Discourse Context & Media最新文献

This paper will explore the multi-modal semiotic properties of a selection of key public health information posters issued by the UK Westminster government on the use of masks and face coverings during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using multi-modal critical discourse analysis, we show how the posters featuring masks sustained consistent government-led branding, while drawing upon what we describe as “synthetic personalisation” to manage the orientation of the crisis as the pandemic progressed. Through this analysis, the article will highlight the possible contribution of these posters to an environment characterised by political confusion and enabling of a relatively widespread rejection of mask-wearing as a public health responsibility. Examining this within a broader decline in trust in government, we suggest the various attempts to produce a positive message about mask-wearing contributed instead to the appropriation of masks as symbols of individual alignment within a contested political field.

In this article, we investigate, through corpus linguistics and qualitative approaches, YouTube responses to an advert which attempts to bring to the fore detrimental masculine toxic behaviours. With the affordances proper to the medium - anonymity, disinhibition, and de-individuation - our investigation focuses on three gendered terms representing subordinate masculinities (Messerschmidt, 2018): soy, cuck and beta, challenging ‘masculine’ attributes such as toughness, power, heterosexuality, competitiveness, and authority. These are thought to deviate from alpha masculinity between traditional opposite points: alpha men and women. The findings show that compound identities are also constructed, and deviant and subordinate masculinities are seen to be associated with political or social movements. Furthermore, comments suggest that traditional masculinity is threatened by groups of men who are considered socially inferior, provoking a (white) male sense of nostalgic entitlement. This online platform becomes a mediated space for discrimination, a softer manosphere, where anti-feminist sentiments are implicit. This article contributes to the literature on discourse and masculinities, and constructions of gender in online hostile spaces.

This article draws from our ethnography in the Complexo do Alemão favelas (neighborhoods built by residents) in Rio de Janeiro to discuss how Black activists bring affordances of digitalization and enregistered practices into broader arenas of political participation. We unpack our own positionality and experience with the armed surveillance and securitization of normative regimes that challenge (and often cooperate with) the state in governing peripheral and, to a lesser extent, central areas in Brazilian cities. Favela residents are disproportionately affected by these violent forms of securitization. We look to their ordinary digital and enregistered languaging and ‘artivism’ as a means of surviving necropolitics that are proper to the African diaspora. In dialogue with the sociolinguistics of globalization and the sociology of violence, the study provides ethnographic evidence of situated cooperation and creative use of language and technologies. We believe this may offer promising paths for further objectives, including antiracist education and comparative studies of grassroots activism.

Several videogames allow players to form their own narratives by making the player choose certain options with different dialogues and thus different representations. This can be problematic when exploring the representation of gender from the perspective of player’s experiences. I argue that one way to overcome this is to use corpus linguistic methods. In this paper, the videogame series The Witcher (CD Projekt Red, 2007, CD Projekt Red, 2011, CD Projekt Red, 2015) is taken as a case study for lexico-grammatical analysis of the representation of gender via corpus methods. Keyword analysis shows that male characters are more likely to occur than female characters and have a more diverse range of professions than female characters. I argue that the main female characters of the game are typically sorceresses, and so I explore how this term is used across the corpus. The analysis demonstrates that sorceresses are represented as educated and intelligent, but subject to a glass ceiling effect: they are only ever advisors and not leaders. I argue that regardless of what options players choose, they are statistically more likely to encounter these problematic representations of gender, thus raising questions about whether it is possible to escape sexist discourses in this medium.

The establishment of social distancing guidance during the first months of the Covid19 pandemic in the UK made behaviour in public spaces open to scrutiny, as observed in reports of lockdown (non)compliance in different types of media. This paper analyses a collection of 13 calls to BBC phone-ins where people publicly admit to breaking the lockdown. It offers an interactional analysis of the discursive practices with which callers account for their breach and build their moral personas while orienting to the accountability concerns that arise in their interaction with hosts, guest experts, and the participating audience on-air. Callers’ accounts were found to be extended objects combining different action components with which they present their licences to breach, list their harm-mitigating strategies, and construct their decisions as informed and common-sensical in the light of the moral dilemmas and disruption that the lockdown introduced to their ordinary lives.

This article critically examines discourse representations of men in a large online vegan community. The analysis reveals a set of discourses which provide oppositional representations of vegan and non-vegan men, wherein the former is aligned with hegemonic masculine norms and the latter represented as transgressing or falling short of these norms. We interpret these discourses as providing means for the forum members to resist societal-level discourses which frame veganism and vegan men as feminine or ‘unmanly’, while also performing a social support function of reassuring posters who express concerns about how their veganism may impact how others perceive them and their masculinity. However, we also argue that such discourses can be considered problematic from an ecofeminist perspective, as they orient to and reinforce a hegemonic gender hierarchy which has enabled, and continues to enable, gender oppression, animal exploitation and the broader destruction of the natural world.

As contemporary wordsmiths and new-generation copywriters, Social Media Influencers (henceforth SMIs) are inherently germane to critical sociolinguistics. Interested in wider cultural discourses about contemporary forms of ‘independent’ language work, this paper examines English-language news media representations of SMIs. The empirical focus of my analysis is a dataset of 143 news stories collected from major ‘broadsheet’ newspapers and LexisNexis. Specifically, I identify two contradictory stances – celebration and derision – by which SMIs are popularly framed. It is in this way, and following van Leeuwen (2007), that their cultural status and work is (de)legitimized. Using the legitimation tactics of theoretical rationalisation and mythopoesis, celebratory stances in my data construct SMIs as a perfect fit for today’s ideal of entrepreneurial success – as ambitious, self-optimizing and risk-taking individuals – ultimately contributing to the recasting of independent and sometimes precarious employment as aspirational ‘entrepreneurship’. Conversely, derisory stances built on the legitimation tactics of moral evaluation and authorisation lament their lack of work ethic as well as their interloping into industries that do not want them. Thus, the news media appear to both applaud SMIs for their entrepreneurial careers and be vested in sanctioning them for foregoing gatekeepers by not following traditional career paths to stable employment. Ironically, and perhaps even hypocritically, the latter are precisely the kind of employment that are increasingly difficult for many young people to access while the former still prerequisite considerable privilege to be able to pursue.

Through an interactionist analysis of guitar pedal review videos this paper explores the communicative practices of product reviewing in YouTube. Focussing on one guitar pedal, the analysis reveals how reviewers positioned the pedal as an ‘idealised object’ and as part of the ‘material good life’ of guitarists. Reviewers’ communicative strategies projected a sense of shared intersubjective experience of the pedal by bracketing out issues of knowledge, skill, and access to technology, and by constructing the vloggers’ credentials as reviewers. This analysis contributes to our understanding of the structures of consumer cultures on YouTube, showing how reviewers communicatively construct audiences, products, themselves, and, more generally, the practices of material culture use in this specific art world. I argue that the interactionist perspective adopted here is an important and under-used framework for analysing consumer culture, and that it helps us to see how material culture is manufactured as a discursive, communicative act through the mundane activities of reviewing.