This article discusses the extent to which methods normally associated with corpus linguistics can be effectively used by critical discourse analysts. Our research is based on the analysis of a 140-million-word corpus of British news articles about refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (collectively RASIM). We discuss how processes such as collocation and concordance analysis were able to identify common categories of representation of RASIM as well as directing analysts to representative texts in order to carry out qualitative analysis. The article suggests a framework for adopting corpus approaches in critical discourse analysis.
Based on semi-structured interviews with journalists in six European countries, this article examines the extent to which the findings of recent literature about the representation of migrants in European media content are reflected in the perceptions of journalists themselves about the way in which migrants are represented in the media discourses produced by their outlets. It finds that the four key findings of the literature were by and large confirmed, namely inaccurate group labelling and designation, negative or victimised representation, underrepresentation of migrants in quotations, and the scarce reference to a wider European context. Finally, the article discusses media professionals’ self-reported awareness about general professional ethics versus diversity-specific ethics, and about the way in which their outlets cover news involving ‘‘new’’ immigrants, i.e. nationals of non-European Union countries residing in the European Union, and examines the differences between media practices and perceptions in ‘‘old’’ and ‘‘new’’ immigration countries.
For a full explanation of the methodology of the research project, please see the introduction in this themed section: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2012.740213.
The contributions gathered in the following part present a combination of theoretical and empirical approaches to representations of migrants (as individuals or groups) and migration (as a wider social phenomenon) in the media and in text types related to the media. As such, the following contributions explore similarities and differences between the nationally specific and transnational representations at the times of accelerated sociopolitical change. The latter, as we have seen, has very often resulted with ardent anti-immigration debates which have become prevalent across the public spheres in most of the European countries. Fuelled by the public fears of globalization and insecurity, those debates cut across the traditional political divisions (left and right), both mainstream (national and regional) and minority media as well as both classic media (press, broadcast media) and new media genres.
This essay illustrates the extent to which crisis has had an impact on public perceptions and discourses of contemporary migration in Poland. We focus on the actual moment of the coming together' between crisis- and immigration-related discourses and argue that this connection has arisen as part of the recent political strategies of Poland's right-wing populist government Law and Justice' (PiS) party. The strong anti-immigration and anti-refugee rhetoric orchestrated by PiS across the Polish public sphere has also played a pivotal role in countenancing xenophobic as well as outright racist sentiments in wider Polish public discourse and society.
This article explores the discourse-conceptual linkages between ‘Brexit’ and ‘crisis’ in European news media reporting about the UK referendum on leaving the European Union of 23 June 2016. The study examines media discourse about the Brexit vote in Austria, Germany, Poland and Sweden at the transformative moment in between the pre/after vote period. The conceptuallyoriented critical discourse analysis shows how Brexit was not only constructed as an imaginary or a future crisis but also how its mediated visions were made real by recontextualising elements of various past social/political/economic crises. As is shown, such a strategy of discursively amalgamating the real and the imaginary, as well as the experienced/past and the expected/future, often allowed constructing Brexit as one of the most significant, critical occurrences of post-War Europe. Through the analysis, the article aims to show how wide and diverse the importance of ‘Brexit as crisis’ has been for European news media discourse. It also emphasises that while in the UK itself – including huge part of the UK traditional media – the critical nature of Brexit was often strategically downplayed, the wider European discourse would see it as a multifaceted ‘crisis’ of huge significance to both the present and the future of the EU, wider Europe and the world.
Looking at mediated, political and wider public discourses on immigration in Poland since 2015 and exploring these in the context of the country's right-wing populist politics, the paper develops a multi-step normalisation model which allows analysing how radical or often blatantly racist discourse can not only be strategically introduced into the public domain but also evolve into an acceptable and legitimate perspective inperceptions of immigrants and refugees. The paper highlights the strategic as well as opportunistic introduction of anti-immigration rhetoric in/by the political mainstream in Poland in recent years, often on the back of the so-called post-2014 European "Refugee Crisis". It explores normalisation as part and parcel of a wider multistep process of strategically orchestrated discursive shifts wherein discourses characterised by extreme positions have been enacted, gradated/perpetuated and eventually normalisedas an integral part of pronounced right-wing populist agenda. The paperfurthers a view that normalisation entails the creation and sustainment of a peculiar borderline discourse wherein unmitigated radical statements are often married with seemingly civil and apparently politically correct language and argumentation. The latter are used to pre-/legitimise uncivil or even outright radical positions and ideologies by rationalising them and making them into acceptable elements of public discourse.
