Temporal Discourse and the News Media Representation of Indigenous-Non-Indigenous Relations: A Case Study from Aotearoa New Zealand

2013 ◽  
Vol 149 (1) ◽  
pp. 174-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyron Love ◽  
Elspeth Tilley

Time is a particularly powerful construct in postcolonial societies. Intermeshed with discourses of race, place and belonging, European ideas of time as linear, Cartesian and chronological function as enduring discursive categories that frame public debate within conceptual legacies from colonialism. There is substantial evidence internationally that modernist and mechanical temporal discourses of progress and efficiency have impeded Indigenous aspirations, including attempts to achieve sovereignty. In this article, we use a critical whiteness studies framework, and a critical discourse analysis methodology, to make visible the temporal assumptions in mainstream news articles from Aotearoa New Zealand. These articles, from influential, agenda-setting media, discuss crucial issues of indigenous rights, including Te Tiriti o Waitangi negotiations. Our analysis shows that they do so within a culturally specific, Western temporal framework, which limits their ability to provide balanced, informative coverage of the issues at stake.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annie Burns

This Major Research Paper (MRP) examines the recent discourse around LGBTQ older adults and aging that has started to be incorporated into Toronto’s senior care ostensibly to promote inclusion and diversity. Applying postmodernism, queer theory and critical whiteness studies as the theoretical framework, this MRP conducts a critical discourse analysis of (1) a sample of articles on older adults and aging from a Toronto-based LGBTQ-focused newspaper and (2) a sample of a LGBTQ2S cultural competency manual from Toronto’s city-run long-term care homes. The analysis of the findings demonstrates a white-centered, homogenizing and depoliticized discourse. The hope is to push conversations of queer/trans aging beyond homonormative models of senior care.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Ian Anderson

<p>2011 saw the lowest voter turnout in Aotearoa/New Zealand since women won the right to vote (Vowles, 2014). This decline in participation aligns with trends elsewhere in the Anglosphere (Ailes, 2015; Hansard, 2015). This organic crisis poses new questions for notions of the ‘public sphere’ and ‘publics’ – the forms of political engagement with citizens in a mass-mediated society. Fraser (1990) contends that in theorising the “limits of actually existing late capitalist democracy” (p. 57), we need a notion of pluralised and contesting ‘publics’ (ibid). The project asks how political parties named the 'public' (or publics) in the 2011 and 2014 Aotearoa / New Zealand General Elections. In order to consider the dominance of these political articulations, research will also consider whether these invocations of 'the public' found coverage in the national press. This is not intended as a sociological examination of actually existing publics, but an examination of dominant encoding (Hall, 2001). This analysis tests the thesis that dominant cross-partisan electoral discourses defined the 'public' in terms of dual identification with productive work and capital, in opposition to named subaltern publics. This formulation suggests that workers are called to identify with capital, following from Gramsci’s (2011) theorisation of bourgeois hegemony. Research begins with a content analysis of party press releases and mainstream coverage during the 2011 & 2014 General Elections, when official discourses hailing 'the public' are intensified. Content analysis quantifies nouns used for publics – for example, 'taxpayer', 'New Zealander', or even 'the public'. From this content analysis, the project proceeds to a critical discourse analysis, which seeks to historically contextualise and explain the patterns in content. Reworking Ernesto Laclau's (2005a) theorisation of populism to factor in the left/right axis (which Laclau considered outmoded), this critical discourse analysis considers what 'public' alliances are articulated, and what political programmes these articulations serve.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (s3) ◽  
pp. 20-34
Author(s):  
Ernesto Abalo ◽  
Diana Jacobsson

Abstract This article addresses how class as a category of conflict and struggle is understood and shaped discursively in mainstream media today. We utilise a case study of how Swedish news media represents the long-lasting conflict in the Swedish labour market between the Swedish Dockworkers’ Union and the employer organisation, Sweden's Ports. Using critical discourse analysis, we show two ways in which class relations are recontextualised in three Swedish newspapers. One is through obscuring class and centring the conflict around business and nationalist discourses, which in the end legitimise a corporate perspective. The other, more marginalised, way is through the critique of class relations that appears in subjective discourse types. This handling of class, we argue, serves the reproduction of a post-political condition.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annie Burns

This Major Research Paper (MRP) examines the recent discourse around LGBTQ older adults and aging that has started to be incorporated into Toronto’s senior care ostensibly to promote inclusion and diversity. Applying postmodernism, queer theory and critical whiteness studies as the theoretical framework, this MRP conducts a critical discourse analysis of (1) a sample of articles on older adults and aging from a Toronto-based LGBTQ-focused newspaper and (2) a sample of a LGBTQ2S cultural competency manual from Toronto’s city-run long-term care homes. The analysis of the findings demonstrates a white-centered, homogenizing and depoliticized discourse. The hope is to push conversations of queer/trans aging beyond homonormative models of senior care.


