Search Results

As a practice of meaning making in society, discourse points to important dimensions of social and historical change. This chapter discusses examples of discourse research on social transformation in Central and Eastern Europe. It shows how methods from linguistic, semiotic, and cultural theory can be used to account for a changing social order (e.g., how change is narrated in Russia during the perestroika period or how Eastern Germans are represented in Western media discourse after the reunification). Against a background in Discourse Studies, we put special emphasis on macrosociological views of discursive change, which one can find, for instance, in Foucault’s power/knowledge approach, Laclau/Mouffian hegemony analysis, and Critical Discourse Analysis. The chapter concludes by pointing out the strengths as well as the limits of discourse research, which is based on the idea that language not only represents social realities but, through representation, also contributes to creating them.

The TRUST framework represents a radical challenge both to existing notions of untruthfulness and to the relevance of this topic to language research. This conclusion to the book All Bullshit and Lies? returns to the three central propositions of the TRUST framework concerning the scope, ethical import, and discursive analysis of untruthfulness, and teases out some of their implications, limitations, and possible future directions. It then takes up the challenge of the relevance of this topic to language research and considers the possibility of an interdisciplinary Ethical Discourse Analysis. Finally, the potential impact of the framework is discussed in terms of the fight-back against epistemic partisanship, the judgment of knowledge on purely partisan grounds. It focuses particularly on applications to education, fostering a greater awareness of the economy of truthfulness, the training of journalists, fact-checkers, and advocates, and the regulation of political advertising and social media.

In addition to providing a summary, the conclusion offers thoughts on how to take the study forward. In particular, there is some tentative analysis of texts which makes use of discourse analysis. The conclusion also discusses the use of autobiography and oral history as means to capture memories of teaching and learning history. Finally, the conclusion returns to the contemporary politics of history teaching and assesses these debates within the context of discussion on citizenship and national identity.

The introduction challenges the widely held view in Western scholarship that the supposed “militarization” of the Cuban Revolution is key to understanding its longevity. While the pervasiveness of the armed forces in revolutionary Cuba is hard to refute, this chapter argues that it is the Revolution’s guerrilla origins, rather than its “militarism,” that partly explains its survival and the political authority of its leaders. Specifically, it is the promotion of a guerrilla ethos in the Revolution’s official, hegemonic discourse that, through the creation of a new political culture since 1959, has afforded historic legitimacy to the ex-guerrilla fighters in power. This chapter explains how the author, through discourse analysis, draws on the works of Michel Foucault and Norman Fairclough to examine a range of texts that span the Revolution’s six decades in power. This analysis reveals a consistent endorsement of the values and attributes associated with the guerrilla fighter, a phenomenon introduced here as guerrillerismo.

This paper investigates the representation of grassroots English in a recent (2012), successful Bollywood movie, English Vinglish. The plot focusses upon Shashi, a young Indian mother who speaks hardly any English, a fact which is hugely embarrassing to herself and her family. During a stay in New York City she secretly takes beginners' English lessons with other international, instrumentally motivated learners. After a section which outlines some background, the paper's first main part analyzes language attitudes and ideologies held by the characters in this movie, presenting a short Critical Discourse Analysis of scenes from the movie, meant to disclose hidden linguistic value judgements. The second part adopts a linguistically descriptive perspective, presenting an analysis and interpretation of the basic syntactic patterns employed by Shashi and her classmates. These reduced but communicatively sufficient structures are characteristic of early adult learners' usage, and are shown to reflect internal development and to be similar to what has recently been termed "grassroots spread" of English. They are shown to display structural similarities with pidgins, patterns found in early language acquisition, and widespread nonstandard structures found in World Englishes.

This chapter offers an account of how “figures” are discursively produced and socially fabricated through practices that sit between distinct but overlapping domains of power/knowledge. Through an extended reading of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and his 1975 lecture course, Abnormal, this chapter takes up the figures of the “delinquent” and the “convicted offender”–paradigmatic figures of the rehabilitative ideal in penology–demonstrating how they are fabricated to manage the tensions and contradictions between discursive spheres of justice and the penitentiary apparatus. This reading is extended to consider the figure of the felon, who, though the practice of disenfranchisement, should be understood as a similar fabrication, managing the tensions that emerge in the unacknowledged overlap between discourses of punishment and citizenship.

The chapter sets out the conceptual framework for the book describing Brexit as part of a paradigm shift in Britain’s socio-economic and cultural chemistry. Brexit is a multi-layered and multidimensional phenomenon, at the intersection of many social, political and cultural forces and processes and the book’s introduction seeks to provide the context to these factors by exploring the nature of the economic, social and cultural drivers of Brexit. The introduction also explores the ‘tabloidisation’ of political rhetoric, basically the subtle manipulation of public thought through speech acts on identity and nationhood to further an agenda premised on achieving a new neoliberal order and the consolidation of power by existing economic, cultural and political elites. In this sense the book explores how a fear of risk and sense of anxiety is manipulated through securitisation. The introduction also sets out for the reader a conception of critical thinking and forms of discourse analysis used throughout the book to understand and dissect Brexit.

