26th April:

The (re)presentation of sexual violence in the British broadsheet press: A feminist critical discourse analysis of the Sarah Everard case

Camila Montiel-Mccann, Liverpool

Male sexual violence against women and girls is a pervasive feature of patriarchal society (Ehrlich, 2007, 2014, 2021; Estrich, 1987). Yet, in Britain, less than one percent of reported cases of rape result in a conviction (Centre for Women’s Justice et al, 2020). Moreover, the erasure of victimhood is especially true when it comes to cases where the victim is a woman of colour (Crenshaw, 1989; Ehrlich, 2021). In this paper, I examine the reporting of sexual violence by Britain’s broadsheet newspapers from September 2020 until July 2021. Using feminist critical discourse analysis (Lazar, 2005), supplemented by feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis (Baxter, 2010), I aim to expose how systemic male violence is naturalised by the broadsheets in order to uphold and maintain patriarchal hegemony. My data shows that sexual violence is under-reported in the British press, with the exception of one case – the tragic kidnap and murder of 33-year-old Sarah Everard by a serving police officer in March 2021. This case sparked a national conversation about institutional misogyny in British society. Having originally concluded that Sarah’s white privilege was responsible for the national interest surrounding her case, I engage in a self-reflexive study that questions, not only the assessment of the case by the British press, but my own original assessment which viewed murder victims ‘through the prism of privilege’ (Day, 2021). I conclude that, whilst coverage of the Everard case did lead to some newspapers engaging in a more feminist analysis of British society as a whole, the majority of coverage (re)produced exceptionalising themes that characterise sexual violence as random and extraordinary, as opposed to systemic and institutional. Thus, paradoxically, the coverage of this case functioned to normalise the majority of sexual violence that does occur in Britain – that which occurs within cases of domestic abuse.

Javier Mármol Queraltó, Lancaster University

Tuesday 15th March:

‘In the context of the recent political and migratory events occurring in Europe, the dynamics of inequality is a recurrent topic in public discourses in international spheres (Deardoff, 2017). While much has been written on media representations of migration in the linguistic modality (Baker et al., 2008; El Refaie, 2001), comparatively little has been written about the visual depiction of migrants and refugees. This is despite a wealth of literature which highlights the role that pictures play in communicating values and thus in creating and sustaining social identities more generally (Economou, 2006). This paper advocates a cognitive linguistic approach to Critical Discourse Studies (CL-CDS) and analyses online newspapers multimodal phenomena (Hart, 2015) of the 2015-16 Refugee Crisis in language and image, in order to assess the interactions between these modalities in terms of intersemiotic convergence (Hart and Mármol Queraltó, 2021) and their potential ideological implications.

This paper focuses on event-construal (Langacker, 2008), and my claim is that the ideological purport of newspapers in the process of forcing a specific perspective toward the event can serve to create alternative, ideology-vested, realities, both in language and image (Hart, 2016). Analysis of enactors of schematisation, metaphor and viewpoint can potentially be applied across languages and modalities (Hart, 2017a), and such approach will be shown in the analysis of Spanish and British news reports. This paper focuses on the critical examination of and emerging interactions between images and specific linguistic elements within online news reports (headline, subheading, caption and lead paragraph), and the (in)congruent relationships there might occur in the shape of intersemiotic convergence (Hart and Mármol Queraltó, 2021).

References:

Baker, P., et al. (2008). A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK Press. Discourse & Society, 19(3), 273-306.

Deardorff, S. (2017). Political and Humanitarian Responses to Syrian Displacement. Abingdon: Routledge.

Economou, D. (2006). The big picture: The role of the lead image in print feature stories. In I. Lassen, J. Strunck y T. Vestergaard (Eds.), Mediating Ideology in Text and Image. Ten Critical Studies (pp. 211-233). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

El Refaie, E. (2001). Metaphors we discriminate by: Naturalized themes in Austrian newspaper articles about asylum seekers. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5(3), 352-371.

Hart, C. (2015). Viewpoint in linguistic discourse: Space and evaluation in news reports of political protests. Critical Discourse Studies, 12(3), 238-260.

Hart, C. (2016). The visual basis of linguistic meaning and its implications for critical discourse analysis: Integrating cognitive linguistic and multimodal methods. Discourse and Society, 27(3), 335-350.

Hart, C. (2017a). Cognitive linguistic critical discourse studies: Connecting language and image. In R. Wodak & B. Forchtner (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics. London: Routledge.

Hart, C., & Mármol Queraltó, J. (2021). What can Cognitive Linguistics tell us about Language-Image relations? A multidimensional approach to intersemiotic convergence in multimodal texts. Cognitive Linguistics, 32(4), 529-562.

Langacker, R. W. (2008). Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: OUP.

