scholarly journals The proximal narratives of online risk communication: fatal aircraft-accident synopses by the U.S. Transportation Agency Safety Board

10.29007/tp1r ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen Sancho Guinda

I explore the narrative strategies adopted by a specific type of institutional discourse grounded in the authority of expertise: risk communication, aimed at influencing our conceptions of hazard and danger to ultimately prevent unsafe behaviours. My focus is the unique discourse of the fatal aviation accident synopses issued yearly online by the National Transportation Safety Board of the United States of America (NTSB for short). Through a blended framework that merges Narratology, Critical Discourse Analysis and the Positioning and Proximisation Theories, I examine how the NTSB didactically brings risks and dangers close to its broad mixed virtual audience while undertaking fluid roles for branding purposes and disseminating the ideological principles of American democracy. In doing so, I especially attend to issues of narrative focalisation (i.e. recounting perspective) and speech representation.

2021 ◽  
pp. 233264922098109
Author(s):  
Shannon K. Carter ◽  
Ashley Stone ◽  
Lain Graham ◽  
Jonathan M. Cox

Reducing race disparities in breastfeeding has become a health objective in the United States, spurring research aimed to identify causes and consequences of disparate rates. This study uses critical discourse analysis to assess how Black women are constructed in 80 quantitative health science research articles on breastfeeding disparities in the United States. Our analysis is grounded in critical race and intersectionality scholarship, which argues that researchers often incorrectly treat race and its intersections as causal mechanisms. Our findings reveal two distinct representations. Most commonly, race, gender, and their intersection are portrayed as essential characteristics of individuals. Black women are portrayed as a fixed category, possessing characteristics that inhibit breastfeeding; policy implications focus on modifying Black women’s characteristics to increase breastfeeding. Less commonly, Black women are portrayed as a diverse group who occupy a social position in society resulting from similar social and material conditions, seeking to identify factors that facilitate or inhibit breastfeeding. Policy implications emphasize mitigating structural barriers that disproportionately impact some Black women. We contribute to existing knowledge by demonstrating how dominant health science approaches provide evidence for health promotion campaigns that are unlikely to reduce health disparities and may do more harm than good to Black women. We also demonstrate the existence of a problematic knowledge set about Black women’s reproductive and infant feeding practices that is both ahistorical and decontextualized.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147821032110016
Author(s):  
Jessica Cira Rubin ◽  
Susan Tily

The early phases of teachers’ professional careers are multi-layered and informed by many factors, including teachers’ values, their own experiences in schools, and the nested contexts of their professional employment. While in teachers’ everyday lives government policies sometimes operate beneath the surface rather than overtly, these policies influence many teachers’ experiences, contributing significantly to what critical discourse analysis scholars call the ‘issue’ of teachers’ available subjectivities being influenced by prevailing ideologies as they are newly entering the profession. In this analysis, we activate critical discourse analysis in order to offer new understandings about policies and contexts associated with new teachers entering the profession. Our analysis is significant in its co-consideration of policies from contexts that we see as experiencing the influence of neoliberal ideologies in different ways. As critical discourse analysis is transdisciplinary, it also offers chances to transcend boundaries of politics and culture to inquire into social wrongs as we actually experience them in a world that is globally connected and globally influenced. The significance of this analysis, then, lies with the continued questioning we hope that it, and others like it, make possible.


Multilingua ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Shenk

AbstractThis article examines the perspectives of Puerto Ricans living in the United States in response to a publicity campaign that focuses on the correction of linguistic features that appear in some Puerto Ricans’ spoken Spanish. The campaign addresses phonetic, morphological, lexical, and syntactic features, including a specific set of words or phrases that are named as lexical and semantic borrowings from English. Participants were invited to respond to the content and ideologies present in the campaign by means of semi-structured interviews. Through a framework of Critical Discourse Analysis and language (de)legitimation, the article analyzes the ways in which interviewees (de)legitimize loanwords in Puerto Rican Spanish. A Critical Discourse Analytical framework allows for the mapping of spoken and written texts (e. g. the campaign texts) onto discourses


2021 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
Nicholas Tapia-Fuselier ◽  
Veronica A. Jones ◽  
Clifford P. Harbour

Undocumented college students in the United States encounter a number of structural barriers to postsecondary education success, including disparate in-state resident tuition (ISRT) policies across the country. Texas, the first state to establish ISRT benefits for undocumented college students, has been a site of tension respective to this issue over the last 20 years. In fact, there have been eight legislative attempts to repeal the state’s affirmative ISRT policy. In order to investigate this ongoing ISRT debate in Texas, we used critical discourse analysis methods to analyze the implicit and explicit messages communicated in the policy and surrounding policy discourse. Our conceptual framework, grounded in three constructs of critical whiteness studies including ontological expansiveness, color evasiveness, and individualization, allowed us to uncover whiteness as a pernicious undergirding force within this policy discourse.


