No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
“Who Wants to Sterilise the Sinhalese?” A Discourse-Historical Analysis of Extreme Speech Online in Post-War Sri Lanka
Abstract
During 1983–2009, Sri Lanka lived a bloody civil war that left more than 100,000 casualties. Far from being peaceful, the long-awaited post-war phase has witnessed several periodic episodes of violence between some of the different ethnoreligious groups in the island. This chapter analyses the comments made on YouTube videos on the attacks on Sri Lankan Muslims in Ampara and Kandy’s districts in 2018. Applying the Discourse-Historical approach as the main theoretical framework and, precisely the argumentation strategy of topoi (Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage, 2015), I explore how linguistic structures of online extreme speech embody and shape stereotypes of the targeted Muslim minority, hinder the process of reconciliation and contribute to deepening the ethnic and religious division in the country.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Los pueblos indígenas amazónicos del Perú mantienen una relación con el poder político que está y ha estado marcada por tensiones y conflictos a lo largo del tiempo. Estos conflictos tienen sus raíces en el proceso de colonización y están sostenidos, en parte, por la creencia de que los pueblos amazónicos y los territorios que habitan son “salvajes” y necesitan ser “civilizados”. Esta creencia forma parte de un aparato ideológico fundamentalmente racista que justifica la empresa colonizadora de la que son objeto estos pueblos. Esta ideología racista tiene una base cultural en la medida en que vincula la “raza” (el fenotipo) con la “cultura”, entendida esta última como un conjunto de factores sociales entre los que se encuentran la educación, la lengua, las costumbres, la ocupación y la procedencia.
Al respecto, este estudio se propone demostrar que la prensa escrita peruana juega un rol muy importante en la legitimación de esta ideología racista con base cultural. En su discurso, la prensa peruana utiliza una serie de estrategias discursivas que, en su conjunto, construyen una representación negativa de los pueblos amazónicos que los sitúa como “salvajes” y “bravos”, es decir, como los Otros racial y culturalmente inferiores al Nosotros que, en este caso, son la prensa, el Gobierno y el ciudadano peruano de costumbres occidentales. Para demostrar esto, se han analizado, desde la perspectiva del Análisis Crítico del Discurso (ACD), las noticias aparecidas en tres importantes diarios peruanos que han abordado la cobertura de un conflicto ocurrido en el año 2008 entre el Gobierno peruano y algunos pueblos de la Amazonía peruana.
Palabras clave: pueblos amazónicos, racismo cultural, prensa peruana, análisis de estrategias discursivas.
With the rise of hate speech phenomena in the Twittersphere, significant research efforts have been undertaken in order to provide automatic solutions for detecting hate speech, varying from simple machine learning models to more complex deep neural network models. Despite this, research works investigating hate speech problem in Arabic are still limited. This paper, therefore, aimed to investigate several neural network models based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) to detect hate speech in Arabic tweets. It also evaluated the recent language representation model bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) on the task of Arabic hate speech detection. To conduct our experiments, we firstly built a new hate speech dataset that contained 9316 annotated tweets. Then, we conducted a set of experiments on two datasets to evaluate four models: CNN, gated recurrent units (GRU), CNN + GRU, and BERT. Our experimental results in our dataset and an out-domain dataset showed that the CNN model gave the best performance, with an F1-score of 0.79 and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.89.
[Published simultaneously in Arabic in Qadaya Israelia 78 (Madar Centre, Ramallah); Arabic version is also uploaded here]
The IHRA definition is one of the most contentious documents in the history of efforts to combat antisemitism. Although it first became well known in the UK as a result of disputes within the Labour Party, the definition reaches well beyond that context, and has been adopted by universities, city councils, and governments. With its intensive focus on the critique of Israel as a marker of antisemitism, the IHRA definition has been heavily implicated in the suppression of Israel‐critical speech in recent years. This article is among the first to adopt a global perspective on the definition—both its history and its content—clarifying the political stakes of this definition and broader paratextual apparatus for a general audience, and provides an explanation of why it should be rejected rather than used to censor Israel‐critical speech.
