Search results for "Discourse"
showing 10 items of 925 documents
(Re)negotiating Freedom of Expression in the Spanish Transition: The Case of El Papus (1973-1987)
2020
Juxtaposing documents from judicial and administrative archives with material published in the satirical magazine El Papus (1973-1987), this essay examines the confrontation between national-Catholic discourse and new modes of visual and textual expression in late Francoism and the early years of the democratic transition in Spain. The present study represents a survey of some 44 state-produced documents and 124 journalistic pieces, applying a two-pronged methodology rooted in discourse analysis with a special focus on the content and themes deemed unfit for publication in the pages of El Papus. The results will show that a loosening of erotic and sexual mores, particularly those related to…
Welcome to the end of the world! Resignifying periphery under the new economy: a nexus analytical view of a tourist website
2013
Accompanying the rise of the globalized new economy, the heritage tourism industry is expanding ever further into the global peripheries. One such ‘peripheral’ site is Samiland, home of the indigenous language minority Sami people, in the north of Lapland. Here, tourism is emerging as an opportunity for the Sami to challenge their longstanding marginalization by mobilizing the periphery and signifying their peripheralized identities in new ways. These processes may look encouraging but they call for critical interrogation. To gain a deeper insight into these processes, the present study draws on a nexus analytical approach combining discourse analysis and ethnography to examine an illuminat…
Studying ideology and discourse as knowledge, power and material practices
2021
The notion of ideology plays a crucial role in the social sciences in general and discourse studies in particular because it helps us conceptualize, problematize and understand the complex relation...
Negations and negativity as linguistic devices in policy discourse of intercultural cities
2015
International audience; Intercultural cities – a joint initiative launched in 2008 by the European Commission and the Council of Europe – aims to develop a model supporting intercultural integration within diversified urban communities. This article examines, using methods of applied linguistics and discourse analysis, how intercultural urban policy is linguistically produced in the initiative. The examination indicates that the intercultural urban policy in the initiative is ‘negative politics’: the policy rhetoric commonly outlines the content of interculturalism by describing what is not included in it and what the policy is not about. The language used in the intercultural urban policy …
Developing a new approach to managing and mediating conflicts
2017
Generally speaking, words can be elusive and they need to be carefully selected when conveying messages, ideas and proposals between parties. This is all the more evident in mediation process as language has to be neutral and mediators should avoid expressions directing parties. In this regard, recent theoretical developments in postmodern social theory and the social constructionist movement in the social sciences and humanities have provided the field of alternative dispute resolution with a new approach to managing and mediating conflicts. These developments are organized around the ‘narrative approach’ which helps us to see how the language we use to describe and understand our conflict…
'The sisters did her every imaginable injury': Power and violence in Cinderella
2012
The main aim of this article is to discuss the results achieved after investigating the presence of violence in the Grimm brothers’ <em>Cinderella</em> with the intention of finding out what kind of processes predominate in this tale and whether they can be related to violent actions. The analysis involved firstly, a study of the frequency and concordances of some words belonging to the semantic field ‘violence’, surveying in detail the context in which they appear and secondly, the analysis of transitivity processes. The method proved to be a good strategy to check whether each character’s identity and social position (power) were somehow related to the infliction of violence w…
Heterogeneous knowledge: Trends in German discourse analysis against an international background
2011
This contribution maps the complex field of discourse analysis in Germany by situating its major currents and putting them in historical perspective. In a first step, it presents the major intellectual sources, such as (post-)structuralism, pragmatism/interactionism as well as hermeneutics, which have served as a backdrop for the establishment of discourse analysis as an interdisciplinary field since the 1980s. In a second step, it takes a closer look at the intellectual conjunctures in the social sciences such as Critical Theory and systems theory before turning to the discourse analytical tendencies that have emerged since the 1980s in the light of Foucault's reception in Germany. Finally…
Semiotics of pride and profit: interrogating commodification in indigenous handicraft production
2014
This study investigates the shifting terrain of pride, profit and power relations in minority language communities under contemporary globalisation. While “pride” associates linguistic-cultural heritage with identity and preservation, “profit” views these as sources of economic gain. In contemporary late capitalism, “pride” seems to be increasingly giving way to “profit”. Arguing that this transformation needs to be interrogated in terms of complexity and that a detailed, multilayered semiotic analysis can open a privileged window for such an inquiry, this study combines critical multimodal discourse analysis and an ethnographic approach to analyse processes of semiotic commodification in h…
‘Culture’ as a discursive resource in newspaper articles from Le Monde about secularism : constructing ‘us’ through strategic oppositions with religi…
2017
Building on research highlighting the complex webs of relations between secularism, culture, and religion, this study investigates how the concept of culture was utilized in discourses of laïcité from the newspaper le Monde. Articles (N = 76) published between 2011 and 2014 were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Results revealed the agency associated with the use of culture as it was strategically – rather than systematically – used in opposition to religion. Overall, culture – and the practices it defined – tended to be represented as normal and invisible. On the other hand, religion tended to be constructed as a disruption to secularism and the corresponding cultural reality. T…
“I look with deep gratitude and admiration ...” – praising and complimenting in papal speeches
2022
Abstract Recently, communicating admiration and appreciation in public discourse has become a subject of study since these acts play a very important role in shaping positive social relations not only on a micro scale, but also on a macro one. My goal in this study is to understand how public officials implement their intention to please addressees in an international arena, in contacts between different religious and national communities. In order to do this, 120 papal speeches delivered to representatives of different churches, religions and societies were analysed, identifying individual topics, functions and patterns of these speech acts, as well as their dependence on such parameters a…