Abstract
It is during times of crisis that the real underlying structures of the prevailing social order are revealed and threatened, and dominant discourses are opened up for contestation/negotiation. And it is precisely by focusing on these critical moments to practise critical discourse analysis (CDA) that Discourse and Crisis shows its strength and relevance. Seeking to unpack the critical intersections between crisis and language/discourse, the book offers empirical data framed in real diverse contexts and builds upon existing theoretical insights to illustrate how crises unfold, discourses are (un)stitched, and participants interact and respond to one another.
The volume’s 12 case studies are subdivided into three major parts: organizational, political and media discourses on crisis. Framing these three parts are two theoretical introductory chapters and a self-reflexive epilogue. In the introductory section, the volume editors (Chapter 1) conceptualize and contextualize discourse in crisis and crisis in discourse. Chapter 2, by Chalozin-Dovrat, extends the discussion to crisis in modern times, arguing that the shifting semantics of ‘crisis’ throughout history reflect the development of our cognition of time and change.
Part 1 focuses on goal-oriented organizational discourses regulated by procedures and marked by asymmetrical relations among participants. Royce (Chapter 3) examines a police crisis negotiation in New South Wales, arguing that contextual knowledge is critical in understanding crises. Chapter 4, by Vaajala and colleagues, identifies the practical, epistemic and affective issues causing misalignments in single-operator emergency call centre interactions. In Chapter 5, Nevile uses cockpit video/audio recordings of a case of friendly fire in the Iraq War to expose how the very processes of collaboration may contribute to crisis. Rycker and Mohd Don point out the paradox underlying these organizational discourse cases: the standardized procedures of established institutions may not always match local interactional needs, and while ‘adaptive flexibility’ is recommended to produce creative solutions aligning the two variables, the inherent crisis-proneness of the organization and its practices may still open it to crises.
Part 2 takes on a political turn, unravelling the competing discourses and processes of identity construction in the life cycle of a crisis. Sandaran and De Rycker (Chapter 6) illustrate how Bush’s post-9/11 State of the Union Address emphasizes a ‘crisis imaginary’ and employs war and nationalism discourses to legitimate his political agenda of persuading Americans to join the voluntary national service. In Chapter 7, O’Rourke and Hogan use the case of Ireland’s 1987 economic crisis to discuss how hindsight may recontextualize past events and link them inter-discursively with other crises. Using the Kenyan Crisis of 2007–2008 as backdrop, Ndambuki’s Chapter 8 employs semi-guided interviews to illustrate how local leaders disempower rural women through their discursive representations and lexico-grammatical choices. Ending the political discourse section is Denti and Fodde’s (Chapter 9) exploration of crisis-related lexis and discursive strategies in selected EU Financial Stability Reviews. Overall, these post-crisis analyses show how crises serve as learning opportunities.
Part 3 examines how media discourse represents and reconstructs critical incidents. Jimarkon and Todd (Chapter 10) expose the lack of logical argumentation and civility in confrontational discourses between the Red (pro-ousted Prime Minister Shinawatra) and the Yellow (pro-government) factions in a CNN.com discussion forum during the 2010 Thai political unrest. Kitis’ Chapter 11 describes a police shooting of a ‘hoodie’ in Athens as a social practice, a discursive event and a text, comparing the representations of the crisis between a ‘breaking news’ bulletin and the independent activist blog Indymedia. In Chapter 12, Belmonte et al. illustrate how the discursive strategies used by Spanish newspaper articles on economic recession reinforce a divisive ideology and maintain the vulnerable position of immigrant workers. Meanwhile, Matus-Mendoz and De Rycker (Chapter 13) weave an interdependent narrative of different political, economic and security crises in Mexico within the representations of the 2009 H1N1 health crisis. In Chapter 14, Lean and colleagues investigate how news media frame terrorism, exposing the ultimately hegemonic discourse of polarization apparent in the lexical and transitivity choices in two leading English-language dailies in Malaysia. This last section identifies critical shifts and reconfigurations in modern media discourse on crises, serving as an apt transition to the epilogue by Priestley, which provides a self-reflexive and self-critical conclusion to the volume by problematizing the role of academic discourse on crisis in creating the meaningful transformational change that CDA aspires to.
This book contributes significantly to the growing literature on discourses on crises by striving to comprehend their semiotic aspects. Unlike other edited volumes on the topic – for example, Hodges and Nilep (2007) on war and terrorism or Powers and Xiao (2008) on SARS – De Rycker and Mohd Don adopt a broad scope and cover a diversity of crises culled from different parts of the globe (both central and peripheral), even accommodating analyses of languages other than English (e.g. Greek and Spanish). Moreover, the inclusive, multi-level and qualitative and quantitative across-method triangulation provide a comprehensive and flexible methodological approach to CDA and crisis scholars. It also meaningfully aligns ‘non-critical’ perspectives (conversation analysis, argumentation analysis, corpus-assisted discourse analysis) with CDA interests.
Admittedly, a volume of this kind would richly benefit from collaborations with actual practitioners of the fields in which the crisis has occurred, but although the contributions here (apart from Royce and Priestley) may lack this industry input, the researchers have given sufficient background information detailing relevant socio-political/historical contexts of the crises under discussion, and most have even proposed practical recommendations beyond tweaking academic research methodologies and realigning the angles of scholarly explorations. The volume thus still holds promise of assisting readers (whether media practitioners, conflict managers or cultural or communication studies researchers) to make sense of and formulate strategies for more efficient interventions during these times of ‘decisive change’ that are ‘potentially irreversible’.