Search results for "Discourse Analysis"

UNESCO and cultural diversity: democratisation, commodification or governmentalisation of culture?

2012

The Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) was first adopted by its member states in October 2005. The document defines UNESCO's general principles and conceptualisations regarding culture, cultural diversity and expressions. In order to better manage culture, cultural expressions refer above all to goods and services of the markets, but another, more universally humanitarian and participatory aspect is also present. For the United Nations member states and especially countries that ratified it, the Convention offers policy and legal guidelines to support all forms o…

Evaluation of Status as a Persuasive Tool in Spanish and American Pre-electoral Debates in Times of Crises

2018

The evaluative function of language is explored from the point of view of the expression of “status,” or how the world is presented, and its persuasive potential in pre-electoral debates in the US and Spain. The types of statements used in two comparable corpora in Spanish and English are examined using Hunston’s model (2000; 2008) for the evaluation of “status”—the degree of alignment of a proposition and the world—to discover similarities and differences between them. The results show that, in general, all politicians prefer to use statements that refer to the actual world—“world-reflecting statements” in Hunston’s classification—rather than “world-creating propositions” in an attempt to …

Care and gendered work in reception centers in Finland

2019

PurposeThis paper focuses on how gendered processes of working life are (re)constructed and are also challenged discursively in paid and volunteer care and work in reception centers. The purpose of this paper is to show how caring work with asylum seekers can both enhance the traditional gender order and challenge it through enabling men to have opportunities to care.Design/methodology/approachThe data were produced through qualitative interviews among paid workers and volunteers in reception centers, and analyzed through a discourse analysis approach.FindingsThree discourses of care and work were identified: a discourse on solidarity and care; a discourse on control and order; and a discou…

Authenticity, normativity and social media

2015

Popularity-driven science journalism and climate change: A critical discourse analysis of the unsaid

2018

Abstract This study traces popularity-driven coverage of climate change in New Scientist with the special aim of identifying which aspects of the issue have been backgrounded. Unlike institutional communication or quality press coverage of climate change, commercial science journalism has received less attention with respect to how it frames the crisis. Assuming that the construction of newsworthiness in popular science journalism requires eliminating, or at least obscuring, some alienating information, the study identifies prevalent frames, news values and discursive strategies in the outlet’s most-read online articles on climate change (2013–2015). With the official statement of the World…

“A Shameless Ideology of Shameless Women”: Positioning the Other in Social Media Discourse Surrounding a Women’s Rights Movement in Pakistan

2022

This study analyzes social media (YouTube) discourse related to Aurat March 2019, a women’s rights movement in Pakistan. Using a discourse analytical approach that draws on the premises of Positioning theory, the analysis reveals the following two major storylines from the data: “The women who stray from the path, and the men who will return them to it,” and “Islam under threat from the outside.” Social media platforms allow their users to express opinions in online spaces, often resulting in polarization and clustering of like-minded people in so-called echo-chambers. This study demonstrates how social media users actively participate in the discursive construction of the “other,” and how…

Banal Sustainability : Renewing the Cultural Norm of Not Wasting Food

2022

Recently food waste has been raised as a major sustainability problem: roughly one third of the food produced globally ends up lost or wasted. This article investigates how people attach meaning to food waste reduction, based on eight individual interviews conducted with people met at a consumer education event in Helsinki in 2017. It is shown how the traditional cultural norm of not wasting food is reproduced in discourse on thrift and frugality and renewed by research-based arguments from circular economy discourse and environmental and sustainability discourse. It is proposed that the interplay of discourses merge into what Lars Kaijser calls banal sustainability: the complicated issue o…

“Cute Goddess is Actually an Aunty”: The Evasive Middle-Aged Woman Streamer and Normative Performances of Femininity in Video Game Streaming

2022

In this paper the focus is on the representations of “middle-aged” or “aging” women streamers in western media. I analyze discussions in Western online media around a case of Chinese DouYu live-streamer. “Qiaobiluo Dianxia,” as her streamer name goes, became a topic in Western media after a glitch in her live stream revealed her to be a middle-aged woman, rather than young woman she was assumed to be. The discussions are analyzed with critical discourse analysis. It is argued that the aging bodies of women, both their presence and absence, should be read and understood through toxic gaming culture and geek masculinity and the hegemonic discourse they constitute.

Can ambivalence hold potential for fat activism? An analysis of conflicting discourses on fatness in the Finnish column series Jenny’s Life Change

2018

In 2017, a publicly funded, nationwide campaign called the Scale Rebellion set out to address fatness through body positivity and fat activism in Finland, with a fat woman named Jenny Lehtinen havi...

Representing the Other in European Media Discourses

2017

This book deals with the construction of the ‘other’ in European media at a time when the recently expanded EU is facing new political, economic and social challenges. The aim of the book is to document the diverse discursive forms of othering, ranging from differentiation to discrimination, that are directed against various ‘other Europeans’ in both institutionalized media and such non-elite semi-public contexts as discussion forums and citizen blogs. Drawing on data from British, Polish, French, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish and Estonian contexts, the individual papers investigate how various social groupings – regions, nations, ethnicities, communities, cultures – are discursively c…