Critical Discourse Analysis Approach Research Articles

Foundational stigma: Place-based stigma in the age before advanced marginality.

This paper joins the debate on the formation of territorial stigma by uncovering the existence of a form of "foundational stigma" that preceded place-based stigma of the era of advanced marginality. I show that not only were the traces of stigma present prior to the era of advanced marginality but that these early traces facilitate later forms of stigma by providing the necessary foundations upon which adhesive and detrimental stigma was operationalized. Following a critical discourse analysis approach, this paper examines coverage in the British press of Toxteth, Liverpool between 1900 and 1981 as a paradigmatic case study to show that this primitive stigma existed in three key ways: relating to inter-community strife, to crime, and to substandard housing conditions. These traces of stigma laid the foundations for later forms of stigma based on the presence of the poor, violent, deviant other that would be operationalized by dominant voices during the era of advanced marginality.

Positive Reaction Toward Trade and Economic Partnership Between Indonesia and Australia Governments in The Jakarta Post

This study explores the representation of social actors, both in the Indonesian and Australian governments on the Trade and Economic Partnership through Critical Discourse Analysis approach. The issue focuses on both governments partnership published in the Jakarta Post during 2014-2018. Using Critical Discourse Analysis as an approach, this article analyses the media exclusion and inclusion strategies of social actors. By applying descriptive qualitative methods, result shows that the dominant strategy is the inclusion strategy. The use of inclusion strategy indicates specifications, individualization and categorization of positive reaction and support of The Jakarta Post towards the Indonesian government on trade and economic partnership between Indonesia and Australia. However, the use of exclusion strategy is aim to hide the social actors in the discourse and to divert reader's attention to the object rather than the subject discourse.

Discourses of Flood Disaster Preparedness by NGOs: Humanitarian Aid, Teamwork and Victimization

In recent years global warming and climate change due to human activity and natural phenomena, have become recognized as major contributors to the increased occurrence of flood events worldwide. Similarly, the frequency and seriousness of floods in Malaysia have made it a major threat to the country. To this end, research on flood disaster has increased. Most investigations have however, focused on engineering fields, thus there is a real need for research on human activities, response and involvement. Addressing the need for research on human involvement in flood, we adopt a social constructionist perspective to investigate the discursive construction of knowledge about flood disaster preparedness by NGOs commonly involved in flood mitigation and management in Johor. We draw on the perspective that disaster discourses reveal interpretations and perceptions of ways of understanding flood disaster, and that different discourses directly shape and influence response and action for flood mitigation and management. The data consists of four in-depth semi-structured interviews with officers from various NGOs. Adopting van Leeuwen’s Critical Discourse Analytic approach, i.e. recontextualisation if social practice and representation of social actors and social action, the findings show that the members from NGOs employ various discourses such as discourses of flood causation, discourses of teamwork and humanitarian which have a direct impact on their actions/ response during the floods. More specifically, these discourses highlight more of what they do rather than the communities being helped. The study posits that the discourses not only show the positioning of the NGOs as humanitarians called on to help others, but via a discourse of victimization, they construct flood risk communities as helpless victims awaiting assistance. It advocates a change in mindset of the various parties involved in flood disaster mitigation and management in Malaysia, from that of perceiving the community as victims to survivors, thereby tapping on the communities’ resourcefulness via discourses of empowerment, communitarianism and responsibilization. Keywords:

Collective identity and discourse practice in the followership of the Football Lads Alliance on Twitter

Previous studies of online (collective) identity have explored how social media–specific practices like hashtags can enable identity construction and affiliation with a wider community of users. Practices such as mentioning and retweeting have also been discussed in the literature but the practice of following as a discourse practice is underexplored. This article presents a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analytical approach to the study of collective identity on Twitter that focuses on the relationships between following and language use and details a study conducted on the language used by followers of the Football Lads Alliance – a protest group who say they are ‘against all extremism’. This approach was fruitful in identifying correlations between salient discourses in follower profile descriptions and their tweets and suggests that a portion of the followership constructs identity in relation to radical right-wing and populist discourse specifically concerning Islam/Muslims.

