Historical Discourse Analysis Research Articles

Representation of political conflicts in history textbooks

This research scrutinizes the representation of political conflict within contemporary Indonesian history textbooks. The research question is about how the contemporary history textbooks present political conflicts in Indonesian historiography for the younger generation within the frame of political interests, nation-building, and the demand of conflict reconciliation and transformation. Discourse Historical Analysis was used as the research method, particularly in investigating conflict representation from the analysis of nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivation, and intensification. The object is Indonesian History textbook used in schools. Data analysis techniques are carried out with discourse historical analysis techniques through analysis of nominations, predicates, arguments, and perspectives. The findings show that historical conflicts in the textbooks are represented in two forms of historical narrative logic. The first is a simple plot and heroism narrative logic to present the conflicts in Indonesia from 1945 to 1965. The second is a cooperative-constructive narrative logic that emphasizes the conflict reconciliation rather than the conflictual process in presenting the conflicts in Indonesia from 1965 to 1998. Those logics consist of the binary system and schizophrenic feeling that shows the confusion of the historians in narrating conflict within the history textbook. Therefore, the chance to take advantage of the textbook in supporting conflict transformation in Indonesia can be hard to achieve. The historian has to find an alternative approach to solve the problem of conflict representation within the Indonesian history textbook. This alternative approach is carried out as an effort to support the transformation of conflict in Indonesian society.

‘He thinks he is inspired, and he is mad’

Abstract During the last decades of the eighteenth century, knowledge about Siberia inspired Catherine II to create the main character of one of her comedies, The Siberian Shaman. Taking Foucault’s dispositif-concept as its theoretical premise, the present paper discusses the historical context in which The Siberian Shaman was written, deconstructs the identity of the comedy’s main character, and explores the socio-political purposes for which the comedy was written. By utilising the perspective of entangled history of religions and the methodology of historical discourse analysis, this paper shows that the comedy’s alleged “shamanic” content and “anti-shamanic” purpose cannot be taken for granted. Rather, the discourse in The Siberian Shaman should be read as Catherine II’s own engagement with the themes of unreason and madness within the philosophical, socio-political and religious context of the period.

Wooden spoons and “pulling the mom card”: A critical discourse-historical analysis of an interview with a social worker

Despite increasing acknowledgement within and beyond the social work profession of our role in enacting violence against people we claim to care for and serve, discursive strategies that rationalize and naturalize violence are endemic within social work discourse. In this article, I use critical discourse-historical analysis to examine one interview I conducted with a practicing social worker in Alberta, Canada. Grounded in an intersectional critical approach to inquiry, I elucidate how rationalization strategies for professional violence emerge in ordinary social work talk and situate one social worker’s description of her practice within a historical context of the fabrication of social work in Canada. I focus on this social worker’s reports of threatening clients with a “virtual wooden spoon” to identify linguistic and discursive patterns at play and their semiotic significance as means to rationalize and normalize professional power and control. I specifically situate the analysis within the context of social work as a story of racist, classist, and ableist violence often committed by morally exalted, wealthy, white women. I conclude by reflecting on the importance of examining discursive strategies to rationalize, dismiss or diminish violence in our everyday social work talk.

Policy Reform in a Colonial Setting: A Historical Discourse Analysis of George Stark’s Advocacy for Technical-Vocational Education