This paper analyzes politicization and mediatization of immigration in Poland in the context of the recent European "refugee crisis." Although largely absent from Polish political discourse after 1989, anti-refugee and anti-immigration rhetoric has recently become extremely politically potent in Poland. The analysis shows that, soon taken over by other political groups, the new anti-immigration discourses have been enacted in Poland's public sphere by the right-wing populist party PiS (Law and Justice). Its discourse in offline and online media has drawn on discursive patterns including Islamophobia, Euro-scepticism, anti-internationalism, and historical patterns and templates of discrimination such as anti-Semitism.
This article proposes a diachronic, empirically founded and qualitative approach to the examination of constructions of a European Public Sphere in Europe's national news media. By focusing on transnational press-reporting of a set of selected Crisis Events in post-war European history (in the period 1956-2006), different discursive representations of "Europe" (and Europe-related normative notions such as, e. g., "European values") are studied to show the diversity and heterogeneity of their nationally specific perceptions. Similar discursive patterns and commonalities in discourses across Europe are highlighted, as are the evolving ways of (re-)constructing the tension between the transnational and the national, in the specifically European context. Within the latter, Europe changes its role in news-media discourse over time-from being an adversary or source of problems for the nation, to becoming the "bearer" of common values for all (or at least several) European nation-states.
This article analyses European Union policy discourses on climate change from the point of view of constructions of identity. Articulated in a variety of policy-related genres, the EU rhetoric on climate change is approached as example of the Union’s international discourse, which, contrary to other areas of EU policy-making, relies strongly on discursive frameworks of international and global politics of climate change. As the article shows, the EU’s peculiar international – or even global – leadership in tackling the climate change is constructed in an ambivalent and highly heterogeneous discourse that runs along several vectors. While it on the one hand follows the more recent, inward-looking constructions of Europe known from the EU policy and political discourses of the 1990s and 2000s, it also revives some of the older discursive logics of international competition known from the earlier stages of the European integration. In the analysis, the article draws on the methodological apparatus of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) in Critical Discourse Studies. Furthering the DHA studies of EU policy and political discourses, the article emphasises the viability of the discourse-historical methodology applied in the combined analysis of EU identity and policy discourses.
Identity has recently become one of the most frequently theorised and explored topics within various sub-branches of social sciences. Collective identities in general, and their ancestry and construction in particular, are being perceived in different ways by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and, last but not least, discourse-analysts. This article aims at shedding a new light on the concept of European identity, which, so far, has been most frequently analysed within the context of the European Union and its political and economic impact on European space. Despite drawing theoretically on some well-grounded traditions of research on European identity, such as, e.g., analysis of its contradiction and suplementariness with national identities, or, its interconnection with such concepts as European citizenship or European integration, the analysis of European identity presented here is put in the context of globally understood identification processes. Empirically, the article draws on the analysis of TV talk show thematically bound by the topics concerning European Union’s impact on national identities.
The aim of this article is to present an approach to analysing organisational practices and identities in complex institutional spaces of the European Union (EU). On the example of the 2002-2003 European Convention, the article targets new types of institutional organisms enacted in the EU in recent years. It does so in order to analyse to what extent such new, short-lived institutional bodies have the ability to develop their own, distinct institutional practices and inasmuch their everyday doings are in fact based on patterns adopted from other, more permanent institutional milieus (in the case of the EU - the European Commission, the European Council or the European Parliament). While analysing Convention's institutional reality by means of extensive fieldwork and ethnography, the article looks at the discursive construction of institutional cultures and identities by means of institutional practices as well as through discourses of officials involved in the work of the European institutions. © 2011 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.
This article highlights that by focusing on concepts, many contemporary discourses increasingly turn towards (re/definitions of) various abstract ideas while moving their focus away from representations of doers as well benefactors of social and politico-economic processes. Focusing on the process of such an increasingly conceptual nature of discourse as one of the key displays of contemporary neoliberal logic in public and regulatory discourse, the article argues that the concept-driven logic – evident in policies, but also in media and political genres – necessitates new theoretical (and analytical) tools in critical discourse studies (CDS). It is suggested that, on the one hand, incorporation of ideas from within conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) into CDS is necessary. On the other hand, it is also argued that an in-depth rethinking of the ways in which CDS approaches recontextualisation as a concept is equally crucial. As is argued, both insights might help tackling the conceptual dynamics in/of discourses by tracing the conceptual logic of discourse and identifying ideological ontologies of contemporary public and regulatory discourses. They also help scrutinise discourses in which social practice is often regulated and where the image of non-agentic ‘invisible’ social change allows for legitimisation of the oftennegative social and politico-economic dynamics.
