Beyond the Language of Covid-19: Transformation of Social Discourse and Reproduction of Cultural Capital

The research draws on the concept of ‘cultural capital’ as well as assumptions of critical discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics to argue that the Covid-19 pandemic may be viewed as a global turning point. The article explores the context and the means that have facilitated the transformation of cultural capital during the coronavirus outbreak. The dramatic changes to culture have been successfully pushed through due to the public’s incessant exposure to institutionalized, governmental and mass media discourses, which have been urging people to adopt new communicative and cultural practices with a varying degree of argumentation and imposition. The changes entail reviewing social structure, spatial and relational stereotypes and standards, which in the long run transforms cultural capital. The global scope of the pandemic and the relatively identical regulations imposed by governments on their citizens generate a tentative tendency to cultural convergence: individuals are made to abandon their culture specific practices and values and adopt those that ensure physical survival. Received: 8 September 2021 / Accepted: 16 November 2021 / Published: 3 January 2022

“Rapport Duclert” and France’s Responsibility for the Genocide in Rwanda

In March 2021 the Duclert Commission, a commission of French experts appointed by President Macron, presented their report which immediately became the subject of academic and political debates. The Report examined the French involvement in Rwandan genocide in 1994, and pointed to the major ethical, legal and political dilemmas accompanying states’ involvement into the affairs of other states. We seek to identify major topics raised by the French media in relation to the report, and how possible reconciliation between France and Rwanda was presented in French periodicals. Through post-colonial lenses to the study of states’ foreign policy, we examine how the French role in the genocide was seen in media discourses, and how the media addressed such painful questions as accepting/avoiding state responsibility for its actions. Using qualitative content-analysis, we studied articles from French media outlets Le Monde, Libération and Le Figaro in the period of late March 2021 ‒ July 2021, as well as a few randomly selected articles from other French outlets to have a more complete picture of public debates across a political spectrum. The article concludes that while the media stressed the importance of the Committee’s work for bilateral relations, still, there is no consensus in the French society over France’s responsibility for the genocide: whether acknowledging state responsibility would be a manifestation of weakness and a threat to state security, or masking of certain colonial inclinations.

COVID-19 and Politics of Representation: A CSA of Pakistani Print Media Semiotic Discourses

Print media discourses are highly polarized. Different linguistic and meta-linguistic moves are employed to represent the same issue under different socio-political themes. This study decodes the semiotic discourses of two (02) Pakistani English and Urdu newspapers (Dawn & Jang) about the representation of COVID-19 related issues. This has been done to broaden the canvas of the research by including English and Urdu newspapers’ readership. The time span for data collection ranges from March 15, 2020, to May 15, 2020. The integrated research approach used in the study has been devised by drawing upon Kress (2010) and Krueger (2001) to analyze the data at linguistic and semiotic levels. The findings of semiotic analysis have been validated through focus group discussions on the selected cartoons from English and Urdu newspapers. The findings of the research reveal that the representation of COVID- 19 related issues varies in English and Urdu newspapers. The most frequently occurred themes in English newspapers about the representation of covid19 related issues include economic downfall, danger to the worlds’ economy, the clash between America and China, delays in vaccine production, and food and health insecurity at national and international levels. On contrary, the Urdu newspapers highlighted the issues related to corruption, the oil crisis, a satire on the general masses for not observing SOPs, a satire on health ministry, and poverty increase because of lockdown policies. The research contends that semiotic discourses are the best sites for ideological investment and are designed keeping in view the target audience.

War yesterday and today: The image of Russia in British media discourse

The paper focuses on diachronic framing analysis of Russias images in British media discourse. The importance of the research is determined by a need to work out adequate linguistic foundations to counteract information war, generated by some foreign media and aimed at distorting Russias history and eroding its spiritual values. Few scholars have drawn on any systematic research into analysis of Russias images in foreign media discourses of different historical spans. The major objective is to compare Russias images and their emotional charge in the British media in chronologically divided periods of war and peace under the influence of changing historical and ideological factors. The authors account for the mechanisms by which Russias images are framed and transformed in the contexts of the largest war of the XX century and the information war of the XXI century. The material comprises 500 samples per period. The data covering two historical spans are investigated through a framing approach. The criteria for diachronic analysis are dominant diagnostic and prognostic frames, constituting the macroframe WAR. The significant difference in Russias images in war- and peacetime consists in their emotive load: Russias contemporary negative images are contrasted to positive images activated in the retrospective period. The findings support the idea that British media discourse focusing on Russia is subject-centered: Russias image is determined by the geopolitical situation, Great Britains political priorities and objectives, and the bilateral relationship between the countries. The results can be used to further develop the linguistic basics of war theory.

