel), and variable ontologies (Galison). We have long understood key concepts like sovereignty and citizenship as complex, variegated, multi-faceted, and historically mutable. A polymorphous approach promises to extend that sensibility towards our understanding of state secrecy.

ABSTRACT. In modern democracies, governments increasingly engage in blame avoiding behaviour when they initiate loss-imposing policies that hurt the interests of some groups (Hood, 2011; Leong & Howlett, 2017). The recent decision of the British government to leave the European Union is a case in point. As nearly half of the voters said they wanted to remain, and millions of people were left deeply concerned about the adverse effects of leaving, the government had to deal with an acute blame risk.

In my talk, I make an original contribution to the linguistically informed study of blame avoidance in government. I identify the discursive strategies by which the officeholders who lead the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU, such as Prime Minister Theresa May and the Secretary of State for Exiting the EU David Davis, try to get away with advancing their divisive policy. I bring concrete textual examples from their public statements to illustrate how they use language to minimise the perceived agency of the government, downplay the contentiousness and harmfulness of their policy, present the UK in a positive and the EU in a negative light, and deal with potential charges of inconsistency.

Working within the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse studies (Wodak, 2011; Reisigl & Wodak, 2015), I uncover particular ways of arguing, framing, denying, social actor and action representation, legitimising and manipulating that top policy makers exploit when attempting to evade accountability for their actions. A detailed context-sensitive analysis of discursive blame avoidance supports an emancipatory goal: it helps us cut through officeholders’ defensive text and talk, thereby enhancing the quality of democratic debate in society.

Hood, C. (2011). The blame game: Spin, bureaucracy and self-preservation in government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Leong, C., & Howlett, M. (2017). On credit and blame: disentangling the motivations of public policy decision-making behaviour. Policy Sciences, doi:10.1007/s1107701792904 Reisigl, M., & Wodak, R. (2015). The discourse-historical approach. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Studies (3rd ed.) (pp. 23–61). London: Sage. Wodak, R. (2011). The discourse of politics in action: Politics as usual (2nd ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

ABSTRACT. This contribution focuses on internationalism as a key driver of discourses of Brexit. It examines a corpus of official documents (including white papers, position papers and PM and Cabinet Ministers’ official speeches) published by the newly created Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) in which the British government sets out its vision for ‘a new partnership with the European Union’ and ‘a truly global Britain’. This data is analysed through argumentation theory (Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012) to identify how specific representations of internationalism and global ‘free trade deals’ act as legitimizing tools of Brexit. This contribution argues that the official vision of a new, global, and out-of-the-EU Britain imagined in the texts embodies controversial propositions of political and economic internationalism. On the one hand, the ideological approach to ‘global Britain’ and free trade perpetrates historical discourses informed by mercantile rationales and indulges in post-imperial nostalgia. On the other hand, whilst embracing global economic neoliberalism, such vision rejects the EU’s transnational social and political project in favour of a resurgent English nationalism and the politics of exclusion. The legitimation of Brexit appears thus sustained by this half-baked narrative caught between ‘global’ and ‘little’ Britain.

Fairclough, I. and Fairclough, N. (2012) Political Discourse Analysis, A method for advanced students. London: Routledge

ABSTRACT. In times of rising Euroscepticism, the interplay of a supranational European identity and various national identities remains a hotly debated topic. Seeing as these identities are frequently renegotiated in moments of historical impact for a nation (Risse 2010), this paper examines discursive identity constructions during the United Kingdom EU membership referendum 2016. In a first step, I briefly discuss a range of studies on the UK's relationship to the EU and the forming of British national identity in relation to the European continent. Then, drawing on the Discourse Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Studies (Reisigl & Wodak 2001, 2009), this paper illustrates how political actors strategically construct different visions of national or supranational identities to support their arguments for or against the EU. To this purpose, a corpus-assisted critical discourse study of transcribed parliamentary proceedings in the House of Commons between May 7th 2015 and June 15th 2016 is undertaken.

This paper focuses specifically on a sub-corpus of utterances by Conservative politicians, as the Conservative party under David Cameron had no official stance on EU membership and allowed MPs to campaign for both sides. Corpus linguistic methods such as the examination of frequency and keyword lists show that use of the first person plural pronoun "we" is particularly high amongst members of the Conservative party. This is in line with Billig's (1995) observation that national identities are often subtly reinforced by politicians via the strategic use of pronouns for the creation of in- and out-groups. Although members of the same political party can be assumed to have roughly similar ideological backgrounds, further analysis of my data thus shows that arguments for and against membership are founded on differing conceptions of what "we" encompasses. In light of these findings, it becomes clear that facts brought forth by the Remain campaign failed to convince a broad range of voters, as their reasoning presupposed an understanding of Britishness that did not adequately address their constituents' sense of self.

ABSTRACT. ‘Post-truth’ came to the fore in the wake of Trump and Brexit, when populist politicians appealed to raw emotions, eclipsing the facts. Analyses of this phenomenon (D’Ancona, 2017, Romano, 2017, Moffitt and Tormey, 2014) offer a useful context for this paper. However, mainstream UK newspapers ahead of the 2016 EU referendum and indeed ahead of the 2017 UK general election also employed highly emotive Brexit-related post-truth rhetoric. The presentation uses critical discourse analysis, specifically argumentation theory, to explore flashpoints in key national newspapers ahead of the 2016 EU referendum and 2017 general election, where there was an escalation in the UK media over Brexit rather than just the standard Eurosceptic persuasion and prejudice (Author, 2016). As a former national newspaper journalist, the author argues that this ‘shouting’ has been corrosive for the UK press, appealing to the public’s emotive Eurosceptic (or indeed Europhile) presuppositions, without challenging or informing readers. This emotional ‘shouting’ shrouded the facts, offered up inaccurate ones or forcefully compelled readers to draw certain conclusions, offering no alternatives. By ‘shouting’, an ailing UK press is self-harming and deepening the polarisation over Brexit. This paper will discuss if the national newspapers have gone too far, whether their discourse is driven by increased market pressure in the digital age, and whether they are sounding their own death-knell in a desperate bid to survive

ABSTRACT. Social media offer tools for digitizing and archiving ephemeral moments of life and sharing them with wide, networked audiences. “Life streaming”, the continuous sharing of personal materials with networked audiences and engagement with such material circulated by others (Marwick 2013a), has become a normalised means by which people document their everyday lives (Dijck 2007), create and maintain social relationships and communities (Raun 2016) and attain social status and monetary gain (Dijck 2013; Marwick 2013a, 2013b).

This presentation examines how self-identified ‘mummy vloggers’ track and broadcast everyday family life through what they refer to as ‘mummy vlogging’ (video blogging), a type of social media life streaming practice that in recent years has gained tremendous popularity yet remains underexplored. Mummy vlogs are up to 30 minute long videos uploaded to YouTube, in which the vloggers narrate their lives as mothers through recorded enactments of motherhood. In these videos family members can serve as on-screen interactants that mummy vloggers speak to, through, and as to construct their own identities as women and mothers. Alongside many other forms of gendered creative production by women that proliferate in social media, mummy vlogs focus on the traditional feminine domains of parenting, domesticity, beauty and craft (Hund and Duffy 2015; Marwick 2013b).