The study adopts approaches in linguistics and critical discourse analysis to interpret media speeches and public statements of the Biafra secessionist movement leader, Nnamdi Kanu, as hate speech. The study shows that hate speech in discourses produced by the separatist Indigenous People of Biafra appears as language aggression, such as insults and verbal attacks, as well as threats. Discourse structures such as the use of interrogation and metaphor also appear in the hate narratives. Compared with the Rwandan case, the study argues that hate speech could result in similar incitement and violence. While hate speech caused genocide in Rwanda, it did not work in Nigeria, largely because of the division among the Biafra campaigners and the Igbo political elite about the Biafra independence campaign.
Ethno-religious violence has a long history in Sri Lanka dating far back as 1883.
The Muslims of Sri Lanka have been victims of sporadic attacks by the
Sinhalese and Tamil majorities since the early 1900s with the most recent
attack being in 2014. While the recent turn towards violence against the Muslim
community in Sri Lanka can be attributed to the “ethno-nationalist rivalries”
(McGilvray 2011) of the Sinhala Buddhist (political) majority of Sri Lanka, this
paper hypothesises that anti-Muslim sentiments are also a result of the
internal conflicts regarding the practice of Islam within the Muslim community.
These conflicts, manifested in the form of visible, symbolic Islamisation, cause
suspicion and fear among members of other communities.
This chapter contributes to the study of stance in political discourse by demonstrating how implicatures-as implicit aspects of meaning inferable from a given utterance-can be publicly targeted as the object of a stance act to promote one's own political stance. Focusing on the institutional context of political debate, it identifies different ways in which the 2016 US presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, used and manipulated implicatures to affiliate or disaffiliate themselves with the stance of their opponent, in turn promoting their own stance as legitimate. By adding implicatures to our arsenal of explanatory tools for the study of stance, this chapter provides a new insight into the interactional role that implicatures play as a discursive tool, demonstrating how the multiplicity of meanings that are implicit yet inferable from a single utterance can be used in communicatively deviant ways to discredit the views of another, while drawing attention to and supporting one's own personal and political motives.
This study adopts a discourse analytical approach to examine the contested identity of the Igbos of the southeast of Nigeria. It analyses the significance of the social and political discourses in the media and the Internet about their claim to the Jewish ancestry and as “Biafrans” rather than Nigerians. The study highlights the implications of these claims and their larger political implications for Nigeria. The study also shows that ideological construction of group identity by IPOB consistently portrays them as the victim and the marginalized. And their claim to Jewish ancestry is possibly a way of seeking foreign support.
Este artículo relaciona investigaciones interesadas en la retórica del conflicto armado colombiano. Tales indagaciones plantean problemas de investigación alrededor del carácter persuasivo de los discursos del conflicto, desde disciplinas diversas. La consulta bibliográfica de base se complementó con una encuesta electrónica autoadministrada, dirigida a investigadores colombianos del discurso. En los resultados, se explican las principales problematizaciones que emergen de la revisión, presentándolas como aproximaciones retóricas que los autores trabajan con una mayor orientación hacia el ethos, el pathos o el logos. Una mirada relacional entre estos trabajos esclarece las tendencias investigativas sobre la violencia en clave discursiva y apunta el valor de esas contribuciones para los estudios sobre el conflicto armado.
In the current media world, there is a huge debate about the importance of the visibility of a news website in order to secure its existence. Thus, search engine optimization (SEO) practices have emerged in the news media systems around the world. This study aimed to expand the current literature about the SEO practices by focusing on examining, via the walkthrough method, the ways that news companies allow the users to comment on their online news articles. The comments on the news websites are related to the notions of social influence, information diffusion, and play an essential role as a SEO practice, for instance, by providing content and engagement. The examined sample was collected by the most visited news websites’ rankings of alexa.com for a global scale and for the countries Greece and Cyprus. The findings reveal that the news websites throughout the globe use similar features and ways to support the comments of the users. In the meantime, though, a high number of the news websites did not allow the users to use their social media accounts in order to comment the provided news articles, or provided multiple comment platforms. This trend goes against the SEO practices. It is believed that this finding is associated with the difficulty of the news organizations to regulate and protect themselves by the users’ comments that promote, in some case harmful rhetoric and polarization.
