1,721,716 research outputs found
Analyzing Intersectional Ableist and Fatphobic Discourses in Digital Spaces. The Case of TikTok
No full textMedicalized definitions of obesity and disability classify them as conditions under which people experience serious physical and psychological pathologies affecting the body (WHO, 2022a, 2022b), having severe implications in their daily lives and forcing them to face inequalities at the personal, social, political, and cultural levels.
There is currently no agreement on whether obesity is a disability (Puhl et al., 2021); nevertheless, ableism and fatphobia frequently intersect (Flint & Snook, 2015), accentuating weight and disability stigma in offline and online environments (Balirano & Hughes, 2020a; Nisco, 2020; Hughes & Nisco, 2022; Raffone, 2022a, 2022b; Nisco, 2023). As Goffman (1963: 3) points out, stigma is “an attribute that is deeply discrediting” and it is caused by stereotypes and mental models embedded in society.
Hate Speech against fat people has been attested in literature, especially concerning their representation in the press (Brookes & Baker, 2021; Coltman-Patel, 2023) and in social media spaces (SMSs) (Chou et al., 2014; Balirano & Hughes, 2020b). Indeed, although social media have become places where counteracting narratives around these issues are shared, and several anti-discrimination laws have been spread over the years, Hate Speech Online (HSO) is still pervasive.
Despite the abovementioned research, to the best of our knowledge, no investigations have been conducted so far on fatphobia at its intersection with ableism in SMSs. Accordingly, this paper will examine an under-researched form of HSO, namely discriminatory behaviours against fat people with disabilities, through a quantitative (Kilgarriff, 2012; Kilgarriff et al., 2004) and qualitative (KhosraviNik, 2017; van Dijk, 2014) approach, to provide insights into how hateful intersectional discourses on disability and obesity/fatness are construed and enacted, focusing on how social media users participate in the process of meaning production
"Languaging the Riots: A Corpus-based Investigation of the Rioters' Identity as Reported by the British Press"
No full textLanguaging Diversity: Identities, Genres, Discourses
No full textLanguaging Diversity: Identities, Genres, Discourses is a suggestive title for ‘another’ book in the field of linguistics, but what does it actually mean? By choosing to speak of Languaging Diversity and not just of difference, otherness, varieties, multiplicity, hybridity or alterity, the editors cover the whole range of meanings in the entire field of diversity. They do not wish to limit themselves by using such specific words with increasingly specialised connotations as Alterity or Other, but rather to allow an eclectic range of perspectives and issues to come to the fore. This volume brings together some of the manifold discourses emerging as bearers of the values of alterity, by exploring the thorny relationship between Language and Diversity. Drawing on the crucial assumption that speakers’ identities are dynamically negotiated as discourse unfolds, Languaging Diversity explores the wide theme of identity in discourse, an area of investigation which has become increasingly popular in recent years. A key theme in assembling this volume was that the relationship between diversity and identity cannot be alienated from the factual distribution of material resources in society. All contributions in the volume—carefully selected and peer reviewed—at least partially react to such critical scenery in order to explore the topics surrounding the modes in which diversity is linguistically articulated by and in discourse. The various studies deal with how individuals draw on linguistic resources to achieve, maintain or challenge representations pertaining to their cultural, social, ethnic, sexual, gender, professional, or institutional identities. The volume comprises six sections: In the News; In Politics; Constructing Identities; Across Generations and Genders; Ethnicities; and Popularising Ideas. Each section reflects the choice of the various topics through the employment of a variety of methodologies and a variety of theoretical frameworks. As such, this volume is an innovative attempt to challenge the present-day underpinnings of diversity studies
Disability, Shame and Discrimination
No full textBy virtue of a number of linguistic and discursive investigations, this special issue of the IJLS aims to map out different forms of knowledge concerning disability with a particular focus on the issues of shame and discrimination. The purpose the guest editors had in mind was not only to explore how the phenomenon of disability is portrayed in a series of relevant contexts, but also to tease out the social, moral, cultural, and political implications of such representations and discursive construals. If, as is widely agreed, there are inextricable relations between discourse, cognition, and society (van Dijk, 1996), then discourse structures can be said to express and mirror the structures of mental models. As these models are, in turn, related to permanent social representations such as knowledge, attitudes, and ideologies, they consequently shape definitions, events, and identities. All the contributions included in this special issue explore the role that language and discourse play in the construction of disability, approaching it from a plurality of angles and perspectives. Discourse analysis, with its investigation of language in use (Fairclough, 2001), is the privileged lens adopted by contributors—in the form of Social-Semiotic Critical Discourse Analysis, Social Media Discourse Analysis, Corpus-based Discourse Analysis, Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies, and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis. We hope that this Special Issue of the IJLS can serve to enhance awareness of the many existing inequalities that the more vulnerable segments of society still face on a daily basis. New ways of thinking about physical or mental impairments must emerge together with a focus shift away from the vilification of persons with disabilities, the deficiencies of a disabling society, and the fallacies of an ableist culture onto a reflection in terms of identity politics
Tutore Gerardo De Nisco - Definizione della struttura litosferica del Somma - Vesuvio mediante tomografia sismica delle onde superficiali.
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"Mediterranean Migration in the British Press: A Corpus-based Discourse Analysis Approach"
No full textLanguage, Theory & Society. Essays on English Linguistics and Culture.
No full textThis book is an exploration of current approaches to the linguistic, cultural and social interpretation of texts in diverse contexts of English. By investigating an array of different discourses, we aim to bring to the fore a variety of social and cultural representations and to illustrate the way in which represented participants are generally em-bedded in social, political, and cultural practices through and in the language.
