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Teacher candidates’ ideological tensions and covert metaphors about Syrian refugees in Turkey: Critical discourse analysis of telecollaboration
Abstract
This study draws data from an asynchronous discussion to which teacher candidates (TCs) from France, Turkey, and USA contributed as part of their participation in a semester-long telecollaboration in 2017. The analysis focused on the contributions of TCs (n=34) from Turkey and explored how they represented Syrian refugees in their responses to a question about refugees and immigration in their country. Using critical discourse analysis, the study examined metaphorical expressions in participants’ representation of Syrian refugees in Turkey. Findings present six metaphorical constellations about Turkey's acceptance of refugees fleeing the Syrian war and these metaphors involve three ideological tensions that were dominant in TCs’ discourse: (a) similarity and togetherness/difference and separation, (b) gift/scarcity, (c) openness and bridging/spreading and disruption. The paper discusses these tensions in relation to the earlier research on the use of metaphors in discourses about immigrants and provides implications for educating teachers to work with refugee children.
... Positioned as non-native English speaking teachers, their tensions point to the interaction between their language user identities (personal), English language teacher identities (professional), and language ideologies that value 'native' over 'non-native' and perpetuate a dichotomy and hierarchy. That interaction is also evident in Lawrence and Nagashima's (2020) duoethnography, which explores English language teacher identity vis-à-vis gender, sexuality, race, and linguistic status, and in Turnbull et al.'s (2022) critical discourse analysis study on TCs' identity tensions in relation to language, race, religion, and nationality. ...
... As discussed in our findings, TCs in our study seem to use this metaphor to place further distance between themselves as dominant English users and EBs they imagine working with in the future. Our findings support a recent study (Turnbull et al., 2022) which found that TCs concealed their ideological tensions (in a corpus gleaned from a virtual intercultural exchange conversations) via metaphorical expressions about the culturally and linguistically minoritized students they will be serving. Additionally, as an ideological instrument, the metaphor of 'language barrier' in this context also legitimizes and perpetuates a discourse of helplessness or powerlessness that is dominant in the educational services of EBs. ...
Teacher candidates (TCs) go through intense identity negotiations and tensions at the intersection of personal, professional, and political dimensions of education. This iterative and complex process brings about ideological tensions. In this article, following a qualitative research design, we analysed the interviews of 48 (majority white monolingual) TCs during a semester-long practice teaching experience with emergent bilingual students (EBs) in grades 6–8 classrooms. The constant comparative method and critical discourse analysis informed our data analysis. The findings demonstrated that TCs experienced tensions related to their identities, ideologies, and future student populations. These tensions were revealed in their discourses, language choices, and the metaphors they adopted. One prevalent metaphor used was ‘language barrier’, depicting TCs’ limited agency and helplessness in their teaching if they did not speak the first language of their EBs. Another recurrent theme was the need to better understand the who, what, where, when, and why questions of teaching as TCs reflected on their professional decision-making at the intersection of personal, professional, and political discourses of teaching EBs. The study suggests that these ideological tensions should be unpacked in teacher education programs to build identity-focused critical teacher learning practices. Such practices can help TCs understand and navigate discourses that are introduced during teacher preparation in an effort to develop ideological clarity and claim ownership of their transformation into becoming social justice-oriented teachers of EBs.