Emergent impoliteness and persuasive emotionality in Polish media discourses

The focus of the paper is to identify and discuss cases of what we call emergent impoliteness and persuasive emotionality based on selected types of discourse strategies in Polish media which contribute to increasingly high negative emotionality in audiences and to the radicalization of language and attitudes when addressing political opponents. The role and function of emotional discourse are particularly foregrounded to identify its persuasive role in media discourses and beyond. Examples discussed are derived from current Polish media texts. The materials are collected from the large Polish monitor media corpus monco.frazeo.pl (Pęzik 2020). The analysis is conducted in terms of quantitative corpus tools (Pęzik 2012, 2014), concerning emotive and media discourse approaches (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Wilson 2013, Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 2015, 2017a, 2017b). The analysis includes a presentation of the ways mass media construe events (Langacker 1987/1991) in terms of their ideological framing, understood as particular imposed/constructed event models and structures (cf. Gans 1979). Special attention is paid to the negative axiological evaluation of people and events in terms of mostly implicitly persuasive and offensive discourse, including the role emotion clusters of harm, hurt and offence, anger and contempt play in the media persuasive tactics. The research outcomes provide a research basis and categorization of types of emergent impoliteness and persuasive emotionality, which involve implicit persuasion directed at negative emotionality raising with the media public, as identifiedin the analyzed media texts.

(In)Visible (a)sexuality? Media discourses and representations on asexuality in Portugal

This article presents the result of a multimodal analysis of the representation of asexuality in Portuguese mainstream media. In Portugal, the media played a pivotal role in the relationship between the newly formed Portuguese asexual community and the wider audience. Media attention on asexuality in Portugal generated a discussion on how asexual people are represented, but also on social representations of sexual diversity in general. As a result, the Portuguese asexual community and LGBTQI+ movement were impelled to reflect on their activity and on the public image they wanted to send out. Therefore, the community had to make choices: which media to participate in; who participates; whose faces the message is associated to; to what extent the allies are to be taken into consideration; which types of discourses get privileged, and which become excluded. Amongst other public effects, the Portuguese LGBTQI+ movement started to acknowledge asexuality in documents produced by them. The corpus of materials on the subject grew, and asexuality left a significant footprint. The major tendency points towards a positive portrayal of asexuality that puts asexual people centre stage, owning narratives about themselves.

‘You Owe It to Yourself, Everyone You Love and to Our Beleaguered NHS to Get Yourself Fit and Well’: Weight Stigma in the British Media during the COVID-19 Pandemic—A Thematic Analysis

The portrayal of obesity in the media can impact public health by guiding peoples’ behaviours and furthering stigma. Individual responsibility for body weight along with negative portrayals of obesity have frequently dominated UK media discourses on obesity. This study aims to explore how the media has represented obesity during the COVID-19 pandemic through a thematic analysis of 95 UK online newspaper articles published in The Sun, The Mail Online, and The Guardian. The first theme, lifestyle recommendations, accounts for media coverage providing ‘expert’ advice on losing weight. The second theme, individual responsibility, emphasises media appeals to self-governance to tackle obesity and protect the NHS during the pandemic. The third theme, actors of change, explores how celebrities and politicians are presented as examples of weight management. These results suggest that individuals are held responsible for their weight and accountable for protecting the NHS during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stigma can be furthered by the decontextualisation of lifestyle recommendations and exacerbated by the actors of change presented: Celebrity profiles reveal gendered goals for weight management, and politicians exemplify self-governance, which consolidates their power. In conclusion, individualising and stigmatising discourses around obesity have taken new forms during the pandemic that link health responsibility to protecting the NHS and invokes celebrities and politicians to foster action.

Politicizing Religion

This chapter defines Graham’s crusades in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom in the 1950s as powerful cultural orchestrations of Cold War culture. It explores the reasons of leading political figures to support Graham, the media discourses that constructed Graham’s image as a cold warrior, and the religious and political worldviews of the religious organizers of the crusades in London, Washington, New York, and Berlin. In doing so, the chapter shows how hopes for genuine re-Christianization, in response to looming secularization, anticommunist fears, and post–World War II national anxieties, as well as spiritual legitimizations for the Cold War conflict, blended in Graham’s campaign work. These anxieties, hopes, and worldviews crisscrossed the Atlantic, allowing Graham and his campaign teams to make a significant contribution to creating an imagined transnational “spiritual Free World.”

