{"title":"Friends, enemies, and agonists: Politics, morality and media in the COVID-19 conjuncture","authors":"S. Phelan","doi":"10.1177/09579265221095408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265221095408","url":null,"abstract":"The radical democratic theorist Chantal Mouffe has long criticized the moralization of politics in its neoliberalized Third Way form. The argument informs her analysis of the rise of the far right, which she suggests has partly been enabled by moralizing antagonisms that inhibit a culture of agonistic political contestation. This paper uses Mouffe to think about the current condition of mediatized public discourse, extending her critique of moralized politics to a wider set of targets. I illuminate the argument through an analysis of a BBC Newsnight report that thematizes the ‘toxic’ nature of public debate about the science of COVID-19. I show how the report internalizes sedimented ‘culture war’ discourses about the polarized nature of today’s public culture and, in the process, offers oblique insights into how far-right discourses are normalized. I end by considering some of the limitations of Mouffe’s work as a resource for thinking about how to counteract the far right.","PeriodicalId":47965,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Society","volume":"33 1","pages":"744 - 757"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48765096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"News media and the politics of fear: Normalization and contrastive discourses in the reporting on terrorist attacks in Sweden and the UK","authors":"Mats Ekström, Marianna Patrona, J. Thornborrow","doi":"10.1177/09579265221095409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265221095409","url":null,"abstract":"This paper provides a comparative critical discourse analysis of news discourse on terrorism with respect to the coverage by two Swedish and two UK broadsheet newspapers of the terrorists attacks that took place in Stockholm and in London respectively in the year 2017. The research goal is to investigate the type of discourses mobilized that help enact a ‘politics of fear’, and to compare the constitutive elements of this rhetoric within the same, and across the two national contexts. The findings point to three major representations as points on a continuum of discourses that emphatically affirm, give rise to, but also resist and counteract, a politics of fear. The paper sheds light on processes of normalization at work in the routine discursive practices of press coverage, but also to the rise of counter-discourses that resist, downplay, or take a critical stance toward the core elements of a politics of fear. It is argued that these latter discursive practices may work in the opposite direction, namely to de-normalize or marginalize a dominant politics of fear.","PeriodicalId":47965,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Society","volume":"33 1","pages":"758 - 772"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49318849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment: Strengthening qualitative corpus methods in the critical discourse analysis of protest press coverage","authors":"C. Kennedy","doi":"10.1177/09579265221093650","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265221093650","url":null,"abstract":"The increasingly used method of corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has recently been criticised for lacking identifiable and accountable methods in its qualitative analyses. For example, manual concordance analysis (a popular corpus technique involving the ‘close reading’ of text) rarely explicates the qualitative method involved – that is, if any has been used at all. This article seeks to strengthen qualitative concordance analysis in the context of the press representation of protests. In doing so, it theoretically formulates the novel linguistic application of Tilly’s sociological ‘WUNC’ framework, which argues protests and social movements are successful when they display worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment. By mapping prominent CDA theories onto Tilly’s definitions of worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment, the article offers a replicable qualitative approach to the analysis of concordances specific to linguistic research about the press representation of protests.","PeriodicalId":47965,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Society","volume":"33 1","pages":"611 - 630"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48401249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sacrificing long hair and the domestic sphere: Reporting on female medical workers in Chinese online news during Covid-19","authors":"Xinmei Sun, Małgorzata Chałupnik","doi":"10.1177/09579265221096029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265221096029","url":null,"abstract":"In the context of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, female medical staff constituted a large proportion of frontline healthcare workers in China, with 50% of doctors and over 90% of nurses being women. In this paper, we aim to examine how these medical workers were represented at the start of the pandemic in online news reports posted on one of China’s most popular social media platforms, Weibo. In the paper, we draw upon corpus-based critical discourse analysis, comparing representations of female medical workers to those of medical workers in general. We observe that not only are female medical workers portrayed through a predominantly gendered lens, but they are also subordinated to the needs of the state. We consider the role played by state-controlled media in regulating the position of (working) women in society and probe into rhetorical means through which this is achieved.","PeriodicalId":47965,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Society","volume":"33 1","pages":"650 - 670"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41329414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The abnormalisation of social justice: The ‘anti-woke culture war’ discourse in the UK","authors":"Bart Cammaerts","doi":"10.1177/09579265221095407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265221095407","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, the so-called ‘anti-woke’ culture war is deconstructed through the notions of metapolitics in fascist discourses – linked to the Gramscian ‘hegemonisation’ and ‘the war of position’ – as well as the Schmittian friend/enemy distinction coupled with theories of deviance and moral panics. The appropriation of the neo-fascist culture war discourse by the mainstream right in the UK is analysed discursively, combining political discourse analysis, the discourse-historical approach and discourse-conceptual analysis. The anti-woke culture war by the British conservative party as well as rightwing media will serve to analyse how social justice struggles like anti-racism, anti-sexism and pro-LGBTQ rights are being abnormalised and positioned as extreme deviant political positions. Linked to this, so-called ‘cancel culture’ is strategically deployed by dominant groups to neutralise contestations against racist, sexist and anti-LGBTQ views. Finally, freedom of speech and the right to offend is weaponised to protect racist and discriminatory language and to position these idea’s as valid opinions worthy of democratic debate.","PeriodicalId":47965,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Society","volume":"33 1","pages":"730 - 