Colonial education is often criticized for being conservative, static, oppressive, and irrelevant to the needs and interests of the colonized people. This theoretical paper, however, disrupts the established narrative of condemnation by challenging scholars of curriculum reform to take a fresh look at colonial education policy. This study teases George Stark’s policy of technical-vocational education for Africans by employing critical policy historiography as the theoretical framework and historical discourse analysis as its methodology. Two questions drive this theoretical paper: What were the central tenets of George Stark’s curriculum reform policy in Rhodesia, and what lessons can be drawn from this policy to inform contemporary education reform in Zimbabwean secondary schools? From the research findings, it cannot be disputed that Stark’s reform policy for African education in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was fervently racist and discriminatory, as it was framed within the overarching scope of white hegemony. But his advocacy for a practical technical-vocational curriculum for Africans seems pragmatic, visionary, and prophetic. These findings become more compelling when considering the current clarion call for worldwide technical-vocational education. As if policy planners are scavenging nuggets from Stark’s widely condemned colonial script, the Zimbabwe government is currently piloting a reform initiative to transform secondary education from an academic to a practical-oriented curriculum. In light of these findings, it appears there are several lessons to be drawn from Stark’s colonial policy for technical-vocational education to inform current curriculum reform and practice in Zimbabwe and globally. Keywords: Curriculum reform, colonial education, critical policy historiography, historical discourse analysis, technical-vocational education

Regulating Poverty: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Media Reporting on Energy Elite

The current discursive development of renewable energy in news media is toward a direction of hyper-commodification, in which the process of creating a commodity is mainly subject to dominant political ideologies rather than a free market. Regarding the process of media reporting on global leaders’ renewable energy policies to the global public, I utilized semantic network analysis and discourse historical analysis to explore the process of hyper-commodification in media narratives. I found that media discourse constructs an illusion when representing renewable energy as essential and affordable in people’s everyday lives and indeed portrays a future without poverty. The underlying statement is that renewable energy is the future if you can afford it. Such discourses reimagine commodification by producing an emergent social class and intensifying the ongoing class warfare through the use of language. Although seeking solutions to implementing renewable energy is key to the public interest, the urgency of having a sustainable plan for energy consumption is often omitted from current media discourse. Instead, such discourses that represent the social reality retrospectively transition from reflecting public interests to only those of well-limited social groups can lead to detrimental consequences for successfully implementing sustainable goals in a timely manner.

Construction of Climate Identity of Britain and America Based on Discourse-historical Analysis

Climate change has always been the focus of the international community, and the construction of national identity in the field of climate is closely related to discourse power. Based on discourse-historical analysis, this paper analyzes the speeches delivered by American and British leaders at the 26th and 27th Conferences of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change through nomination strategy and predication indication strategy. It is found that Britain constructs its national identity as an active advocate and the United States constructs its national identity as a trustworthy world leader. National identity, national power, and discourse restrict and influence each other. This paper adds a reference for other countries to build their identity and enhance their national discourse power in climate diplomacy.

American Superiority, Democratic Idealism, and the Truman Commission: A Critical Discourse Historical Analysis of Higher Education for American Democracy

ABSTRACT In this critical historical analysis, Higher Education for American Democracy is considered a historical artifact, and its veneration as a landmark quest for equal opportunity in higher education is challenged. I argue that this report and the institutional expansion that resulted positioned the federal government to have a direct role in higher education, allowing presidential agendas and dominant ideologies to influence the course of college and university curriculum, access, and purpose. Through a discourse historical approach and a critical realist lens, the Truman Commission Report and President Truman’s public statements are analyzed to reevaluate ther report and its implications for the democratic purpose of higher education in America after World War II.

Anti-Black sentiments in Chinese Weibo discourse: a critical discourse historical analysis

ABSTRACT Diplomatic ties have deepened between China and Africa. However, unlike the friendly rhetoric at the State level, racist issues at the individual and societal levels, which are under-researched, are becoming increasingly salient in the Chinese context. Analysing 2766 posts and 13 477 comments from Weibo, this study deploys the 2021 Shadeed Abdulmateen murder case in Ningbo to investigate the online racial discourse that Chinese Weibo users construct around Black people. While thematic analysis shows that racism in China comprises a complex combination of anti-Black, anti-government, and anti-social class attitudes, critical discourse analysis identifies the discursive strategies used to construct the dichotomy between “positive Chinese” and “negative Black people". Specifically, the argumentation strategy justifies exclusionary practices against Black people in China, whereas the predicational strategy criminalises the Black community. Moreover, the nomination strategy discursively represents Black people as foreign threats and animals. Lastly, this study also reveals the orthographic manoeuvrings contrived by Weibo users to avoid censorship of racist language use on Weibo.