Author(s):  
Catherine Hoad

This chapter uses critical discourse analysis and textual analysis to offer a general overview of metal as a multi-sited, multi-modal genre. While acknowledging the centrality of metal’s ostensible “birth” in the United Kingdom, and rapid spread to the United States and Western Europe, to the genre’s identity, this chapter also discusses metal’s positionality in discrete studies from Northern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. In examining how metal is experienced in these contexts, this chapter thus seeks to problematize the discourse of metal’s “true” birth in the Anglosphere, and elucidate a critique of the scholarly literature of the “global metal” model, which has permeated metal music studies over the last decade. Such a model, as the author concludes in this chapter, potentially replicates many of the problems—Othering, exclusive, non-agentic—with “world music” as a discourse, and thus it is necessary to assert the ways in which scholars and scene members alike are speaking back to these characterizations.


Author(s):  
John Downing

This chapter begins with a comparative overview of violence against civilians in war, terrorist events, and torture. The comparisons are between the United States since the 9/11 attacks, Britain during the civil war in Northern Ireland 1969-2000, and France during and since the Algerian armed liberation struggle of 1954-1962. The discussion covers the general issues involved, and then summarizes existing research on British and French media representations of political violence. This chapter then proceeds to a critical-discourse analysis of the U.S. Fox Television channel's highly successful dramatic series, 24. The series is currently considered one of the most extended televisual reflections on the implications of 9/11. Political violence, counter-terrorism, racism, and torture are central themes demonstrated in this television series. It is argued that the show constructs a strangely binary imaginary of extremist and moderate “Middle Easterners” while simultaneously projecting a weirdly post-racist America. In particular, the series articulates very forcefully an ongoing scenario of instantaneous decision-making, under dire impending menace to public safety, which serves to insulate the U.S. counter-terrorist philosophy and practice from an urgently needed rigorous public critique.


2019 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 163-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaran Shin ◽  
Liz Ging

Historical and legislative evolutions of education policy have repurposed federally funded adult education programs in the United States. The 2014 passage of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) has considerable repercussions for everyone involved in the field because it controls the funding, assessment, and structure of these programs. Using critical discourse analysis, this study examines the public law and a Program Memorandum from the federal government. It demonstrates how the language used in the documents characterizes Title II of WIOA (the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act), the goals of adult education, eligible adult learners, and the process by which programs are held accountable for federal funding. The findings show the ways in which Title II tactically legitimizes the U.S. government’s neoliberal capitalist desire within a democratic society: The idealistic language of opportunity acts as a camouflage for the further infiltration of market-oriented practices into the public sector.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-74
Author(s):  
Amy Burden

