Discursive Representations Research Articles

Postfeminist neoliberalization of self-care: a critical discourse analysis of its representation in Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Elle

ABSTRACT Encouraged by the popularization of the feminisms and the essentiality of care in the face of the increasing precarity of the living conditions, popular women’s culture in the global North has been showing signs of a growing interest in self-care practices. Given this new visibility, the present work proposes a critical approach to the discursive representation of self-care from a transdisciplinary and feminist theoretical-interpretative perspective, located at the nexus of political economy and cultural studies. For this purpose, we undertake a critical discourse analysis—from a feminist perspective—of the cultural articulation of self-care in women’s magazines Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Elle (Spanish editions). Among our main findings, we can highlight the hyperfeminization of self-care; the re-politicization of young women’s discomfort and wellbeing in postfeminist neoliberal terms; the identification of self-care with consumption practices, especially aesthetic ones, which, in turn, are related to the financialization and indebtedness of everyday life; and the signification of self-care as utilitarian and productive, i.e., as a tool for women to constantly work on ourselves and transform ourselves to optimize ourselves in line with the feminization of the neoliberal subject and the maximization of their human/social/erotic capital.

The Discursive Representation of Proletariat Subjectivity: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Working Class in Hard Times, and Oliver Twist

This research is a social study of poverty and the way Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1992), and Oliver Twist (2003) specifically addressed the poor. This study will focus on socially disadvantaged members of Victorian society, including poor children and underprivileged adults. This critical analysis of Dickens' selected novels will demonstrate that Dickens was a realist and naturalist writer in some way; As a result, the subject of this research is the traces of bourgeois exploitation of the poor and working class through various means, most notably through language in his social novels in relation to Marxism. This study will also use Norman Fairclough three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis. This research concludes the analysis by presenting the gap between the higher class and lower class and its impact on the lower class.

How China and Chinese people are visually represented: The case of a series of Liberal Studies textbooks in Hong Kong

Aim. The aim of the research is to examine how Mainland China and Chinese people are represented in the visual materials of four sets of Liberal Studies (LS) textbooks in Hong Kong. 
 Methods. Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, viewing language as a social practice and van Dijk’s ideological coding categories are integrated to analyze discursive representations (e.g., the embedded hidden power) in the Hong Kong Today volumes published by four influential commercial publishers: Modern, Ming Pao, Marshall, and Aristo. 
 Results. The analysis reveals that China and mainland Chinese are negatively portrayed in visual images in four commercial LS textbooks, in which, the representations concerning mainland China and mainlanders are all found ideologically biased to highlight their negative characteristics and alienness.
 Conclusions. Via an overview of Hong Kong’s history, economy, educational policies, and controversial political events, the reasons why China and its people are represented negatively in LS textbooks is explained.

The Discourse of Sustainability in English Language Teaching (ELT) at the University of Oxford: Analyzing Discursive Representations

Abstract The article presents and discusses a study that focuses upon discursive representations of sustainability in English Language Teaching (ELT) that are found on the official web-site of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. The study involved a corpus of texts related to sustainability in ELT that were collected on the website of the University of Oxford. The corpus was analyzed qualitatively to identify and classify the types of discursive representations of sustainability in ELT. After that, it was investigated quantitatively to calculate the most frequent types of discursive representations of sustainability. The results of the corpus analysis revealed that the most frequent types of discursive representation of sustainability in ELT at the University of Oxford involved “lifelong learning” and “digital sustainability”, respectively. It was found that the aforementioned discursive representations did not reflect the main sustainability goals that were set by the University of Oxford, inter alia, zero carbon emissions and biodiversity. It is suggested in the article that the discursive representations of sustainability “lifelong learning” and “digital sustainability” are indicative of an ELT-specific aspect of the discourse of sustainability that is communicated online by the University of Oxford.