Spain has become the second most popular destination in the world, and the city of Barcelona has experienced several incidents characterized by anti-tourism sentiment. One of them was the 'tourist go home' movement, which attracted interest throughout the world. In this study, quantitative and empirical approaches were used to collect and analyzed the sample. The analyses were conducted focusing on specific characteristics of YouTube videos. This research highlights the dynamic of a brand-new "anti-tourist" emotion and movement, which is linked to mass tourism and to renting platforms such as Airbnb. Additionally, the conducted study tried to analyze this new social phenomenon, paying simultaneous attention to the YouTube platform as a propaganda tool and the use of hate speech as a weapon against individuals. Subsequently, it is believed that the examined issue influences social media companies, social movements, the tourism industry, journalists, state, and non-state actors.
In this article, we introduce the Special Section on Extreme Speech and Global Digital Cultures by developing the concept of "extreme speech." In addressing the growing cultures of online vitriol and extremism, this concept advances a critical ethnographic sensibility to situated online speech cultures and a comparative global conversation that moves beyond the legal-normative debates that have been dominant in North America and Europe. We demonstrate this intervention by highlighting three interlinked arguments: Extreme speech inhabits a spectrum of practices rather than a binary opposition between acceptable and unacceptable speech; the sociotechnological aspects of new media embody a context in itself; and the violence of extreme speech acts is productive of identity in historically specific ways. This approach entails a methodological move that takes account of the meanings online users attach to vitriol as historical actors. It thus allows for critical frameworks to emerge from emic terms of action rather than moral concepts superimposed from the outside. Ethnographic explorations of extreme speech, we suggest, open up a new avenue to critique the contemporary global conjuncture of exclusionary politics.
By exploring lessons learned from Ethiopia and Finland, this article challenges two assumptions about online hate speech research. First, it challenges the assumption that the best way to understand controversial concepts such as online hate speech is to determine how closely they represent or mirror some underlying set of facts or state of affairs online or in social media. Second, it challenges the assumption that academic research should be seen as separate from the many controversies that surround online hate speech debates globally. In its place, the article proposes the theory of "commentary" as a comparative research framework aimed at explaining how the messy and complex world of online and social media practices is articulated as hate speech over other ways of imagining this growing problem in global digital media environments.
This article looks at extreme speech practices in Danish weblogs and Facebook comment threads that treat issues of refugees, migration, Islam, and opponents as a cultural war of values and conflict. The article highlights the ritualized ways in which anti-immigrant sentiments are being communicated, received, and responded to. Such recurrent ritualistic communicative patterns include the use of a distinct indignant tone, sarcasm, racialized reasoning, and the use of "high-fives," as well as a general indifference to facts. The article argues that these online speech patterns can best be understood as a form of "ritualized opposition" that relies on extremist, divisive use of language and a naturalization of racialized difference in its attempt to recruit and consolidate communities of support.
This study is concerned with Article 3 of the Greek Constitution and the relations between the State and the Church in Greece. The scientific views expressed regarding the Third Article of the Constitution were examined with emphasis on the public debate that developed around the interpretation of the terms ‘prevailing religion’ and ‘holy canons’. Moreover, the results of two studies carried out are presented in order to approach the issue from a journalistic perspective. The first research was conducted on websites to see how media are contributing to the debate on what Article 3 stipulates. The second research looked at how citizens directly related to journalism and communication perceive the stipulations of this Article. The results revealed how Article 3 of the Constitution is in question in its current form and how, in the future, it could be fairer to all Greek citizens via an open and multidimensional dialogue.