This presentation draws on recent narrative interactional sociolinguistic research, namely small stories research which looks at how stories that are told in social media unfold across segments, media platforms and offline contexts and can implicate a broad range of co-tellers (Dayter 2015; Georgalou 2015; Georgakopoulou 2015a, 2015b, 2016; Page 2010, 2012). I present findings from an ethnographically grounded narrative interactional analysis into how seven mummy vloggers from the US, the UK, and Canada construct maternal identities through displays of interaction with family members. Based on a sample of 560 mummy vlogs, this analysis provides insight into how mummy vloggers who incorporate family members in vlogs negotiate (1) networked audiences’ sense of ‘entitlement to know’, (2) neoliberal ideologies of individuality, self-governance and entrepreneurialism, and (3) sensibilities promoted by postfeminist media culture (Hund & Duffy 2015; Marwick 2013a, 2013b; Shepherd 2014).

ABSTRACT. Research into representations of working mothers is timely. The new sexual contract (McRobbie, 2009), situating western women in both the private-domestic as well as the public-productive work sphere, entails the crucial demand to reconcile working and caring identities (Ringrose and Walkerdine, 2008). Yet, as feminist research continues to show, caring and domestic responsibilities are still unequally distributed between the genders, and women remain positioned as primary caregivers (e.g. Lyonette and Crompton, 2015).

This paper presents findings from a project that explores the discursive constructions of working mothers on the large British parenting website Mumsnet.com. Drawing on feminist critical discourse analysis, it aims to illuminate the ‘ways in which frequently taken-for-granted gendered assumptions and hegemonic power relations are discursively produced, sustained, negotiated, and challenged’ (Lazar, 2007: 142) in editorial website content and user forum discussions on Mumsnet.

Arguing that Mumsnet occupies a key position in discourses on maternity in the UK, editorially-authored content on the site, available in the form of articles, surveys and reports, provides a rich source for the study of contemporary parenting culture, yet it has remained unexplored. By analysing the maternal representations that are constructed in these materials, focusing particularly on work-related content, the study aims to identify the dominant discourses surrounding working mothers. Further, the multiple connections between these and user discussions are explored. A particular focus pertains to how gender inequalities that relate to the uneven distribution of caring and domestic labour are navigated by users, and to what extent these lived experiences of site users correspond to and conform with representations of maternal and occupational identities.

The analysis suggests that representations of working and caring on Mumsnet undermine notions of equally shared childcare responsibilities by promoting a self-responsibilising outlook on work-family reconciliation that is constructed as a matter of the will to ‘make it work’. Contrastingly, while equality in the division of caring and household labour is expressed as a powerful norm by users, the paper also offers examples that demonstrate how affective responses such as anger and rage can be read as resistance towards gendered expectations to combine working and parenting.

ABSTRACT. Postnatal depression (PND) affects 10 to 15 in 100 mothers in the UK but it is reported that up to 50% of women with symptoms of PND do not seek medical intervention (NHS, 2016). As a diagnosis PND is subject to contested definitions and the low rates of disclosure may be due to its potentially stigmatising nature. Cain (2009) problematises PND as another form of societal scrutiny on the maternal body; the dominant bio-medical lens through which the maternal body is seen reinforces hormonal explanations of PND (Ussher, 2002) often framed as an imbalance in the perinatal body (Cain, 2009). Drawing on the feminist account of the maternal body as a materiality constructed through social and cultural meanings open to contestation (Butler, 1990; Grosz, 1994; Shildrick, 1997), this study examines how discourses of the embodied, lived experience of motherhood in the context of PND are positioned in relation to cultural norms and expectations, particularly the othering of the “imbalanced” maternal body. We address the following research questions: (a) how mothers use digital communications to re-present the embodied offline experience of PND and (b) what kind of discourses they draw on to negotiate their embodied being online? Using a corpus-assisted discourse approach (CADS) (Partington et al. 2013) supported by Wmatrix, we examine the constructions of embodiment in posts about PND on the Mumsnet Talk forum. At the macro-level, our findings suggest that discourses around body and physicality are especially pervasive in the context of online discussions about PND highlighting the inadequacy of body-mind dualism when conceptualising mental health. At the micro-level, we show the multiple ways in which mothers re-construct their embodiment online; while discourses of the normative perinatal embodiment are present, more often than not they are contested through disclosing different ways of being in the body often underpinned by humour and irony. Our study showcases the significance of digital communication as a space in which mothers can express feelings and experiences outside cultural normatives and challenge those to break silence and exercise agency.

ABSTRACT. Social photography (Zappavigna, 2016), that is, sharing images on social media services, is an increasingly important means of negotiating experiences and relationships. In this talk, we explore the discursive function of social photography in construing the everyday experiences of mothers (Zappavigna and Zhao, 2017a) through a practice that has been controversially labelled ‘mommy blogging’ (Chen, 2013). We analyse in particular two types of photographs posted by mothers on Instagram: selfies and portraits of children. The dataset is collected using a mixed-method approach, and consists of posts by two “influencer” (Abidin, 2017) mommy bloggers from Australia and a sample of 500 images tagged with #momlife. This data is analysed using grounded theory, utilising the multimodal analytical categories developed in Zhao & Zappavigna (2017b). Central to our analysis is the idea that social photography enacts intersubjectivity. On the one hand, social photography draws on a unique combination of visual resources for representing the photographer’s perspective, and on the other, it relies on affordances (e.g. #hashtags) of the social media platforms for sharing and negotiating this perspective. Our analysis shows that intersubjective relations—between the mother (the image creator), the child (the represented participant) and the ambient motherhood community (the viewer)—are central to discourses of motherhood in visual social media such as Instagram. It also illustrates how different intersubjective relations can be represented in different genres of social photography such as inferred or quasi-selfies (Zhao & Zappavigna, 2017b). Based on this analysis, we argue that unpacking the discursive construal of relationality holds the key to understanding motherhood in the age of social media. To do so, we need to shift our analytical focus from the notion of subjectivity to intersubjectivity, and from negotiating identity to negotiating perspectives.

ABSTRACT. A discourse of co-creation or co-production has recently gained importance within several governance areas, including the field of environmental communication. Central features of the discourse are notions of mutual responsibility between citizen and authorities, commitments to participation, and an alleged loosening of power relations (Voorberg, Bekkers & Tummers, 2015). However, the concrete implications of the discourse, not least for environmental communication, are yet to be explored,

This paper examines the interplay between the discourse of co-creation and local experiences in a green transition project involving four municipalities in Scandinavia. The protect participants are in charge of their own local cases, for instance on electric cars or solar panels, but they meet regularly and exchange experiences within the overall framework of ‘co-creational green transition’.

The paper is guided by two complementary research questions:

1.How does the discourse of co-creation enable the participants to make sense of their experiences in the different local green transition projects? 2.How is the discourse of co-creation challenged by the local experiences of the partners?

The two questions address each side of the dialectical relation (Fairclough, 2010) between so-called big ‘D’ and small ‘d’ discourses (Keenoy & Oswick, 2004). This dialectic relation is theoretically well established in the field of discourse analysis, but has been less pursued empirically.

As for data, the paper relies on transcripts of presentations and discussions at workshops for the project partners, where they represent and share experiences from their local cases and relate them to the overall framework of the project.

Analytically, the paper focuses on conceptualizations and evaluations. For RQ1, it is analyzed how concepts and ways of evaluating, stemming from the discourse of co-creation, are employed in the articulation of events, actors and processes from the local cases. Concerning RQ2, it is analyzed how concepts and ideals from the discourse of co-creation are explicitly or implicitly questioned or contested in the articulation of local events, actors, and processes. At a higher level of detail, analytic devices (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009) such as lexis, semantic relations of causality, and epistemic and deontic modality, are drawn upon.