John Pechey (1654–1718) and the Popularization of Learned Medicine

AbstractThis essay offers a corpus‐based linguistic analysis of the paratexts of the works of John Pechey (1654–1718), a licentiate physician and prolific medical author and popularizer, whose ideas and practice brought him into conflict with the Royal College of Physicians. Following the methodology of corpus‐assisted discourse analysis, historical discourse analysis, and historical sociopragmatics, the essay analyses the paratextual material of Pechey's medical publications, with the aims of (a) collecting a corpus of texts published under his name, (b) assessing his role in the popularization of learned medicine, and (c) tracing how he constructed and performed his identity both as a knowledgeable medical practitioner and as a critic of the beliefs and practices of the Royal College of Physicians.

Critical Discourse Analysis on China’s Image in Climate Coverage by Mainstream US Media

In the trend of information globalization, mass media is not only an authoritative source of information but also a participant and executor of international affairs. News reporting is the most influential and authoritative form of media, shaping people’s cognition and attitudes while conveying information. Therefore, using news reports to build a national image has become an essential strategy for the government of a country. At the same time, an excellent national image is essential for improving a country’s global discourse power. Therefore, this paper uses discourse-historical analysis as a theoretical framework to analyze the China-related climate reports of mainstream media in the United States from 2015 to 2023 and explores the diachronic changes and reasons for the image of China in mainstream media reports in the United States. In this study, a combined approach of quantitative and qualitative methods is employed, with a particular emphasis on data-driven corpus research methods. The study found that mainstream US media’s climate reporting on China mainly focuses on China’s climate responsibility, renewable energy, and inter-country relations in climate governance. Through the analysis of the predication strategy, argumentation strategy, and intensification strategy, it is found that the media’s stance has gone through a period of neutrality from 2015 to 2017, increased hostile rhetoric from 2018 to 2019, and continued to worsen from 2020 to 2023. The media’s stance is mainly related to the changes in climate policies in the United States at different phases.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Language Used in Dove’s Advertisements

The study investigates the use of language in the ‘Real Beauty’ advertising campaign initiated by the care brand Dove from 2006 to 2020 through the lens of Fairclough’s (1989) three-dimensional critical discourse analysis and Wodak’s (2001) historical-discourse analysis. By unfolding the textual elements used in five video advertisements, it aims to examine how the advertiser Dove constructs the beauty image of women through discursive strategies used in the text and investigate the possible ideologies underlying the discourse. The findings indicate that the textual resources used in Dove’s advertisements experienced a discursive construction to reveal the essence of feminism and further explore the connection between female’s negative self-evaluation and social judgment. It concludes that although the changing traits of Dove’s advertisements may not escape from the accusation of legitimating the commercialism, they indeed attempted to empower women with the autonomy to control the vision of beauty and provide solutions to unite women of all ages and with all colors.

Discourse Historical Analysis of Identity Construction of New Energy Enterprises in China and the United States

Discourse Historical Analysis of Identity Construction of New Energy Enterprises in China and the United States

Inverting the Bogeyman: Evangelical Constructions of Critical Race Theory

The United States has witnessed a public display of outrage toward critical race theory (CRT). This opposition has been buoyed by White evangelical Christian polemics. I conducted a discourse-historical analysis of 21 statements, reflecting a diversity of voices within evangelical discourse (ED). First, ED constructs CRT as both bereft of theoretical validity and evil. Second, the discourse inverts the objectives of CRT by claiming those goals for its own. Third, ED seeks to strip CRT of its transformative and emancipatory power. Fourth, ED constructs CRT in ways that diffuse accountability. Finally, ED questions the faith of Christians who seek to learn from CRT. Reflection is offered for how CRT and Christianity might conspire together toward the aims of addressing racial inequity.

