Discourse Studies Research Articles

AI Privacy in Context: A Comparative Study of Public and Institutional Discourse on Conversational AI Privacy in the US and Chinese Social Media

The proliferation of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as chatbots, has sparked widespread privacy concerns. Previous research suggests that privacy perceptions and practices vary across sociocultural contexts. This study examines public and institutional discourses on conversational AI privacy in the United States and China. Semantic network and discourse analyses of privacy-related discussions on Twitter and Weibo reveal divergent patterns. On Twitter, public discourse emphasizes privacy risks and concerns and advocates for systemic changes, while institutional discourse promotes individualistic approaches to privacy protection. Conversely, on Weibo, public discourse is less focused on privacy risks and more on the positive impacts of AI, aligning closely with institutional narratives. These variations are intertwined with the cultural, political, economic, and regulatory contexts of the two countries. Our study underscores the importance of multi-level analysis in comparative privacy research to provide a holistic view of privacy in various contexts.

Linguistische Diskursethnographie als Zugriff auf das Praxisfeld Queer-Gottesdienst

German-Speaking Discourse Linguistics has long been concerned with the analysis of primarily textual data. Thus, other approaches to discourse building up on ideas from qualitative social research have often been neglected. Following Phillip Dreesen (2018), I am going to argue in this paper that ethnographic research strategies are a useful complement to traditional text-analytical approaches. Accordingly, I will illustrate what I mean by Linguistic Discourse-Ethnography and how it can connect to the already existing interdisciplinary research within Discourse Studies. In order to illustrate my arguments, I am going to investigate the phenomenon of hermeneutic speechlessness and how queer church-services help actors to resolve it. Eventually, I will argue that one of the major strengths of Linguistic Discourse-Ethnography is that it can give insight into process of subjectification i.e. that it can illustrate how actors use hegemonic linguistic resources to reconceptualize ways of becoming a subject in discourse.

‘Abbiamo liberato un’Islamica’: deconstructing the argumentative legitimation of discriminatory attitudes against Silvia Romano

ABSTRACT This paper aims to explore the argumentative legitimation of discriminatory attitudes against Silvia Romano on Italian newspapers front pages. A volunteer-aid worker and activist, Romano was kidnapped in northeast Kenya in 2018 and eventually released after 18 months of captivity. Upon her return to Italy, a jilbāb-covered Romano declared she converted to Islam while held hostage and changed her name to Aisha. Romano’s conversion triggered a wave of exclusionary rhetoric across Italian media and opened the dam to a deluge of misogynous and Islamophobic attacks against the newly liberated activist, accused of having betrayed Catholic religion and Italian culture. Our corpus comprises 86 front pages from mainstream Italian newspapers of different ideological backgrounds, collected during the first week after Romano’s release in May 2020. Following the agenda of Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies and drawing on van Leeuwen’s language of legitimation, we study the recontextualization of social practice on the front pages and the main argumentation strategies, namely topoi, that emerge on the basis of this recontextualization, ending up argumentatively legitimizing discriminatory attitudes against the intended target.

Organs-without-body: a study on the genealogy of vision leading to the posthuman age

In 1834, an American medical missionary, Peter Parker, arrived in Guangdong and established a hospital. He used his medical skills to evangelise and commissioned a local artist named Lam Qua to paint numerous medical portraits. Previous studies on these portraits have mainly focused on historiography or critical discourse studies, with little attention given to the visual thinking behind them. Therefore, this paper uses Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge to systematically sort out similar images from different periods to demonstrate how the epistemological type brought by medical observation operates and is represented through discursive formation. The study shows that Lam Qua’s medical portraits can be traced back to clinicians’ records of cases and served as ethnographic displays, similar to freak shows. Information gradually becomes emphasised partially due to its detachment from the entity in the dissemination process. This idea inspired Rei Kawakubo’s clothing fashions, while Cunningham’s dance art takes it further by abstracting information from the body, visually representing posthuman thinking. These seemingly unrelated cases belong to the same collection of statements that form a system called organs-without-body in this paper, serving as a metaphor for non-physical information to help us better understand the formation of posthuman thought.

