Discursive Construction Research Articles

News coverage of climate change and generation Z

This study examines 2021 and 2022 news coverage of Generation Z and climate change to understand how this discursive relationship is constructed. This is important to understanding how Generation Z’s climate change activism is perceived by other groups such as other generations, activist groups, and journalists. This study answers the central question: In what ways do news articles construct and represent the relationship between Generation Z, climate change, activism, and intergenerational relationships? The study identifies five common discourses from the most popular news articles on the subject that reflect nuances in reporting and discursive construction of the group and issue: (1) climate change as inherited and chosen by Generation Z, (2) passive and active motivations for activism, (3) activism negatively impacting relationships with older groups, (4) future responsibilities, and (5) overuse of figureheads. The nuances of these news discourses impact opinions of Generation Z and the impact the group have on climate change activism with the potential to impact activist group outreach strategies, policy development, and relationships with the news media.

Understanding Colourism in Malaysia Through Discursive Constructions of Skin Colour on Social Media

Colourism refers to any act of discrimination that is portrayed on the basis of skin colour or the act of attributing negativity upon dark skin. This article explores the extent to which colourism prevails in Malaysia by studying the discourse of skin colour on social media. The data is gathered from Twitter (now known as X), a social media platform that allows users to interact with short messages called “tweets”. The tweets are sourced from the Malaysian Twitter diaspora via the keyword “kulit gelap”—a phrase in Malay language which translates to dark skin. The analysis is conducted in alignment with the viewpoint of discourse-historical approach, where a qualitative analysis is employed to examine the linguistic devices and discursive strategies utilised to construct the notion of dark skin. The results indicate that dark skin is often portrayed in a negative light, suggesting that colourism is pervasive in language use. Through the analysis, several discursive strategies are identified, such as nomination of dark skin as a problem and stereotypical predication of dark skin.

LINGUISTIC RESEARCH OF THE EPISTOLARY DISCOURSE OF KHAMIT YERGALIEV

The article is an analysis of the epistolary discourse of the Kazakh poet Khamit Yergaliyev, a famous representative of the literary activity of the second half of the last century in Kazakhstan. The aim of the work is to linguistically investigate the correspondence of the poet, laureate of the State Prize of the Republic of Kazakhstan, with a focus on revealing his subjective stylistic and grammatical peculiarities as a bilingual.The study is based on the analysis of epistols from the personal archive of Hamit Yergaliyev, as well as using scientific publications and written materials stored in the National Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Emphasis is placed on the importance of studying epistolary discourse in both scientific and creative communication with contemporaries in order to form a linguistic picture of a certain time period.The scientific significance of the study lies in the possibility of revealing the characteristic features of the construction of discursive constructions of letter writers, which will give an opportunity to shed light on the various linguistic approaches used in the creation of communicative act in the conditions of bilingual component of the ethno-linguistic landscape of Kazakhstan. Such a study is important for a deeper understanding of linguistic dynamics and cultural aspects of communication in Kazakhstan.

Officers and men and fallen heroes: The discursive construction of regimented masculinity in the Nigerian Army

This paper examines the use of gendered language in the Nigerian Army's community of practice through the application of insights from language ideology and theory of masculinity. Data were generated by means of participant observation and semi-structured interviews in a one-year fieldwork involving representative sample of 18 personnel of the 6 Battalion, Ibawa and 2 Brigade, Uyo, both in Akwa Ibom State in South-eastern Nigeria. The findings show that the Nigerian Army maintains institutional gendered language practices used among its personnel in regimented functions and social events. The gendered registers occur in the soldiers' generic use of male address terms, adaptation to male-coded voice pattern in parades, masculinisation of Army's workout songs, and the subordination of femininity in institutional associations, all combined to construct the regimented and performative masculinisation of the profession. This practice is observed to be informed by the numerical domination of men in the profession that was originally perceived as males'; a conception that has shaped the linguistic ideology and performance of the Nigerian Army to rehearse masculine orientations. It is however recommended that the Army's language practices should capture modern ideals of a gender sensitive world that connect to the clamour for gender equality and equal social belonging through the inclusion of feminine linguistic markers in workplaces.