Discursive constructions of racism and white privilege in a U.S. pilot seminar

ABSTRACT Utilising discourse from college students who participated in a three-day seminar focused on racism and white privilege that I designed and piloted, this study examines and critiques participants’ constructions of these constructs. I collected data via a pre- and post-seminar survey, and through recordings of students’ participation in small and large-group discussions, activities, affinity groups, and role-play scenarios. I used a Critical Discourse Analysis approach that most closely follows Fairclough to analyse participants’ negotiated constructions of racism and white privilege before, during, and one month after the seminar. I then discussed findings from the study that include participants’ subject positionings within the discourse, the implications of students’ constructions of racism and white privilege within educational contexts, and how these constructions can reinforce social practices that reify hierarchies, power relations, and status positionings. The paper concludes with implications for scholars and educators who teach courses that examine racism and whiteness.

‘US VS THEM’ RHETORIC OF LEAVE NEWSPAPERS IN THE BUILD-UP TO BREXIT REFERENDUM

Applying the critical discourse analysis approach, the article analyses the ‘us/good vs them/bad’ pro-Brexit campaign in British newspapers during the three months before the EU membership referendum.

Religious discursive practices and identity in Iran: new trends in religious ritual performances among the youth

ABSTRACT The paper attempts to demonstrate that a better understanding of the changes of national/cultural perceptions and representations of the Iranian community is possible by approaching the complex meanings of religious ritual practices in the country. Through a systematic interpretive discursive analysis of a sample of Traditional and Non-traditional religious Eulogies, this article figures out how the juxtaposition of new and old contexts and use of Pop and Hip-Hop genres provides discursive opportunities for the Iranian younger generation to express their version of national/cultural tendencies and to articulate both Shi’a Iranian and global identities simultaneously. While there is a gap in the analysis of religious discourse from a critical discourse study perspective, I draw on the theoretical assumptions from the Discourse-Historical Approach of Critical Discourse Analysis to explore the implications of the discursive strategies that are employed to associate the religious discourse of Shi’a Eulogies to the socio-political context of Iran and how the youth would transform these narratives of grief and sorrow into an evocative narrative that captures the imagination of the contemporary audiences.

Replacing actual political activism with ethical shopping: The case of Oatly

There has been an increase of food products marketed through buzzwords like organic, ‘local’, ‘recyclable’, ‘Fair-trade’. These have been described as part of a newer kind of ethical or emotional capitalism, where consumers can align with political issues through acts of shopping. The problem is that such acts replace or shape what we know about, and how we act towards, actual socio-political matters. In this paper, we look at one example of such a product: Oatly, a milk alternative, which brands itself as sustainable and anti-corporate. Taking a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analytical approach, we want to learn more about how such brands do not actually state details of the socio-political issue alongside which they align (its causes, process, solutions) yet successfully communicate a compelling sense that buying the product is a form of social activism in a way which cleverly implicates consumers to internalize its values and give them a powerful sense of being part of a political moral order. And this is a form of activism which is fun, chic and rather easy.

Symbolic structures in discourse analysis of environmental social life

The problem this research is how the structure of the symbolic meaning in the discourse of social life. The aim was to describe the construction of the structure of the symbolic meaning in the discourse of social life. The data source is the study entitled news of social life online media. This study used the approach of critical discourse analysis of Norman Fairclough, who built a model by integrating together a discourse analysis based on the linguistic and social and political thought, which in turn is generally integrated in social change. Based on the findings, it was concluded that the ideology and power in the discourse of social life is represented in the following linguistic features. (1) Recommended vocabulary that represents the ideology and power in the discourse of social life consists of: (a) modality, which includes modalities “for sure”, (b) the verb which include “make”, “have” and “upload”, (c) nouns include “ATM machine”, and “croquet”, and (d) includes the conjunctive “but”. (2) Features phrase that represents the ideology and power in the discourse of social life consists of a verb phrase. (3) Features sentences represented ideology and power in the discourse of environmental social life consisted of sentences inversion.

