scholarly journals Presidential Rhetoric on Foreign Crises: George W. Bush on Georgia and Barack Obama on Ukraine

Ad Americam ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 73-85
Author(s):  
Marta Rzepecka
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
Presidential Rhetoric ◽  
Central Objective

Presidential Rhetoric on Foreign Crises: George W. Bush on Georgia and Barack Obama on Ukraine This article offers a critique of the rhetorical responses of President George W. Bush to the 2008 Russia-Georgia conflict and of President Barack Obama to the 2014 Russia-Ukraine conflict. Its central objective is to identify parallels and differences between the situations calling for presidential rhetoric on the crises in Georgia and Ukraine and determine how the president’s reactions to the conflicts were similar or different, judging the responses against Theodore Otto Windt, Jr.’s analytical framework for foreign crisis rhetoric.

The intervention taboo(s): Strategy and normative invalidation

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 557-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Bentley
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Bill Clinton ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
Presidential Rhetoric ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
Strategic Narratives ◽  
Comparative Case Studies ◽  
Moral Expectation

AbstractIntervention comprises one of the most contentious issues in International Relations. This controversy results from the way normative understanding is structured around two key, but mutually exclusive, taboos: the moral expectation to respond in cases of humanitarian need and the protection of state sovereignty. In examining this dilemma, this article asks: what happens to the construction of rhetorical strategy, where that strategy seeks to justify intervention (or not), within a binary normative environment? It is argued that actors can only successfully construct a rhetorical case by engaging in, what is termed here, normative invalidation. In a binary situation, actors cannot adhere to both taboos. These taboos are so compelling, however, that actors must necessarily invalidate or neutralise any taboo not adhered to. This is discussed in relation to the Strategic Narratives paradigm and comparative case studies on the presidential rhetoric of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

scholarly journals Architecture as Political Image: The Perspective of Advertising

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Cairns
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
The United States ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
Semiotic System ◽  
Effective Technique ◽  
Ferdinand De Saussure ◽  
Noam Chomsky ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Communicative Strategies

In the realm of contemporary politics, the need to “communicate” is paramount. Some call political communication a process of manipulation, others a dark art of depict. Here, it will be examined as a form of promotion; as a form of advertising. However, it is an advertising typology that clearly appropriates architecture to its own persuasive ends. The world of advertising has been subject to numerous developments throughout the course of its history. In the last three decades this has seen what had become the standard mode of visual communication, semiotics, replaced by divergent and ever more sophisticated systems. These systems, we suggest, require the application of phenomenology as an analytical framework if we are to fully understand how they work. However, the importance of semiotic systems of communication has not evaporated. They remain core to advertising and, although obvious to a now fully visually literate public, a reasonably effective technique. They also remain evident in the realm of architecture, political communication and, as we describe here, the combination of the two. Examining two images of Barack Obama form the 2008 Presidential election in the United States, this paper underlines how core aspects of the standard semiotic system of analysis clearly reveal the promotional and persuasive techniques employed in “political imagery”. However, it also describes how they are incorporated into a broader framework of the politico-media-complex and how this has helped transform their communicative strategies into techniques which require the application of a phenomenological analysis. Employing the terminology of Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Judith Williamson, Noam Chomsky and Maurice Merleau Ponty it will describe these images in fully advertising terms; an approach that turns the politics in play into a form of commercial exercise and the candidate promoted into a “product”. The communicative techniques revealed are of course applied by all parties and individuals operating within the competitive political arena but these images of Barack Obama are perhaps the ones that reveal the similarities between the advertising and politics, and their use of architecture, most succinctly.

scholarly journals On covert and overt sayers: A pragmatic-cognitive study into Barack Obama’s presidential rhetoric of image construction and (de)legitimisation

Res Rhetorica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 147-168
Author(s):  
Anna Ewa Wieczorek
Keyword(s):  
Bill Clinton ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
Presidential Rhetoric ◽  
Reported Speech ◽  
Cognitive Perspective ◽  
Image Construction ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Image Creation ◽  
Presidential Speeches ◽  
Cognitive Study

This article aims to investigate narrative reports based on the use of reported speech frames from a pragmatic-cognitive perspective. As rhetorical means of image creation and (de)legitimisation, they are frequently employed to represent utterances that constitute integral elements of short narratives incorporated into American presidential speeches. This paper’s main objective is to propose an original taxonomy of sayers, namely speakers of words reported (Halliday 1981, 1985; Vandelanotte 2006) in political discourse and to investigate their potential for self- and other-presentation and (de)legitimisation of one’s stance, actions and decisions. The data used for illustrative purposes comprise extracts from Barack Obama’s speeches delivered during his presidency (2009 and 2016) and have been selected from a bigger corpus of 125 presidential speeches by three American presidents: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy. Findings in this study indicate that specific sayer types have greater potential for effective image formation and contribute to (de)legitimisation of events.