In this paper, we focus on the situatedness of teacher identity and agency within sociopolitical contexts dominated by neo‐nationalist discourses and rely on data from online conversations among preservice and in‐service teachers of English in Türkiye and the United States (US). We report on data constructed in a telecollaboration (a.k.a., virtual intercultural exchange) that we, four TESOL teacher educators, designed for teachers to discuss issues of social justice (particularly for minoritized immigrant students) and to have a discursive and experiential space in which to negotiate their language teacher identities (LTI). Gathering 117 teachers from five universities (three in Türkiye, two in the US) and underserved school districts in both contexts, this telecollaboration is our pedagogical, agentive response to dominant neo‐nationalist discourses in the two countries. To make quantities of data more manageable, we analyze interactions from one‐third of those 117 participants (five of 15 small groups) to address this research question: How do preservice and in‐service teachers from Türkiye construct their teacher identities in response to neo‐nationalist discourses in their sociopolitical context? In particular, how do they engage in this identity work through asynchronous small‐group discussions in a social justice‐focused telecollaboration with teachers from the US? Findings indicate that participants from Türkiye discussed teacher agency, conservatism and cultural difference in the society, and discrimination/xenophobia against refugees as important factors that shape their work with minoritized English language learners. They experienced tensions in their identity construction between their desire to advocate for their students and the external forces coming from meso‐ and macro‐level policies that impact their instruction and assessment procedures. We discuss our findings in relation to previous research on language teacher identity and social justice in sociopolitical contexts shaped by neo‐nationalist discourses. We also share the implications of our study for pedagogizing identity in teacher education.
Turkey hosts the world’s largest community of displaced Syrians. According to UNHCR, there are more than 3 million registered Syrians in Turkey as of 2018. Since the beginning of the conflict in Syria in 2011, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has followed an open-door policy, which was accompanied by a discourse emphasizing religious solidarity and humanitarian values. However, the arrival of Syrian refugees has become entangled with the existing identity debates and conflicts in Turkish politics. The AKP’s discourse on Syrian refugees has become intertwined with its positive self-representation as the defender of all oppressed people (mazlum) and its attempts to reconstruct the Turkish nation along more Islamic lines. The article analyses parliamentary debates and presidential speeches in order to unravel AKP discourses on Syrian refugees. Drawing upon the Discourse Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Analysis, the article puts forward two arguments. First, the refugee issue has become a constitutive component of AKP identity and a discursive tool to reconstruct the nation along more Islamic lines. Second, Turkey’s refugee policy has become a source of pride and enabled the AKP to claim moral superiority both vis-à-vis the West and its political opponents at home.
p>The paper deals with the problems of cognitive linguistic discourse and comparative analysis studies of metaphor as a means of representing migration in mass media. It presents the most productive metaphoric models, shaping the concept of “migration”, that function in printed and electronic media discourses of Great Britain, USA and Russia in 2016-2017. A comparative analysis of metaphorical models representing migration in British, American and Russian media discourses has shown that in media discourses on the migration of 2016-2017, regularly three high-frequency and productive metaphorical models operate: hydronymic, military and morbid. Images of these metaphorical models are united by vectors of anxiety, despair, threats to life and have negative conceptual potential.</p
Critical discourse analysis In recent decades critical discourse analysis (CDA) has become a well-established field in the social sciences. However, in contrast with some branches of linguistics, CDA is not a discrete academic discipline with a relatively fixed set of research methods. Instead, we might best see CDA as a problem-oriented interdisciplinary research movement, subsuming a variety of approaches, each with different theoretical models, research methods and agenda. What unites them is a shared interest in the semiotic dimensions of power, injustice, abuse, and political-economic or cultural change in society. CDA is distinctive in a) its view of the relationship between language and society, and b) its critical approach to methodology. Let us take these in turn by first exploring the notions of ‘discourse’ and ‘critical’. The term ‘discourse’ is used in various ways across the social sciences and within the field of CDA. In the most abstract sense, ‘discourse’ ...
Este artículo tiene origen en mi tesis doctoral, presentada y defendida en la Universidad de Barcelona en el año 2011. Como parte del marco teórico de la investigación, busca explorar el contexto socio-político y simbólico a través del cual, desde mediados de los años 80 en España, las migraciones provenientes de países no comunitarios se han transformado en un foco de intervención y debate público mediado por metáforas de otredad y diferenciación negativa. Se exploran tres cuestiones interrelacionadas: (i) las dinámicas de la inmigración laboral dentro de Europa desde la época del pos-guerra hasta la crisis del petróleo en 1973; (ii) los mecanismos políticos, administrativos y jurídicos que comenzaron a emerger en el contexto español a partir de entonces, destinados a regular la inmigración no comunitaria, y (iii) el conjunto de representaciones y estrategias discursivas en torno a la inmigración no comunitaria y a las personas inmigrantes.