The Representation of the Arab Spring in the U.S. Media

The present study examines the representation of the Arab Spring in the American imprint media. The study analyzes principally from a critical discourse analysis approach how journalists employ discursive strategies and linguistic devices which may serve their own ideology and agenda in their news coverage of the Arab Spring. The analysis of newspapers suggests that the media’s representation of Arabs and Muslims is saturated with discourses related to the ideology of Orientalism. In fact, a number of Orientalist themes appear in the majority of texts. The preliminary and common themes found in the coverage of the Arab Spring are that of violence in the Arab world (negative other – representation), Islamophobia (Islam as a threat), and Western superiority in comparison with Arabs (positive selfrepresentation). The results show that the American media coverage of the Arab Spring was biased and unjust. Besides, there is a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed.

Representation of Power in the News Text of the Inclusion of Indigenous Faiths on ID Card (e-KTP)

This paper presents the results of news analysis of the Supreme Court decision that Indigenous Faiths on the ID card (E-KTP) with Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis approach as the central platform. The study covers descriptions (text analysis), interpretations (discourse practices), and explanations (social practices). The results are as follows. (1) The structure of the news text Indigenous Faiths allowed on the ID card is built by four units of discourse: headline, orientation, the sequence of events, closing. Modalities and affirmative sentences represent the positive ideology of the conflicting faction and the institutions (government, scientists, and community leaders). Meanwhile, prohibiting speech and negative sentences represent the negative ideology. (2) What events occur, who is involved, what is the relationship with the issue raised, and what role the language can be expressed through the interpretation of the practice of discourse. (3) The situation when the news text is produced, the influence of the institution on the produced text, and the condition of Indonesians related to economic, political, social, and cultural interests (socio-cultural context).

The Representation of Women’s CEO Image in Online Media

The research focused on the representation of women in the news about the absence of women in Uber’s CEO candidates from the perspective of feminist stylistics by Sara Mills. Five news texts from five different websites published during August 2017 were analyzed; they were Washington Post, Daily Mail, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Fortune. The method used was a qualitative research method with the approach of critical discourse analysis of Sara Mills. By applying three levels of analysis which was analysis at the level of the word, phrase/sentence, and discourse, this research aimed to analyze how women were represented linguistically in the online news of Uber’s CEO candidates and to discover the reason why women were represented in the way they were. The findings reveal that women remain underrepresented in news media. It is proved by the dominance of women as the object in the stories. Moreover, women are represented as ‘glass cliff position’, minority, and a way to recreate the good image in the company. The gender stereotypes, the background story of Uber, the male-dominated industries, and the prevalent condition become the reasons why women represented that way.

Medicinal Cannabis Users Downplaying and Shifting Stigma: Articulations of the ‘Natural’, of What Is/Is Not a ‘Drug’ and Oppositions with ‘Chemical’ Substances

While sympathy exists among the public for chronically ill and/or disabled people who use cannabis medicinally, cannabis remains a prohibited substance in the UK. How do medicinal cannabis users negotiate this potential stigma when talking about their use of this substance? I reflect on the spoken discourses of 10 medicinal cannabis users (from a sample of 32), obtained by way of qualitative interviews, adopting a critical discourse analysis approach to the data. Specifically, I focus on their articulations around three related themes: cannabis as a ‘natural’ substance, discursive oppositions between cannabis and other substances, and articulations about what is/is not a ‘drug’. I examine how participants articulated these themes in ways that attempted to negotiate the potential for stigma that talking about their cannabis use involved. I found they used rhetorical strategies that downplay their own deviance, attempt to shift the application of stigma to users of other substances, or both. I argue that the more powerful the discursive resources that are articulated, the less rhetorical work an individual has to do to negotiate positive moral standing in an encounter. I also consider to what degree these articulations involved constructions emphasising individual self-control. I argue participants emphasise their individual self-control by asserting that cannabis is a ‘natural’ substance (connoting less inherent risk).