ABSTRACT. Contemporary online charity communications make use of many textual and visual devices that aim to enhance the persuasive potential of the messages to solicit donations and to legitimize the organization’s activities. Given the backlash following the intense marketization and mediatization of charity (Krause, 2014), the current rhetoric of fundraising tends to be more contemplative and centered on the prospective donors’ needs. With images of smiling faces and elegant descriptions of effective results of charity actions, this strategy ia also attuned to the conventions of popular culture (Chouliaraki, 2013). Another trend in charity communication is related to the prominence of representations of prospective donors, with the textual foregrounding of options and reasons for action, which Vestergaard (2014) describes as legitimation by material and moral compensation. However, most current research centers on human-oriented charity causes while an increasing number of charities has been devoted to environmental, climate and conservationist actions. Using a sample of recently posted multimodal materials pertaining to mission statements and donation appeals of twenty most prominent environmental charities in the UK (according to www.charitychoice.co.uk), this study explores how current online charity communication relies on specific construals of the self as the beneficiary of environment-oriented actions and on the aestheticized photos that align the aims of the organization with the social imaginaries and emotional dispositions of prospective donors. The categories for the present analysis are adapted from multimodal discourse analysis and the rhetoric of legitimation and identification. Hence, one objective of this study is to show how CDS’s analytic framework can be used for a systematic analysis of charity rhetoric; another objective is to grasp the latest trends in discursive strategies of alignment and legitimization at a time of erosion of trust in charity institutions and desensitization towards (some forms of) charity appeals.

Chouliaraki, L. (2013). The ironic spectator: Solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Krause, M. (2014). The good project. Humanitarian relief NGOs and the fragmentation of reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vestergaard, A. (2014). Mediatized humanitarianism: Trust and legitimacy in the age of suspicion. Journal of Business Ethics 120: 509-525.

ABSTRACT. The study aimed to uncover the ideologically contested power relation between the developed and developing countries at the global climate conferences, as constructed in the news coverage of these conferences. It addressed the questions, “What kind of power relation between the developed and developing countries is constructed in the English media discourse under study? How is this relation linguistically manifested via the discourse?” By applying Norman Fairclough’s (2015) approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA) with the support of corpus techniques in analyzing The Independent and The New York Times’ coverage of the global climate conferences between 2004 and 2013, we found two main kinds of power relation in response to the research questions. Both unity and conflict existed in the power relation between countries at the global climate conferences, with the heavier weight on the conflict. In addition, countries followed different routes to climate change. Consequently, no consensus could be reached on a common legal framework for climate change, and the climate conferences yielded nothing positive but confusion and delayed action during the study period. The linguistic features of lexical choice, metaphor, passivization, modality, and nominalization were found ideologically invested in the media’s construction of the power relation and ideologies. Also, the ideologies and the language features were influenced by the media outlets’ political commitments, news values, news agenda, and the socio-economic background that embedded the discourse. The findings of the study provide a scientific basis to assert the effectiveness of the methodology in which a qualitative CDA is supported by quantitative corpus techniques; to reaffirm the significance of CDA in unveiling the media’s power in manipulating its language use to convey ideological stances; and to contribute to raising faculty and students’ awareness of the role of CDA in education and the role of media language in constituting the society.

ABSTRACT. This study locates itself within a body of critical policy research focusing specifically on a recently published disability activation policy in Ireland ‘Comprehensive Employment Strategy for People with Disabilities 2015-2024’ (CES) through a critical discourse analytical (CDA) framework, raising questions about the role of policy discourse in creating power relationships and constructing disabling identities. Hyatt’s (2013a) Critical Discourse Analysis Framework is deployed in this study to identify and scrutinise the dominant discourses framing the relationship between the State and the disabled person in receipt of social welfare, through the theoretical lens of critical disability studies (Goodley 2014). The study is located within a body of research the focuses on the relationship between the respective responsibility of citizens and government, as governments such as the UK, Australia, Canada and the US implement a host of policies which are redrawing the boundaries between public and private responsibility for social welfare.

The study is underpinned by the theories of policy sociology (Taylor 2004) and Stephen Ball’s ( 1993,1997) conceptualisation of policy as discourse. By engaging in a critical discursive analysis of CES, the study digs deep into the policy’s discourses in order to uncover and cross-examine the deeply embedded assumptions and naturalistic fallacies that have come to determine the discursive contours of Irish disability policy-making in the guise of disability inclusion. Following Liasidou (2011), the aim is to delve into the linguistic subtleties of the policy narrative in order to make transparent the “Othering” of people with disabilities, the paternalistic rhetoric that construes and depicts the role of the State, and unequal power relationships inscribed therein.

The study highlights the importance of the CDA approach to the political goal of bringing about social change through critique and disruption of normative ideas and assumptions that frame disability policy-making. By revealing through a process of thick description, the Hyatt Framework (Hyatt 2013a) at work in this analysis, the aim is to encourage and convince the critical policy research community of the usefulness of the CDA approach in forward an agenda for social change through critical engagement with policy discourse.

ABSTRACT. Following the global economic crisis (2008-2009), a renewed focus has been placed on economic inequality in Germany. Despite this short-term shock, a fundamental policy change addressing growing economic inequalities has yet to take place. In this context, political science research has until now concentrated on the theoretical compatibility between democracy and capitalism while using conventional survey data and methods to empirically analyze the relationship between political participation and growing socioeconomic inequalities. However, discourse analyses of the German economic inequality discussion and corresponding political inaction on the matter remain sorely lacking. Adopting Maarten Hajer’s discourse-analytical approach, this contribution fills this gap by analyzing the discussion through the prism of discourse coalitions and dominant storylines. The results show that the discussion consists of three main storylines: the first one denies inequality is a problem, the second one sees inequality as a challenge necessitating pragmatic solutions, and the third one interprets the dynamics of inequality as a fundamental threat to an already deteriorating democratic society. The three storylines are reconstructed using, first, a quantitative corpus analysis of the die ZEIT, die WELT and taz newspapers as well as Bundestag speeches from 2005 to 2015 and, second, an interpretative discourse analysis. The results furthermore show that the discussion is dominated by discourse coalitions represented by the two major parties (CDU, SPD) and economic actors who either deny inequality is a problem or call for ‘pragmatic’ solutions, thereby marginalizing debates on the legitimacy and functioning of democratic capitalism. This political constellation largely explains the missing political shift on inequality: On the one hand, the dynamic arises through the nearly constant Grand Coalition that has little interest in a legitimacy crisis of capitalism and, on the other hand, the marginalized political and societal position of the Left Party. Ironically, the two dominant storylines frame economic inequality in a way which removes self-accountability for past decisions and instead externalizes moral responsibility onto other actors.

ABSTRACT. The discursive problem guiding this study is how to foster relations between states through amicable communication. Although scripts of friendship are integral part of the diplomatic discourse (Cohen, 1987), the efforts to classify the types of actions and their guiding logic have been minimal. The literature of discourse analysis has been paid attention only to specific phenomena, such as speech acts (Kampf & Löwenheim, 2012), metaphors (Chilton & Lakoff, 2005), or narratives (Suzuki, 2013) in the service of peace. Attempts to classify such actions in international studies have been focused only on processes of reconciliation (Mitchell, 2000) or specific situations, such as calamity (Hall, 2015), while neglecting other communicative scenarios in interstate relations. Studies that did try to trace the role of amicable actions suffered from an oversimplified linguistic analysis that generally characterizes works in diplomacy studies (Chilton, 1990). Resorting to linguistic-pragmatics and international relations theories, this study aims to (1) conceptualize amicable actions and their guiding logics; (2) classify variations of amicable actions available in the verbal toolbox of foreign affair policymakers, and (3) point out their potential to thwart escalatory processes or initiate, maintain, and restore solidarity-based and deference-based relations between leaders and states. Analysis of 2,180 actions delivered by a variety of international actors (Israel, Palestine, Qatar, US, Australia, Russia, UK, Germany, and Kenya among others) in a range of communicative contexts (formal, mediated, etc.), and eight interviews with senior foreign affair policymakers, shows a considerable preference for performing intestate amicable communication through solidarity-oriented actions (91%). Asserting friendship (9.9%) and thanking (9.4%) were found to be the most popular actions in diplomatic discourse, frequently utilized by international actors to secure solidarity with others. Expressions of honor (2.9%) were found to be the most frequent deference-oriented actions, utilized for signaling respect to international actors' sovereignty and autonomy. In the conclusions, I argue for the importance and applicability of amicable actions and discuss six challenges (situational, intentional, interpretative, power, cultural, and media-related) that need to be confronted in the future in order to answer the overarching question: Under what conditions do amicable actions achieve their ends?

