“’We’ are good, ‘They’ are bad”: Critical Discourse Analysis in the age of populism:
You have probably all seen hate speech language on Twitter, Facebook or IG, or seen it on the news. With the rise of populism around the world, racist, homophobic, and other forms of exclusion are more present than ever.
This MA course is aimed at students who are interested in how language is used (and abused) in politics, society, the media and in our own private conversations, both online and offline.
We start from a view that there is a relationship between language and society - each impacts upon the other – and that language use cannot be understood without looking at society, in particular social inequalities (power inequalities, gender relations, race etc.). Students taking this MA course will look at the relationship between language and inequalities and their consequences, including:
· How social media communication is so important to current public debate and politics – memes, emoticons, hashtags etc.
· How people are constructed negatively or positively through language – Trump calling Joe Biden “crooked”;
· Our use of metaphors – what does it mean when there is “a tide of migrants?”;
· How we justify our arguments - “It is the will of the people!”
· Whose voices are heard? Whose are silenced? How can this be challenged?
The course starts with an introduction of key terms and theories that we will use through the seminar – we will investigate what a text is, how texts make up discourses and how these discourses can be analysed. We follow this with a study of different social theories that can be used along with text analysis to explain and interpret discourses (including theories of populism, race, gender, and the public sphere). After, this, we start to look at and use different qualitative methodological approaches to discourse analysis – students will do a lot of ‘hands-on’ analyses of texts. A fourth portion of the course takes students to different ‘spaces’ of discourse: newspapers, social media, parliaments, advertising posters, internet forums, and gaming. During the course we delve into current issues in the US, Europe and the world including: National identity, racism, migration, populist politics, climate change, the rise of the far-right, LGBTQ rights, and social movements such as Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion.
Sample references:
Bennett, S. (2018), Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse: Becoming British (London: Bloomsbury)
Bennett, S. (2019). ‘Standing up for ‘real people’: UKIP, the Brexit, and discursive strategies on Twitter’. In J. Zienkowski, & R. Breeze (eds.), Imagining the Peoples of Europe: Populist discourses across the political spectrum (230-256). John Benjamins.
KhosraviNik, M.. (2017). Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS). In J. Flowerdew & J. Richardson (eds), Handbook of Critical Discourse Analysis (582-596). Routledge.
Krzyżanowski, Michał (2018). ‘Discursive shifts in ethno-nationalist politics: On politicization and mediatisation of the ‘refugee crisis’ in Poland’, in: Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, 16(1–2): 76–96.
Page, R., Barton, D., Unger, J. W., & Zappavigna, M. (2014). Researching language in social media . Routledge.
Zappavigna, M. (2018). Searchable Talk: Hashtags and Social Media Metadiscourse. Bloomsbury.
Van Dijk, Teun (2015). ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’ in D. Tannen, H. Hamilton, & D. Schiffrin (Eds.), Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Second Edition. 2 vols. (vol. 1, pp. 466-485). Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. http://www.discourses.org/OldArticles/Critical%20Discourse%20Analysis.pdf
Wodak, R. & Meyer, M. (Eds.) (2009). Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (2nd revised edition). London: Sage.
Wodak, R. (2015). The politics of fear: What right-wing populist discourses mean. London: Sage.
- Nauczyciel: Samuel Bennett