2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmad Y. Ayyad

This paper examines aspects of political ideology as realised through translation in the context of a case study, the translations of the Roadmap Plan. The Roadmap is one of several peace plans or initiatives that have been launched in the last decades to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Originally drafted in English in 2003 by the Quartet, the plan was subsequently translated into Arabic and Hebrew by different institutions and news media. This paper begins by examining the textual profiles of the different Arabic and Hebrew versions, focusing on their functions and principles of audience design. This study then moves on to establish how ideological factors inform translational choices as well as the interpretation of translated texts by readers. The main body of the analysis, informed by concepts and methods of descriptive translation studies and critical discourse analysis, focuses on the translator’s mediation of proper names (including protagonists of the conflict and toponyms); instances of deliberately ambiguous or vague drafting; and politically sensitive terms (e.g. ‘normalisation’ or ‘curfew’). The concluding section accounts for the findings of the analysis in terms of the social, political, and ideological constraints shaping the different language versions of the document under scrutiny.


2009 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Nairn ◽  
Tim McCreanor ◽  
Jenny Rankine ◽  
Angela Moewaka Barnes ◽  
Frank Pega ◽  
...  

Research has shown news media in post-colonial societies such as Aotearoa New Zealand naturalise the colonising processes by which settler values and social organisation were imposed and the resulting marginalised status of the indigenous peoples. We explore these processes in news reports that claimed Māori wanted to charge for airspace over Lake Taupo. Studying headlines, the originating newspaper article, and subsequent television reports, we show how Māori were constructed as threatening the ability of ‘New Zealanders’ to enjoy the lake. That threat was constructed as imminent although the accounts included no direct evidence or identified source for the reported demand. We consider the one-sided coverage inaccurate, unbalanced and unfair, encouraging perceptions of Māori as hostile and disruptive social actors in our contemporary society. Wider implications of this media performance for this crucial area of social relations are considered.


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-101
Author(s):  
Georgina Tuari Stewart ◽  
Nesta Devine

This article unpacks and critiques the scholarship of Elizabeth Rata on the politics of knowledge in education. Rata represents a widespread, though covert, influence within the global academy of an imperialist form of philosophical universalism which has particular significance for Aotearoa New Zealand due to her vocal opposition to Kaupapa Māori education and Māori politics more generally. This article uses critical discourse analysis (CDA) to focus on the arguments of one key article, in order to expose its philosophical weaknesses. Our analysis shows that Rata’s scholarship is based on misconceptions of several key terms and concepts, which inexorably lead to inadequate arguments and invalid conclusions, and undermine the cogency of her claims about the ‘dangers’ of Kaupapa Māori education.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saira Ali ◽  
Umi Khattab

This article presents an empirical analysis of the Australian media representation of terrorism using the 2014 Sydney Lindt Café siege as a case in point to engage with the notion of moral panic. Deploying critical discourse analysis and case study as mixed methods, insights into trans-media narratives and aftermath of the terrifying siege are presented. While news media appeared to collaborate with the Australian right-wing government in the reporting of terrorism, social media posed challenges and raised security concerns for the state. Social media heightened the drama as sites were variously deployed by the perpetrator, activists and concerned members of the public. The amplified trans-media association of Muslims with terrorism in Australia and its national and global impact, in terms of the political exclusion of Muslims, are best described in this article in the form of an Islamophobic Moral Panic Model, invented for a rethink of the various stages of its occurrence, intensification and institutionalization.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Ian Anderson

<p>2011 saw the lowest voter turnout in Aotearoa/New Zealand since women won the right to vote (Vowles, 2014). This decline in participation aligns with trends elsewhere in the Anglosphere (Ailes, 2015; Hansard, 2015). This organic crisis poses new questions for notions of the ‘public sphere’ and ‘publics’ – the forms of political engagement with citizens in a mass-mediated society. Fraser (1990) contends that in theorising the “limits of actually existing late capitalist democracy” (p. 57), we need a notion of pluralised and contesting ‘publics’ (ibid). The project asks how political parties named the 'public' (or publics) in the 2011 and 2014 Aotearoa / New Zealand General Elections. In order to consider the dominance of these political articulations, research will also consider whether these invocations of 'the public' found coverage in the national press. This is not intended as a sociological examination of actually existing publics, but an examination of dominant encoding (Hall, 2001). This analysis tests the thesis that dominant cross-partisan electoral discourses defined the 'public' in terms of dual identification with productive work and capital, in opposition to named subaltern publics. This formulation suggests that workers are called to identify with capital, following from Gramsci’s (2011) theorisation of bourgeois hegemony. Research begins with a content analysis of party press releases and mainstream coverage during the 2011 & 2014 General Elections, when official discourses hailing 'the public' are intensified. Content analysis quantifies nouns used for publics – for example, 'taxpayer', 'New Zealander', or even 'the public'. From this content analysis, the project proceeds to a critical discourse analysis, which seeks to historically contextualise and explain the patterns in content. Reworking Ernesto Laclau's (2005a) theorisation of populism to factor in the left/right axis (which Laclau considered outmoded), this critical discourse analysis considers what 'public' alliances are articulated, and what political programmes these articulations serve.</p>


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