ABSTRACT. Policymakers often engage in blame avoidance behaviour that affects the ways in which they structure their organisations, adopt policies and operating routines, and present their work to the public. The discursive aspects of such behaviour have received relatively little critical academic attention. In this paper, I seek to advance blame avoidance scholarship by integrating analytical tools from discourse-historical studies (Reisigl & Wodak, 2015; Hansson, 2015), rhetorical approaches to public policy and administration (Hood, 1998; Stone, 2012), and the sociology of mediated scandal (Adut, 2008; Entman, 2012).

Based on a multidisciplinary literature review, I show how the discursive study of political blame games is situated within the wider scholarship dealing with philosophical, psychological, and sociological aspects of blame phenomena. I provide an inventory of the micro-level building blocks of blame games: discursive strategies of persuasion, and narratives of cause, failure, and scandal. I suggest that by treating government blame games as mediated ‘language games’, political scientists can complement the analysis of various political variables traditionally discussed in policy literature with detailed understanding of the micro-politics of presentational blame avoidance.

Adut, A. (2008). On scandal: Moral disturbances in society, politics and art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Entman, R. M. (2012). Scandal and silence: Media responses to presidential misconduct. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hansson, S. (2015). Discursive strategies of blame avoidance in government: A framework for analysis. Discourse & Society, 26(3), 297–322. Hood, C. (1998). The art of the state: Culture, rhetoric and public management. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Reisigl, M., & Wodak, R. (2015). The discourse-historical approach. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse studies (3rd ed.) (pp. 23–61). London: Sage. Stone, D. (2012). Policy paradox: The art of political decision making (3rd ed.). New York: W.W.Norton.

ABSTRACT. Why is it that actors in different nation-states end up using the same catchwords in their political justifications? In this paper, I approach this mystery by exploring how the concept of “austerity” as a globally fashionable term in the economic crisis period has been conceptualized and used as a part of the discourses and justifications in national decision-making. In national governments, many reforms have been made to face the consequences of the recent economic crisis. Applying austerity has been a dominant idea in addressing the public debts and the economic problems. Despite the lack of a general agreement about the meaning of austerity and its variety of ideas and interpretations, it has been a fashionable and widespread word. Clark and Newman (2012) remarked that austerity seems to be a dominant piece of global wisdom in the political domain; being used either by the political right or the left (Anstead, 2017). Although the majority of the authors of previous empirical studies have analysed the advantages or drawbacks of austerity by adopting an economic perspective, in this paper, I analyse austerity as a sociopolitical concept and investigate its functions in the decision-making process. The data used consists of parliamentary floor debates in Portugal and Spain during the recent economic crisis (2008-2013). In this paper, I apply a mixed-method approach. First, I use a discourse analysis (DA) to investigate the discursive practices of how austerity is evoked – meaning the conceptions, ideas and frames given to this word. Second, I apply corpus linguistic (CL) using the T-lab software (Lancia, 2012) to examine the same textual material by focusing on the repetitions of singular words and themes around the concept of austerity and by employing word associations, a sequence analysis, and a thematic analysis of elementary contexts. With this paper, I aim to contribute to the wider theoretical discussion about the synchronization through epistemic governance (Alasuutari & Qadir, 2014; Alasuutari, 2016), by shedding more light on how and why the nation-states react to the same signs and catchwords and introduce them into their national contexts.

ABSTRACT. A lesson in love: Deconstructing definitions of love in encyclopedias

An article in an encyclopaedia functions as a display window, where the most substantial information about a topic is to be exposed. Because of this expectation on representativeness, and because the article is usually written by an expert, it has a status of neutrality and authority (cp. Landau 1985:269). However, the expert has selected what material to exhibit and how to arrange it, under influences of personal preferences, the conditions for the encyclopaedia and the prevalent discourses in academy and society. Given the impact of these selections on the ostensible neutrality of the article, and given the diffused use of encyclopaedias, it is of public interest to subject this genre to critical analysis. Such analysis has previously been undertaken on entries on sex and genitalia in dictionaries (Braun & Kitzinger 2001; Milles 2009). But, what about the entry love? Love is a far more complicated phenomenon than sex, and it is one among the entries that is consulted as a barometer of societal values, when a new encyclopaedia has been launched (Söderberg 1994). The aim of this paper is to deconstruct the definition of love in Sweden’s main digital encyclopaedias: Nationalencyklopedin and Wikipedia.se. The subsequent research questions are addressed: What is love and how are the components of it hierarchized? To whom or what can love be directed (and not)? And how can the answers to these questions be interpreted from a contextual perspective? As point of comparison, serves the article on love of an encyclopaedia from 1911, Nordisk familjebok, providing the reading of the contemporary articles with an estrangement perspective (Janks 1997:330). The investigative method is a triangulation of Fairclough’s CDA model, Jank’s model of critical literacy in research, and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar (Fairclough 1989; Janks 2013; Halliday 1985). The results are, inter alia, that the objects of love differ from one encyclopaedia to the other, and that an explicit discourse on “normality” is present in both contemporary versions. Most notable is, that the essence of love has been altered from the year 1911 to the year 2017.

ABSTRACT. The term partnership has become a buzzword in Higher Education and, although there is a proliferation of its use in learning and teaching contexts (Healey, Flint & Harrington 2014), there is little agreement over what constitutes a partnership in Higher Education more generally. In an exploratory study that analysed the meanings and patterns of use of partnership in a variety of different corpora (e.g. ukWaC and its ac.uk subcorpus) using corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS; Partington, Duguid & Taylor 2013) as well as interview and focus group data, it became apparent that everyday uses of the term partnership influence the interpretation of specialised uses of partnership in more narrowly defined contexts, e.g. staff-student partnerships. This may explain why the notion of students as partners in Higher Education is seen as a “surprising (to some) juxtaposition” (Matthews 2017: 1). Building on the above, this paper will explore how partnership and partners are discursively constructed in the strategic plans of universities in the UK. The findings of the analysis are then compared to the results of our previous study of academic webpages, where the focus seems to be predominantly on links with bodies and/or people external to the university and staff-student partnerships are rarely mentioned.