This article investigates the link between how Latino migrants are represented in U.S. crime reports, the formation of immigration laws/policies, and the effects on children of Latino migrants in U.S. schools. From a framework of cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis, I examine crime reports in U.S. online newspapers depicting crimes allegedly committed by Latino migrants in the years 2008–2010. The analysis exposes linguistic strategies such as the use of metaphor and metonymy to construct a negative representation of Latino migrants. I conclude with a discussion of the indirect effects on Latino schoolchildren.
For at least 3 decades, researchers and political theorists have been interested in how metaphors are used as persuasive devices. Theorists in this area have tended to assume that metaphors are persuasive, and they have discussed how this process occurs. They have focused on the necessity of communication in politics and have noted that metaphors have assisted politicians in communicating more effectively by addressing latent symbolic themes residing in segments of the public consciousness. Metaphors also fit in with the new information-processing models of political knowledge, in which metaphors collapse complicated issues into more simplified packets of information that can be easily understood by the public. However, research in this area is much more equivocal. Metaphors do not appear to be generally effective, so the future of research needs to focus upon specific areas in which they are effective as opposed to answering the general question of whether they are effective or not.
This article discusses how the study of metaphoric and more generally, figurative language use contributes to critical discourse analysis (CDA). It shows how cognitive linguists’ recognition of metaphor as a fundamental means of concept- and argument-building can add to CDA's account of meaning constitution in the social context. It then discusses discrepancies between the early model of conceptual metaphor theory and empirical data and argues that discursive-pragmatic factors as well as sociolinguistic variation have to be taken into account in order to make cognitive analyses more empirically and socially relevant. In conclusion, we sketch a modified cognitive approach informed by Relevance Theory within CDA.
The impact of iconic imagery on policymaking during humanitarian crises is oft-discussed within the literature. When rapid humanitarianization or sudden policy shifts emerge, researchers seek to identify why. One potential explanation is that of ‘focusing events’ – sudden, harmful events which destabilize political consensuses and elevate marginal agendas. While focusing events have been used to explain the impact of large-scale accidents and disasters, this paper extends their usage to activist-generated events such as the iconization of images of the drowned Syrian toddler, Alan Kurdi, during the 2015 migrant crisis. In exploring the Kurdi images’ impact on US media and political discourses of asylum, this paper finds that asylum-related discourses became increasingly sympathetic and domestically focused, eventually culminating in the announcement of an increase in resettlement targets for Syrian migrants. By expanding conceptualizations of focusing events to cases such as Kurdi’s, this paper supplements understandings of the agenda-setting function of iconic imagery.
In this paper, we, as three transnational TESOL practitioners (TTP), engage in a collaborative autoethnography (CAE) to examine our professional identity tensions. Theoretically, we follow the premise that the tensions we experience in our professional life can be productive experiences for identity-oriented reflection and, as we work toward resolving these tensions, we can explore and negotiate new dimensions of our identities. Methodologically, we explore the affor-dances of CAE in combining internal and community dialogues to make sense of our identities, which are situated at the nexus of the personal and the cultural. Each one of us describes and analyzes one major tension that has been part of our professional identity negotiation as TESOL practitioners in the US. Addressing our research question , we conceptually argued that tensions are inevitable in our identity work and found that border-crossing and in-betweenness predominantly characterized our identities as TTPs. We cross borders and carve out in-between spaces, identities, and voices for ourselves in our professional lives.
Our study draws from discussion board data from a telecollaboration including three teacher education courses in France, Turkey, and the USA. Our data analysis of three groups' conversations (n = 21) addressed this research question: How do participants use translingual negotiation strategies in online contact zones as they construct their cultural, linguistic, and professional identities? The findings indicate that preservice teachers employed: Envoicing and interactional strategies to create a caring teacher identity and resolve conflicts; recontextualizing strategies to maintain the frame of culturally-responsive instruction through their linguistic choices; and entextualizing strategies to locate self in time and space when discussing future teaching and diverse students.