Colliding Utopian and Dystopian Worlds: Revising Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Ahmed K. Towfik’s Utopia

The article discusses two symptomatic texts that are imbricated within the utopian/dystopian ambience: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik. The style and structure of the selected novels are revealed at the level of the chronotope and aimed at clarifying the correlation of genre-forming components within the triad of a ‘person – civilisation – society’. This paper tests a hypothesis that the discursive representation of these components in a narrative structure is realised through colliding utopian and dystopian worlds. Problematising this idea in fiction reveals how the tension between the diametrically opposed worlds promotes critical scrutiny of both to draw attention to the most pressing social problems facing humanity: the role of ordinary people in society, impact of mass media on public opinion, dissolution of morals, social disparity, drug addiction, etc. The study primarily follows a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach to exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of utopian/dystopian worldviews in the literary dimension. The dichotomy of utopia/dystopia manifests in the novels through the overt conflict of different patterns of life, mentalities, and cultures. Analysing the ways of a literary embodiment of this conflict in Bradbury’s and Towfik’s books explicates how creating a new reality from utopian/dystopian perspectives alters consciousness and promotes a completely different paradigm of existence..

Feminist sex-positive art on Instagram: reorienting the sexualizing gaze

ABSTRACT Instagram has been identified as potentially offering opportunities for feminist activism and resistance against limiting normative ideals surrounding femininity and the body. Extending this work, this article examines a corpus of illustrations shared to Instagram by feminist sex-positive artists. Locating these representations within the constraints of a platform where gendered norms and hierarchies are predominant, we ask how and to what extent these visual and discursive digital representations may be representative of more transgressive constructions of feminine sexuality. To address these questions, we employed a qualitative feminist methodology, combining content analysis with critical discourse analysis of Instagram posts (n = 200) from a small sample of influential feminist artists (n = 10). Four key discursive strategies were identified: making the female body visible/refusing censorship, desexualizing the naked female body, diversifying feminine and sexual desirability norms and centering female pleasure and enjoyment. Our findings demonstrate how a current sex-positive movement on Instagram aims to re-orient the gaze through illustrations, to subjectify rather than objectify women.

A portrait of academic literacy in mid-adolescence: a computational longitudinal account of cognitive academic language proficiency during secondary school

This study describes academic literacy development during mid-adolescence, when learners need to adjust to the demands of academic discourse as a gateway to linguistic adulthood. Unlike most research to date, which is cross-sectional and detached from disciplinary content, this study provides a two-year longitudinal description of academic language in the form of history essays. During the two-year study, a group of 20 students (whose first language was Spanish) produced a corpus of history essays in relation to topics covered in the official curriculum. These essays were processed with MultiAzterTest, a state-of-the-art computational tool that produces linguistic and discursive representations of texts. A statistical analysis of the metrics shows a significant evolution of key measures, which may contribute to charting academic language literacy. More precisely, the results point to a statistically significant evolution of the length of language units (i.e. the amount of words, sentences and paragraphs), in syntactic complexity (i.e. the proportion of nouns and the complexity of noun phrases), in lexical richness (i.e. the frequency and precision of lexis) and in cohesion metrics (i.e. the overall use of connectives), hence exploring the boundaries between basic child speech and adult discourse.

Amazigh in Morocco through the Lens of the U.S. State Department’s Reports between 1999 and 2020: A Critical Discourse Analysis

This paper uses critical discourse analysis (CDA), particularly Theo Van Leeuwen’s socio-semantic inventory, to discover the discursive representations of the social actors in the U.S. State Department’s coverage of Amazighs’ struggle for their linguistic and cultural rights in its annual reports on human rights practices in Morocco, between 1999 and 2020. The data comprises 21 texts with 5796 words. These are the content of the ‘National/ Racial/ Ethnic Minorities’ section within the pertinent reports, available on the State Department’s online database. The investigated section follows the section of ‘Persons with Disabilities’. The findings show that the Amazigh issue has not been reported with careful attention; inaccurate information has, for instance, been detected. The inclusion representational categories are predominantly used; differentiation and categorization are given special weight, compared to the strategies of genericization, individualization, objectivation, and assimilation. Assigning distinctive prominence to two groups aims to emphasize the persistent ‘conflict’ in Morocco between the disempowered Amazigh activists and the empowered Moroccan ‘authorities’. The exclusion representational categories, on the other hand, specifically backgrounding and nominalization, are also heavily employed to mystify agency in critical situations, mainly when the related social actors are ‘the authorities’. The study concludes that the representation of the social actors is influenced by the ideological stances and agenda of the U.S. State Department.

