Crisis discourses

Abstract

Taking the whole European Union (EU) as background, the present study discusses the way a corpus of English language media articles has represented the 2009-2016 crisis and austerity policies in Poland and Portugal, the home countries of the authors. The selected corpus comprises 68 articles from mainstream English language media, namely the newspapers The Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the economics magazine The Economist. The theoretical framework draws on the Bakhtinian notions of polyphony and heteroglossia, as well as on Gramsci's theory of hegemony. It thus juxtaposes and interprets the different voices and conflicting meanings within crisis discourses, relating them to issues of power and ideology. The Conclusion shows that despite rhetorical diversity, common politically contingent voices were identified which underpin the discourses dominating the crisis narrations in these two economically and geographically distant countries of the European Union.