References Healey, M., Flint, A. & Harrington, K. (2014). Engagement through partnership: Students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. York: Higher Education Academy, available from https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/engagement-through-partnership-students-partners-learning-and-teaching-higher-education Matthews, K. E. (2017) Five Propositions for Genuine Students as Partners Practice. International Journal for Students as Partners, 1(2), available from https://mulpress.mcmaster.ca/ijsap/article/view/3315 Partington, A., Duguid, A. & Taylor, C. (2013). Patterns in Meaning and Discourse: Theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

ABSTRACT. The knowledge of History is not just “about what happened in the past; it is also about how we evaluate what happened” (Rose & Martin 2012). As such, an important part of the curriculum consists of interpreting and expressing evaluation about the significance of past events (Martin & Wodak 2003 (eds); Martin, Maton & Matruglio 2010). This paper focuses the verbal construction of evaluation. Evaluation in History is a threefold challenge: it involves different linguistic resources, it is not always explicit, and different evaluations are seldom used simultaneously in the same text. As Coffin (2006) showed, the “appraiser voice” is significantly construed through the movement from implicit to explicit judgements across a text. Previous studies regarding History textbooks in Portugal showed that an Eurocentric worldview is symbolically given as uncontested and as a natural part of the national identity (Araújo & Maeso 2011, 2013). In other words, the evaluation of past events is implicit and foregrounds particular perspectives that, in turn, are presented as inevitable. These findings collide with general political orientations in Portugal of giving voice to non-European participants/actors and creating a multicultural historical narrative. In this paper, three questions are put forward: How is evaluation expressed in History textbooks in Portugal? Do the evaluation of past events differ, when they involve Portuguese actors or other (European and non-European) nations? This study analyses a set of 10 recent textbooks between year 5-9, with the double purpose of identifying the underlying ideological strategies and providing emancipatory reading tools. Working within appraisal system categories of discourse semantics (Martin & Rose 2008; Rose & Martin 2012) and ideological construction categories of Thompson (1990) (apud Ramalho & Resende 2011), a qualitative analysis is applied. The analysis shows that evaluation is presented mostly in implicit and indirect ways and that one general premise is ideologically construed: violent events caused by Portuguese people are legitimate. On the contrary, similar events brought about by other nations are evaluated differently and portrayed as intrusive.

ABSTRACT. Currently there is major concern on multiple levels for the immunization issues both globally and in Romania related to: vaccine coverage rates, public trust in vaccines and pharmaceutical companies. I intend to approach the vaccine hesitancy subject from a Discourse Analysis perspective. I analyze discourses and repertoires as commodities using a metaphorical frame of competitive market that will provide a dynamic perspective on how and why certain repertoires are picked up. According to this metaphor, “sellers” are those who have firm pro- and respectively anti- vaccination convictions while the “buyers” are the parents who are trying to make a decision. My aim here is to analyze some of the most prevalent pro- and anti- vaccine repertoires that are displayed on the Romanian online discursive ”market”. My starting assumption is that the parents that want to make an informed decision will soon have to deal with an enormous quantity of available information that is way too expensive to critically review. This brings them inevitably on a market of repertoires that provides ready-made discursive constructions displaying taken for granted: empirical data and scientific conclusions, metaphors, accusations and various narratives. Thus, a discourse that is accessible, rhetorically augmented with legitimate moral and scientific assumptions, containing vivid metaphors easy to invoke and master, is tempting. Analyzing the interpretative repertories, rhetorical construction, categorizations and metaphors used as weapons on a market of discourses, that is at war on the matter of child immunization, provide an insight on vaccination hesitancy intending to show why certain repertoires are more probable to be picked up, assimilated and used for decision making.

ABSTRACT. The concern of CDA proponents with how ‘elites’ including media elites play a role in reproducing dominant discourses has been used in the critical analysis of many aspects of health. We contribute to this trend by studying how British print media constructs the issue of mental health and arts participation. While media discourses around mental health have received much attention, existing research has focused on specific diagnoses or events involving mentally ill individuals. In contrast, representations of mental health and arts participation have not been studied despite growing interest in how they interlink (Arts Council England, 2014). To redress this gap, we analysed news articles published in national and local newspapers (2007-2015) using corpus-assisted frame analysis - an approach that follows in the tradition of corpus-assisted discourse analysis (Baker et al, 2013) and frame analysis (Entman, 1993). We identified three frames - recovery, stigma and economy (in order of prominence). The recovery frame emphasised that mental illness can be treated similarly to physical illness and positioned arts participation as a form of therapy. The stigma frame presented arts participation as a mechanism for challenging social conceptions that mentally ill individuals are incapable of productive work. The economy frame discussed the economic burden of mentally ill individuals and portrayed arts participation as facilitating their return to employment. We argue that while the prominence of the recovery frame is a seemingly positive development, the concept of recovery that it advanced was medicalised and individualised. By being replete with physical health analogies, this frame left the medical model of mental illness unchallenged and portrayed recovery as the heroic journey of individuals without considering the wider social and economic resources involved. We are also critical of how the sources of stigma were invariably traced to ordinary people (family and friends), not institutional actors, and how the economy frame suggested that recovery is about getting service users on board with the neoliberal agenda. The uncovered frames can be seen as reproducing dominant discourses and sustaining the interests of institutional actors (van Dijk, 1995).

ABSTRACT. In the UK between 1997 and 2010, the New Labour discourse of social and emotional wellbeing (SEWB) in schools emerged, as part of a broader mental health difficulties (MHD) agenda, which shaped and created versions of childhood located in notions of neoliberal self-regulation and surveillance (Klein, 2016). My doctoral findings, presented through the frame of critical discourse analysis (CDA), illuminated the influence of national traditions and cross-societal inequities on the conceptualisation and discourse driving mental health difficulties (MHDS) in England and Wales. This research builds on my doctoral study and recent papers (BERA, 2017) investigation how the MHD discourse circulates power and defines subject framing and positioning, resulting in the normalising and pathologising of who it is possible to be, and what it is possible to do, within the present English MHD frame. In England starting under the Coalition government and continuing under the current Conservative administration, there are clear inconsistencies and confusion about what is meant by mental health difficulties in the school policy arena. This paper explores what is at stake in such inconsistencies and offer reasons why a perceived MHD crisis (The Guardian, October 3rd, 2016) has occurred. Addressing how and why a MHD crisis has emerged in the public sphere, including the role of the media, and why this crisis has become the responsibility of schools, brings into focus the ways discourses of MHDs shape policy and practice. Through a CDA approach this study interrogates the forms of provision that are being encouraged and privileged and illustrates the power and ideologies, driven by discursive practices, shaping the relationship between schools, the state and the public.

ABSTRACT. Chair: Chris Hart Journal Liaison Officer: Charlotte Taylor Incoming Conference Liaison Officer: Lise-Lotte Holmgreen Outgoing Conference Liaison Officer: Marco Venuti Web Editor: Chris Hart Regular Member: Laura Flardo Llamas Regular Member: Bertie Kaal Regular Member: Majid KhosraviNik Regular Member: John Richardson

Not present at the conference: Regular Member: Claudia Ortu PhD Student Representative: Angela Zottola

ABSTRACT. This contribution deals with the English Wikipedia’s treatment of ‘Brexit’. It examines versions of the article on Brexit from dates that mark spikes in public attention to this particular article , and also investigates the associated talk page (TP) and the so-called ‘reference desk’ (RD), which allows Wikipedia users to consult the community for information on any topic (Wikipedia:Reference desk 2017). The Wikipedia TP constitutes an insightful repository of data since it provides a globally-accessible platform that allows private individuals from various backgrounds to debate and grapple with Brexit. The RD complements this by shedding light on which aspects of Brexit have sparked requests for additional information and how the Wikipedia community has addressed these. Thus, the TP and RD entries relating to Brexit are subjected to in-depth corpus-assisted qualitative analysis (cf. e.g. Partington 2010; Baker 2013; McEnery et al. 2010), whereas article examination is limited to observing differences between versions with considerable view count. Preliminary findings indicate that the Wikipedia community heatedly debates reasons for the Brexit vote with focus on what role xenophobic sentiments might have played, potential consequences of Brexit and the meaning of hard versus soft Brexit.