Recovery rhetoric: a critical discourse analysis of substance use recovery

ABSTRACT Dominant discourses of recovery permeate substance use research, policy, and practice recommendations around the world, exercising the power to shape the identities of people with substance use issues. Drawing on Foucauldian and intersectionality theories, this study explores power operations embedded in recovery discourses constructing a certain type of recovery for a certain type of subject. A critical discourse analysis using van Leeuwen’s social semiotic approach examines two Canadian federal recovery documents to consider the discursive representation of people with substance use issues, legitimization of recovery, and interpretation of space. Findings suggest that substance use recovery discourses are entwined in a complex web of neoliberal, biomedical, and moral discourses by which stigmatized identities are (co)constructed at micro, mezzo, and macro levels. This study offers a unique and relevant opportunity to complicate the dominant recovery literature by challenging oppression, deconstructing normative identities, and facilitating the empowerment of marginalized populations.

‘The bullets brought the curtain down on that lowlife’: discursive representation and legitimation of capital punishment in the press

ABSTRACT Underpinned by the polemical idea that governments have redefined their role as a penal actor that prioritizes the practices of repressing, punishing, and confining people (instead of tackling the very complex root causes), this study scrutinizes how the press discursively collaborates with the State in ‘governing through crime’ (Simon, J. (2007). Governing through crime: How the war on crime transformed American democracy and created a culture of fear. Oxford University Press.). Drawing upon a corpus of Thai newspapers, the study analyzes representational choices and identifies polarizing strategies in execution reports that serve to legitimize and neutralize the harshness of executions. The findings reveal that state-inflicted violence is mystified and downplayed by agent suppression and non-aggressive, judicially administered material processes. In contrast, executed individuals are dehumanized and their agency in sensational material processes foregrounded, which in turn constructs ideal victims. It is argued that this exaggerated, at times disturbing, dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’ serves to project an image of the State as the champion of citizens’ and victims’ interests. A shift from the use of fault-assigning and consequence-imposing discourses to more holistic ones that attend to offenders’ and victims’ commonalitiesshould be adopted.

International or refugee students? Shifting organisational discourses on refugee students at German higher education organisations

ABSTRACT Following the refugee influx of 2015 and 2016, many German higher education organisations (HEOs) responded with support programmes for refugee students. In this context, refugees became formally and discursively differentiated from other international students. During later stages of the programmes, this differentiation became blurred, and discourse surrounding refugee students partly shifted back to framing them as international students, which is also represented in further support programme development. Based on a systems theoretical framework, this paper investigates the shifting organisational discourse on refugee students within the context of functional needs and structural changes at German HEOs. The analysis shows that structural development is strongly related to the way functional needs and ways to address them are constituted by discursive representations. It is based on 25 expert interviews with heads of international offices and first contacts for refugees at eight German HEOs.

We Are (Not) a Family? Analysis of Argumentation in Favor of Eu Enlargement in the Western Balkans after the 2003 and 2018 Summits

This paper aims to investigate the change in EU rhetoric on enlargement to the Western Balkans using analysis and comparison of the arguments of EU officials and strategic documents, which are closely related to the Union's enlargement policy to the Western Balkans, after the European Council summits on the enlargement of the Union, in 2003 and 2018. Following the fundamental tendency to enlarge the Union in the context of the common foreign and security policy, European officials articulated this differently in the context of the two summits. While during and after the first Summit, the European Union was presented in various discursive representations as a highly successful political community capable of attracting countries to adapt to its strict rules and norms to achieve the possibility of integration; during the second Summit, in 2018, the importance of the accession of the Western Balkan countries to the Union was persistently emphasized. In this way, the patronizing discourse present in rhetorical representations during and after the first Summit was replaced by the discourse according to which the European Union insists on the accession of these countries to the Union, regardless of the complete fulfillment of previously set normative criteria. The reason for that is the growing influence of China in the Western Balkans and the growing Russian appetite for power and political action in this region.

