From space to spatiality: critical spatial discourse analysis as a framework for the geo-graphing of media texts

Abstract

ABSTRACT The myriad ways in which spatiality, or socially produced space, impinges on media texts is the overarching concern of this study. Responding to Edward Soja’s call for an assertive foregrounding of a critical spatial perspective, this article is an ontological reassertion of space in relation to news media discourse and argues that the socially constructed spatiality of a journalistic text is just as revealingly significant as its historicality and sociality. Introduced here is Critical Spatial Discourse Analysis (CSDA), a methodological framework that employs the spatiocultural theory of Bill Richardson to enable a mapping of the various aspects of spatiality informing media texts. Edward Said’s imaginative geographies is also drawn upon to advance a geographical notation and mapping of the territorial imaginations underlying news media texts. The fundamental assumption of CSDA is that space is not only actively constituted in media texts but also constitutes and that it can, and indeed must be read and interpreted as any other text. A sample column from Turkey’s Sabah newspaper will be used to illustrate the application of CSDA to press coverage of democracy to see what might be revealed of those real-and-imagined spaces that are interposed and obscured in the text’s background.