Perceptions of the ‘mainstream’ and the mainstreaming of the far right: from Ed Sheeran to Keir Starmer

ABSTRACT While people use the term ‘mainstream’ on a regular basis, there has been relatively little discussion about what it actually means. Within far-right studies, attempts to define the mainstream often center around party politics and the impact of mainstream party strategies on the far right. While a useful starting point, this focus has led to more rigid conceptions which encourage particular normative assumptions about its identity. Through poststructuralist discourse theory, supported by insights from music studies and critical discourse studies, this article proposes a definition which accounts for its contingency and construction, challenging dominant narratives about its nature. These issues are crucial when we consider the relationship between the mainstream and far right because they encourage us to question their perceived relative positioning. By introducing the concepts of talking ‘with’ and ‘about’ the far right, this piece establishes the need for us to take the role of the mainstream in the mainstreaming of the far right seriously.

Framing the shooting of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in English and Arabic news headlines: a critical discourse study

The study aims to investigate the ideological manipulation of language within news media headlines regarding the killing of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. This study employs Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of Critical Discourse Analysis to conduct a comparative qualitative analysis of 100 Arabic and 100 English news headlines, exploring linguistic features at both microstructure and macrostructure levels. The analysis delves into identity construction for the victim and perpetrator, revealing the discursive linguistic manifestations of underlying ideologies in two distinct linguistic and cultural contexts. The microstructure analysis reveals the preference of Arabic headlines for active voice structure, rhetorical devices of numeration, emphatic language, and metaphors. On the other hand, English headlines preferred the passive voice structure and the rhetorical device of litotes. The macrostructure analysis unravels the cognitive interplay between news media outlets and their target audience, demonstrating how selective headlines significantly impact public opinion. It shapes their comprehension and interpretation, particularly within the broader context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ultimately, this research highlights the dynamic interplay between language, ideology, and power in news media, offering key recommendations for understanding their comparative impacts.

Mapuche women in the city: celebrating their process of ethnogenesis

ABSTRACT The article examines how urban Mapuche women co-construct discourses about their ethnogenesis process through evaluations and dialogical positioning. The methodology is qualitative with an interpretive design. The collection method was a focus group in which four urban Mapuche women between 25 and 55 years old participated. The analysis was conducted from a Critical Discourse Studies approach that integrates sociopolitical studies of Mapuche history and decolonial perspectives on the formation of ethnic identity, with the analytical tools of the appraisal system within the Systemic Functional Linguistics theoretical framework. The study focuses on the intersubjective meanings of the attitude and engagement to identify evaluations, positions, and voices present in this discursive construction. The results indicate that participants develop discursive strategies of ‘counter-racialization’ to respond to the ‘racialization’ that has shaped their lives. The discursive strategies are collectively constructed through different evaluative micro-maneuvers that are realized in the discursive semantic stratum as couplings of areas of attitude: affect/judgement and affect/appreciation and couplings of the attitude/engagement meanings. Through these discursive strategies, these women re-signify and celebrate their Mapuche identity by embodying a new symbolic territory that allows them to carry their ancestors and spiritual world.

Platformisation Practice for Emancipation or Subordination? A Multimodal Critical Discourse Study of Self-presentations of African-Chinese Families on Douyin

ABSTRACT In China, the rise in popularity of African-Chinese families is largely driven by the influence of new media, with many African women turning to Chinese social media platforms to document their daily lives and explore economic opportunities through increased online visibility. However, scholarly attention to the self-presentation of African-Chinese families on these platforms remains minimal. Addressing this gap, this study, through analysing 26 selected short videos posted on Douyin (Chinese Tiktok), employs multimodal critical discourse analysis to investigate how African women in African-Chinese families conduct self-presentations on Douyin. The study found that African women in African-Chinese families, when engaging in digital practices, employ certain discursive strategies to conduct self-presentations in alignment with the Chinese context and national conditions. In videos, they identify with and construct patriarchal norms within heteronormative families, align with China’s political agenda, and perform ambiguous feminism. It is argued that African women’s digital practices represent an acceptance and response to the platformisation of Chinese social media. This study sheds light on the complex ways in which marginalised groups navigate digital platforms to gain visibility, while also revealing the potential of such practices to reinforce gender inequalities in the Chinese context. By highlighting these factors, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the intersection between digital media, cultural integration, and gender politics in the context of contemporary China.