ABSTRACT. We analyze the citizens’ reactions to Brexit on social media after the referendum results by performing a quali-quantitative content analysis of 7578 multimodal #Brexit tweets collected from Twitter between June 24 and July 23 2016. Our research aims to answer the two following questions: What multimodal practices are adopted by citizens when they react to societal events like Brexit on social media? To what extent do such practices illustrate types of citizenship that are specific to social networks? Our hypothesis is that our corpus particularly illustrates: 1. Affective citizenship through affect-loaded tweets, in which declarative and emotional content prevails over deliberative content (Papacharissi 2010) 2. Personalized citizenship through tweets that place personal experience at the forefront (Highfield 2016, Mortensen 2011) 3. Cultural citizenship through tweets that enhance a “cultural public sphere” (Burgess et al. 2006) by paying a premium for artistic creativity (through aesthetic renderings) or for humorous creativity (by sharing user-generated content).

Inspired by Halliday’s ideational and interactional functions of language, we focus on the types of visual content the citizens used to react to Brexit, as well as on the types of interaction between Twitter members these #Brexit tweets enhance, in order to see to what extent we can find markers of these three forms of citizenship in our corpus.

ABSTRACT. The 2016 British EU referendum showed a notable division between liberalism and populism. We analyse examples of vox pops, i.e. short interviews in public space, from British voters in the run-up to the referendum. Specifically, we ask what topics and motivations are made relevant by people voting for leaving the EU and what linguistic features are used. After reviewing some of the literature on the genre of vox pops (Feng 2017), the discourse of right-wing populism (Wodak 2015) and voting motivations (Kemmers 2016), we present an analysis of 14 videos from around the UK, featuring topics such as immigration, international politics and the economy. We show how these topics are reinforced by social actor representation and appraisal, in that voters construct an out-group of politicians and migrants and present them as morally inferior. Finally, we analyse gesture, prosody and paralinguistic features to understand voters’ emotions when talking about their motivations. We then interpret these findings in terms of individual and collective identities, understood as socio-cognitive representations To conclude, we discuss what our findings suggest about support for right-wing populist politics in the UK.

References Feng, D. (2017): Representing ordinary people: experiential interview fragments in CCTV news. Text & Talk 37(2): 165–188. Kemmer, R. (2016): Channeling discontent? Nonvoters, populist party voters, and their affective political agency. Paper presented at the ECPR General Conference, Prague/Czech Republic. Wodak, R. (2015): The Politics of Fear: what right-wing populist discourses mean. London: Sage.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents a study of a contemporary digital site that has relevance for many UK families: the online discussion forum for parents, Mumsnet Talk. It identifies and examines three competing and interrelated discourses of gendered parenthood from a small corpus of 50 threads posted to this forum between April and September 2014, comprising a total of 185,157 words. Analysis of this corpus is both quantitative, utilising a corpus-assisted approach, and qualitative, drawing on theories of positioning (Davies and Harré 1990), stance and evaluation (Du Bois 2007). The analysis is unified by the theoretical foundations of feminist poststructuralist theory (Baxter 2003; Weedon 1997).

Analysis of the Mumsnet corpus reveals that two interrelated discourses of gendered parenthood: ‘absent fathers’ and ‘mother as main parent’, permeate contributors’ interactions (Author forthcoming). I show that these discourses work to reinforce one another, with the exclusion of fathers from parenting roles working to position mothers as the main, if not sole, carers for their children. These discourses work to restrict Mumsnet users’ access to a range of subject positions, positioning them as ‘default’ parents, even where they try to resist being positioned in this way. However, I also show that Mumsnet Talk users do challenge and resist these dominant discourses of gendered parenthood, by taking up emergent and competing discourses such as ‘equal parenting’, which are less reliant on traditional gender roles.

ABSTRACT. The answers to the question “Am I a ‘good’ mother?” are rarely straightforward as they often go beyond individual identities and are intertwined with various factors such as the pervasive roles of social media in many new mothers’ lives. This research aims to explore how new Malaysian mothers relate to prevalent discourses of (good) motherhood when constructing their identities in research interviews and two most widely used social media platforms in Malaysia, i.e. Facebook and Instagram.

This qualitative study draws on Baxter’s (2008) Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis (FPDA) approach and Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) five sociocultural linguistic principles of identity construction. About 2500 motherhood-related Facebook and/or Instagram posts of nineteen Malaysian women who had children under five years were collected and selectively analysed to complement the main data obtained from their individual interviews. The posts collected are multimodal in nature, with a mix of written (e.g. caption typed out) and audio-visual aspects as well as features that are unique to social media (e.g. hashtags, external shared links). The participants are all Malaysians who reside in Malaysia during data collection period and they largely fall into three career-role categories: stay-at-home (seven participants), work-at-home (five participants) or working mothers (seven participants).

Initial findings show that there is incongruence between the participants’ ideas about a ‘good’ mother and their own reported mothering practices in relation to dominant mother Discourses. The women’s accounts of ‘good’ mothering thus reflect their identity struggles in which they are orienting to and trying to combine sometimes opposing temporal, relational and sociocultural aspects and roles associated with being a ‘good’ mother. The multicultural settings of Malaysia further intensify these struggles as they often need to respond to wider sociocultural and religious ideologies and thus, arguably, higher expectations related to being a ‘good’ mother, in comparison to dominant European and/or American contexts. For example, some of the women’s reported ‘good’ mothering beliefs and practices reveal reinforcement, negotiation and rejection of the ideas that a ‘good’ Malaysian mother should prioritise her children, teach them religious values, Malaysian traditions, as well as modern values, be a ‘good’ wife and become financially independent.

ABSTRACT. One of the main criteria of being a “good mother” is evaluating motherhood as worthwhile (Donath, 2015, p. 201). Yet in recent years there has been increased debate regarding women who regret having had children and who question the “utilitarian rhetoric” of childbirth and parenting (Donath, 2015, p. 207). However, there is very little research into such counter-discourses of maternity and femininity or into how narratives of regret are constructed in online environments (Mundlos, 2015). This study adds to the understanding of counter-discourses of motherhood by examining narratives of mothers who express regret over having had children in discussions on mumsnet.com and quora.com. The study analyses sixteen threads on the sites (eight on each) from 2011 to 2017 across a transnational cross-section of posters. By combining a small stories framework (Georgakopoulou, 2015) and elements of critical discourse analysis (CDA), it examines how women attempt to deal with the “taboo” of regret in the context of motherhood and to create a sense of self between the binaries of good/bad mothers and agency/coercion. The study contributes to an appreciation of the diversity of experiences of motherhood and the emotions that accompany it – ranging from mourning for one’s previous life through guilt to acceptance. It sheds light on the power of hegemonic notions of femininity (Favara, 2015) and highlights some of the affordances of digitally mediated communication (DMC) as arenas in which women can “break the taboo” of maternal regret.

ABSTRACT. Many countries have adopted language laws for various reasons. In the Czech Republic, there were a few attempts to establish Czech as the state language, too. It never got through, but the parliamentary debates were highly interesting from the perspective of study of ideologies, especially nationalism. The aim of the study is to examine language ideologies employed when there is argument whether a language law should be introduced in Czech Chamber of Deputies. It intends to find out how is language conceptualized when being discussed by the politicians and what sets of beliefs, attitudes and normative propositions underlie them. Special attention is paid to the national(ist) aspect of argumentation, both covert and overt. The corpus collected for this purpose consists of ca. 30,000 words and contains the debates on language law proposals held in the Czech Chamber of Deputies from 1995 until 2017. The paper combines the corpus-based approach allowing to deal with larger sets of data and employ highly controlled procedures (inspired by the Lancaster approach; e.g. Baker 2006) with a rather traditional CDA approach benefiting from detailed and interpretative analyses of texts, taking the context into account (using mainly the tools of the discourse historical approach; e.g. Reisigl – Wodak 2009). It starts with keywords analysis compared with thematic concentration (Popescu – Altmann 2011) and continues with closer concordance analysis of the identified terms with regards to relevant context. The particular speakers’ utterances are compared with their alleged political-ideological position and real votes. The analysis shows a strong accent on the national aspect of Czech language, which is in compliance with previous surveys (Bermel 2007). What is of particular interest is how stable and widely spread they are. The analysis shows that it almost does not matter to what political orientation particular MP adheres to, be it left or right, liberal or conservative – while it is likely that he or she may hold a purist and nationalist stance towards language, the civic principle embodied in the Czech constitution is almost not heard.