In this chapter, I will explore the mediation of neighbour and family conflicts through the lens of discursive psychology, focusing particularly on what interaction between mediators and their prospective clients (neighbours, parents) tells us about the nature of dispute and the efficacy of mediation. I will describe a research project, from its inception studying neighbour disputes to its culmination in training mediators to better engage prospective mediation clients. The chapter will start by locating this project in the wider fields of mediation, neighbour and family disputes, as well as discursive and interactional work on conflict in interaction. I will describe the collection of large-scale qualitative datasets, including telephone calls to mediation services, environmental health services, and police interviews with arrested suspects in neighbour and family conflict cases. These data were analysed using conversation analysis, in the discursive psychological tradition pioneered by Edwards (e.g. 2005) and Potter (e.g. Potter & Hepburn, 2007). I will show how mediators fail and succeed to attract potential clients to mediation depending on how mediation is explained, and how resistant clients may be persuaded to mediate. Finally, I describe how research findings about what works to engage clients has underpinned national and international mediation training, using the Conversation Analytic Role-play Method. In sum, the chapter will show how discursive psychological research can have big pay-offs in terms of the impact of its findings in real-life settings that matter for people in conflict.
Although ‘hate speech’ is often incorporated in legal and policy documents, there is no universally accepted definition, which in itself warrants research into how hatred is both expressed and perceived. The research project synthesises discourse analytic and corpus linguistics techniques, and presents its key findings here. The focus is especially on online comments posted in reaction to news items that could trigger discrimination, as well as on the folk perception of online hate speech as revealed through semi-structured interviews with young individuals across the various partner countries.
The communicative affordances of the participatory web have opened up new and multifarious channels for the proliferation of hate. In particular, women navigating the cybersphere seem to be the target of a disproportionate amount of hostility. This paper explores the contexts, approaches and conceptual synergies around research on online misogyny within the new communicative paradigm of social media communication (KhosraviNik 2017a: 582). The paper builds on the core principle that online misogyny is demonstrably and inherently a discourse; therefore, the field is envisaged at the intersection of digital media scholarship, discourse theorization and critical feminist explications. As an ever-burgeoning phenomenon, online hate has been approached from a range of disciplinary perspectives but has only been partially mapped at the interface of meaning making contents/processes and new mediation technologies. The paper aims to advance the state of the art by investigating online hate in general, and misogyny in particular, from the vantage point of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS); an emerging model of theorization and operationalization of research combining tenets from Critical Discourse Studies with scholarship in digital media and technology research (KhosraviNik 2014, 2017a, 2018). Our SM-CDS approach to online misogyny demarcates itself from insinuation whereby the phenomenon is reduced to digital communicative affordances per se and argues in favor of a double critical contextualization of research findings at both digital participatory as well as social and cultural levels.
Why do some former authoritarian elites return to power after democratization through re-election or re-appointment to political office, or by assuming board positions in state-owned or major private enterprises, whereas others do not and still others face punishment? This paper investigates this question using an original dataset on constitutional origins and the fate of the upper echelon of outgoing authoritarian elites across Latin America from 1900-2015. I find that authoritarian elites from outgoing regimes that impose a holdover constitution that sticks through democratization are more likely to regain political or economic power-especially through national positions where the potential payoffs are largest-and less likely to face severe or nominal punishment. I also find a positive role for political capital among former elites. These results are robust to alternative explanations of authoritarian elites' fate and using instrumental variables to address potential endogeneity. The findings have important implications for democratic consolidation and quality.
This paper provides an overview to conducting discourse analysis (DA) as used in Discursive Psychology. The purpose of this paper is to fill the gap left by there being a lack of useful accounts of how to conduct and write up this type of discourse analysis. It begins by outlining the discursive psychological approach and its claim that analysts should focus on what is accomplished in talk, rather than addressing what this talk may tell us about people's cognitions. Following this theoretical introduction there is a step by step guide to conducting discourse analysis. This eight-point guide covers 1) deciding on an appropriate question for discourse analysis, 2) picking appropriate data sources for analysis, 3) generating a corpus, 4) transcribing the data, 5) preliminary reading-searching for the action orientation, 6) generating results-discursive devices and rhetorical/interactional strategies, 7) building a case to support the findings, and finally, 8) report writing.