743"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44670532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Occupying the streets, occupying words. Reframing new feminisms through reappropriation","authors":"Manuela Romano","doi":"10.1177/09579265221093649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265221093649","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a Critical and Socio-Cognitive analysis of protest discourse as created in slogans for feminist rallies taking place in Spain (2017–2020). The study focuses on the discursive evolution of the term manada (‘wolfpack’), from its origins as a metonymy to refer to a gang rape taking place in the San Fermín bullfighting celebration of July 2016, to its reappropriation by feminists to bring attention to gender violence and, most importantly, to create a positive in-group identity of cohesion and empowerment, while delegitimizing and dispossessing the out-group, rapists, of their power. The analysis shows how reappropriation, together with recontextualization and multimodal creativity, helps to understand the impact of a single term, manada, in the transformation of the traditional discourse of fear and threat into one of solidarity and hope when addressing gender violence, as well as its effects on the constructions of new cognitive and social frames within the community.","PeriodicalId":47965,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Society","volume":"33 1","pages":"631 - 649"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43069364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The intertextuality and interdiscursivity of “mirroring” in South Korean cyberfeminist posts","authors":"Sunyoung Yang, Kathy Lee","doi":"10.1177/09579265221096028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265221096028","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines the phenomenon of “mirroring” used by Womad, a cyberfeminist community in South Korea. Mirroring involves the reversal of gender to spotlight misogynist practices that might otherwise go unnoticed. To better understand mirroring, we introduce selected posts from Ilbe, a male-dominant online forum, known for denigrating Korean women and then analyze Womad’s posts on similar topics following approaches in critical discourse analysis and feminist post-structuralism. Our analysis examines two main linguistic strategies of mirroring that Womad uses to disrupt gendered ideologies. First, we focus on the use of intertextuality in Womad’s posts through their adoption of Ilbe’s masculine register to combat misogyny by targeting men. Interdiscursivity is another important strategy Womad users deploy to foreground the inequities entrenched in Korea’s long-standing patriarchy. Ultimately, mirroring offers critiques of gender inequity and misogyny through active engagements with everyday linguistic practices online while opening up new possibilities for gender politics.","PeriodicalId":47965,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Society","volume":"33 1","pages":"671 - 689"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48810543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Marginal voices: Exploring presence and participation in interaction in child protection conferences","authors":"Eleanor Lutman-White, J. Angouri","doi":"10.1177/09579265221108024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265221108024","url":null,"abstract":"Child protection conferences are key meetings in the social work child protection process in England. They provide the context where decisions are made about how best to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and constitute an important opportunity for social work services to work in partnership with parents; yet there is little research about what happens interactionally in these meetings and particularly about parents’ participation. Using interactional sociolinguistics, we analyse the data from three audio-recorded child protection conferences, focussing on sequences where concerns are raised and responded to, to illuminate how parent involvement is accomplished interactionally. We look specifically at the linguistic and discursive features of turns and the management of the floor, connecting the sequential nature of the account sequences to presence and participation. The analysis shows a contrast between professionals’ participation versus parents’ presence in this asymmetrical event, suggesting a marginalisation of parents’ contributions and a mismatch between the principle of partnership working with parents and practice in this area of child protection social work.","PeriodicalId":47965,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Society","volume":"33 1","pages":"324 - 348"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48585875","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From fallacies to semi-fake news: Improving the identification of misinformation triggers across digital media","authors":"Elena Musi, C. Reed","doi":"10.1177/09579265221076609","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265221076609","url":null,"abstract":"This study tackles the fake news phenomenon during the pandemic from a critical thinking perspective. It addresses the lack of systematic criteria by which to fact-check the grey area of misinformation. As a preliminary step, drawing from fallacy theory, we define what type of fake news convey misinformation. Through a data data driven approach, we then identify 10 fallacious strategies which flag misinformation and we provide a deterministic analysis method by which to recognize them. An annotation study of over 220 news articles about COVID-19 fact-checked by Snopes shows that (i) the strategies work as indicators of misinformation (ii) they are related to digital media affordances (iii) and they can be used as the backbone of more informative fact-checkers’ ratings. The results of this study are meant to help citizens to become their own fact-checkers through critical thinking and digital activism.","PeriodicalId":47965,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Society","volume":"33 1","pages":"349 - 370"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42417446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Allison Nguyen, Tom Roberts, P. Anand, J. E. Fox Tree
{"title":"Look, Dude: How hyperpartisan and non-hyperpartisan speech differ in online commentary","authors":"Allison Nguyen, Tom Roberts, P. Anand, J. E. Fox Tree","doi":"10.1177/09579265221108022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265221108022","url":null,"abstract":"Identifying the characteristics of hyperpartisan communication that make it so amenable to sharing is crucial to combating the spread of misinformation. We analyzed a corpus of hyperpartisan and non-hyperpartisan writing produced on internet forums and found that markers of spontaneous communication are strongly predictive of hyperpartisan speech, regardless of whether that speech is left- or right-leaning. The markers of spontaneous communication included swear words, discourse markers, local pronouns like I and you, and exclamation marks. This suggests that speakers in hyperpartisan online communities exploit linguistic resources, even those without overtly political or persuasive content, to engage readers through appeal to closeness and familiarity.","PeriodicalId":47965,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Society","volume":"33 1","pages":"371 - 390"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45695468","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}