Prejudice in selected American and Iranian newspaper articles on Gaza crisis: A critical discourse study

Prejudice discourse is considered as one of the most important language uses usually invested in different social situations, particularly by in-group speech communities. This highlights the need to investigate this language phenomenon according to some interdisciplinary perspectives. So, this paper compares and contrasts from critical discourse perspective the prejudiced content used in the news coverage of American and Iranian newspapers' discourse as part of the discursive portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the 7th Oct. 2023 attack. Two articles were gathered from two opposing international newspapers, one is American (New York Post) and another is Iranian (Tehran Times). This paper aims at discovering prejudice's components and function, identifying the discursive strategies to determine the ideologies that allow a journalist to write a prejudice content. So, this helps the researcher to expos the differences and similarities in the selected data. To get a thorough critical comprehend of the nature of prejudice in the selected data, the researcher adopted a model for critical discourse analysis and applies qualitative and quantitative data analysis. The researcher finds that the cognitive, affected and behavioral components which are a reflection of an attitude in the function of publishing prejudiced content in the selected articles include semantic-strategies of lexicalization and aggregation and rhetorical-strategies of topo and contrast. The polarization of positive in-group self-representation and negative out-group representation in a racist and discriminatory way are the most prevalent ideologies that drive the creation of prejudiced content in the selected data. The articles differ in the sense that while the news coverage in Iranian was prejudiced "pro-Palestinians," American newspapers published prejudiced "pro-Israeli" articles. Although these two newspapers have adopted similar linguistic methods, they convey the news coverage of that event in some prejudiced way based on the newspaper's ideological perspective.

Behind the Protein Battle Lines in the 1970s: Nutritional Turmoil in the Postwar World.

This study examines the development of international debates about the perception of nutrients, particularly protein, with a focus on the "Protein Debate" of the late 20th century. The nutritional obsession with protein has been ongoing since the early 19th century, when scientific nutrition was established, and has been at the center of debates surrounding food, agriculture, healthcare, and the environment, changing in shape and form over time. In addition to being a nutrient necessary for optimal physical and mental performance, protein has been a marker of poverty and discrimination at the international level and explains differences in individual living standards. Kwashiorkor, also known as protein calorie disorder, medicalized the problem of poverty in the Third World or underdeveloped countries. By the 1970s, the nutritional discussion of protein had undergone a radical transformation, with implications for the entire development discourse, including poverty and human rights. This study of the historical discourse on protein deficiency goes beyond the scientific focus on nutritional status, food, and dietary health to identify the social, economic, and cultural implications of nutrition.

‘Not that We’re not Hard-Working Ourselves, but Germans are the Model’: mediatising Germans as the national other in the video project Easy Languages

ABSTRACT The present paper focuses on the analysis of four videos which portray the ways British, Italian, French and Greek people talk about Germans as the national other, within the context of a video series project aiming to promote multilingualism and foreign language learning (Easy Languages). Contrary to traditional views on national stereotypes from social psychology, and on cultural categorisations of countries from intercultural communication as universally fixed entities, a Critical Discourse Studies perspective is adopted, which views them instead as hegemonic discourses, which sustain particular power relations with the excuse of ‘cultural’ difference. The analysis discloses that the mediatisation of Germans as the national other aligns with the well-known national stereotypes of competence and warmth, as well as with the widely held cultural categorisations distinguishing monochronic from polychronic countries. Yet, viewed as dynamic discursive resources, it is shown that discussing national matters is a delicate topic, requiring a positive impression management, especially within a context with ‘clear’ intercultural objectives. Moreover, these discourses lead to the neutralisation of politics through culturalisation.