Soviet Politics of Memory in Southern Bessarabia and Northern Bukovyna: Representation of the Past and Mythmaking during World War II

The incorporation of new territories into the Ukrainian SSR during World War II required reconstructing the local community’s identity and shaping its historical memory through Stalinist ideology. This article examines the features of Soviet memory politics in Ukrainian territories through the examples of Southern Bessarabia and Northern Bukovyna, which were annexed in 1940 due to the military campaign against Romania. The study’s objectives were to determine the influence of Soviet ideology on the representation of the past, characterize the ways that the official memory was shaped during World War II, and analyze historical myths that spread throughout the official and historical discourse. The main historical images, which Soviet ideologists formulated in official statements, historical works, and propaganda in periodicals, have been extracted using historical discourse analysis. Comparative historical analysis has identified similarities and differences in interpreting the above-mentioned regions’ pasts. It is pointed out that the historical arguments and concepts used by the Soviet power to justify the annexations became the foundation for the historical discourse. The article analyzes the introduction of the myth of “longsuffering lands” into historical narratives, which interpreted the Soviet territorial conquests as the liberation of oppressed peoples. It has been established that the representation of Southern Bessarabia and Northern Bukovyna’s pasts corresponded to the Soviet concept of “Ukrainian people’s reunification.” However, the distinction between these regions’ ethnic composition and historical development influenced the politics of shaping historical memory.

A Discourse Historical Analysis of Identity Construction in Becoming (2018) by Michelle Obama

Research on identity through written narrative has been popular in the linguistics field over the decades. In this paper, a famous memoir written by Michelle Robinson Obama, Becoming (2018), is examined to analyze the construction of identities. This memoir is chosen because of the strong personal narrative and inspiring story which recounts the struggle of the African American woman against discrimination in the United States. This paper focuses on Becoming Us, which is examined through the Discourse-Historical Analysis (DHA) by Ruth Wodak. This approach offers several discursive strategies, some of which are referential/nomination and predication that are applied to analyze the linguistic features which provide positive, negative, and neutral representations of the social actor. All of these representations contribute to construct Michelle Obama’s cultural and racial identities. The novelty of this research lies in a more linguistic approach and historical context as the endeavors to examine the identities.

Арктическая политика Индии: исторический контекст

India released its Arctic Policy in March 2022, a long awaited document by one of the four Observer countries to the Arctic Council indicating India's realisation of the significance of the Arctic. This article examines the evolution of India's Arctic engagement through a historical analysis of India's Arctic dis-course. Apart from enunciating the scientific and political endeavours to date, the article traces the historical evolution of India's Arctic dialogue by political, strategic and academic experts and the process of India's engagement in the region. The objective of the article is to trace the historical context of India's Arctic policy. The article's analysis of India's recently published Arctic policy suggests that India's cooperation with Arctic council countries needs to be expanded, and it also must build up on its Arctic expertise by forging links with scientific institutions and universities across the Arctic. The practical significance of the article is in its use by policy makers and researchers interested in cooperation with India in the Arctic and for academic use at universities.

Corpus Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of Pakistan’s Language Education Policy Documents: What are the Existing Language Ideologies?

