Features of the development of a research plan for Muslims discourse analysis of the Ukrainian press

Abstract

The article deals with the problems in project design process of the Muslims discourse study in Ukrainianmedia. The Muslims discourse is an important research object for sociology due to its significance inshaping the social interaction conditions, in particular attitu des towards of non-Orthodox persons.Through the analysis of an English and Portuguese publications about Muslim discourse studies itwas grounded the correlation between the research questions and the project design issues in discourseanalysis. The author highlights three types of Muslims discourse studies in the press: analysis of coverageof a separate event related to Muslims; analysis of the attributive words with the word `Muslim’; analysisof media coverage of selected topics related to Muslims. The research questions of some of the Muslimdiscourse studies, their methodological features and the analit ical tools are examined in more detail.The author emphasizes the diversity of the existing analytical tools of discourse study and the possibilityof their combination, provided that the methodological differences of each of the approaches are taken intoaccount.The articles presents the research plan according to the three main issues that influence the design ofa discourse study. This research is developed within the framework of the author’s dissertation empiricalpart. The purpose is to describe the Muslims discourses in the Ukrainian press, their way of functioningand to evaluate the discursive conditions for the inclusiveness of Ukrainian society for Muslims. The mainapproaches of discourse analysis is a Critical Discourse Analysis by N. Fairclaugh. The corpus of texts isrepresented by the Muslims related articles of eight Ukrainian journals in the period of 2010–2018.Therepresentativeness of the corpus is considered as the ability of the corpus to represent the various discoursesthat exist in the Ukrainian media, according to different social conditions of the text production. Thepossibility of combining quantitative and qualitative parts of discourse analysis is demonstrated. Special attention should be given to the synthesis of the analytical tools proposed by such authors, as N. Fairclough,E. Laclau and C. Mouffe and E. Orlandi.One of the benefits of this article is a possibility to use the following project plan to study Ukrainianpress discourse on any other social group.