Since Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party came to power in 2002, various educational changes have been mandated in Turkey to raise a conservative, pious generation in line with its conservative-democratic identity. Yet, these changes have not come all at once, but implemented gradually, through a process of subtle Islamization. In this paper, drawing upon the Discourse Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Analysis, I analyze in-service teacher education policy documents produced by Ministry of National Education (MoNE) as part of the Inclusive Education Initiative for integration of Syrian refugee children into Turkish education. Through the analysis, I demonstrate how Islamic ideology is interdiscursively and intertextually woven in the construction of inclusion, refugees, and teachers and discursive strategies employed by MoNE to convince teachers to be inclusive. I argue that this initiative should be considered as a sign of Islamic ideology also infiltrating teacher education in Turkey. I conclude with implications for policymakers, educators, and researchers.
Dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs are critical sites for exploring language ideologies given the policy goals of student bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturalism. Drawing on a larger study of language ideological inquiry, this article used predominantly interview data to explore the articulated language ideological stances of teachers implementing a district-wide DLBE program in central Texas. The article builds from the assimilationist/pluralist distinction and contributes to an understanding of how language ideologies interact and are articulated at the individual level and reflect these broader societal discourses in multiple and contradictory ways. To disrupt the binary of ideological orientations I drew on the concept of a continuum to present and make sense of the educators’ ideological stances. Analysis revealed language ideologies articulated across three dimensions: language status, variation, and participation. Implications for DLBE policy and implementation are discussed including the need for ideological consistency and reflection at the program level.
This research focuses on the Turkish government's communications with the international community with regards to Syrian refugees. I use the Discourse Historical Approach to reveal and compare the discursive strategies that the official Turkish news agency has used as part of its public diplomacy efforts in their mass communication efforts regarding Syrian refugees during the last eight years. The results reveal how a humanitarian issue such as the plight of refugees might be employed to establish a government’s political position, affirm its involvement, and influence public opinion about a conflict that exceeds national boundaries and has turned into a challenge for international dominance involving world superpowers. The topics highlighted in the Turkish news reports and the argumentations that these reports put forward reveal that the Turkish government is highly critical of the international community, especially Western powers, for not fulfilling their humanitarian responsibilities. This specific criticisms from Turkey regarding its outsized role in hosting refugees has become a leverage point to claim a place in the decision table about the future of Syria.
This chapter explores the model of “nested interculturality” (Avineri, 2015), a collective of dispositions and practices for ethical intercultural engagement that can be used to navigate tensions often experienced in cultural and linguistic immersion experiences. The conceptualization of “nests” foregrounds an ecological and dynamic view of interculturality in which both cultivation/growth and precariousness/risk are negotiated simultaneously in partnership with others. The chapter explores interculturality as an individual-in-context learning process and an “oppositional practice” (Kramsch & Nolden, 1994) negotiated through interactions across spaces, temporalities, and narratives. Ultimately, this chapter is both theoretical and model-building as well as pedagogical and practice-oriented, highlighting how interculturally-minded and relationally-oriented educators can mobilize their professional practice for societal change.
This paper explores the discursive representation of refugees in a 1.8-million-word corpus of Spanish news articles collected from the digital libraries of El Mundo and El País. Through a corpus-assisted methodology, synchronic and diachronic analyses have been conducted in order to examine the semantic preference of the lemma refugiado over the 2010-16 period. The results show a semantic preference of refugiado for two major semantic sets, namely victimization and dehumanization. Indeed, the preference tends to fluctuate between these two extremes over the years analyzed: either they are victims and their human condition is highlighted or they are dehumanized. Both sets of collocates represent about 50 percent of the total semantic preference of 'refugiado'.