Ideological framing of sign languages and their users in the South African press

Abstract This exploratory study provides an overview of prominent themes pertaining to portrayals of sign languages (SLs) and Deaf people in the South African press (2011–2019), as well as an analysis of a subset of articles to illustrate the discursive constructions of each of the prominent ideological framings. The findings of the paper suggest that many ways of representing South African Sign Language (SASL) and their users align with international trends. The two most prominent ideological framings are the medical/disability model and the linguistic minority model. Within the medical model, SLs are seen as inferior means of communication used by a disabled minority. Within the linguistic minority framework SLs are regarded as natural, legitimate languages deserving equal status to spoken languages. The paper also identifies an ideological framing that is not predicted by the international literature, coined here as ‘diversity tokenism’. Diversity tokenism is when SL is mentioned only to increase perceived diversity, where diversity is a commodity that holds social capital. This portrayal of SASL seems to be increasing and holds a warning: although SASL users have received official recognition and rights through the recent declaration of SASL as an official language, it might not be the end of the battle to ensure that users of SASL can live out their linguistic citizenship.

Embodied Geopolitics: The Discursive Construction of Refugee Men and Masculinities in Turkey

ABSTRACT A new wave of displaced people from Afghanistan arriving in Turkey in August-September 2021 generated public debates about how the country would protect its borders while continuing to face the ‘problem’ posed by more than 3 million displaced Syrians. Much of these debates centred on refugee men and scrutinised their bodies and bodily acts to produce them as Other. This article analyses how the racialised and gendered depictions of refugee men in Turkey discursively produce geopolitical spatial hierarchies. Our analysis includes political leaders’ speeches, news articles, and opinion pieces published in mainstream media outlets and social media about displaced people from Syria and Afghanistan since 2016. We build on and contribute to feminist geopolitics and refugee studies by focusing on refugee men and masculinities, teasing out the contradictions in the geopolitical narratives centred on refugee men’s bodies, and analysing their implications for representing civilisational hierarchies. Using the concept of embodied geopolitics, we show how the dominant anti-refugee discourse in Turkey operates through a series of contradictory -but eventually complementary- geopolitical depictions of refugee men’s bodies, appearance, and behaviour that simultaneously masculinise and feminise them. These portrayals present refugee men either as fighters or cowards, as modern or backward. We argue that gendered and racialised refugee bodies animate geopolitical narratives and demonstrate that bodies are not simply territories with fixed meanings. Instead, they are constantly and simultaneously inscribed with multiple meanings that operate together and, ultimately, produce international hierarchies, ethnic boundaries, and the modern/backward dualism.

Examining the discursive construction of Chinese grassroots cybernationalism

Abstract Recent years have seen a surge in Chinese grassroots nationalism. Based on the public discussion on Weibo, the largest social media platform in China, this study investigated the cybernationalism (re)produced during the People’s Republic of China’s release of the Regulations on the Administration of Permanent Residence of Foreigners in early 2020. Deploying a synergy of thematic analysis and the discourse-historical approach (Reisigl and Wodak 2005, 2016), especially its argumentative perspectives, it examined the articulation of bottom-up cybernationalism and how this nationalism, boosted by the party-state, turns against the party-state when it fails to uphold its own nationalistic rhetorics, thereby influencing the government’s immigration policymaking. The results revealed that the discursive construction of a dichotomy between “derogatory foreigners” and “dignified Chinese” prevents the implementation of the regulation; the foregrounded anti-Black sentiment reflects a (re)appreciation of the global hierarchy of race in China based on orientalistic views; the discursive representations of humiliated history vitally motivates nationalism.

