Afghan Women’s Representation in News Discourse during the First 365 Days of Taliban Governance A Corpus-Based Analysis

Abstract

The study attempts to investigate the 365 days of Afghan women in the post-Taliban regime in Afghanistan in news discourse. The study particularly aims to analyze the lexical collocation of the keywords related to Afghan women in the news discourse. The study is qualitative as it analyses the data qualitatively. Corpus Linguistics has been used as a methodology in this study. Fifty online news articles have been selected from Pakistani newspaper The News International, and a corpus has been developed with the name Afghan Women News Corpus. The data have been analysed using LancsBox v.5.x (Brezina et al., 2020). The study draws on Baker’s (2004) Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis framework. The corpus was uploaded to LancsBox and a list of collocations of the keyword Afghan Women was generated. Both the left and right collocates of the keywords were analyzed in detail and were used for thematic development and coding. The findings of this analysis revealed the basic patterns the data used to deal with the topic of Afghan women in particular and their social setup in general. It is found that in the majority of cases, the news discourse negatively represents the Taliban regime, occasionally shows it neutrally, and rarely shows it positively. The research concludes with a discussion of the main findings by highlighting the discourse surrounding community representation before and after the war.