ABSTRACT. The paper presents a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of policy papers regarding current approaches to teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in Israel. The English curriculum states that it is uniform at all schooling levels to both Jewish and Palestinian Arab learners and that the teaching of English must be approached from a global rather than an Anglo-centric perspective. Based on these statements, EFL discourse might potentially function as an arena for effecting social change while constructing a more egalitarian, inclusive, and representative educational reality. However, a CDA of the national English curriculum, an official document entitled 'Teaching English in Israeli Schools', and Director General Circulars from the Inspectorate's desk points out numerous inconsistencies between stated EFL policies and their implemented practices. For one, stating that the English curriculum is uniform for both Hebrew and Arabic speakers contradicts actual practices of consistent marginalization and absence of the Arabic speakers prevalent in EFL discourse (Awayed-Bishara, 2015). Furthermore, despite acknowledging the new globalized status of English and the need to situate the teaching of English in a global rather than an Anglo-centric framework, analysis shows a systematic tendency towards constructing the Anglo-centric native speaker of English as superior and as the ultimate professional English teacher, thus reinforcing hegemonic ideologies of native speakers' supremacy. By the same token, through a systematic use of Jewish-Zionist concepts, national symbols, and values, such policies construct the EFL context in Israel as exclusively Jewish, thus reinforcing the exclusion of the Palestinian Arab minority from the EFL educational context. This paper also offers an 'ecological' (Gavrily-Nuri, 2016) approach to English pedagogy in Israel that prioritizes narratives emphasizing universal values, human rights, respect, and acceptance of the Other. For such pedagogy, cultural differences are considered the source – rather than the problem – for presenting the Other while teaching English as a global/international language.

References:

Awayed-Bishara, M. (2015). Analyzing the cultural content of materials used for the teaching of English to high school speakers of Arabic in Israel. Discourse & Society, 1-26. Gavriely-Nuri, D. (2016). Israeli Peace Discourse, A Cultural Approach to CDA. John Benjamins: Amsterdam/ Philadelphia.

ABSTRACT. Currently, Taiwan has 16 officially recognised Indigenous 'nationalities', and each has its unique language. However, even with a great deal of legislation currently aimed at revitalising these languages, Taiwan is struggling to keep these languages alive. Using critical discourse studies (CDS), this study investigates how ideology and societal power imbalances are related to Indigenous language revitalisation policies in Taiwan. CDS is used in the present study as means to examine the efficacy of Taiwanese Indigenous language revitalisation policy discourse. Unlike conventional research in Taiwan that looks at resources for language revitalisation, I investigate the impact of dominant versus dominated ideology and how this may have influenced language revitalisation. To examine the potentially diverging ideologies, two sets of data must, therefore, be selected: policy documents and Indigenous participants’ interviews. This paper follows Fairclough’s dialectical-relational approach to CDS. The analysis involves examination of the linguistic features such as choice of terms for groups as well as discourse strategies such as presupposition in the laws and regulations relating to Indigenous language. Intertextual connections between texts are also analysed to investigate how social cohesion is achieved. In addition to the textual data, interviews with Indigenous people are used to inform CDS approach. This study seeks to uncover how ideology emerges from discourse such as Taiwan’s Indigenous language policy and the potential conflict between Indigenous ideology and government ideology. This study also demonstrates how CDS can be a useful tool to investigate language policy and its impact on Indigenous language revitalisation.

ABSTRACT. Taking as its premise the ethical responsibility of the educator towards diversity, both in students and the materiality of their knowledge production practices, this paper examines four surfaces of emergence of academic writing governmentality. These are characterised as different ‘styles’ of knowledge production: Style 1 (canonic, Western rationalist governmentality); Style 2 (bureaucratic, product-control governmentality); Style 3 (transformative, academic literacy governmentality); and Style 4 (poststructural and deconstructive governmentality). Drawing on Foucault’s genealogical approach (1984), and a small ‘archive’ of literature and texts that regulate and/or problematise these four knowledge territories, I examine ways these complementary and competing disciplinary technologies orient us and our students differently in the ‘constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects’ (Foucault 1984:43), in both our educational and writing practices. Specific points of interest are the historically contingent ways they constitute the agency of the (student) writing and learning subject, and the extent to which they acknowledge rupture and continuity as inherent to knowledge production. The findings of the study are intended to make more explicit the hegemonic rhetorical landscapes, which call us all to order in our everyday practices. They are also used to argue that Style 4 affords small possibilities of keeping power in play within the university’s ‘matrix of calculabilities’ (Ball & Olmedo 2012:103).

References Ball, S. & Olmedo, A. (2012) Care of the self, resistance and subjectivity under neoliberal governmentalities. Critical Studies in Education. 54(1), 85-96 Foucault, M. (1984) What is Enlightenment?. In: Rabinow, P. (ed.) The Foucault Reader. London: Penguin

ABSTRACT. Higher education is experiencing profound changes. In the UK, policy reforms have addressed the structure, funding and even purpose of higher education (see e.g. Molesworth et al., 2011). Research into the discourses of a marketised higher education sector has examined a variety of documents and sites (e.g. Fairclough, 1993; Zhang & O’Halloran, 2013). Wodak and Fairclough (2010) have traced the recontextualisation of European policy in national policy and institutions. There has, perhaps, been less focus on pedagogy. Using Bernstein’s (1990) notion of recontextualisation to explore the influences on pedagogic practice, I examine the relationship between policy and practices in one institution. Using a conception of context and analytical tools from the discourse-historical approach (DHA) (Reisigl and Wodak, 2015), I investigate intertextuality and interdiscursivity between texts in different fields of action. To explore accounts of practice, I use interviews with students and staff thus seeking a complementary approach to analysis of documents (Krzyżanowski, 2011). Analysis of national policy documents on learning & teaching reveals the discursive construction of the higher education community with a wide range of social actors including academic developers. These appear to be a bridge between learning & teaching policies and lecturers’ practices. An earlier discussion by Trowler (2004) considered the potential impact of so-called academic development units (ADUs) in disseminating policy and their ability to influence practices in universities. Given the renewed focus on teaching with the introduction of the TEF (Teaching Excellence Framework), academic developers and the discursive practices in which they are engaged are becoming prominent. I examine the discursive strategies used to legitimate particular approaches to learning, teaching and assessment and consider how lecturers and students respond to these.