(De)Constructing 'Body Love' Discourses in Young Women's Magazines

<p>This thesis is about the recent emergence of ‘love your body’ messages and discourse in mainstream women’s magazines available to New Zealand audiences. It is situated culturally and historically, in a time when media discourses about women and their bodies are dominated by post-feminist and neo-liberal conceptualisations of bodies as commodity objects of production, representative of successful femininity and an inflexible natural order. This thesis contributes to the existing feminist research literature about magazines by investigating an apparently ‘new’ textual feature of young women’s magazines, and through adding to an emerging literature about the production of magazine content. Methodologically, the thesis draws upon critical, feminist, and post-structuralist approaches as the basis of its own understanding of bodies and the undertaking of research. The research upon which this thesis is based has two parts. First, an in-depth investigation of the text and image content of magazine ’body love messages’ in two different titles – Cleo (New Zealand) and Cosmopolitan (Australia) – employed thematic and discourse analysis to explore the kinds of discursive ideas made available through the magazine’s communication of positive body messages to their readers. The analyses presented illustrate how ‘body love’ magazine content i) is framed within heavily dualistic discourses of the woman and her body, using obsessively repetitive images to illustrate its point, ii) constructs women’s bodies as essentially difficult to love, and then in turn constructs love itself as a visually evidential practice, and finally iii) introduces a heterosexual (male) partner as an accomplice / audience for this visual practice. The second study involved a discursive analysis of interviews undertaken with magazine editorial staff based in New Zealand and Australia, asking participants about the production of positive body messages in the title(s) they work for. Drawing upon this work, the latter analytical chapters of my thesis address i) how various discourses are used by magazine employees to simultaneously legitimate the limits around positive body content in their magazines, and at the same time construct their practices as those of a ‘good magazine’, and ii) the centrality of ‘images’ as a carefully managed topic in these interviews, and what this implies about how ‘love your body’ content is conceptualised within the industry which produces it. In undertaking this work, my intention was to provide a basis upon which feminist questions about the use and purpose of magazines as cultural-discursive spaces might be revisited in light of the new ‘body love’ content. The concluding chapter to the thesis comprises a dialogue in response to these questions about contemporary magazine body messages; weighing arguments of hope and promise against more conservative concerns about misrepresentation and appropriation. It also reconsiders the implications of the analyses with a view towards evaluating what, if anything, has changed about the way young women’s magazines address their readers’ bodies through the production of body love discourse.</p>

(De)Constructing 'Body Love' Discourses in Young Women's Magazines

<p>This thesis is about the recent emergence of ‘love your body’ messages and discourse in mainstream women’s magazines available to New Zealand audiences. It is situated culturally and historically, in a time when media discourses about women and their bodies are dominated by post-feminist and neo-liberal conceptualisations of bodies as commodity objects of production, representative of successful femininity and an inflexible natural order. This thesis contributes to the existing feminist research literature about magazines by investigating an apparently ‘new’ textual feature of young women’s magazines, and through adding to an emerging literature about the production of magazine content. Methodologically, the thesis draws upon critical, feminist, and post-structuralist approaches as the basis of its own understanding of bodies and the undertaking of research. The research upon which this thesis is based has two parts. First, an in-depth investigation of the text and image content of magazine ’body love messages’ in two different titles – Cleo (New Zealand) and Cosmopolitan (Australia) – employed thematic and discourse analysis to explore the kinds of discursive ideas made available through the magazine’s communication of positive body messages to their readers. The analyses presented illustrate how ‘body love’ magazine content i) is framed within heavily dualistic discourses of the woman and her body, using obsessively repetitive images to illustrate its point, ii) constructs women’s bodies as essentially difficult to love, and then in turn constructs love itself as a visually evidential practice, and finally iii) introduces a heterosexual (male) partner as an accomplice / audience for this visual practice. The second study involved a discursive analysis of interviews undertaken with magazine editorial staff based in New Zealand and Australia, asking participants about the production of positive body messages in the title(s) they work for. Drawing upon this work, the latter analytical chapters of my thesis address i) how various discourses are used by magazine employees to simultaneously legitimate the limits around positive body content in their magazines, and at the same time construct their practices as those of a ‘good magazine’, and ii) the centrality of ‘images’ as a carefully managed topic in these interviews, and what this implies about how ‘love your body’ content is conceptualised within the industry which produces it. In undertaking this work, my intention was to provide a basis upon which feminist questions about the use and purpose of magazines as cultural-discursive spaces might be revisited in light of the new ‘body love’ content. The concluding chapter to the thesis comprises a dialogue in response to these questions about contemporary magazine body messages; weighing arguments of hope and promise against more conservative concerns about misrepresentation and appropriation. It also reconsiders the implications of the analyses with a view towards evaluating what, if anything, has changed about the way young women’s magazines address their readers’ bodies through the production of body love discourse.</p>