Reporting on research undertaken under the auspices of the C.O.N.T.A.C.T. project, the present paper investigates the roots of xenophobic and homophobic attitudes in Malta and the extent to which these can be pinpointed in the lexical choices made in discriminatory comments posted online in reaction to local news stories pertaining to migrants and members of the LGBTIQ community. Adopting Fairclough’s threedimensional framework (1995), we start off by presenting the values that underlie local discriminatory attitudes as social practice, as these were identified by the participants of four focus group interviews that were conducted at the University of Malta. In this respect, while xenophobia seems to be a far more pressing issue in Malta, homophobia, which is still also present, is taken to be predominantly triggered by deep-rooted religious beliefs and allegiance to heteronormative values. Then, when it comes to xenophobia, the main relevant trigger seems to be the perceived threat that the different collective background of a particular subset of migrants in Malta poses to the local culture. In an attempt to show that these values can also be discerned by examining even the most basic textual characteristics of a dataset comprising xenophobic and homophobic talk in the local context, we turn to identify them by looking at quantitative measures pertaining to lexical choice and metaphorical extension in the relevant parts of our corpus. In this way, we provide evidence for the fundamental – for Critical Discourse Analysis – claim that the textual analysis of a relevant dataset can indeed reveal the axiological framework that underlies the negative stance that the general population may have in relation to particular minorities, showcasing the relevance of discourse analytic methods for the broader understanding of discrimination and hate speech.
Propaganda, Media, and Nationalism in Mainland China and Hong Kong gives a clear and insightful introduction to the nature of media in China and Hong Kong and presents a conceptual discussion of propaganda. It presents two case studies of Chinese media control including the presentation of Taiwan, Xinjiang, and Tibet and the misrepresentation of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. This book also provides an important in-depth discussion of the battle between state propaganda and counter-propaganda in open societies, which can render them vulnerable to foreign governments, undermine civic society, and create dangerous polarization, as in the case of Hong Kong’s response to state media.
This book maps the discursive terrain and potential of person to person peacebuilding as it intersects with, and is embedded in, intercultural communication. It foregrounds the voices and discourses of participants who came together in the virtual intercultural borderlands of online exchange through a service-learning project with a non-profit organization which focused on peace through education in Afghanistan, primarily through English language tutoring. By analyzing the voices and perspectives of US-based tutors who are pre-service teachers of English as an Additional Language, in equal measure with the voices and perspectives of adult English learners in Afghanistan, the authors examine how intercultural interactants begin to work as peacebuilders. The participants describe the profound transformations they undergo throughout their intercultural tutoring journeys, transformations which evidence three dimensions of person to person peacebuilding: the personal, relational and structural. Inspired by these voices, the book further explores ways teachers and teacher educators of language and intercultural communication can more deliberately leverage the affordance of peacebuilding, whether face to face or in the virtual intercultural borderlands of online exchange.
In this article, I address the way in which extreme right populist actors in Belgium and the Netherlands have managed to mainstream their divisive and racist discourse. Processes of othering, the identification of a set of ideological enemies, fear mongering and a type of populism that articulates “the people” in a very exclusionary manner characterize this discourse. Even though journalists tend to be critical of the extreme right discourse, they are also to some extent complicit in amplifying the extreme right discourse and providing a platform for populist politicians using a politics of provocation. It is argued that public journalism tradition might be a productive resource to combat this mainstreaming of extreme right discourses and protect democratic values.
This chapter examines the role of dialogue in building connections across socio-cultural and ideological divides. Applying the lens of dialogue, it seeks to promote bridging social capital in an increasingly fragmented and polarized society. Social capital is often seen as the glue that holds societies together. The central idea of social capital is that social networks and relationships matter, and provide individuals and groups with useful and beneficial resources in two ways. Bonding social capital refers to horizontal ties between individuals within the same social group who are similar to each other. Bridging social capital refers to ties between individuals or social groups who are dissimilar and which cross socio-economic and cultural divides. For a stable and healthy society, both forms of social capital are needed, but especially bridging social capital is important for reconciling democracy and diversity. Moreover, social relationships with others have a positive impact on individuals’ well-being and life-satisfaction. This chapter explores the crossroads of two related, yet separated, areas of scholarship, namely social capital and dialogue studies. By reviewing their literatures and identifying areas where these disciplines might be brought together, it aims to demonstrate how dialogue can be used as a positive intervention to create bridging social capital. It will show how characteristics of dialogue foster the process of relationship building between people who are different. However, to successfully intervene in the formation of bridging social capital, it is crucial to consider the context in which it is built and maintained. Therefore, research needs to examine the purpose (why), the places (where), and the people (who) in the process (how) of building bridging social capital. As communication is crucial to cultivate relationships, this chapter asserts that creating bridging social capital is essentially a communicative accomplishment. The underlying long-term and challenging goal of building bridges through talk is to promote a more inclusive, empathetic, civil, and compassionate society.