Using corpora to investigate the representation of poverty in the 2015 UK general election campaign

This paper investigates the representation of poverty during the 2015 UK general election campaign. The analysis is based on a corpus of articles published in the daily, Sunday and online editions of nine national newspapers. A framework combining the mainly qualitative approach of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with corpus-based techniques is used to address the following questions: which themes did the press foreground and background a) when poverty was mentioned explicitly, b) when it was referred to in terms of the welfare system and c) when the two were mentioned together in the same article? The main claim of this study is that explicit discussion of poverty in the media was infrequent during the campaign period, reflecting a lack of attention paid to poverty by politicians. Moreover, when poverty was mentioned, it was talked about as an international issue without tangible public impacts; this placed it firmly outside the arena of the general election campaign. Poverty was presented as a moral issue that must be ended, while the reduction of expenditure on benefits through welfare reform was posed as a necessity for the reduction of debt, and central to the general election campaign. I further argue that the press was able to send such contradictory messages about poverty and the welfare state by separating them into two parallel debates.

Are UK music therapists talking past each other? A critical discourse analysis of three book reviews

Ansdell’s ‘Winds of Change’ paper articulated a distinction in UK music therapy between established ‘consensus’ practice drawing on psychotherapeutic principles and developing or previously hidden ‘community music therapy’ practices based on ecological or social-psychological principles. Writing that addresses different theoretical positions in music therapy (meta-theory) exists from European and American perspectives but far less from a UK perspective. This article considers the view that UK music therapy writing in general has continued along one or other of these paths and that there has been relatively little exchange between them; indeed, that UK music therapists tend to ‘talk past each other’. To explore the matter systematically, this article takes a critical discourse analysis approach to analysing three recent music therapy book reviews. Critical discourse analysis was chosen to identify underlying assumptions (‘ideologies’) that shape thinking and practice, as revealed by language use. Book reviews were identified as texts where reviewers typically engage with authors from different perspectives and in doing so offer potentially rich material for such analysis. The analysis identifies ways in which UK music therapy writing shows signs of stress across a divide between ecological and psychodynamic approaches, with reviewers going to some lengths to reconnect these different positions and so unify a discourse within which ‘fault-lines’ are present. It is suggested that, in the United Kingdom at least, ecological and psychodynamic music therapy writing are becoming more separated as discourses, with a lack of integrated meta-theoretical discussion or examples of shared practice. This inhibits coherent development of the discipline and the effective training of future practitioners. A case is made for greater integration in music therapy writing through both developments in meta-theory and by practitioners sharing examples of cross-theoretical practice.

From fighting the bad to protecting the good: Legitimation strategies in WADA’s athlete guides

The global anti-doping effort in sport is based upon perceptions of the system as desirable, proper and appropriate and thus considered legitimate. The legitimacy of the anti-doping system has earlier been studied bottom-up, based on the views of athletes. In order to gain greater understanding of legitimation processes, it is also important to study legitimation strategies top-down, used by decision-making and governing bodies. The aim of this study was to use Fairclough’s critical discourse analytical approach to analyse the social construction of legitimacy in the World Anti-Doping Agency’s three editions of a guide to anti-doping rules aimed at athletes. The analysis was performed based on van Leeuwen’s four specific legitimation strategies: authorization, rationalization, moral evaluation and mythopoesis. Our analysis shows that the legitimation of the anti-doping discourse as constructed in the athlete guides that has accompanied anti-doping regulations for more than a decade is characterized by continuity as regards an authoritarian attitude, but also by change towards a more rational and athlete-centred stance. A shift can be seen in the construction of legitimacy in the anti-doping discourse from “fighting the bad” to “protecting the good”. We discuss the moral evaluation strategy as a way to construct legitimacy for anti-doping efforts and sport in general towards a wider public. In the light of the results of this study, we conclude that policymaking in relation to doping issues should take into account the dimension of the discursive top-down legitimation, which could affect how the policy is received at the level of the athletes and provide conditions for a sustainable anti-doping system.