Construction of TCM Institution Image: A Corpus-Based Comparative Critical Discourse Study of Chinese and Western Mainstream Media Reports

This study conducts a corpus-assisted comparative analysis of the media images of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) institutions in Chinese and Western media contexts. Applying Fairclough’s three-dimensional critical discourse analysis (CDA) model alongside the TCM Social Image Evaluation Index System, this study explores media image construction and ideological factors shaping the perception of TCM institutions globally through an analysis of linguistic features in keywords, evaluative collocates and modal verbs. It’s found that Chinese media present TCM institutions in a positive light, depicting them as multifaceted organizations with a rich cultural legacy and robust capabilities in medical and scientific research. They showcase TCM institutions as cooperative, promising in integration with modern healthcare, efficient, rapid, flexible, innovative, and imbued with humanitarian values especially during the COVID-19 epidemic. Western media, however, adopt a more cautious stance. They tend to frame TCM institutions as providers of alternative medicine and temporary solutions, with a focus on health preservation, leisure and overall well-being. Concerns have also been raised about the potential illicit activities associated with some massage schools. These disparities in presenting TCM institutions reflect cultural, political and audience demand differences between China and the West. The results of this study contribute to a deeper understanding of the media portrayal of TCM institutions, provide insights into the challenges facing the global recognition and acceptance of TCM institutions, and suggest strategies for Chinese media, TCM practitioners, and policymakers to enhance their international image.

Constructing resistance in the quest for social justice

Abstract This study adopts the concept of “positive peace” and draws on critical discourse studies to investigate the texts of two Thai activists responding to the 2006 coup d’état and subsequent events in Thailand. The study analyses the texts from a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) perspective to show how the first text challenges the legitimacy of the coup, and how the second text reflects a widening of the cracks then appearing in Thai royalist hegemony. In particular, the study compares the construal of one social actor in the first text published in 2007 with that in the speech of the second activist three years later, highlighting how the meaning of a key word evolved from one of oppression to one of pride.

Contextual parameters in transcreating political aphorisms and imageries

ABSTRACT This study examines the efficacy of the contextual parameters-governed re-contextualisation model (CPRM) framework in translating Chinese political aphorisms and imageries into English. Our dataset covers 300 examples from Xi Jinping: Governance of China (Volumes I – IV), which includes 81 thematic discourses and articles. In this article we provide a justification for developing the theoretical model; analyse the official translations, and compare examples following the CPRM. Our findings reveal that the CPRM may improve the political and cultural implications of the aphorisms and imageries. Ultimately, this study aims to enrich the study of the political discourse in translation studies, offering a model that bridges linguistic fidelity with contextual sensitivity.

How Women Are Portrayed in Opinion in the Kompas Daily Newspaper According to Sara Mills' Critical Discourse Studies?

This research is motivated by the problem of gender inequality issues in women's lives that are still often reported by the mass media. Among the mass media that reported this was the daily newspaper Kompas, especially in an opinion piece entitled Perempuan dan Mimpinya published on June 6, 2024. Based on the background of the problem depicted in the Women and Their Dreams (Perempuan dan Mimpinya) opinion, the purpose of writing this article is to describe how women are viewed by the mass media and their relationship to the current social reality of society. The collection of research data was carried out using reading techniques, including the steps of reading carefully and repeatedly the opinions that were the source of research data, marking vocabulary, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that were in accordance with the criteria of the research problem, recording and inventorying them in an inventory table. The data was analyzed using an interactive method to reveal the position of women behind the text Women and Their Dreams (Perempuan dan Mimpinya) and its relationship to the current social reality of society. Analysis of the research data shows three things. First, the position of the subject in the discourse of the Perempuan dan Mimpinya opinion is occupied by the author who acts as the storyteller, while the position of the object is occupied by women. Second, the author tries to direct the reader to become the actor of the story by presenting a pseudo reality and cultural code in the text that seems to be the reality in the reader's real life. Third, the meaning of the entire discourse of opinion on Women and Their Dreams shows that in the domestic and public spaces women are still not fully able to become a gender group that is equal to the masculine gender group.