Critical race theory (CRT) provides a highly generative perspective for studying racial phenomena in social, legal, and political life, but its integration with sociological theories of race has not been systematic. However, a group of sociologists has begun to show the relevance of CRT for driving empirical inquiry. This special issue (our first of two on the subject) shows the relevance of CRT for sociological theory and empirical research. In this introduction, we identify primary concerns of CRT and show their sociological utility. We argue that CRT better explains the long-standing continuity of racial inequality than theories grounded in the “progress paradigm,” as CRT shows how racism and White supremacy are reproduced through multiple changing mechanisms.
This Handbook maps the contours of an exciting and burgeoning interdisciplinary field concerned with the role of language and languages in situations of conflict. It explores conceptual approaches, sources of information that are available, and the institutions and actors that mediate language encounters. It examines case studies of the role that languages have played in specific conflicts, from colonial times through to the Middle East and Africa today. The contributors provide vibrant evidence to challenge the monolingual assumptions that have affected traditional views of war and conflict. They show that languages are woven into every aspect of the making of war and peace, and demonstrate how language shapes public policy and military strategy, setting frameworks and expectations. The Handbook's 22 chapters powerfully illustrate how the encounter between languages is integral to almost all conflicts, to every phase of military operations and to the lived experiences of those on the ground, who meet, work and fight with speakers of other languages. This comprehensive work will appeal to scholars from across the disciplines of linguistics, translation studies, history, and international relations; and provide fresh insights for a broad range of practitioners interested in understanding the role and implications of foreign languages in war.
Michael Kelly is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Southampton, UK.
Hilary Footitt is Senior Research Fellow in the University of Reading, UK.
Myriam Salama-Carr is Honorary Research Fellow in Translation and Interpreting at the University of Manchester, UK.
The diffusion and rapid evolution of new communication technologies has created a pressing need to understand the complex forces reshaping media and politics. Who is emerging as powerful in this new context? Written by a leading scholar in the field, this book provides a new, holistic interpretation of how political communication now works. In The Hybrid Media System Andrew Chadwick reveals how political communication is increasingly shaped by interactions among older and newer media logics. Organizations, groups, and individuals in this system are linked by complex and ever-evolving relationships based on adaptation and interdependence. Chadwick shows how power is exercised by those who create, tap, and steer information flows to suit their goals, and in ways that modify, enable, and disable the agency of others across and between a range of older and newer media settings. The [CE1][NN2]book examines a range of examples of this systemic hybridity in flow in political communication contexts ranging from news making in all of its contemporary “professional” and “amateur” forms, to parties and election campaigns, to activist movements and government communication. Compelling stories bring the theory to life. From American presidential campaigns to WikiLeaks, from live prime ministerial debates to hotly contested political scandals that evolve in real time, from historical precedents stretching back five hundred years to the author’s unique ethnographic data gathered from recent insider fieldwork among journalists, campaign workers, bloggers, and activist organizations, this wide-ranging book maps the emerging balance of power between older and newer media technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms.
Research has highlighted a strong association between far-right parties and populism, although this is often taken as concerning the softer radical right rather than fully fledged extremism. Further, there is limited analysis on how far-right parties in different countries employ populist rhetoric. In order to explore the relationship between the extreme right and populism, this article conceptualises and categorises the populism of the Greek GD (Χρυσή Αυγή—Golden Dawn), and that of its Cypriot sister party ELAM (Εθνικό Λαϊκό Μέτωπο—National Popular Front), on the basis of a content analysis of press releases. First, existing theses about the relationship between the far right and populism are qualified, illustrating how extreme right parties (including the most extreme among them) utilise populist rhetoric. Second, patterns and variations in populist rhetoric are identified between extreme right parties based on context.