The Power of the Powerless: Constructions of Self‐Employment in Czechia

This article examines the construction of self‐employment in public policy debates, focusing on how political actors define self‐employment and on the moral implications of these categorisations. Employing critical discourse analysis and the social construction of a target population, the authors examine verbatim transcripts of parliamentary debates in the Czech parliament between 2021 and 2023. These debates reveal how legislators perceive the value of self‐employment as a part of the economy. The study explores the underpinnings of such public policy debates, as well as the moral consequences of categorising self‐employment. We argue that by foregrounding some morally loaded argumentations and, in particular, discursive constructions, politicians (as both discursive and policy actors) make some parts of the experience of self‐employment invisible and neglected by policy; as a result, this contributes to the precarity of the self‐employed.

The power of words in political discourses of the general election campaigns in Kenya

This paper examines the power of words in political campaign discourses in Kenyan media. The study focuses on the several meanings of concepts employed by politicians in the run-up to the general elections of August 2022. Discursive practices and linguistic tactics are employed in discourses to achieve a particular political, social, psychological or linguistic goal. Critical theories of language see the use of language as a form of social practice. Critical discourse analysis claims that major social and political processes and movements have a partly linguistic and partly social and political character. Social relations of power are linguistic and discursive in nature. They are exercised and negotiated in discourse. The study utilised Mitchel Foucault’s approaches to political discourse and Norman Fairclough’s critical approaches to discourse analysis. Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis was employed in the study. First is the analysis of text; words are a part of the community, and texts contain interpretation. Secondly, language is viewed as a discursive practice, which is the production or the constitution of text and, finally, the analysis of language as a social practice, which includes the analysis of norms. The study sought to contribute to studies dealing with the discursive construction of power and ideology in political discourses. The study demonstrates that Kenyans do not vote independently; rather, they are persuaded to vote through the power exerted by the rhetoric of the politicians and the professional media practices that assist their presentation.

Fair or biased? A corpus-based study of Australia’s early COVID-19 media representation of China

ABSTRACT Given the surge in xenophobia faced by Chinese communities during the pandemic, there is a pressing need to delve into the concealed ideologies within public discourse that fuel discrimination. Against this backdrop, this study employs Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics to scrutinise the discursive construction and communication of China’s image in Australian print media during the early outbreak of COVID-19. The analysis uncovered recurrent negative depictions of the Chinese government, associating it with authoritarianism and responsibility for the pandemic. In the context of blame attribution and racialisation of COVID-19 terms, a counter-narrative was observed in Australian newspapers, reflecting journalistic efforts to present a balanced perception of China and to challenge the prevailing racialisation and discrimination. Furthermore, the study revealed Australian media’s focus on economic consequences over human losses during the early outbreak of this pandemic. That underscores China’s role as Australia’s indispensable economic partner. This research contends that the depiction of China in Australian news discourses during the COVID-19 pandemic is intertwined with historical tensions, bilateral relations, and journalistic efforts to counter prevailing biases.

Museum Discourse in the Conditions of Information Warfare: problem statement

The article is devoted to the consideration of the position of museum discourse in the communicative system of modern Russia and, more broadly, in the national security system. In the context of geopolitical challenges and the development of political discourse in the semantics of the pervasive cancel culture in the format of applying new ethics as a symbolic act of oblivion, the national museum discourse acquires a particular significance. The “memory war”, the purpose of which is to delegitimize the previous discourse using techniques of rewriting, ignoring, neutralizing, and denying, actualizes the study of museum discourse in the context of national security strategy. Considering museum discourse as an imperative to strengthen national security, the authors identify a separate research area of socio–humanitarian sciences – “memory studies”, and introduce into the scientific categorical apparatus rather interrelated concepts of political discourse: “identity politics”, “memory politics” and “memorial politics”. The authors implement a strategy for analyzing the communicative effects of ensuring cultural sovereignty and overcoming the cancel culture, and conclude that museum discourse and the discourse of memory in the logic of cognitive and structural aspects represent mental constructs with the potential for dialogism and conversion (including the conversion of cultural capital into political capital), and determine the multilevel combinatorics of various communicative effects in the development of national identity. Hence, the authors propose to study the mutual influence of three discursive constructs: museum discourse – discourse of the state policy of memory – discourse of national identity, considered in relation to the modern political realities of Russia in the context of the implementation of the national security strategy.