L’ús pòstum de les figures literàries en l’esfera pública: pràctiques i processos commemoratius en la cultura catalana contemporània

This special issue brings together a series of in-depth case studies of commemorative discourses and practices dedicated to some of the most important figures in contemporary Catalan literature from the beginning of the 19th century onwards, which contributed to transform selected writers (including Antoni Capmany, Jaume Balmes, Jacint Verdaguer, Àngel Guimerà and Josep Maria de Sagarra, as well as female authors, such as Josepa Massanés, Mercè Rodoreda, Anna Murià, Maria Aurèlia Cap-many and Montserrat Roig) into collective memory sites for the Catalan community. It aims to contribute critically to the burgeoning international scholarship on “cultural saints”, that is, the (generally male) writers, artists and intellectuals marked out as representative of cultural-national community identities in the age of consolidation of the nation-state. The bodies and corpora of the symbolic figures and cultural icons examined across the nine articles commissioned and collected here both served to confer legitimacy on diverse projects and agents in the public sphere and were the site of sometimes heightened debate over contested cultural memory narratives. In other words, they show the ways in which Catalan commemorative practices and processes are both a vehicle for the construction of a distinctive community imaginary as well as reflecting the divisions and dissensus between different agents and sub-groups, according to social, political, geographical, linguistic, generational and gender affiliation, among other factors.

Time matters: a critical multimodal study of an English learning app for children in China

ABSTRACT Time and its management, as evident in the scheduling, sequencing and structuring of activities, is important in early childhood education (ECE). While ECE apps have been changing teaching and learning practices for over a decade, research has yet to examine how they represent and manage time. To address this gap, we analysed the representation and management of time in iHuman ABC, a popular English learning app for children in China. Adopting Djonov and Van Leeuwen's (2018) model for analysing semiotic software and Van Leeuwen’s (2008) critical discourse studies framework, we examined temporal features in the app's design and references to these features in promotional materials and user reviews. Findings reveal that iHuman ABC reflects an instructivist ideology which considerably limits children’s ability to organise their time and contradicts research-based recommendations for teaching English. This study contributes to critical multimodal studies of the potential of software to transform educational practices.

Review of Cheng & Machin (2023): The law and critical discourse studies

Review of Cheng & Machin (2023): The law and critical discourse studies

‘All my friends here are ghosts’: everyday geo-legalities in a rural poultry town

ABSTRACT In recent years, feminist legal geographers have pressed for deeper engagement with the lived experience of law’s spatial logics including methodologies that extend beyond the study of legal discourse, practice, and enforcement to include ethnographic and other qualitative approaches that centre the experiences of those living with legal precarity. Building upon the work of feminist political geographers concerned with intimacy geopolitics, the concept of everyday geo-legalities emphasizes the ways that people interpret the spatiality of law, legal practice, and state policing and how it affects their lives, livelihoods and im/mobilities. This research reveals how undocumented im/migrants in a small, rural poultry town interpret and socially negotiate their racialized legal status in terms of im/mobility, heighted workplace pressure, increased job-related health risks, persistent fears of immigration raids, family separation and deportation, and prejudice and policing due to discourses of racialized criminalization. Social and familial relations, however, are central to the everyday negotiation of these dynamics, as community connections and care emerge from experiences of marginalization. This paper thus emphasizes how social relations are central to analysing the complexities and contradictions of everyday legal geographies.

Are videogames represented as violent in the press? Hypothesis testing using md-cads and corpora of UK newspapers from 2000 and 2020

Previous academic research has argued that videogames are represented as violent in the media, and that these representations provide a justification to study videogames as a social object. However, little systematic research has been done to confirm whether such representations occur frequently, or whether this is a non-representative assumption based on a small number of news stories. Through using methods associated with Modern-Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (md-cads), we explore two corpora of newspaper articles from the British press containing references to videogames: one contains data from 2000 and the other from 2020. We find that whilst newspapers do represent videogames as promoting violence, these representations occur much more frequently in 2000 than in 2020, and that in 2020 this idea is more regularly challenged. Furthermore, in 2020 there is a greater focus on the benefit of videogames for the economy compared to 2000. The research highlights the need to critically revaluate assumptions about how the media represents not only videogames, but also comparable topics.