Dimitris Serafis

University of Groningen | RUG · Department of Communication and Information Sciences

Drawing upon the notion of hate speech—and soft hate speech, more specifically—this chapter aims to bring to light the discursive strategies that constituted Golden Dawn (GD)’s cultures of violence in their public appearances and justified hatred against the perceived “Other” (such as the migrant worker and leftist/communist trade unionist “Other”)...

This article extends to the study of populist argumentation a framework for the analysis of inferences implicitly emerging from multimodal artifacts. The framework builds on a post-structuralist approach to populism and integrates multimodal critical discourse studies and argumentation studies, specifically the Argumentum Model of Topics. Particula...

The ongoing migration ‘crisis’ in European countries (2015 to date) has fostered different stances and practices within European nation-states, ranging from xenophobia to solidarity. In this context, two contradictory discourses seem to coexist: the national racist discourse and the humanitarian, antiracist one. This volume brings together studies...

In this paper, we analyze the front pages of mainstream Greek newspapers with the highest circulation reporting the official result of the Brexit referendum in 2016. Our analysis seeks to extract the standpoints and arguments that circulated in the Greek mainstream press on that day by studying the headlines and visuals on the front page. We study...

The chapter reviews the extent to which contemporary Greek scholarship in humanities and social sciences makes use of rhetorical categories as relevant descriptive and analytical tools. It proposes revisiting two classical rhetorical concepts, namely topoi and endoxa, in order to illustrate their descriptive and explanatory potential for the analys...

Social Media and Society brings together a range of scholars working at the intersection of discourse studies, digital media, and society. It is meant to respond to changes in discourse technologies, i.e. the techno-discursive dynamic of social media discourses. The book critically engages with the digital dynamics of representations around discour...

This volume offers a critical discursive-argumentative framework that scrutinizes the discursive construction and, moreover, the argumentative justification of authoritarian attitudes on newspaper front pages in highly polarized times of multiple ‘crises’ in Greece. At the same time, it aspires to outline novel research avenues for scholars working...

This paper aims to study the argumentative basis on which the prevention of migration is justified and hatred politics is institutionalised in three Mediterranean settings, namely Greece, Malta, and Italy, that were at the centre of the so-called 'refugee crisis' in 2015-2017. Following the rubric of corpus-assisted Discourse-Historical Approach (D...

Since 2015, the mobilization of refugee and migrant populations towards the European Union has at times monopolised public debate, and the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ has put fundamental European values, such as solidarity, to the test. In this article, the authors focus on Greece with the aim of examining the extent to which manifestations of discr...

News consumers are more likely to inform themselves through digital news outlets and social media ‘newsfeeds’ than physical newspapers [Ofcom. (2022). News Consumption in the UK: 2022. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/241947/News-Consumption-in-the-UK-2022-report.pdf]. Guided by our thumbs, we scroll through news outlets’ homepa...

This article sets out to outline a methodological framework that enables us to unravel the underlying reasoning of covert hatred (i.e. soft hate speech), through an examination of the ways in which this is realised and, moreover, argumentatively justified in multimodal artefacts of the mainstream press. It focuses on a controversial case study – th...

This paper examines the discursive construction of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern after she wore a veil following the unprecedented terror attack in two mosques in the city of Christchurch in 2019. The articles analyzed are collected from three main newspapers published in New Zealand’s three main cities. Analyzed using principles and tools from Cri...

This chapter intends to provide an argumentative perspective on the justification of securitization by Southern EU’s political leaders in times of a public health crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic by examining instances of public discourses, specifically addresses to the nation of four EU leaders with different ideological positioning, in different...

This paper examines the reasoning lines in PM Alexis Tsipras’ political discourse in critical moments of SYRIZA’s tenure as the ruling party in Greece. Adopting a CDS perspective, we zoom in on the patterns that underlie the (de)legitimization of the crisis-ridden EU in three seminal speeches by PM Tsipras during the Greek/EU financial crisis. To t...

While these lines were written, Taliban were conquering Afghanistan, establishing a regime of terror in the country, while concurrently provoking a wide conflict in the Western public sphere about responsibilities and consequences of this situation. More specifically, Europe witnesses a racist and xenophobic wave of discourses against a new possibl...

The present paper analyses discursive representations and standpoint-arguments pairs, realized in articles of four mainstream Italian newspapers that report on migrants’ and refugees’ mobilization at the perceived peak of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ (2015–2017). We draw on the scholarly agenda of Critical Discourse Studies, employing tools from...

This paper sketches a methodological integration of tools from multimodal discourse analysis and argumentation in order to unveil opaque argumentative inferences emerging in multimodal configurations (i.e., headlines and press photos) of seemingly non-argumentative genres such as news articles. We offer illustrative examples from the Italian mainst...

In her book European identity and the representation of Islam in the mainstream press: Argumentation and media discourse, Salomi Boukala offers us a thoroughly interdisciplinary and extremely timely scrutiny of print media communication in times of profound crises in Europe. Boukala interweaves Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Argumentation th...

The article examines two key-speeches given by Greek PMs, at crucial junctures of the Greek crisis, both aiming to legitimize austerity programs to the Greek population. The speeches by Papandreou (Socialists) and Tsipras (Radical Left) represent critical moments of the crisis as the two PMs prepared to annul their pre-election promises for a cessa...

The present paper examines how discursive representations and emotive constructions underpin an argumentative dynamic that emerges from apparently non-argumentative statements, like those found in newspaper headlines. Our data comes from Greek broadsheet newspapers in the polarized context of the Greek crisis. First, we outline an analytic synergy...

This paper proposes a methodological synthesis in order to study multimodal media discourse and argumentation in the context of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece. It follows the framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, integrating this with argumentation studies, with a particular emphasis on the analysis of inference. Our data c...

This article examines the way that collective identity was discursively constructed during the anti-austerity protests of 28 and 29 June 2011 on the environs of the Greek Parliament. Drawing on the framework of critical discourse analysis, we study the interrelation between macro-level (dominant) values and views, and micro-level individual positio...

This paper examines media discourse and emotions in discourse (pathos) during the week before the Greek Referendum of 2015. Drawing on the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, we study the interrelation between macro-level (dominant) values and views, and the micro-level of media positioning, as retrieved from newspaper headlines. The headline...