Representing slavery in visual art: a multimodal approach

Abstract This article explores some issues related to the trauma of slavery, colonialism and identity-formation processes through a multimodal analysis, which is particularly useful in studying the manifold meanings and relationships emerging from the forms of cultural and social representation such as visual art. A series of images, chosen within Ellen Gallagher’s art exhibition “AXME”, held at Tate Gallery in London, is investigated to deal with the discursive constructions of gendered and racial identities. Employing Kress and van Leeuwen’s model (2021 [1996]. Reading images: The grammar of visual design. London: Routledge), this article attempts to identify the signs related to categories such as gender and race, as well as the persistence of stereotypical representations in our contemporary societies.

Education hubs in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates: Analysis of discursive constructions using Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Advanced techniques for linguistic analysis provide the opportunity to extract meanings from the available documents on education hubs. We use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a topic modelling method for natural language processing and big data mining, to analyze the discourse of education hubs in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Our data derive from a corpus of academic literature, non-peer-reviewed articles, and policy documents. The analysis shows that education hubs have been at the core of efforts to transition from a hydrocarbon-based economy to a knowledge economy. The analysis also shows that education hubs have been increasingly associated with the two countries’ efforts to achieve regional leadership in overlapping geopolitical spheres of influence. Describing the situation as a ‘constructive rivalry’, we highlight its geopolitical implications and we call attention to Knight, (2022) knowledge diplomacy whereby the two countries can use education hubs as a mechanism for exercising leadership in promoting peace and development in the broader region of the Middle East.c.

Counterpublics and Structural Change in Media and Politics: A Theoretical Framework on Transformations Within a Long-Term Historical Perspective

The paper contributes to current debates on counterpublics and the applicability of the concept to various ideological contexts with a long-term historical perspective on structural changes in media and politics. It analyses problems of theory formation, offers an alternative approach and places current upheavals in the context of previous changes. Based on a literature review of current research in view of the increasing importance of right-wing actors’ online communication, a shift in theory is identified. On the one hand, theories of hegemony are expanded to describe alleged exclusions and, on the other hand, by emphasising the discursive construction of counterpublics, actors’ claims and perceptions are adopted as analytical criteria. As an alternative to approaches that focus on discursive construction of actual or alleged exclusions, this conceptual article presents a definition of counterpublics as opposed to structures of (hybrid) media systems and offers a framework to examine ideas and practices of counterpublics derived from classical approaches of counterpublics and adaptations based on findings of communication and media research. A sketch of transformations in communication history in the US and Europe from press under feudal rule to diversifications in hybrid media systems in liberal democracies is used to illustrate the framework.

Framing News and Framing Migrants: A Qualitative Study

Frames can have an essential role in the (re)production of the ‘shared ideologies’ concerning several social categories, including migrants. The overall aim of this work is to investigate the discursive construction of frames concerning migration, as rhetoric tools (a) connected to editorial orientations; (b) related to both specific events and more general thematic news articles; (c) having socio-cultural and emotional connotations. The qualitative analysis of 235 Italian news articles enabled us to outline different configurations of discursive elements as well as to identify different emotional pathways. Reflections about the critical role of framing in the social knowledge construction are proposed.

Discursive Constructions of Corruption in Ancient Rome: Introduction

Discursive Constructions of Corruption in Ancient Rome: Introduction

Navigating Identity Negotiation and Cultural Adaptation in 'American Fever': A Critical Discourse Study

The current study aims to analyze the discursive construction and representation of the processes of cultural adaptation and identity negotiation among Pakistani students in America in Dur e Aziz Amna's novel American Fever (2022). The study utilizes Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and mimicry (1994) to unveil students' strategies during their stay in America. Fairclough’s three-dimensional model (1992) was also employed to examine linguistic choices underpinning power and resisting strategies used by the protagonist to establish her position in society. The findings indicate that Pakistani students adapt to American norms, contrasting their native culture. Power dynamics play a significant role in identity negotiation, as Islamophobia and the Pakistani identity of the students affect their power position in American society. The author has used evocative language, metaphors, intertextual references, and code-switching to render the complexities of cultural adaptation and manifest her resistance to prevailing ideologies, including Islamophobia and gender norms.