The construction of knowledge on “quality” in higher education: A study of universities’ websites in India

In the context of India, the current paper studies the ways in which select public and private universities are representing themselves on their own website. In the process, the objective is to reveal what claims on “quality” in higher education (HE), are made by these universities; and how and why marketing power/knowledge influences these claims. Adhering to a critical realist discourse analysis approach, the paper not only describes the discourse on “quality” in HE on the selected universities’ websites but also makes an attempt to explain why marketing power/knowledge has come to have causal influence over the ways of knowing about “quality” in HE. Invoking, a moderate constructionist theory which is compatible with critical realism, it is accepted that knowledge on “quality” in HE is constructed discursively. However, these constructions are also shaped by non-discursive factors such as materiality, structural, institutional and physical embodied elements. The paper finds marketing power/knowledge is invested in the statements—both visual and textual, particularly on private universities’ websites. As mainstream marketing literature and practice recognize HE as a service and conceptualizes student/parent as a consumer, these universities’ websites have emerged as a site of playing out internet marketing strategies. There is an emphasis on tangibilization of the so-called HE service so that a prospective “student/parent-consumer” can see and find it cognitively easy to understand “quality” in HE. Consequently, one finds an emphasis on the discourses of “rankings”, “recognitions”, and “infrastructure” on these websites. In addition to this, one also finds influence of post-modern marketing and post-modern attitude towards truth on these statements. Marketers believe more in the appeal of these statements than in their authenticity. However, instead of invoking a relativist approach where only cultural factors are invoked to explain these influences, this paper hints towards materiality such as the ephemerality of the web, among others, as causal factors shaping these discourses.

The representation of sex work in the Greek Press

AbstractThe representation of sex work in the media has received little to no attention in the field of linguistics and discourse analysis. Given that news discourse can have a huge impact on public opinions, ideologies and norms, and the setting of political agendas and policies (van Dijk 1989), the study adopts a Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CACDA) approach (Baker, Gabrielatos, KhosraviNik, Krzyżanowski, McEnery & Wodak 2008), seeking to explore whether journalists reproduce or challenge negative stereotypes vis-à-vis sex work. Examining 82 articles published in three Greek newspapers (Kathimerini, TA NEA, Efimerida ton Syntakton) in 2017, this paper considers the lexico-grammatical choices that are typically involved in the representation of sex work and sex workers in the Press. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics, the Discourse Historical Approach and corpus linguistics, the analysis links the textual findings (micro-level context) with the discourse practice context (meso-context) as well as the social context in which sex work occurs (macro-context). Findings illustrate that although sex work in Greece has been legalised for about two decades, traces of abolitionist discourses can be found in the Press, building barriers in the emancipatory efforts of sex workers who stand up for having equal civil and labour rights as their fellow citizens.

Bordering work in contemporary political discourse: The case of the US/Mexico border wall proposal

In this article, I use a critical discourse analytic approach to investigate how President Trump’s campaign goal to build a wall along the US/Mexico border has been discussed in United States political discourse. The data analyzed are 30 videotaped speeches and other public events which occurred between October 2016 and March 2018. These data are publicly available from the cable news channel C-SPAN’s online video archive. The analysis focuses on the communicative techniques and strategies used to persuade others and justify one’s position in the interactions and events studied. In this article, I show how the border wall proposal is reformulated into a debate about border security, and how diverse ways of referring to persons without approved documentation are used to support arguments on both sides of the debate.

MUHAMMAD’S LIFE HISTORY: A GENEALOGICAL DISCOURSE THROUGH WESTERN 18 - 20 CENTURY VIEWS

This paper describes the discourse of the image and biography of Prophet Muhammad in the view of Western scholars from the 18th century to the 20th century. Photographing the dynamics and development of their thinking in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach, through Foucault’s genealogy. The discourse focused on the features and characteristics of three important scholars of his time: Edward Gibbon, R. Bosworth Smith, and W. Montgomery Watt