‘Sorry everything’s in bags’: The accountability of selling bread at a market during the COVID-19 pandemic

Societies are undergoing enormous upheavals in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. High levels of psychological distress are widespread, yet little is known about the exact impacts at the micro-level of everyday life. The present study examines the ordinary activity of buying bread to understand changes occurring early in the crisis. A dataset of over 50 social interactions at a community market stall were video-recorded, transcribed and examined in detail using multi-modal conversation analysis. With COVID-19 came an orientation to a heightened risk of disease transmission when selling food. The bread was placed in bags, a difference which was justified as a preventative measure and morally normalised by invoking a common-sense prohibition of touching produce. Having the bread out of immediate sight was a practical challenge that occasioned the expansion of turns and sequences to look for and/or confirm what was for sale, highlighting a normative organisation between seeing and buying. The analysis shows how a preventative measure related to the pandemic was adjusted to interactionally. More broadly, this research reveals the small changes to daily life that likely contribute to the overall negative impacts on health and well-being that have been reported.

The master’s tools: Media repurposing of exclusionary metaphors to challenge racist constructions of migrants

Metaphors are powerful mechanisms by which to rally exclusionary nationalist sentiment without necessarily appearing racist. However, sometimes those metaphors are challenged, inverting exclusionary functions. In this paper, we track how metaphors in the Australian press over the last 165 years which have generally constructed migration as a threat to the integrity of the nation, are repurposed to counter the claims embedded within them. For example, while invasion, swamping and flooding are generally recruited to negative ends, the same tropes are used to argue that fears of invasion are unjustified, that numbers of migrants are too small to swamp the nation and that the so-called floods of foreigners are overstated. However, this does not necessarily result in a decrease in metaphor use, nor challenge the fundamental implications of the metaphors. We explore how the repurposing occurs, and why it may not be an effective tool for anti-racist action.

Gesture and legitimation in the anti-immigration discourse of Nigel Farage

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) increasingly recognises the role played by multiple semiotic modes in the discursive construction of social identities and inequalities. One embodied mode that has not been subject to any systematic analysis within CDA is gesture. An area where gesture has been extensively studied, and where it is shown to bear significant semiotic load in multimodal utterances, is cognitive linguistics. Here, we use insights from cognitive linguistics to provide a detailed qualitative analysis of gestures in a specific discursive context – the anti-immigration discourse of Nigel Farage. We describe the gestures that accompany a range of rhetorical tropes typical of anti-immigration discourses and critically analyse their role, alongside speech, in communicating prejudice and legitimating discriminatory action. Our analysis suggests that gesture is an important part of political discourse which is worthy of further investigation in future CDA research.

Sexism in Facebook discourse about clergy misconduct

Sexism and sexist ideology have significant negative consequences for female victims of sexual assault and other crimes. Thus, uncovering how language is used as a discursive tool for maintaining unequal power relations is extremely important in discourses around sexual misconduct and sexualized violence. In this study we used Critical Discourse Analysis and Manne’s theory of the moral economy of patriarchy to analyze Facebook posts supporting a religious leader who had committed sexual misconduct. The analysis reveals the patriarchal ideology underlying some of the Facebook conversation discourses and the discursive strategies used by individuals to try to normalize their sexist arguments. Content of the posts shows the religious leader’s defenders showing sympathy for the perpetrator, ignoring the female victims, and minimizing sexual assault, as they argue that he should not be criticized or held accountable for his actions.

The slanted beam: A critical discourse analysis of anti-Islam and anti-Muslim discourse in China

Adopting the Critical Discourse Analysis perspective, this study investigates the ideology reflected by the anti-Islam and anti-Muslim discourse in China, the power dynamics revealed by such discourse and how social media discourse differs from and utilises the government discourse. Four ways to disguise the anti-Muslims, anti-Islam prejudice are investigated: appealing to patriotism to demand cultural assimilation; claiming to defend secularism; framing Islam as incompatible with mainstream culture; appealing to consumer rights to reject halal food. Non-Muslims and assimilated Muslims (especially the elites) are found to have the prerogative to dictate who belong to the ingroup, what dietary restrictions are legitimate and whom to blame when undesirable situations arise, while Muslim non-elites are at the receiving end of such dictates. This study also argues that social media discourse expresses antagonism of higher intensity than the government discourse does, and may misappropriate the official narratives to express the interlocutor’s hatred towards Muslims.