Covering the Distant Other: Discursive Construction of the Makoko Community in Nigeria as “Venice of Africa”

ABSTRACT Journalistic texts are sites for the construction of meaning. Through their work, journalists construct, enact, and sustain identities and social realities. In particular, journalistic representations of poverty have implications for how poverty is perceived and addressed, and although extensive research has examined media representations of domestic poverty in the United States, very little is known about how American news organizations represent poverty in other contexts. Nonetheless, Western media have been criticized for presenting a homogenizing and totalizing image of Africa as the “dark continent.” This study explores CNN’s representation of Makoko, a low-income community in Nigeria, as the “Venice of Africa.” Critical discourse analysis of CNN stories about Makoko published between 2012 and 2023 reveals a complicated practice. CNN constructed different identities for Makoko, such as victim, achiever, and spectacle, thereby challenging notions of stereotypical representations of countries in Africa by Western media. However, a predominant focus on success, and the discursive strategy of transforming suffering into artistic spectacle, suggests an exclusive ideology, which contributes to a public ambivalence toward addressing the structural issues faced by this community.

A Snapshot of Ongoing Transculturalism in Britain: Refugee NGO Website Personal Narratives and Global Border Crossing—A Case Study

With a focus on refugees’ written personal narratives on refugee NGO websites, this paper examines ongoing transculturalism in Britain and its interplay with globalization and current international migration. Conceiving such personal narratives as cultural texts pertaining to refugee narratives as a broad genre that encompasses different storytelling modalities, those personal stories on refugee NGO websites are explored from a cultural studies perspective. CDA is employed as a methodology for this cultural studies-oriented piece. A qualitatively oriented case study is accordingly presented based on the detailed examination of an example of such written narratives on the website of one such refugee NGO in the UK so as to instantiate and contribute to disentangling the articulation of this characteristic form of ongoing transculturalism. Special emphasis is laid on the discursive construction of refugees’ transcultural identities in such narratives through their participation in those global border-crossing processes characteristic of the contemporary landscape.

‘Don't forget Tibet’: Understanding the discursive construction of Tibetan national identity through the identity entrepreneurship of the Dalai Lama

AbstractGiven the exponential increase in the number of refugees and displaced people worldwide, it has become critical to examine the experiences of refugees; particularly their identity, since it is an important marker of their adjustment to the new context. Besides other factors impacting their identity and adjustment, the role of the leader is important as it can impact the construction of refugee identities. This paper explores the construction and negotiation of Tibetan refugee identities through the identity entrepreneurship of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and erstwhile political leader of the Tibetans. It is postulated that leaders are entrepreneurs of identity who shape identity construction and negotiation. With an emphasis on the social, political, and historical context, three kinds of sources are analysed using a discourse‐historical approach to understand how leaders function as entrepreneurs of identity across the various contexts and negotiate identity construction across the shifting contexts. First, 12 speeches by the Dalai Lama on 10 critical events in Tibetan history since 1959; second, six speeches by the Dalai Lama for Tibetan Uprising Day (1961–2009); and third, two international interviews (CNN, 2009; BBC, 2012). The analysis demonstrates that the identity entrepreneurship of the Dalai Lama has strong elements of protection towards the ingroup, that is, the Tibetan refugees, through the crafting of a collective sense of identity for Tibetans. The study sheds new light on the nature of refugee leadership, acknowledging the impact of the shifting nature of identity, from a native citizen to refugee; and the leader's identity entrepreneurship in these evolving and often malleable contexts.