This chapter provides an introduction to the volume, and maps out some of the core conceptual and analytic principles of discursive psychology, whilst noting some of the debates and disagreements within the field, as well as providing an orientation to some of the foundational concerns of peace psychology. An initial sketch of the possibilities for a discursive peace psychology is set out through a brief illustrative analysis of an extract from a televised political debate concerning the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The chapter concludes by providing brief summary overviews of the remaining chapters in the book.
In this chapter, the authors introduce corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), a means of using the methods of corpus linguistics to facilitate discourse analysis of large volumes of textual data. The chapter uses this framework not only to demonstrate the value of CADS but also to explore the importance of repeating studies over time to test the degree to which discourse is static, or changes, through time. By extending a study of the representation of Muslims and Islam in the UK press, the chapter shows the value of exploring the dynamic nature of discourse as a way of cautioning against the idea that discourse is necessarily stable across time.
The contestability of the concept of populism and the variability of its application have given rise to long-lasting discussions about what populist features in discourse are and how these can be empirically determined and tested. This chapter offers a cognitive socio-linguistic approach to evaluating how populist framing in political (diplomatic) discourse can be facilitated through the use of Self and Other metaphors. Its specific aims involve the identification of metaphors in the context of political identity construction and their populist use vis-à-vis the discursive strategies of legitimisation and delegitimisation in the political speeches delivered by Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, two leaders representing opposite leadership styles and ideologies. To achieve the above aims, Arcimavičienė examined the interrelated speeches delivered by President Obama and President Putin in the time span of two years (2014–2015) in the analytical framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis by applying Pragglejaz Group’s Metaphor Identification Procedure (2007). This analysis demonstrated that their metaphor use contributes to the framing of these leaders’ populism through the metaphorical extension of the core concept of ‘the people’ onto the concept of ‘the nations,’ and, more importantly, that the discursive strategies of legitimisation and delegitimisation can be used in parallel but with different metaphoric intensity and ideological purposes.
Poverty relief programs are shaped by politics. The particular design which social programs take is to a large extent determined by the existing institutional constraints and politicians’ imperative to win elections. The Political Logic of Poverty Relief places elections and institutional design at the core of poverty alleviation. The authors develop a theory with applications to Mexico about how elections shape social programs aimed at aiding the poor. Would political parties possess incentives to target the poor with transfers aimed at poverty alleviation or would they instead give these to their supporters? Would politicians rely on the distribution of particularistic benefits rather than public goods? The authors assess the welfare effects of social programs in Mexico and whether voters reward politicians for targeted poverty alleviation programs. The book provides a new interpretation of the role of cash transfers and poverty relief assistance in the development of welfare state institutions. © Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, Federico Estévez and Beatriz Magaloni 2016.
How do people communicate in mobile settings of interaction? How does mobility affect the way we speak? How does mobility exert influence on the manner in which talk itself is consequential for how we move in space? Recently, questions of this sort have attracted increasing attention in the human and social sciences. This Special Issue contributes to the emerging body of studies on mobility and talk by inspecting an ordinary and ubiquitous phenomenon in which communication among mobile participants is paramount: participation in traffic. This editorial presents previous work on mobility in natural settings, as carried out by interactionally oriented researchers. It also shows how the investigation into traffic participation adds new perspectives to research on language and communication.
This paper uses conversation analysis and video-based methods to study how the driver and passengers interact in order to coordinate multiple activities in cars. The video data have been recorded in naturally occurring driving situations in Britain and Finland. The analysis focuses on leave-taking during drop-offs, i.e. situations where the driver is pulling over for a momentary stop to let a passenger out of the car. It shows how in-car participants time and coordinate the conversation's closing step by step with respect to the car's movement and the eventual stop; i.e. they coordinate leave-taking as multiactivity. The paper suggests that some of the ways in which leave-taking is managed as multiactivity contributes to the construction of safety in traffic.
