Discourse & Society

We are experiencing a time during which there is a clear crisis of values, meaning a distancing with regard to the problems of socially disadvantaged groups. This article’s main purpose is to discuss whether this situation has had any impact on solidarity discourse towards immigrants. To fulfill our objective, we will analyse the written messages in a visitors’ book used for a sit-in that took place in Murcia, Spain, in 2001. We selected 100 of these messages to determine the degree of involvement that visitors show towards immigrants. In this regard, we have proposed four processes of involvement, from low to high: proximity, accompaniment, support and identification. We will analyse these processes from a critical and constructive viewpoint in an attempt to determine which is the most common and which combinations of processes are preferred by the authors of the messages. In addition, we will focus on the use of key expressions, terms of intensification, and argumentative structures as basic elements for the interpretation of these processes of involvement.

In this article, I present an analysis of the discursive response of two British politicians – the Prime Minister David Cameron and the leader of the opposition, Ed Miliband – to the riots that took place in British cities in August 2011 and the Occupy protests of later in the same year. Considering this response as, following Van Leeuwen, recontextualisation of the events with which the two politicians are concerned, I suggest that in both cases a particular neoliberal discourse is employed that serves to moralise what is in actual fact material, class-based opposition. Cameron suggests that the riots are indicative of a ‘moral collapse’ in contemporary Britain, and Miliband, superficially aligning himself with the movement, suggests that the Occupy protests indicate a ‘value gap’. In both cases, I argue, the discursive response serves as an attempt to assert as hegemonic a substantively identical moralised neoliberal understanding of the inequalities of contemporary capitalism. This is an understanding – a discourse – that I suggest is both a contributor to these inequalities and a false representation of their true nature.

Political socialization is an interdisciplinary subfield that addresses questions surrounding the inter-generational transmission of political engagement, values, and preferences. Through close analysis of face-to-face conversations about political issues, events, and ideas in Los Angeles families, this article brings a linguistic anthropological and conversation analytic perspective to bear on the study of political socialization by demonstrating the key role played by discursive and interactional practices. Children in this corpus take an active role in their own socialization, as they use a range of conversational strategies – particularly questions and repair – to initiate and sustain their participation in political conversations. Parents in this corpus vary widely in their tolerance for and treatment of children’s questions: some parents attempt to shut down or re-orient lines of questioning, while others use children’s questions as teaching moments in which to state values explicitly. Several possible explanations for the variance in parents’ uptake are considered, and parents’ responses are examined for their implicit political messages or stances. Finally, the article suggests that many of the strengths of language socialization – including its focus on interaction, its consideration of child agency, and its emphasis on socialization as an ongoing process – make it a useful framework for those who study political socialization.

This article uses a combination of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and corpus linguistics (CL) to investigate the discursive realization of the security operation for the London 2012 Olympic Games. Drawing on Didier Bigo’s (2008) conceptualization of the ‘ban-opticon’, it addresses two questions: (1) What distinctive linguistic features are used in documents relating to security for London 2012? (2) How is Olympic security realized as a discursive practice in these documents? Findings suggest that the documents indeed realized key features of the ban-opticon: exceptionalism, exclusion and prediction, as well as what we call ‘pedagogization’. Claims were made for the exceptional scale of the Olympic events; predictive technologies were proposed to assess the threat from terrorism; and documentary evidence suggests that access to Olympic venues was being constituted to resemble transit through national boundaries.

Literature on modern racism identifies denial as one of its key features. This article examines the discourses of denial that feature in the talk of local anti-racism actors in Australia, and asks what drives these discourses. The research draws on qualitative interviews undertaken with participants involved in local anti-racism in two case study areas, one in South Australia and the other in New South Wales. This article explores the way local participants in the case study areas deployed four discourses to deny or minimise racism: temporal deflections; spatial deflections; deflections from the mainstream; and absence discourses. Place defending and the desire to protect one’s local area from being branded a racist space is discussed as a driver of those local denial discourses. Local denial of racism is also linked to national politics of racism and anti-racism. In particular, the Australian government’s retreat from multiculturalism, and the preference for ‘harmony’ rather than ‘anti-racism’ initiatives, was linked to the avoidance of the language of racism within participants’ responses. The way denial discourses narrow the range of possibilities for local anti-racism is discussed, as is the importance of acknowledgement of racism, particularly institutional and systemic racism. Public acknowledgement of these forms of racism will broaden the scope of local anti-racism.

In this article, we examine how ethnic Finnish migrants construct their ethnic identities before and after migrating from Russia to Finland. We use a discursive psychological (DP) approach to analyse our longitudinal focus group data. In the analysis, we focus on the ways in which the participants use category labels, rhetorical devices, interpretative repertoires and other discursive resources in accounting for their identities. We also consider the social functions these identity constructions have over the course of migration. In the pre-migration data, participants mostly presented themselves as Finns. In the post-migration data, a larger variety of self-labels was used and the Finnish identity was explicitly problematized. The three main interpretative repertoires used when constructing identities both in Russia and in Finland were the biological repertoire, the repertoire of socialization and the repertoire of intergroup relations.