EN Gender equality in language learning has received considerable attention in research on classroom policy and materials. Within studies of materials like language learning texts, most research focuses on content analyses of character roles and images, with sometimes purposeful exclusion of non-human characters. However, non-humans in children’s picture books comprise almost 60% of the characters children read. Therefore, their representations of gender, including biases, overt sexism, and covert sexism should be examined. In this study, I examine gendering of non-human characters using corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Additionally, I use critical image analysis to discuss pictorial gendering of non-human characters within 12 textbooks in two of the United States’ most widely used textbook series for language learning in elementary schools. Results indicate a strong preference for aggressive and adventurous male characters, male supremacist ideologies, and the suppression of female agency. Key words: CORPUS LINGUISTICS, CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS, TEXTBOOK ANALYSIS, GENDER AND LANGUAGE, ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE (ESL), CRITICAL IMAGE ANALYSIS ES La igualdad de género en el aprendizaje de idiomas ha recibido una atención considerable en la investigación sobre la política y los materiales en el aula. Dentro de los estudios sobre materiales como los textos para el aprendizaje de idiomas, la mayoría de las investigaciones se centran en el análisis del contenido de los roles y las imágenes de los personajes, con una exclusión de los personajes no humanos. Sin embargo, los personajes no humanos de los libros ilustrados para niños representan casi el 60% de los personajes que leen los niños. Por lo tanto, deben examinarse sus representaciones de género, incluyendo los prejuicios, el sexismo manifiesto y el sexismo encubierto. En este estudio, examino la representación de género de los personajes no humanos utilizando la lingüística de corpus y el análisis crítico del discurso. Además, utilizo el análisis crítico de la imagen para analizar el género pictórico de los personajes no humanos en 12 libros de texto de dos de las series de libros de texto más utilizados en Estados Unidos para el aprendizaje de idiomas en las escuelas primarias. Los resultados indican una fuerte preferencia por personajes masculinos agresivos y aventureros, ideologías de supremacía masculina y la supresión de la agencia femenina. Palabras clave: LINGÜÍSTICA DE CORPUS, ANÁLISIS CRÍTICO DEL DISCURSO, ANÁLISIS DE LIBROS DE TEXTO, GÉNERO E LINGUAJE, INGLÉS COMO SEGUNDA LENGUA (ESL), ANÁLISIS CRÍTICO DE LA IMAGEN IT L’uguaglianza di genere nell'apprendimento delle lingue ha ricevuto una notevole attenzione nella ricerca sulle norme di comportamento nelle classi così come nei materiali didattici. All'interno degli studi su materiali didattici come i testi per l'apprendimento delle lingue, la maggior parte della ricerca si concentra sull'analisi del contenuto dei ruoli e delle immagini dei personaggi con l'esclusione, a volte intenzionale, di personaggi non umani. Tuttavia, i non umani nei libri illustrati per bambini costituiscono quasi il 60% dei personaggi. Pertanto, dovrebbero essere esaminate le loro rappresentazioni di genere, inclusi pregiudizi, sessismo palese e sessismo nascosto. In questo studio si esamina la sessuazione di personaggi non umani usando la linguistica dei corpora e l’analisi critica del discorso. Inoltre, viene utilizzata l'analisi critica delle immagini per discutere la sessuazione di personaggi non umani all'interno di 12 libri in due delle serie di libri di testo più utilizzate negli Stati Uniti per l'apprendimento delle lingue nelle scuole elementari. I risultati indicano una forte preferenza per personaggi maschili aggressivi e avventurosi, ideologie suprematiste maschili e soppressione dell'agire femminile. Parole chiave: LINGUISTICA DEI CORPORA, ANALISI CRITICA DEL DISCORSO, ANALISI DEI LIBRI DI TESTO, GENERE E LINGUAGGIO, INGLESE COME SECONDA LINGUA, ANALISI CRITICA DELLE IMMAGINI


Author(s):  
Grace Karram

The migration of post-secondary students is an increasingly debated phenomenon as the number of students living outside of their home country has risen to more than three million in the past decade. Governments, regions and institutions have developed new structures and strategies to facilitate and benefit from this worldwide student movement. This research article uses Fairclough’s (1993) notion of critical discourse analysis to explore the relationship between two distinct discourses on foreign students: national-level economic competitiveness and institutional-level student success. A comparative approach examines these discursive events in the four leading, Anglophone destination countries: Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States. The findings suggest that foreign students are objectified as tradable units in the market-driven discourse of economic development with student support literature providing a buffer that limits the critique of the economic discourse. At the same time, potential exists for current events to highlight the tension surrounding the two discourses and provide new opportunities for dialogue.


Author(s):  
Corrina Laughlin

This paper focuses on the Black Christian response to the 2020 uprisings against police brutality in the United States. Through a critical discourse analysis of three podcasts and interviews with podcasters, this paper argues that the Black, Christian podcast circuit is a counterpublic (Squires, 2002) that seeks to change Christian culture in America. I argue that it is the affordances of the medium of podcasting that make this counterpublic possible and that make it a potent force for changing the Christian conversation about race. These podcasters offer a portrait of a divided Christian church in need of repair and they make the case that repair is only possible through decolonizing the Christian faith, repenting and offering reparations for the racial trauma caused by white Christians, sparking Christians’ activist inclinations in favor of racial justice causes, and interrogating and correcting sexism within both the Black church and white evangelical culture.


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