Discourse & Society

Attention to men’s attitudes towards sexual consent and violence has led to sexual consent guidance targeting men specifically. This article examines conflicting notions of consent and the construction of implied readership in a UK corpus of online sexual consent guidance for gay, bisexual and trans men. ‘Positive consent’ discourse presents consent as free, active and able to be withdrawn. ‘Talk, listen, think’ discourse recommends clear and explicit communication about boundaries. I argue that these discourses present gay, bisexual and trans men as effective moral agents, but these conflicting discourses also weaken the message of consent as free and affirmative. I show how synthetic personalization constructs solidarity between the implied reader and an imagined community of gay, bisexual and trans men who share the aim of ending sexual violence, but also constructs solidarity with men who are presented as unintentionally violent. I conclude by suggesting ways to improve consent guidance.

Recent trends in British education policy have led to an increased focus on promoting ethnic diversity in schools, as well as greater parental involvement in school choice. This combination has led some schools to actively market diversity as a selling point in order to attract more minority ethnic students, as well as attract White middle-class students seeking a more ‘diverse’ educational experience. This article analyses how students attending such a school in England engage with discourses of multiculturalism. I identify three themes that characterise talk about multiculturalism at school: (1) multiculturalism-as-beneficial commodity, (2) claims of ‘reverse racism’ in provision for minority groups, and (3) denial of racism and constructing the school as a tolerant environment where everybody gets along. Through an analysis of discourse strategies and positioning tactics, I demonstrate how students negotiate tensions between the existence of racism and the construction of an inclusive and anti-racist educational environment.

In this article we present an analysis of the discursive connections between Islamophobia and anti-feminism on a large Internet forum. We argue that the incipient shift from traditional media toward user-driven social media brings with it new media dynamics, relocating the (re)production of societal discourses and power structures and thus bringing about new ways in which discursive power is exercised. This clearly motivates the need to critically engage this field. Our research is based on the analysis of a corpus consisting of over 50 million posts, collected from the forum using custom web crawlers. In order to approach this vast material of unstructured text, we suggest a novel methodological synergy combining critical discourse analysis (CDA) and topic modeling – a type of statistical model for the automated categorization of large quantities of texts developed in computer science. By rendering an overview or ‘content map’ of the corpus, topic modeling provides an enriching complement to CDA, aiding discovery and adding analytical rigor.

The increased exodus of more than one million Ecuadorians in the last decade means greater numbers of families and parents are separated from their loved ones and children. From oral life history interviews with sons, the authors address research on children who stay behind by focusing on the discourse of legitimation that sons of migrant Ecuadorian parents residing in Spain internalize and/or challenge. Utilizing critical discourse analysis (CDA) and more specifically Van Leeuwen’s legitimation strategies framework, the authors argue that while reproducing and rationalizing familial discourses of sacrifice and well-being, these young men’s narratives simultaneously express the language of loss and suffering.

Enlightened by Van Dijk’s Context Model Theory and Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach, this article puts forward the Discourse-Historical-Contextual Approach as the analytical framework for the study of the recontextualization and transformation processes involved in media discourse. It is then applied to the analysis of the First-Instance Judgment of the Peng Yu Case. Through exploring the relevant context models, the article examines why a text is interpreted differently when it is circulated in different contexts. The study also reveals, by investigating the traces of previous texts in subsequent texts, how intertextuality is formed as well as how specific transformations are used in the processes. It is hoped that this study will provide some insights into the understanding of recontextualization and transformation processes in media discourse.