This paper looks at how social/online media - using the example of Twitter - are used in the politico-organizational communication of the European Union at a time when it faces multiple crises and is in acute need of effectively communicating its politics to the European demos. Proposing a critical discourse framework for the analysis of the politico-organizational use of Twitter, the paper shows that while, to some extent, bringing change or 'modernization' to EU political communication patterns, social/online media help in sustaining some of the deep-seated dispositions in EU communicative and organizational practices as well as political discourses. As deployed by the EU's - and specifically the European Commission's - spokesperson service, social/online help in solidifying some of the controversial patterns in EU political communication. They also bring in other, more contemporary, challenges as regards using Twitter and social media as parts of political and institutional/organizational communication.
This article starts from the premise that rather than being a solely contemporary notion or a concept related to the development of the European Union, European Public Sphere (EPS) should be viewed as a historically conditioned process, which draws on a longue durée of European perceptions and imaginaries constructed and disseminated in the national contexts. By looking at existent analyses of national media contents, this article, which draws on the analysis of over a hundred media studies, provides an extensive and critical examination of post-War Polish media discourses on “Europe” and “European issues” (including definitions of “Europe”, “Europeanness”, “European identity”, and “European values”). Seeing the role that those issues played in Polish media discourses during the period between 1945 and 2005 (i.e. from the end of World War II, through the development and fall of the Communism, up until and including Polish accession to the EU), the article locates when and where ethical notions related to the idea of Europe were negotiated and appropriated within media discourses. The article also attempts to fi nd examples of (possibly) transnational and event-specific aspects of reporting in order to discover the historical development of either Polish or transnational media constructions of a European Public Sphere.
This article shows that templates are not only crucial for the ways in which journalists construct or structure the media discourse but also for how they perceive themselves and others in the process of journalistic practice. A Critical Discourse Analysis of interviews with Polish journalists on their practices related to reporting migration - a topic largely discarded and ignored by the Polish media - shows that the construction of practice in the journalistic field constantly negotiates the contradiction between "knowing-it-all", a key element of the template of journalistic habitus/identity, and the frequent lack of experience or limited knowledge of practice and of journalistic work. The analysis reveals that, while often using a discursive strategy of pre-legitimation, journalists enact templates that blur the boundaries between discourses about experiences of journalistic work and imaginaries or scenarios of actions they would only potentially undertake. Journalistic discourses of practice thereby become increasingly displaced, that is, they run along similar templates of discourse of/about quasi-universalised ethics and values of journalism almost irrespective of media organisations of the informants. By the same token, it is emphasised that, rather than being limited by the ideologies and powers of media organisations, agency seems to be often self-constrained by journalists in their self-entrapment in values, templates and imaginaries of journalism.
This article looks at mainstream political discourses about immigration in Sweden during the recent "refugee crisis". It argues that different patterns of politicization of immigration have traditionally dominated in Sweden and focuses on Swedish mainstream politics wherein, as is shown, explicit focus on politicization via (previous as well as current) immigration-related policies still persists. However, as the analysis of Sweden's Social Democratic Party's Twitter discourse shows, a hybrid new discourse of politicization is now emerging. It allows political actors to legitimize immigration policy with often populist-like politicization and the use of new modes of online political communication.
This article emphasises the need to devote more attention to concepts and theories in critical discourse studies (CDS). We are particularly eager to emphasise that CDS theory of the second decade of 2000s – often known as the post-crisis era or as the period of ‘late neoliberalism’ – faces a number of challenges that are both real world (social) and academic in nature. On the one hand, CDS theory must be reconsidered from the point of view of socio-political challenges and the necessity to tackle new (public and private) discourses as well as their trajectories that no longer undergo the once long-standing socio-political or politico-economic dynamics. On the other hand, we see the need for embracing new ways of theorising and conceptualising discourse in late modernity in the wider landscape of the social theories and their engagement with discourse. This article emphasises the need to address some voices that come from beyond the ‘core’ CDS community with the aim to enrich CDS theory by ideas that would help us move the latter beyond its foundations as well as face socio-political and academic challenges ahead.
This paper explores the connection between the rise of new types of online uncivil discourses and the recent success of populism. While discussions on the upsurge of populism have centred on institutionalised politics and politicians, only limited attention has been paid to how the success of the former and the latter was propelled by developments outside of the political realm narrowly conceived. Our interest is therefore in the rise of uncivil society, especially on the web, and in its 'borderline discourse' at the verge of civil and uncivil ideas, ideologies and norms. Those discourses - showcased here on the example of the language on immigration/refugees in Austria and Sweden - have been using civil-to- uncivil shifts in the discursive representations of society and politics. They have progressively 'normalised' the anti- pluralist views across many European public spheres on a par with nativist and exclusionary views now widely propagated by right-wing populist politics in Europe and beyond.