Discourse & Society

Shared memories play a central role in everyday communications. They are usually based on interpersonal and cultural knowledge of a shared past among group members (e.g. family, friends, partners, etc.). These memories are verbally conveyed in everyday conversations in real-world settings. Shared memories are also utilized to create a feeling of connection and maintain a consistent feeling of identity among group members. In family conversations, shared memories function to structure and synchronize the shareable life story of the family as a group. Family members are strategically engaged in processes of remembering and forgetting, which are modelled according to the specific goals of a particular interaction. In these cases, family members construct a sociocognitive system shaped by the physical and social environment in which they are located. This system operates by connecting autobiographical knowledge, which is distributed among family members, but forms part of shared past experiences. By interrelating distributed episodic memories, this sociocognitive system endows family members with the ability to manage distributed autobiographical knowledge. In order to perform this cognitive task, they make use of a wide set of discursive epistemic strategies such as presuppositions and implicatures, justifications, rejections and reminders of shared knowledge of the past. The aim of this article is to show the ways in which a shared past is managed, communicated and negotiated in an everyday family conversation by means of discursive epistemic strategies. The conversation was about five historical dates linked to Argentinean political history.

Children born of war rapes continue to be a marginalized political, media and academic topic in Bosnian and other post-war societies. The goal of this article is to contribute to the research that deals with the life situations of children born of war rape, and to show the usefulness of an analysis of metaphors when a specific topic is emotionally difficult to talk about. The metaphor analysis of life stories of 19 adolescents — all Bosniak girls — born of war rapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina shows that metaphorical language provides abused girls with the only way to express their painful situations. The authors identify three main uses of metaphors as discursive strategies. These are the only possible articulations of their painful situations: the avoidance of the use of vocabulary from the primary domain, the repetition of the metaphor and the immediate use of the metaphor when it collapses into the primary domain. There were three major metaphorical frames that dominated the self-presentation of the girls: ‘shooting target’, ‘cancer’ and ‘warrior’.

This article explores the role of personal life narrative as a self-shaping transformative process in the day-to-day family lives of 17 US children diagnosed with autism. Employing ethnographic video-and audio-taped data of naturalistic family interaction, the article illumines how family members employ conversational narrative in co-creating, with children, possible imagined futures, aspirations, and goals. Despite uncertain futures and unknown clinical outcomes, children are encouraged to engage in self-reflexive narrative practices that portray them in a hopeful yet realistic light. By exploring moment-by-moment details of talk-in-interaction in the lives of children diagnosed with autism, the article contributes to scholarship on how children’s experiences and self-conceptions pertaining to well-being, disability, and difference are configured and shaped via discursive practices carried out within the family sphere. Children with autism display socio-communicative difficulties that call attention to, and render visible, discursive processes involved in children’s acquisition of culturally rooted narrative capacities. As such, analysis is positioned to shed light on children’s narrative proclivities in fathoming and reflecting upon personal life experience.

Combining peace studies, cultural studies and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study demonstrates a Cultural approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CCDA) of political peace discourses. Inspired by the UNESCO definition for the ‘culture of peace’, the study offers two peace discourse models: a supportive peace discourse versus an oppressive one. From a theoretical perspective, CCDA enables a culturally comparative study of ‘peace’, its conceptual boundaries and semantic margins. From a practical perspective, application of such an approach within ‘local’ discourses may remove unique obstacles and cultural barriers to the realization of peace processes. Application of the CCDA to Israel’s political peace discourse revealed that use of the term in this discourse served two purposes: first, the construction of the Israeli speaker’s positive self-image as a peace-seeker together with delegitimation of rivals; and second, the facilitation of public acceptance of strategically problematic actions, primarily use of military violence, by their presentation as part of the peace discourse.

News carries a unique signifying power, a power to represent events in particular ways (Fairclough, 1995). Applying Critical Discourse Analysis and Chouliaraki’s theory on the mediation of suffering (2006), this article explores the news representation of the 2003 global SARS outbreak. Following a case-based methodology, we investigate how two Belgian television stations have covered the international outbreak of SARS. By looking into the mediation of four selected discursive moments, underlying discourses of power, hierarchy and compassion were unraveled. The analysis further identified the key role of proximity in international news reporting and supports the claim that Western news media mainly reproduce a Euro-American centered world order. This article argues that news coverage of international crises such as SARS constructs and maintains the socio-cultural difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ as well as articulating global power hierarchies and a division of the world in zones of poverty and prosperity, danger and safety.