Journalism and Democratic Backsliding: Critical Realism as a Diagnostic and Prescription for Reform

ABSTRACT Renewed scrutiny of how U.S. journalism functions as a political institution is warranted in an era of democratic backsliding. While news media cannot deliver policy on their own, they are fully equipped to represent, interpret, and amplify grievance. If disaffection is directed at retribution rather than policy, journalism contributes to backsliding in the further pathologizing of (non)-responsive government. This essay proposes critical realism (CR) as a heuristic for conceptualizing unique contributions of news media to backsliding. Reality consists of layered strata in CR. This approach accepts the premise of news as a social construction but maintains that a domain of reality exists independent of discursive representation, and that this realm can be actualized in ways that are damaging to democracy. Applied to political communication, the domain of the real includes democratic deficits that may or may not become actualized depending on how journalism operates at the empirical level. Critical realism also generates insights applicable to reform. CR insists that journalists avoid reifying sentiment in ways that comfort authoritarians. The diagnostic acknowledges the journalistic conviction that an external reality is knowable, positing nevertheless that the news interacts with underlying social forces. The profession must forge a healthier relationship with the public to avoid reifying audience support for anti-democratic norms. Reflexivity could be directed beyond the recognition of complicity to two productive rationales for safeguarding democracy: liberal multiculturalism and journalistic paternalism. A final section offers a framework for future research in tracing linkages between journalistic practice and backsliding.

The Challenges of Reconstructing Citizen-Driven EU Contestation in the Digital Media Sphere

This article reflects on the discursive representation, legal, and practical challenges of locating, classifying, and publishing citizens’ views of the EU in digital media discourse. We start with the discursive representation challenge of locating and identifying citizens’ voices in social and news media discourse. The second set of challenges pertains to the legal, regulatory framework guiding research ethics on personal data but also cuts across the academic debate on what constitutes “public” discourse in the digital public sphere. The third set of challenges are practical but of no less consequence. Here we bring in the issue of marketisation of the public sphere and of the digital commons, and how these processes affect the ethics but also the feasibility and reliability of digital public sphere analysis. Thereby we illustrate that barriers to content analysis can make data collection practically challenging, feeding dilemmas with data reliability and research ethics. These methodological and empirical challenges are illustrated and unpacked with examples from the Benchmark project, which analysed the extent to which citizens drive EU contestation on social and digital news media. Our study focuses on UK public discourse on a possible European Economic Area solution, and the reactions such discourse may have triggered in two EU-associated countries, Norway and Switzerland, in the post-Brexit referendum period 2016–2019. We thus take a broad European perspective of EU contestation that is not strictly confined within the EU public sphere(s). The case study illustrates the research process and the emerging empirical challenges and concludes with reflections and practical suggestions for future research projects.

Media representations of young people during pandemic times in Turkey

ABSTRACT This study discusses patterns of media representations of Turkish youth during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially, during the early lockdowns. We focus on media narratives as discursive practices, with the pandemic being the main object of these narratives. Building upon a thematic analysis of mainstream news media, we suggest that discursive representations portray young people along the axis of responsibilities and vulnerabilities. Along this axis, there lie three types of representations: (i) responsibilization of youth to deal with the health crisis, (ii) socio-economic vulnerabilities, and (iii) socio-cultural impoverishment. Viewing through this lens, we argue that representations of youth in news media during pandemic times maintain the recurrent figures of the youth that are conceived through the terms of the ‘myth of youth’ and ‘denied citizenship’ at the same time. To the extent that young people are recognized and praised as instrumental figures of crisis management, their vulnerabilities are partially or completely disregarded. Thus, youth in pandemic times emerges as a figure that is both instrumentalized and obscured.

Sailing toIthaka

AbstractThis paper examines the reasoning lines in PM Alexis Tsipras’ political discourse in critical moments of SYRIZA’s tenure as the ruling party in Greece. Adopting a CDS perspective, we zoom in on the patterns that underlie the (de)legitimization of the crisis-ridden EU in three seminal speeches by PM Tsipras during the Greek/EU financial crisis. To this end, we integrate systemic-functional and cognitive linguistic tools with a view to scrutinizing representational meaning, before turning to employ the notions ofendoxonandtopos/locusas a means of studying the particularargumentative inferences, triggered by the respective discursive representations. Through this lens, we show how the overall argumentation can be seen as supporting the (de-)legitimation of dominant EU austerity perspectives while transforming SYRIZA into a pro-austerity voice.