This book offers a new and critical perspective on the global reconciliation technology by highlighting its contingent and highly political character as an authoritative practice of post-conflict peacebuilding. After retracing the emergence of the reconciliation discourse from South Africa to the global level, the book demonstrates how implementing reconciliation in post-conflict societies is a highly political practice which entails potentially undesirable consequences for the post-conflict societies to which it is deployed. Specifically, the book shows how the reconciliation discourse brings about the marginalisation and neutralisation of political claims and identities of local post-conflict populations by producing these societies as being composed of the ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ of past human rights violations which are first and foremost in need of reconciliation and healing. This book will interest students and teachers of transitional justice and international relations.
en Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, the study examines video data in which drivers with a valid licence participate in voluntary instructor‐led training. The study discusses noticings by the instructor that concern current events or states of affairs and prompt the driver to adjust her driving or that concern habitual practices developed by the driver over time and encourage her to alter them in the future. The former are simple noticings, whereas the latter are prefaced with “I notice that.” The design and timing of the noticings reveal how they are to be understood with respect to the mobile instructional situation. Moreover, they make visible the instructor's ongoing monitoring and assessment of the driver's performance and the instructor's expectations regarding the driver's experience and competence.
Abstract
fi Tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan videoaineistoa ikäkuljettajien vapaa‐ehtoisesta kertaavasta koulutuksesta. Aineistonkeruuvaiheessa heillä oli voimassa oleva ajokortti mutta vain vähän tai ei lainkaan viimeaikaista ajokokemusta. Tutkimuksen menetelmät ovat etnometodologia ja keskustelunanalyysi. Tutkimuksessa käsitellään kouluttajan kielellisiä huomiointivuoroja, jotka koskevat meneillään olevaa tilannetta ja ohjaavat kuljettajaa muuttamaan ajotoimintaansa välittömästi tai jotka koskevat jotain kuljettajan aiemmin omaksumaa ajotapaa ja ohjaavat häntä muuttamaan tapaa tulevaisuudessa. Edelliset ovat muotoilultaan yksinkertaisia huomiointeja, kun taas jälkimmäiset alkavat tyypillisesti sanoilla huomaan että. Kouluttajan huomiointivuorojen muotoilu ja ajoitus osoittavat, miten kuljettajan tulisi tulkita ne kyseisessä liikenne‐ ja koulutustilanteessa. Huomionti‐vuorot tuovat ilmi myös sen, millaisin keinoin kouluttaja jatkuvasti seuraa ja arvioi kuljettajan suoriutumista, sekä sen, millaisia odotuksia kouluttajalla on kuljettajan kokemuksesta ja kompetenssista.
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
Framed within cognitive linguistics, Critical Metaphor Analysis and social psychology, the present paper explores the dynamics of the online construction of the Other in the context of migration and current refugee crisis. Thematically, it scrutinizes online refugee- and migrant-related mainstream and social media discourses in two European countries, Cyprus and Poland, in 2015–2016. On the theoretical and methodological level, it looks at the constituted and constitutive nature of metaphorical conceptualisations of migrants/refugees, their axiological and emotional potential for threat construction, and thus impact on possible cognitive-affective attitudes of the host countries’ citizens. It is theorized here, in line with Conceptual Metaphor Theory, that the choices of particular metaphors and their frequency of usage are likely to influence the salience of issues among the public, activate certain moral evaluations and generate fear, thereby creating grounds for verbal and physical aggression targeted at the Other. The paper addresses the following questions: 1) How is the Other conceptualised as a THREAT in both physical and symbolic sense? 2) To what extent are particular metaphorical conceptualisations within the representation of migrants and refugees common to corpora from both countries and/or socio-cultural context dependent? 3) How can metaphors, including dehumanization, serve as a springboard for individual acts of prejudice, as well as systematic discrimination, and violence? The analysed data was collected within the European project C.O.N.T.A.C.T., exploring various aspects of hate speech and hate crime in ten EU countries.