Language education policies contain discourses that have language ideologies embedded within them. This study explores the language ideologies in official language education policy documents of Pakistan from 2000 to 2020. Using Corpus Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis techniques, a 1.28 million-word-corpus was generated from 32 policy documents collected from official websites of UNESCO and the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training, Pakistan. The corpus analysis of frequency, collocation, and MI significance values were utilized to find out the typicality of topics and semantic preferences, while the concordance analysis revealed discourse prosody around the languages mentioned in the corpus. Moreover, seven documents were downsampled through dispersion plot. Discourse Historical Analysis was carried out on these documents based on discursive strategies of argumentation, predication, and perspectivization with reference to intertextuality and interdiscursivity. The findings show that English and to some extent Urdu occupy the ideological space related to education. The local languages were discussed in positive light, but they were marginalized in educational ideological space. The analysis also showed that the policies had underlying monoglossic ideology that can be seen having tolerance-oriented and expediency-oriented policy ideologies for local languages. This implies that the official policies of Pakistan marginalized the local languages in the discourse of language education. These findings invite policymakers to bring the local languages in the ideological space of education and introduce high level of ideological uniformity, consistency and goal setting for English, Urdu, and local/indigenous languages in the language-in-education policies of Pakistan that matches, captures and promotes the linguistic diversity in Pakistan.

Climate Change Journalism in Norway—Working with Frequency Around the “Green Shift”

ABSTRACT This article traces the origins of the term of the green shift, which gained increased cultural, social and political traction in Norway after it was introduced in 2015 by journalist Anders Bjartnes, editor of Energi og klima (2011-). By looking at this outlet as well as two other contemporary niche media, Harvest (2013-) and Naturpress (2016-), we show how this term provided a way of working with frequency, one of the 12 news values outlined in Galtung and Ruge’s seminal study from 1965. Inspired by discourse-historical analysis, we base our article on interviews with the editors of the three outlets, their journalistic output as well as on contextual material in order to show how the slow, uneven, global and partially invisible process of climate change was given a different temporal frame through the notion of the green shift. By addressing notions of frequency in relation to a specific time and context, we speak, on the one hand, to discussions about how an event-driven journalism struggles with the complex temporalities of climate change and, on the other, to recurrent calls for providing a more “context-driven reflection on the value and legacy of Galtung and Ruge” [Joye, Stijn, Ansgard Heinrich, and Romy Wöhler. 2016. “50 Years of Galtung and Ruge: Reflections on Their Model of News Values and its Relevance for the Study of Journalism and Communication Today.” CM Komunikacija i Mmediji 36: 5–28].

Old patients in mental health research

The present study takes a diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies approach (Partington et al. 2013) to examine the representation of mentally-ill elderly patients in medical research articles, in the fields of psychology and psychiatry, published between 1950 and 2019. Despite evidence of the expanding scope of mental health research in more recent years, nihilistic views about mental health assessment and intervention underpin the discourse around mentally-ill older adults across the time span under consideration. In the literature, ageing is variously constructed as a process leading to deprivation, resignation and physical decay, increasing the chances of the onset of mental illnesses. The perpetuation of these discourses, which confirm and propagate discriminatory age-bias positioning on the part of medical researchers, specialists and the health community at large, may constitute a significant obstacle to an improvement in the quality of mental and physical health care provided for the older population, both currently, and without substantial intervention, for the foreseeable future. Overall, it is hoped that this article has not only made a valuable contribution to the understanding of ageing from a historical discourse analysis perspective, but may be of interest to mental health scholars and professionals alike inspiring them to question their knowledge and practices about and for older patients.

DECLINE OF BUDDHISM IN PAKISTAN: A HISTORICAL REVIEW

The decline of Buddhism in the regions now in Pakistan is usually associated with the arrival of Islam. There is no doubt that the regions that are now dominantly Muslim were once dominantly Buddhist. But whether it is a simple matter of arrival of Islam to these areas that the entire Buddhist population turned into Islamic demography? How this transformation took place and at which historical juncture? This paper reconsiders such a narrative in light of some historical evidence traced form the contemporary sources f the period. While doing so a sketch of religious situation of the subcontinent at the arrival of Islam is presented. The paper is based on historical discourse analysis; the data is derived from various contemporary sources like the local Indian narratives, accounts of the Buddhist travelers from China besides the Islamic historical sources as well as the debate of contemporary scholars on the issue is also reviewed. Key Words: Buddhism, religious history, archeology