ABSTRACT. There is a widespread imperative to be “creative” today, and digital technologies are widely assumed to support creative thinking and practices. This paper has two goals: First, in Part 1, to draw on discourse theory, software studies and corpus linguistic tools to analyze how “creativity” is construed in policy discourse and encoded in digital technologies. Second, in Part 2, to draw on this specific analysis to rethink the relation of “critical” to “positive” discourse analysis. In Part 1, the analysis focuses on educational technology (“edtech”) as an eminently political case study for creativity. It presents a brief genealogy of the concept, illustrating how the “creativity dispositif” (McRobbie, Reckwitz) emerged. It then analyzes policy on the Digital Agenda across Europe (i.e. European policy and approx. 15 national policies). Findings suggest that creativity is often associated with new educational technologies. However, the term remains “empty” (Laclau): its affective component is not articulated with concrete issues. Part 1 also analyzes 50 learning apps that foster creativity. Most apps invite students to enthusiastically develop aesthetic projects on fun topics. Overall, the analysis suggests that in policy and technology, pedagogies of creativity have been tamed, neutralized and made “productive”, where productivity refers both to making aesthetic projects and to being successful in a global market economy. However, analysis also identifies a small number of digital tools in which creativity is untamed and made “generative”, where generativity refers both to making aesthetic projects and to formulating a “generative critique” – akin to, yet different from, positive discourse analysis (PDA) – of social inequity. Part 2 uses this analysis to reflect on recent discussions on PDA, which locate PDA “alongside” CDA. It situates generative critique as a mode of analysis which embeds PDA more firmly “within”, rather than alongside, CDA.

ABSTRACT. In the context of an ongoing debate about antibiotic-resistant MRSA, this paper focuses on how action-regulating genres on MRSA-prevention in Denmark construe risks of contamination and stigmatization, paying particular attention to the discursive construal of power relations among patients, health professionals and authorities at the interpersonal text level. Analytically, I approach this though CDA (Fairclough 2003; 2014), genre analysis (Fairclough 2003; Miller 1984) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). In recent years, the debate about antibiotic resistance has oscillated between politicians and various interest groups in Denmark and abroad, and although there is consensus that antibiotic resistance should be avoided, there is still disagreement about the extent to which agricultural consumption of antibiotics should be reduced. Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) is a type of staphylococci that is resistant to a variety of antibiotics, which has so far been the standard treatment of staphylococci infections. A particular type of the antibiotics resistant bacterium is known as livestock MRSA and may be transmitted from animals to human beings. MRSA-infections may be acquired in hospitals as well as in communities, as boundaries between the public and private domains are becoming increasingly fuzzy. This situation has caused increased fear of a spread and chronic illness, and may potentially lead to stigmatization of and by health professionals, patients and relatives. In order to counteract the spread of MRSA to humans, the Danish National Institute for Health Data and Disease Control (Statens Serum Institut) has published a number of infectious hygiene precaution genres. These genres can be attributed to what Miller (2017: 23) categorizes as 'administered genres' that occur in situations where an institutional authority wishes to act as an action-regulating body. These include guidelines, and procedures aimed at educating citizens and health professionals in precautionary measures for preventing MRSA and will be used as data in this study. The genres may be seen as a social practice (Fairclough 1995; 2003; 2015)) that construes previous genres and orchestrates future action interdiscursively and intertextually.

ABSTRACT. Social media platforms such as Twitter have become important sources of awareness raising by patient advocacy organisations who promote acts of public self-disclosure as one of the key strategies to achieve visibility. By disclosing individual experiences and identities, even people who do not directly participate in the social movement are able to declare their allegiance to it and in this way challenge dominant representations of their group (Wodak and Meyer, 2009) within their circles. The paper examines the discursive practices of mental health advocacy by Twitter users during Depression Awareness Week in 2016. We focus on 438 tweets using one of the most popular hashtags - #WhatYouDontSee - promoted by the UK charity ‘Blurt’ with the aim to reduce the stigma around the ‘invisible illness’ by giving people the opportunity to reveal the realities of living with depression. Drawing on pragmatic approaches to narrative (Georgakopoulou, 2016; Page, 2017) and positioning theory (Harre, 2012) we analyse how Twitter users create different positions for themselves and their audiences (e.g. agents or victims), pursue the discursive goal of protest, and invite alignment with the moral stances of ‘witnesses’ and ‘judges’. Broadening the analytic framework of narrative analysis to include multiple semiotic resources available in the social media environment we demonstrate how such positions are achieved via the combination of verbal and visual resources (including selfies), as well as via the use of metadata such as hashtags and hyperlinks. Results reveal how the interplay between the platform’s digital affordances and users’ content choices shape these practices of public self-disclosure, expression of solidarity, and pursuit of visibility. Emphasising the important role of metadata and visuals in such mediated performances of advocacy, we argue that approaching social media posts as multi-semiotic compositions allows us to better understand the uses of digital narratives by groups that campaign for social change.

ABSTRACT. Research in Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is abundant in both scientific and social disciplines, but discourses surrounding ADHD remain understudied in the linguistics field. The study examines how ADHD and individuals with the diagnosis are portrayed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V; APA, 2013), the psychiatric publication with a major social impact.

The analysis brings together the traditional SFL transitivity framework (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) and the Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005), the extension of SFL that examines the discourse semantics. The appraisal framework distinguishes three aspects in the expression of evaluation, i.e. Graduation, Attitude and Engagement. The study demonstrates the three elements are interdependent and interact with the transitivity resources in the linguistic generation of representations and attitudinal stances, two constitutive factors of comprehension.

Graduation is evidenced as both an Attitude modifier and builder. The examination of Graduation shows ADHD symptoms ultimately understand human behaviour as gradable. Graduations of the Quantification type (e.g. “in excess”) evoke Appreciation attitudinal evaluations of the symptomatic manifestations described. The Judgement attitude type is presented in an implicit form, occasionally derived from the Appreciations. The two attitude types are based upon different conceptions of behaviour: Appreciation regards behaviour as a generalizable object of study (i.e. as symptom); Judgement is concerned with behaviour as a conduct performed by a particular social subject. Judgements regarding the capability of the individual are mostly attributed to behavioural manifestations of Inattention, and Judgements of social sanction to manifestations of Hyperactivity and Impulsivity. The conceptualization of human behaviour as scalable promotes an understanding of pathological conduct in terms of prototypicality. The assessment of particular conducts in comparison to those assumed as prototypical entails an evaluation of Judgement of Normality attitudinal type, which underlies all accounts of symptomatic behaviours.

The general implicitness of Attitude is attributed to the genre of the text. Despite the implicitness, attitudinal evaluations are hypothesized to have a relevant impact on both professional and lay understandings of the ADHD core symptoms (i.e. inattention. hyperactivity and impulsivity).

ABSTRACT. Social media sites such as Facebook have emerged in the last few years as an important arena for public discourse. Following recent political events – the Brexit vote in the UK and Trump’s victory in the US – concern has been voiced in the traditional media about polarisation and the spread of misinformation on Facebook. The problem, as currently framed in the media, is that Facebook’s personalisation algorithm selectively predicts the information that users will find of most interest based on data about each individual and that this creates a form of online isolation from a diversity of opinions, which enables fake news to go unchallenged. What such technologically deterministic discourses ignore, however, is how users choose to engage with content on Facebook, choices which have as much to do with maintaining or negotiating relationships and the construction of online identity as they do with concerns about ‘truth’; in other words, that there is a social as much as an epistemic element to the creation of Facebook as a space for public discourse.

In this talk, I draw on a research project carried out with Philip Seargeant called Creating Facebook to critically analyse how users’ awareness of Facebook as a social space shapes the decisions they make in sharing and evaluating news stories. Building on concepts from media studies such as ‘context collapse’, we argue that while algorithms are certainly an important element in the spread of false news, of equal importance is how people fashion their experience of Facebook as a communicative space through their actions, and how, in effect, they contribute to the construction of these opinion-ghettos themselves. Given the increasingly central role of social media in political debate, our study highlights important considerations for a critical and interdisciplinary understanding of public discourse in the twenty-first century.