The United States’ reaction to the Arab Spring

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-175
Author(s):  
Gibreel Sadeq Alaghbary
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Arab Spring ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
The United States ◽  
Presidential Rhetoric ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Official Statement ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
Ideological Attitudes

This study explores ideological embedding in US presidential rhetoric on aggression and conflict. Specifically, it examines President Obama’s first official statement on each of the 2011 popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain and Syria. The first statements are sampled because they are often carefully timed and phrased to project position and perspective. The objective of the study is to examine how Obama’s speeches on the Arab Spring articulate US ideological assumptions about the pro-reform protests (and protestors), the aggressive responses of the embattled regimes and the conflict which developed as a result. The methodology of analysis is constituted by the analytical framework of Critical Stylistics. Findings from the analysis reveal the ways in which value systems and sets of beliefs may be structured in the language of aggression and conflict, and, more specifically, the ways in which Obama’s ideological attitudes and assumptions are embedded in the structure of his statements. Obama’s construction of the different unrests, for example, is evident in the naming conventions, his evaluation of the revolutionaries and their oppressors is reflected in the transitivity patterns, and the US regional priorities are signposted by the structural subordination options.

Reframing Xenophobia in South Africa as Colour-Blind: The Limits of the Afro Phobia Thesis

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-444
Author(s):  
Amanuel Isak Tewolde
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Conflict Theory ◽  
Black African ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Online Newspaper ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
Realistic Conflict Theory

Many scholars and South African politicians characterize the widespread anti-foreigner sentiment and violence in South Africa as dislike against migrants and refugees of African origin which they named ‘Afro-phobia’. Drawing on online newspaper reports and academic sources, this paper rejects the Afro-phobia thesis and argues that other non-African migrants such as Asians (Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis and Chinese) are also on the receiving end of xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa. I contend that any ‘outsider’ (White, Asian or Black African) who lives and trades in South African townships and informal settlements is scapegoated and attacked. I term this phenomenon ‘colour-blind xenophobia’. By proposing this analytical framework and integrating two theoretical perspectives — proximity-based ‘Realistic Conflict Theory (RCT)’ and Neocosmos’ exclusivist citizenship model — I contend that xenophobia in South Africa targets those who are in close proximity to disadvantaged Black South Africans and who are deemed outsiders (e.g., Asian, African even White residents and traders) and reject arguments that describe xenophobia in South Africa as targeting Black African refugees and migrants.

Managing uncertainty in healthcare interpreter-mediated interaction

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-164
Author(s):  
Claudio Baraldi ◽  
Laura Gavioli
Keyword(s):  
Systems Theory ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Social Systems Theory ◽  
Intercultural Mediators ◽  
Or History

This paper analyses healthcare interactions involving doctors, migrant patients and ‘intercultural mediators’ who provide interpreting services. Our study is based on a collection of 300 interactions involving two language pairs, Arabic–Italian and English–Italian. The analytical framework includes conversation analysis combined with insights from social systems theory. We look at question-answer sequences, where (1) the doctors ask questions about patients’ problems or history, (2) the doctors’ questions are responded to and (3) the doctor closes the sequence, moving on to another question. We analyse the ways in which mediators help doctors design questions for patients and patients understand and eventually respond to the doctors’ design. While the doctor’s question design aims at obtaining details which are relevant for the patients’ care, it is argued that collecting such details involves complex interactional work. In particular, doctors need help in displaying their attention to their patients’ problems and in guiding patients’ responses into medically relevant directions. Likewise, patients need help in reacting appropriately. Mediators help manage communicative uncertainty both by showing the doctor’s interest in what the patient says, and by exploring and rendering the patient’s incomplete, extended and ambiguous answers to the doctor’s questions.

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