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The socio-discursive landscape surrounding the migration debate is characterised by a growing sense of crisis in both personal and collective identities. From this viewpoint, discourses about immigration are also always attempts at reconstructing the threatened ‘home identity’ of the respective host society. It is such attempts at reasserting identity-in-crisis (due to migration) that are the focus of the volume Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis . This four-part book explores the representational strategies used to frame current migration debates as crises of identity, collective and individual. It features fourteen case-studies of varying sets of data including print media texts, TV broadcasts, online forums, politicians’ speeches, legal and administrative texts, and oral narratives, drawn from discourses in a range of languages – Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Ukrainian – , and it employs different discourse-analytical methods, such as Argumentation and Metaphor Analysis, Gendered Language Studies, Corpus-assisted Semantics and Pragmatics, and Proximization Theory. Such a diverse range of sources, languages, and approaches provides innovative methodological and theoretical analysis on migration and identity which will be of interest to scholars, students, and policy makers working in the fields of migration studies, media studies, identity studies, and social and public policy.
As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
The past generation has seen a switch to restrictive policies and language in the governance of migrants living in the Netherlands. Beginning in 2010, a new government with right-wing populist backing went further, declaring the centrality of proposed characteristic historic Dutch values. In this article, we investigate a key policy document to characterize and understand this policy change. Discourse analysis as an exploration of language choices, including use of ideas from rhetoric, helps us apply and test ideas from governmentality studies of migration and from discourse studies as social theorizing. We trace the chosen problem formulation; the delineation, naming, and predication of population categories; the understanding of citizenship, community, and integration; and the overall rhetoric, including chosen metaphors and nuancing of emphases, that links the elements into a meaning-rich world picture. A "neoliberal communitarian" conception of citizenship has emerged that could unfortunately subject many immigrants to marginalization and exclusion.
The past generation has seen a switch to restrictive policies and language in the governance of migrants living in the Netherlands. Beginning in 2010, a new government with right-wing populist backing went further, declaring the centrality of proposed characteristic historic Dutch values. In this article, we investigate a key policy document to characterize and understand this policy change. Discourse analysis as an exploration of language choices, including use of ideas from rhetoric, helps us apply and test ideas from governmentality studies of migration and from discourse studies as social theorizing. We trace the chosen problem formulation; the delineation, naming, and predication of population categories; the understanding of citizenship, community, and integration; and the overall rhetoric, including chosen metaphors and nuancing of emphases, that links the elements into a meaning-rich world picture. A “neoliberal communitarian” conception of citizenship has emerged that could unfortunately subject many immigrants to marginalization and exclusion.
This collective case study examines how two teacher candidates' digital story projects created in literacy methods courses made visible their negotiated and evolving visions of teaching and learning. The digital stories were created to show and describe their future literacy classrooms. Using metaphoric analysis, the researchers uncovered the implicit metaphors of teachers and students present in each of the teacher candidates' digital stories. Looking across these metaphors, tensions and alignments between how the teacher candidates envisioned the role of teacher and the role of student and how these relate to prominent models of education including Industrial and Inquiry models are apparent. Implications for practice include modifications made to literacy methods courses to support teacher candidates to begin the negotiation of their professional identities as they explore multiple experiences of teaching and learning. These modifications include: (a) prompting teacher candidates to see themselves as readers, writers, and inquirers; (b) modeling and experiencing inquiry in teacher education coursework; and (c) providing opportunities for teacher candidates to experience purposeful tensions within their teacher education classes.
Numerous studies have examined the manner in which minority groups, including refugees, are depicted in the media discourse of the host countries or the dominant majority groups. The results of such studies indicate that media systematically discriminate these minority groups and deem them as a security, economic and hygiene threat to the majority groups. Through the use of Lakoff and Jonson’s conceptual metaphor theory, this study compares and contrasts the representation of Syrian refugees in the online media discourse of not only host countries but also non-host countries, which, in this study, refers to nations that do not host Syrian refugees. The results show that statistical differences between the metaphors used by host and non-host countries only occur when using the metaphors that describe the entry of refugees and the burden they are inflicting on the host countries. This is clearly indicated by the p-values of the log-likelihood test.
