To Örebro University

Despite extensive research on inequalities in music, it remains unclear how power is conceptualized and analyzed within musical practices and institutions. The purpose of this study is to explore contemporary academic research on power in musical practices and institutions. Through a scoping literature review of peer-reviewed articles published between 2013 and 2023, the study examines how inequalities in music are framed and explored. Our findings reveal a strong emphasis on gender, race, and social justice, with music education emerging as the most studied context. Despite frequent references to power, the concept is often left undefined, and research primarily highlights marginalized groups’ experiences rather than the mechanisms through which power operates, limiting its ability to address structural inequities. We suggest that future research further engage with how power operates, is maintained, and contested in musical institutions and practices, with particular attention to dominant groups, material power, and institutional mechanisms shaping inequalities.

This paper examines how an adult’s letter to the New South Wales Minister for Disability regarding problems identified within the disability service sector resulted in successful outcomes: that is, the changes asked for were delivered. A range of discourse semantic tools of analysis including appraisal (Martin and White 2005) and connexion (Martin 1992; Rose and Martin 2012) were employed in analysing this letter, which can be seen as an example of empathy activism. The analysis identifies how the complex layering of stages and phases that organise the arguments in this letter powerfully drives the point home, which is to convince the Minister to increase the staff ratio at a government-run respite house for children with intellectual disabilities.

This article presents a multimodal rhythmic analysis of a TikTok video, adopting a social semiotic perspective on embodied meaning-making. We highlight the importance of rhythm in coordinating and intertwining semiotic modes to produce meaning. The study develops a method for undertaking an integrated multimodal analysis of rhythm across speech, bodily action, gesture and music, and develops a transcription convention for representing this rhythmic unfolding. The data considered is a TikTok ‘glambot/boss challenge’ video featuring a lip sync to audio sampled from former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s 2012 culturally iconic ‘Misogyny Speech’ condemning misogynist and sexist men, particularly those in positions of power. This speech achieved viral prominence internationally and continues to be a key feminist text in Australian political history. The paper demonstrates how end-accented rhythmic groups create anticipation and lead to the main event in both the speech and glambot sections of the video. Alongside the rhythmic analysis, the article examines the intertextual meanings established with other TikTok videos that iterate the glambot meme and glambot challenge.

After a short history of discourse-analytical approaches to evaluation, the chapter introduces the currently most widely used approaches to evaluation analysis – Martin and White’s appraisal theory, developed in the context of systemic-functional linguistics, and the approach to corpus linguistics developed and applied by Bednarek and Zappavigna. The chapter details the key dimensions of these approaches – engagement, which analyses how speakers or writers align or disalign their evaluations with those of others, attitude, which analyses how speakers or writers express feelings, normative assessments and aesthetic appreciations, and graduation, which analyses the intensity of evaluations. The approach is exemplified by the analysis of a single text as well as a corpus of texts. Particular attention is paid to the relation between evaluation and modality. Appraisal theory is then contrasted to Wodak and van Leeuwen’s legitimation analysis, which was developed in the context of critical discourse analysis. While appraisal analysis has often foregrounded the use of evaluative language among the members of online and offline communities, legitimation analysis has foregrounded the use of evaluation as an instrument of power in unequal relationships, for instance in monitoring and appraising people’s behaviour. The chapter includes examples of both these uses of evaluation.