Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> This article proposes the analysis of synthetic personalization as a new approach in studying and understanding the legitimization of the Crimean annexation. Drawing upon Norman Fairclough, synthetic personalization is a discursive strategy that identifies how aspects of language, which are regarded as commonsensical and normal, have ideological power, as they can become manipulative and controlling. The application of synthetic personalization to the March 2014 address of Russian President Vladimir Putin draws the audience’s attention to traits that unify the masses and thus stimulate their individual features, in particular by relying on presuppositions. The article argues that the address legitimized the annexation of Crimea by framing the annexation as a result of a religious, military, and heterogeneous unity, which unified Crimea and Russia. The findings also question the impact of the one-sided production process and who is the actual producer of the address. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This paper presents a Critical and Socio-Cognitive analysis of protest discourse as created in slogans for feminist rallies taking place in Spain (2017–2020). The study focuses on the discursive evolution of the term manada (‘wolfpack’), from its origins as a metonymy to refer to a gang rape taking place in the San Fermín bullfighting celebration of July 2016, to its reappropriation by feminists to bring attention to gender violence and, most importantly, to create a positive in-group identity of cohesion and empowerment, while delegitimizing and dispossessing the out-group, rapists, of their power. The analysis shows how reappropriation, together with recontextualization and multimodal creativity, helps to understand the impact of a single term, manada, in the transformation of the traditional discourse of fear and threat into one of solidarity and hope when addressing gender violence, as well as its effects on the constructions of new cognitive and social frames within the community. </jats:p>

<jats:p> In this paper, the form and function of personalized Covid-19 WhatsApp sticker memes created and shared as social laments by citizens in Oman are examined. The compiled data set of 288 WhatsApp stickers was taken from a larger ethnographic project on Arabs and Covid-19. To collect and analyze the data, perspectives from visual semiotics were integrated with participatory and geosemiotic approaches to ground the stickers socially and globally. Six functions of Covid-19 WhatsApp stickers in Oman were identified: expressing political dissent, creating public signs, promoting religious agenda, indexing frustration, expressing levity, and constructing counter-discourse. Based on this analysis, it is suggested that by creating and using WhatsApp stickers during the 2020–2021 Covid-19 pandemic, Omani citizens positioned themselves as agentive participants in charge of their own lives, thus, solidifying a decade-long request for a new form of public-government relationship. The paper adds to research on Arabic digital communication and pandemic discourse. </jats:p>

<jats:p> COVID-19 has become a mental health pandemic. The impact on vulnerable demographic groups has been particularly severe. This paper focuses on women in employment in Hong Kong who have had to balance remote work and online schooling for over 2 years. Using semi-ethnography and theme-oriented discourse analysis, we examine 200 threads that concern members’ mental health on a popular Facebook support group for mothers. We demonstrate that mental health messages are typically framed as ‘troubles talk’. Other support group members actively align with a trouble-teller through ‘caring responses’, namely expressions of empathy and sympathy. These are realized through assessments of the trouble-teller’s experience, reports of similar experiences; expressions of compassion and advice-giving. Mental health talk online is heavily mitigated, nevertheless the medium provides a space for expressing mental health troubles and providing informal psychosocial support. We advocate the importance of microanalytic discourse studies for mental health research to get insights into people’s lived experiences during the pandemic. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This paper explores the Taiwanese same-sex marriage debates from a particular analytical perspective: (1) how the identity as a mother is employed as stancetaking moves in both the supporting and opposing discourses, and (2) how stances are taken through intertextual links among the same-sex marriage-related discourses and the larger discourses concerning motherhood. It examines the online posts of two mother bloggers, focusing on how evaluative stances and parodic frames are achieved and how intertextual links help both bloggers to align or misalign themselves with particular value positions. The analysis reveals how the mother identity, traditionally situated in the private sphere, can be mobilized to advance arguments in political debates. It also exemplifies the ideological contestation about motherhood and family in Taiwan, where traditional Chinese cultural ideologies and Western influences co-exist. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Explicit images and descriptions of violent death are typical within the Mexican media landscape, and especially within the context of the War on Drugs. Here, I share observations of my encounters with these media, particularly television narcotelenovelas and tabloids. I also center the voices of people with firsthand experience of the narcoscape in Mexico City and Ciudad Juárez, including Mrs. Luz María Dávila, the mother of two youths slain in a 2010 drug cartel-directed massacre. Across the two main sites of this study, a university seminar and a public town hall meeting, a professor and a self-politicized mother each question the role of the media in upholding investments in violence within news and entertainment. As the professor asks, ‘News are not simply news, right?’ These insights invite reflection on the public’s participation as spectator-voyeurs in the more than 105,000 Mexican deaths facilitated by cross-border trade in illicit narcotics to-date. The interactional data also suggest effective ways of encouraging critical media analysis in and beyond university settings. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article presents evidence of a conspiracy theory discourse on the anonymous messaging board 4chan, specifically /pol as in politically incorrect. Previous research shows 4chan lacks a coherent political discourse. Recent research suggests that the site is at least a reliable source of white supremacism within a larger framework of conspiratorial thinking. Grounded theory guides a systematic analysis of posts from 4chan’s /pol board during the dates third to ninth January 2021, before and after the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Following Trump’s call to supporters to Stop the Steal (referring to unsubstantiated claims of a fraudulent 2020 election), the search terms steal and Trump collected all posts in threads with matching posts. A critical discourse analysis investigates the presence and articulation of conspiracism in selected posts. Findings reveal confirmation with previous research about the apparent lack of ideological coherence on/pol yet also affirms the discourse of white supremacism. Additionally, a diversity of conspiracism functions as a primary form of communication on 4chan regardless of one’s loyalty to a particular political ideology. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Global environmental change has provoked changes in how humans experience and perceive their relationship to nature. Such conceptual changes can be observed through language use, and specifically lexical change. This paper investigates how such changes manifest through an analysis of how the terms ‘greenhouse gas’, ‘climate gas’, ‘carbon’, and ‘CO<jats:sub>2</jats:sub>’ are used in the Norwegian parliament in the time period 1999–2019. We observe a discursive specialization where different discursive dimensions are linked to the different expressions, corresponding to different framings of climate change, including technological, economic, and moral perspectives. Importantly, there is a shift over time where the discursive division of labor between the expressions is consolidated and new framings emerge. We show that a more refined language of GHG expressions is a discursive resource that contributes to making sense of the multiple ways that climate change impacts society. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Based on a corpus of 40 U.S. news articles and transcribed news videos, I bring together techniques from Critical Discourse Analysis with concepts from cognitive linguistics in analyzing mainstream portrayals of The Satanic Temple (TST), a newer, non-supernaturalist religion. I probe quotation, lexis, and metaphor, and interrogate patterns through the lenses of framing, radial category structure, and Lakoff’s Idealized Cognitive Models. I draw form-based parallels between mainstream U.S media portrayals of TST and accounts from the CDA literature of othering portrayals of other marginalized groups, in the U.S. and elsewhere. I submit that many accounts of TST are sensationalist, and propose reclamation as a useful lens for understanding the contemporary Satanist identity. I suggest that research on news values, particularly Bednarek and Caple’s concept of Negativity, is a useful avenue for further research. </jats:p>