Since June, 2014 when the U.S. government began to document an
increase in unaccompanied/separated children arriving in the United
States from Central America, these children have become a frequent topic
in media discourse. Because rhetoric about immigration issues have been
shown to affect schooling of these children, the present paper aims to
examine how these children are represented in the discourse of one community.
Findings from this critical multimodal discourse analysis reveal
multiple strategies of representation that result in the dominant metaphor
of IMMIGRANT CHILDREN ARE DANGEROUS WATER and negative perceptions
that have implications for the education of these students.
This study advances a model for Critical Discourse Analysis which draws on Evolutionary Psychology and Cognitive Linguistics, applied in a critical analysis of immigration discourse. It will be of special interest to students and researchers with which to explore new perspectives in CDA.
Since the war erupted in Syria in 2011, Turkey has followed an “open door” policy toward Syrian refugees. The Turkish government has been promoting this liberal policy through a humanitarian discourse that leads one to expect that Syrian refugees have not been securitized in Turkey. This article, however, argues that a security framework that emphasizes control and containment has been essential to the governance of Syrian refugees in Turkey, despite the presence of such non-securitarian discourses. To develop this argument, the article first builds an analytical framework based on a critical engagement with the theory of securitization, which was originally developed by the Copenhagen School. Unlike the Copenhagen School’s theory emphasizing “speech acts” as the vector of securitization, this article applies a sociological approach to the analysis of the securitization process by focusing on both discursive and non-discursive practices. In carrying out this analysis, securitizing practices, both discursive and non-discursive, are defined as those that: (1) emphasize “control and containment,” especially in relation to societal/public security concerns (here, specifically, the labor market and employment); and (2) establish a security continuum about various other issues—including criminality, terrorism, socioeconomic problems, and cultural deprivation—and thereby treat migrants as “risky” outsiders. Subsequently, in line with this analytical framework, the article seeks to trace the securitization of non-camp Syrian refugees, especially in the labor market. Finally, the article demonstrates that this securitization process is likely to conceal structural and political problems, and to close off alternative public and political debate about the refugees.
Now that the doors of historically white schools have officially been opened to Black learners, this paper presents a critical analysis of discourses of domination transmitted behind the doors of learning in a History classroom. While the official History curriculum (NCS, 2002) advocates multi-perspectival epistemological approaches, this paper illustrates the subordination of epistemic goals to racist and sexist ideological goals through the transmission of racist and sexist discourses. A teacher's lessons were observed, audio-taped, transcribed and analysed according to critical discourse theory. The conventional Grade 10 topic, The conquest of the Aztecs by the Spanish, was mediated through racist and sexist formal and informal discursive strategies such as the use of teacher power to silence contestation of inaccurate statements; the use of metaphor, simile, and binary oppositions to convey prejudicial meanings, derogation, inferiorisation, ridicule, jokes, disclaimers, and stereotyping that subsumed the historical topic being taught. The analysis exposes the informal yet effective workings of power for the perpetuation of discourses of domination in the History lesson. Such discourses subjected learners to a form of symbolic violence which may lead students to ontological misrecognition of self and race.
This book brings the voices of teachers into the fierce debates about language ideologies and cultural pedagogies in English language teaching. Through interviews and classroom observations in Chile and California, this study compares the controversies around English as a global language with the similar cultural tensions in programs for immigrants. The author explores the development of teacher identity in these two very different contexts, and through the narratives of both experienced and novice teachers demonstrates how teacher identity affects the cultural pedagogies enacted in their classrooms.