Managing the communication channel. Discursive representations of clinical communication in forensic psychiatric reports

Background: Forensic reports require clinicians’ presence as an agent in court-ordered forensic assessment.Aim: We focus on discursive representations of clinical communication in forensic psychiatric reports.Methods: We perform a critical discourse analysis of 142 forensic assessment reports for 33 patients detained and hospitalized on forensic wards in three hospitals in the southwest of Poland. Results: Clinical communication is constructed as controlled by the clinician. All references to patients’ communication are anchored in interpretation by the clinician. While the speaking patient is explicitly constructed as a communicator, the clinician her/himself is only very rarely represented as personally communicating, invoking an impersonal voice of institutional medicine. Discussion: Our study offers insight into the role of communication is forensic psychiatry as serving the clinician to construct an institutionally useful account of the patient. In contrast to psychiatry’s pronouncements, communication is not a means for a clinical dialogue, but for an institutional monologue. Conclusion: The results of our qualitative study are useful as do not only examine how things are done in forensic psychiatry, but also what it means in its context.

The discursive representation of male sex workers in Thai newspapers

The objective of this study is to examine how male sex workers are represented in Thai newspapers. The analysis is contingent upon Reisigl and Wodak’s concept of discursive strategy in conjunction with Machin and Mayr’s compilation of transitivity analysis. Methodologically, this study employs corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The 45,769-word corpus consists of news articles retrieved from the websites of 11 Thai newspapers. They were published in English between the period of 2000 and 2019. Findings reveal that the media pursue the nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivization together with intensification and mitigation strategies to portray male sex workers in a non-threatening fashion. Possible contributing factors behind such portrayal are discussed.

Reclamation and Expulsion. Frontiers of City Expansion and the Loss of Public and Communal Spaces at Abidjan’s Lagoonal Waterfronts

The paper analyses the motivations of actors who reclaimed and appropriated the banks of the Ebrié Lagoon in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, which were in many cases marginal lands under public ownership. The analysis focuses on the evolution of two unplanned settlements, Soweto (from 1964) and Adjahui (from 2011). Practices of incremental place-making and residential stories connect these places, which are located opposite to one another at the Bay of Koumassi. The research questions are as follows: Why and by who were waterfronts reclaimed and appropriated? And how does reclamation entail social-economic inequalities and the loss of public and communal spaces? Conceptually, lagoonal waterfronts are approached as waterscapes, cultural landscapes with discursive representations. Their evolution is analysed by using the concepts of fixity and flows by Desfor and Laidley (2011). Findings show although tenure was highly insecure in the legal sense, use rights, house ownership and local power relations in Soweto were fixed for decades despite the fact that buildings, residents, local arrangements and the spatial form constantly changed. Though inhabitants increasingly entered the water space and the lagoon, the material condition of the settlement seemed stable because the process took place over many decades before urban renewal set dynamics in motion that speeded up the reclamation process and brought the waterscapes into flow.

Mediated Enjoyment- Representations of Luxury in the Web Discourse of Lifestyle Magazines

Luxury is a 913BE global industry spanning multiple categories according to the Boston Consulting Group, and it represents a major market worldwide, one that has registered a tremendous growth in the last decade. Brands have developed a significant presence in the digital space and consumers have, indeed, augmented their purchases in the online environment. Even though there are a few studies about luxury in media and magazines there seems to be an absence of luxury studies on online magazines. More important, the examination of discursive representations of luxury in the online media has not, until now, deserved much attention. This paper explores the discursive construction and representations of luxury on the top 5 web magazines on luxury lifestyle. It concludes that Leisure, Hedonism, Carpe Diem, Singularity, Escape and Magnificence form the pentactic axis from which web magazines audiences take part in luxury discourse. By exposing this discursive pentactic construct, as well as by uncovering luxury web magazines social-cultural practices, linguistic, visual and strategic discursive principles, this investigation sheds light into the discursive mechanisms through which web magazines luxury discourse occurs. At the same time, the paper found that web magazines portrait luxury standing between two opposing poles: on one hand, luxury discourse is associated with the display of social status; on other hand, it is linked with personal gratification in a clear alignment with postmodern principles of Individualism, Hedonism and Indulgence.