This chapter examines the neoliberal logic behind the restructuring of the family preference category, with a particular focus on the controversy over elderly parents, who are commonly portrayed as a financial liability. The chapter discusses how politicians negotiated issues of age, race, and ethnicity among family-sponsored immigrants.

This chapter introduces the fundamentals of memetic media. It traces the (imperfect) connections between conceptualizations of memes as cultural replicators and the mediated texts that have come to bear the name in pop cultural parlance. It then outlines five fundamental logics central to memetic participation. Memetic media are unique for their multimodality (their expression in multiple modes of communication), reappropriation (their “poaching” of existing texts), resonance (their connections to individual participants), collectivism (their social creation and transformation), and spread (their circulation through mass networks). These logics persist beyond individual texts, and are lynchpins for public conversations occurring across mediated contexts.

This chapter focuses on the complex multimodal reappropriation at the heart of memetic media, outlining the socially-situated grammar that connects participants as they employ memetic media in their conversations. This grammar is premised on bricolage and poaching, on participants “making do” by transforming media texts they didn’t narrowly create and don’t narrowly own. It addresses the tensions between imitation and transformation in this process, arguing that the bricolage and poaching at the heart of memetic media are creative, expressive acts. As it outlines the formal and social dimensions underscoring memetic media, it builds a case for the persistent power of memetic logics as a lingua franca for public conversation.

This chapter focuses on the social dimensions of memetic practices, arguing that the memetic lingua franca is a vernacular premised on the creative transformation of expressions that have come before. In this way, memetic participation depends on the interrelations of fixed premise and novel expression. Just as spoken conversations are “prepatterned” by norms, tropes, and colloquialisms, memetic conversations are prepatterned by the expressions others have produced before. The chapter then outlines the vernacular creativity required in memetic conversation, emphasizing the collective standards guiding that creativity. Memetic expression is simultaneously influenced by and influences collective conversations. Because of this reciprocity, vernacular creativity is susceptible to the jargons, marginalizations, and antagonisms inherent to all collective conversations. Ultimately, memetic conversations are vibrant, if imperfect.

This chapter focuses on the everyday antagonisms that are perpetuated through memetic participation, specifically regarding race and gender identities. However, it also argues that memetic participation can be employed for the counterpublic contestation of those same antagonisms. The memetic logics, grammar, and vernacular introduced in the first half of the book are tools employed for both silencing marginalization and vocal pushback of that marginalization. The nature of this counterpublic engagement is ambivalent though, given that memetic media are often fraught with ambiguous irony and ambivalent humor. Genuine antagonisms and marginalizations can thrive under the “just joking” frame. But—even in the midst of this ambivalent system—there is value to the agonistic counterpublic engagement occurring through memetic media. Voice exists, even in the midst of the tensions evident throughout this discussion.

This chapter argues that memetic media carry the potential for polyvocal public voice, even given their everyday antagonisms. Focusing on mediated conversations surrounding the Occupy Wall Street movement, it addresses tensions between populism and pastiche when popular culture is part of public commentary. Vernacular creativity can be utilized for collective civic talk, as participants create, circulate, and transform memetic media in the name of critique, discussion, and argument. Memetic logics, grammar, and vernacular underscore a system of assertion and response, of point and counter-point as public participants contribute their expressive strands to vast public debates. Even if individual contributions are ambivalent and factionist, memetic media can indeed facilitate vibrant polyvocal participation, and our public conversations are stronger when they do.

This chapter argues that memetic participation complicates the culture industries that remain at the heart of public life. It assesses the ambivalent relationship between collective participation and individual expression, especially when age-old gatekeepers intertwine with new means of sharing information. It focuses on the complex relationship between collectivism, publicity, and fame in memetic media, as well as on concerns about commercialism and authenticity in a seemingly open media ecology. The tapestry of conversation afforded by memetic media is part new precedent and part established infrastructure. Memetic media intertwine with established culture industries; ambivalent network gatekeeping enables both restrictive commercial control of mediated participation and conversations open enough to cast doubts on the credibility of information. In this way, memetic media exhibit new potentials and old tensions.

The introduction examines how the immigration reform discourse of the mid-1990s differs from earlier debates. It also provides a brief overview of some of the main discursive strands and explains the tension between the explicit emphasis on economic concerns and the underlying anxieties about immigrants’ race, class, gender, and sexuality.

This chapter examines three key concerns that dominated the discourse about undocumented immigrants: (1) Sexuality, birthright citizenship, and undocumented children. (2) The rhetorical connection between “illegal” immigration, crime, and homeland security. (3) The discourse about unauthorized workers’ impact on the U.S. labor market. This chapter argues that politicians criminalized undocumented immigrants to establish that they were unfit to join the national community and access the rewards a neoliberal state had in store for responsible and motivated legal immigrants.