1,720,975 research outputs found
Salomi Boukala. “European identity and the representation of Islam in the mainstream press: Argumentation and media discourse”
Get PDFIn her book European identity and the representation of Islam in the mainstream press: Argumentation and media discourse, Salomi Boukala offers us a thoroughly interdisciplinary and extremely timely scrutiny of print media communication in times of profound crises in Europe. Boukala interweaves Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Argumentation theory, employing also notions and principles coming from the fields of Political Sciences, Anthropology, (Cultural) Political Economy. In particular, the author examines how “specific [European] newspapers with opposite ideological background […] construct the European supranational identity via references to the EU and the representation of Islam as a common, European ‘Other’” (p. 7)
Subtle hate speech and the recontextualisation of antisemitism online:Analysing argumentation on Facebook
Get PDFThis chapter presents the online debate on two highly ambiguous political cartoons that were published by the Greek left-wing newspaper I Efimerída ton Syntaktón (EfSyn) and aimed to criticise a series of public policies proposed by the conservative New Democracy party. The employment of the Holocaust in these cartoons was discursively constructed as a (re)production of antisemitism by members of Facebook groups and pages of the Jewish community, who are actively engaged in countering this form of discrimination. Against this backdrop, this chapter focuses on the examination of Facebook posts and comments against what has been perceived as antisemitic hatred. Principles and tools from the discourse-historical approach (DHA) and the argumentum model of topics (AMT) are employed, aiming to provide insights on the socio-historical context in which commonly accepted contextual premises (endoxa) may be established, before being challenged via the relevant argumentative schemes (topoi) in dialectical syllogisms. In doing so, the chapter intends to sharpen the analytical armoury of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) by offering an in-depth investigation of the following interrelated levels: the socio-historical vertical (macro-)level as this is encoded or opposed in the (micro-)level of communicative content
“Let’s Send Them to Desert Islands”:Right-Wing Populist Argumentation and Hatred against Migrants in Greece
Get PDFIn one of his interviews on a Greek TV broadcast, the leader of the right-wing populist party Ellinikí Lísi (Hellenic Solution), Kyriakos Velopoulos, suggested that migrant populations that were hosted in Greece should be transferred to desert Greek islands. In doing so, he portrayed migrants as a threat to national security and social cohesion, among other things. His proposal caused polarisation and was perceived as deepening hate-based discrimination in Greece, since it brought to the fore connotations related to traumatic periods in Greek history, when Greek democrats and communists were jailed and tortured in desert islands. Against this background, this chapter unveils the lines of reasoning used by Velopoulos to justify the exclusion of the migrant ‘Other’ in Greece. Drawing on previous studies on right-wing populist discourses and hate speech, we couple principles from Critical Discourse Studies and studies of inference in Argumentation. In this way, we showcase how the overall argumentation that revolves around desert islands as places of exclusion of the perceived ‘Other’ can be used as a vehicle for the legitimation of hatred, all the while backing up Greek right-wing populist discourses and deepening social inequalities in Greece
The construction of the Greek Crisis in the public sphere : discourses and emotions (pathos) under critical perceptions
Get PDFThe present dissertation aims to examine how significant, Greek social actors and institutions (i.e. PMs, newspapers and protesters) represent social agency in different types of texts and discourses (i.e. parliamentary proceedings-parliamentary discourse, newspapers headlinesmedia discourse and graffiti slogans-protest discourse), and how this discursive representation gives birth to an emotional construction, shaping significant moments of the Greek crisis in the public sphere[s]. Drawing on the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA, see Fairclough 2003, 2010, 2014; Van Dijk 2008), we study the interrelation between macro-level (dominant) values and views, and the micro-level of individuals and institutions positioning (Van Dijk 2008: 85-89), as retrieved from three types of texts, that is, parliamentary proceedings, newspaper headlines and graffiti slogans. In our theoretical discussion, following a transdisciplinary and integrationist CDA perception (see Fairclough 2010; Van Leeuwen 2005), we, also employ—and proceed to an examination of—the notions of public sphere[s] (see Arendt 1958; Habermas 1989) and politics, as a discursively emerged process within the public sphere; a perception which seems to have significant impact on both political and (critical) discourse studies (see Fairclough 2003; Fairclough and Fairclough 2012; Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Focusing on the micro-level, we sketch and propose an integrationist framework of analysis based on two analytical pillars: We conduct a Systemic-Functional (SF) analysis to scrutinize the transitivity structures (see Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: Ch. 5) of different texts, and an analysis of emotions semiotization in discourse (pathos, see Plantin 2011; Micheli 2014) in order to track constructed emotions and their argumentative force
The front page as a canvas for multimodal argumentation: Brexit in the Greek press
Get PDFIn this paper, we analyze the front pages of mainstream Greek newspapers with the highest circulation reporting the official result of the Brexit referendum in 2016. Our analysis seeks to extract the standpoints and arguments that circulated in the Greek mainstream press on that day by studying the headlines and visuals on the front page. We study the front page not merely as an informative genre but crucially as an argumentative one, where the arguments can be reconstructed with the help of tools from argumentation theory combined with principles from multimodal critical discourse analysis. The proposed approach makes it possible to compare how the different ideological orientations in the Greek public sphere were steered by the representation of this piece of news. We show that, despite their ideological background, the newspapers under study converge to the construction of Brexit as a menacing phenomenon that puts the EU integration to the test and, as such, as an event that should have been avoided.We are grateful to the COST Action CA17132 'European Network for Argumentation and Public Policy Analysis' (www.publicpolicyargument.u) for providing us with opportunities to meet and work on the ideas presented in this chapter.</p
Between adversariness and compromise : A Rhetorical Analysis of Greek Political Discourse in Times of Crisis
No full textThe chapter reviews the extent to which contemporary Greek scholarship in humanities and social sciences makes use of rhetorical categories as relevant descriptive and analytical tools. It proposes revisiting two classical rhetorical concepts, namely topoi and endoxa, in order to illustrate their descriptive and explanatory potential for the analysis of political discourse characterized by adversariness, polyphony, and the need to create communion. To illustrate this theoretical and methodological proposal, two fragments of parliamentary discourse are analysed by combining the insights of Pragma-Dialectics and the Argumentum Model of Topics. The fragments are from the speeches that the government and opposition leaders made during the parliamentary debate on the signing of the first memorandum of understanding between Greece and the “troika” of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund in May 2010
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Normalizing assimilation in antiracist (con)texts and (re)producing liquid racism:Argumentative inferences in Greek right- and left-wing political discourses
Get PDFThis chapter aims to show how liquid racism (Weaver 2016) emerges when assimilationist viewpoints are argumentatively normalized in mainstream (right- and left-wing) political-parliamentary discourses in Greece. I analyze two seminal speeches given by two Greek political leaders, namely PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis (New Democracy; European Peoples’ Party) and Opposition leader, Alexis Tsipras (SYRIZA; European Left), on October 31, 2019, in the Greek parliament; that is, the very day of the vote in favor of the bill proposed by the Ministry of Citizen’s Protection, which outlined the terms according to which international protection would be awarded by the Greek authorities to ‘foreign’ populations. I draw on the framework of Critical Discourse Studies (Wodak and Meyer 2016), employing tools from Social Semiotics (van Leeuwen 2008) and the Argumentum Model of Topics (Rigotti and Greco 2019) to critically examine standpoint-argument couplings inferred in the discursive representations of social actors and realized in the relevant speeches. I conclude that the two Greek politicians under study converge to claims in favor of the assimilation of migrant populations to the Greek context and therefore (re)produce liquid racism, despite their seemingly antiracist attitude and their different ideological and political stance
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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