As theoretical developments in applied linguistics challenge the dominant mentalist framing of cognition as knowledge residing in the head, new ways of understanding and recording teachers’ and students’ engagement with languages are needed. Structural and competence-based formats for measuring proficiency posit an incremental model of learning as sequential mastery of language features acquired in a predictable order, but this is only one story of how languages are learnt. An alternative and emerging paradigm seeks to understand how different languages are experienced and appropriated subjectively in individual lives. In this article, I point to recent scholarship in language teacher education to show how critical language awareness entails reflecting not only on language content but also on perceptions of language(s) and language learning. I analyse a set of language portraits, produced in a workshop with teacher candidates, to demonstrate that language autobiographies, when used within a phenomenological perspective, elicit a broader reflexivity vis-à-vis teachers’ own language learning history (plurilingual repertoire) through recourse to different metaphors that are both embodied and emotional. This reframing extends the research agenda into language teacher cognition by bringing into teacher education different modes of reflexivity to encourage a more nuanced picture of how individuals relate to and personally invest in languages.
Acknowledgements Introduction Section 1: Literacy, Politics and Social Change Introduction 1 Putting Literacies on the Political Agenda 2 Literacy and Social Change: The Significance of Social Context in the Development of Literacy Programmes Section 2: The Ethnography of Literacy Introduction 3. The Uses of Literacy and Anthropology in Iran 4. Orality and Literacy as Ideological Constructions: Some Problems in Cross-cultural Studies Section 3. Literacy in Education Introduction 5. The Schooling of Literacy 6. The Implications of the New Literacy Studies for Pedagogy Section 4: Towards a Critical Framework Introduction 7. A critical Look at Walter Ong and the 'Great Divide' 8. Literacy Practices and Literacy Myths Index
Metaphor and Thought, first published in 1979, reflects the surge of interest in and research into the nature and function of metaphor in language and thought. In this revised and expanded second edition, the editor has invited the contributors to update their original essays to reflect any changes in their thinking. Reorganised to accommodate the shifts in central theoretical issues, the volume also includes six new chapters that present important and influential fresh ideas about metaphor that have appeared in such fields as the philosophy of language and the philosophy of science, linguistics, cognitive and clinical psychology, education and artificial intelligence.
This is an essential read for anyone interested in the way language is used in the world of politics. Based on Aristotle's premise that we are all political animals, able to use language to pursue our own ends, the book uses the theoretical framework of linguistics to explore the ways in which we think and behave politically. Contemporary and high profile case studies of politicians and other speakers are used, including an examination of the dangerous influence of a politician's words on the defendants in the Stephen Lawrence murder trial. International in its perspective, Analysing Political Discourse also considers the changing landscape of political language post-September 11, including the increasing use of religious imagery in the political discourse of, amongst others, George Bush. Written in a lively and engaging style, this book provides an essential introduction to political discourse analysis.
The aim of this special edition of International Migration is to bring about discussion between those conducting research in Diaspora Studies and the Anthropology of Public Health and Medicine. Historically, international migration has been associated with the transport of disease. Regardless of the evidence, metaphors of plague, and infection have circulated and been used to marginalise and keep out diaspora communities in host countries in an effort to ‘exclude filth’. Migrants have been referred to in terms such as the ‘Asiatic menace’ indicating a virus-like threat to local populations. We look at the impact the traces of these images have on current host nations’ perceptions of diaspora communities and also ask what impact does this have on the diasporic communities’ self-perceptions, if any? Does this affect conceptions of belonging, or feed into continuing dialogues of displacement? The movement of people has long been associated with the spread of disease and infections. In light of this, we are concerned with the role of medical knowledge and practices in relation to diaspora communities, and how these discourses have contributed to the perception of diaspora populations by host societies, and helped shape wider questions of belonging and citizenship. We aim to look at these questions in their historical context, both in their continuities and discontinuities, emphasising the importance of this to an understanding of current practices. Circuits of migration, and connected medical practices are taking new forms, where, on the one hand migrants are still associated with disease and pollution, but on the other migrants are also increasingly staffing the infrastructure of western public health services. At the same time, the west can no longer lay claim to ‘superior’ biomedical provision. These shifts signal new directions in the relationship between medical discourse and diasporic ‘others’, giving rise to a contradictory language of migrants being seen as both a threat, and a solution to the ‘health of the nation’.
The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"âmetaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.