A glance at the contents of the book will immediately reveal that this is an unusual, and maybe uncomfortable, type of academic publication, at least within the complex Italian academic context. Indeed, corpus linguists may well define the volume as an un-‘principled’ collection of texts. However, the rationale behind this purposefully unsystematic assortment of essays resides in the fact that it is only by adopting different, though somewhat contiguous, linguistic, cultural and social perspectives that researchers can comprehensively approach a variety of texts when seeking out the covert meaning-making structures of different discourses.
The editors’ initial stance, when deciding to assemble this volume, stemmed from the consideration that every time we engage with language in order to represent our world, social practices inevitably influence the way we talk, think, and decode/encode texts. Consequently, we decided that one of the issues this book needed to face and overcome was the rigid separation between sibling cultural phenomena expressed through language. Strict topical boundaries can, indeed, exclude some important perspectives and impede a thorough understanding of the way language works.
This book promotes the working hypothesis that those involved in academic research in the field of linguistic, translation and cultural studies must necessarily engage with an unprecedented and simultaneous exploration of language, social interaction, and diverse forms of representation in society. As such forms are always reflected in expressions of identity, we strongly posit that the realm of subjects and topics confined to each of our individual disciplines should be expanded and extended to encompass all possible perspectives and practical methodologies, including those belonging to neighbouring disciplines. This book revolves around a constellation of topics investigated from multiple disciplinary and methodological perspectives ranging from multimodality, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, pragmatics to translation and audio-visual translation, literature and cultural studies. As a whole, the volume delves into the relationship between language, theory and society, as the title suggests, though each essay might deal with only one subset of this constellation. Each chapter provides detailed reading of a particular text or event, providing examples of some key methodologies for the critical analysis of language and society.
The book is designed for readers who have an interest in English, but who do not necessarily have any detailed background knowledge of linguistics or other forms of language, social, or cultural studies. All the texts analysed in this volume are self-contained instantiations of language in use. They are instances of real communication, in real social contexts of use. A cultural approach, for ex-ample, can reveal meanings and patterns in literary texts that cannot be retrieved by means of more traditional linguistic analyses based on grammatical, lexical or phonological investigations. Through a contextually oriented approach of this kind much can be revealed about specific discourses in order to raise questions about the relationship between language and culture, or even language, power and ideology. The editors’ view of language inevitably focuses on the social and cultural contexts in which language operates, considering it to be a discourse-based social activity which may adjust to, or indeed contest, reality depending on the specific circumstance. This view is very much in line with the following apt comment provided by Ed-ward Sapir, with which we would like to conclude this introductory foreword and leave the floor to the reader’s critical engagement with Language, Theory and Society:
"it is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection" (Sapir, 1958 [1929]: 69)
Language, Theory & Society. Essays on English Linguistics and Culture.
No full textThis book is an exploration of current approaches to the linguistic, cultural and social interpretation of texts in diverse contexts of English. By investigating an array of different discourses, we aim to bring to the fore a variety of social and cultural representations and to illustrate the way in which represented participants are generally em-bedded in social, political, and cultural practices through and in the language.
A glance at the contents of the book will immediately reveal that this is an unusual, and maybe uncomfortable, type of academic publication, at least within the complex Italian academic context. Indeed, corpus linguists may well define the volume as an un-‘principled’ collection of texts. However, the rationale behind this purposefully unsystematic assortment of essays resides in the fact that it is only by adopting different, though somewhat contiguous, linguistic, cultural and social perspectives that researchers can comprehensively approach a variety of texts when seeking out the covert meaning-making structures of different discourses.
The editors’ initial stance, when deciding to assemble this volume, stemmed from the consideration that every time we engage with language in order to represent our world, social practices inevitably influence the way we talk, think, and decode/encode texts. Consequently, we decided that one of the issues this book needed to face and overcome was the rigid separation between sibling cultural phenomena expressed through language. Strict topical boundaries can, indeed, exclude some important perspectives and impede a thorough understanding of the way language works.
This book promotes the working hypothesis that those involved in academic research in the field of linguistic, translation and cultural studies must necessarily engage with an unprecedented and simultaneous exploration of language, social interaction, and diverse forms of representation in society. As such forms are always reflected in expressions of identity, we strongly posit that the realm of subjects and topics confined to each of our individual disciplines should be expanded and extended to encompass all possible perspectives and practical methodologies, including those belonging to neighbouring disciplines. This book revolves around a constellation of topics investigated from multiple disciplinary and methodological perspectives ranging from multimodality, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, pragmatics to translation and audio-visual translation, literature and cultural studies. As a whole, the volume delves into the relationship between language, theory and society, as the title suggests, though each essay might deal with only one subset of this constellation. Each chapter provides detailed reading of a particular text or event, providing examples of some key methodologies for the critical analysis of language and society.
The book is designed for readers who have an interest in English, but who do not necessarily have any detailed background knowledge of linguistics or other forms of language, social, or cultural studies. All the texts analysed in this volume are self-contained instantiations of language in use. They are instances of real communication, in real social contexts of use. A cultural approach, for ex-ample, can reveal meanings and patterns in literary texts that cannot be retrieved by means of more traditional linguistic analyses based on grammatical, lexical or phonological investigations. Through a contextually oriented approach of this kind much can be revealed about specific discourses in order to raise questions about the relationship between language and culture, or even language, power and ideology. The editors’ view of language inevitably focuses on the social and cultural contexts in which language operates, considering it to be a discourse-based social activity which may adjust to, or indeed contest, reality depending on the specific circumstance. This view is very much in line with the following apt comment provided by Ed-ward Sapir, with which we would like to conclude this introductory foreword and leave the floor to the reader’s critical engagement with Language, Theory and Society:
"it is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection" (Sapir, 1958 [1929]: 69)
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