Antoaneta Dimova, Queen Mary University of London

Tuesday 8th March:

Prevalence of mental health distress is so widespread that one in four people will experience it in their lifetime (Mind 2021). Societal attitudes around mental health are still prone to stigma, which can negatively influence affected individuals. Non-governmental mental health organisations (Mind, Time to Change, Rethink Mental Illness) are conducting social media campaigns (on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) with the aim to decrease stigma and provide support. The WHO (2013) has highlighted advocacy’s ability to induce positive change for affected individuals. Organisations conducting health advocacy campaigns further play an intermediary role “between those with formal power and those communities whose collective ‘voice’ can be used to influence policy decisions” (Jackson & Parker 2021: 153). The discourse used to convey messages within these mental health campaigns can not only impact campaign outcomes but also how messages are perceived by affected individuals. Discourse used further has the ability to shape societal attitudes towards affected individuals and mental health conditions. In my PhD research, I conduct an analysis of the language used in organisational social media mental health awareness campaigns. In order to examine how stigma reduction and support provision are expressed, appraisal theory is used in combination with multimodal analysis (using Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar 2021). Both approaches conflated allow for explorations of how meaning creation occurs linguistically and visually (typography, image/post structure, gaze), through different social media affordances (functions). The WHO has previously pointed out that, in order to improve mental health globally, a “unifying” language needs to be adopted around all sectors of mental health activities, which focuses on “health as opposed to illness” (WHO 2013). This statement forms the basis for what will be investigated in the first research question, whereby focus on health over illness within the campaigns will be explored. The first research question thus (RQ1) seeks to explore what positive and negative evaluations are expressed by UK mental health organisations. This also entails identifying representations of “good” and “bad” mental health, which are of interest due to their impact on societal attitudes. Appraisal’s positive and negative attitudinal categories are particularly relevant for what is framed as good or bad by organisations. The second question (RQ2) focuses on linguistic and semiotic expression of agency, as this can reveal how responsibility, blame and power are assigned to parties represented in the charities’ social media content. Finally, the last two research questions discuss how charities position themselves amongst other mental health actors (RQ3), and how the above explored questions (RQ1-3) work together to construct an organisational identity on social media (RQ4).

Tuesday 8th Feb: Seda Karanfil,  Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona.

Transgender individuals consist of one of the most vulnerable groups in Turkey which records the highest rate of hate crime in Europe (Balzer, LaGata, and Berredo; 2016), including murders that on many occasions are not penalized. In addition, transgender subjects can experience adverse life conditions, such as unemployment, poor accommodation, and health care issues. Apart from going through the abovementioned adversities, transgender subjects also face segregation in institutional discourses shaped by judicial bodies, religious affairs, and state institutions. Furthermore, the legislation that defines disorderly social behaviours commonly targets sex workers and transgender women (sexualrightsdatabase.org; 2016).

Drawing on queer linguistics, queer theory, and critical discourse analysis assisted by corpus methods, this research takes a stance in favour of transgender subjects in Turkey and explores how transgender identities are enacted and negotiated in media in order to disclose the marginalized positions of transgender individuals in discursive domains that are constitutive to the unequal life conditions faced by them. With a focus on the variation of terminology, I look at how specific linguistic choices construct transgender identities, with what consequences, and for whom.

This talk comprises of a bundle of corpus data from 1980s, which is part of the large database consisting of three segments of news articles from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. The data foregrounded here is centred on Bülent Ersoy, the most famous transgender idol in Turkey, whose gender affirmation coincided with the 1980 military coup in Turkey. The military junta banned her public performances and refused to recognize her gender identity/status (Ertür, Lebow; 2014), which was then widely reported in newspapers. As a result, the visibility and representations of transgender subjects in the press became remarkably augmented, and the variation of terminology used to negotiate transgender identities came into sight. Showing this process, I argue that the concept of identity is negotiated and operationalised in the social world as a language-mediated product constituting real-life complexities, which also leads to the perception of non-normative identities as being crafted and problematic in the press (Bucholtz and Hall; 2004, 2005).

References

Balzer C., LaGata C., Berredo L., 2,190 murders are only the tip of the iceberg- An introduction to the Trans Murder Monitoring project: TMM annual report 2016, TvT Publication Series Vol.14, October 2016.

Bucholtz M., Hall K., Language and Identity, In: A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (pp. 369-394), Chapter 16, Blackwell, November 2004.

Bucholtz M., Hall K., Identity and Interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach, In: Discourse Studies Vol 7 (4-5) (pp. 585-614), Sage Publications, 2005.

Ertür B., Lebow A., Coup de Genre: The Trials and Tribulations of Bülent Ersoy, Theory& Event 17.1, 2014.

Sexual Rights Database https://sexualrightsdatabase.org/map/21/Adult%20sex%20work

Tuesday 25th Jan

Kashif Raza, University of Calgary

The socio-economic integration of immigrants, especially skilled workers coming under the economic class, is one of the top priorities of Canada (GC, 2020). However, a disconnect may be observed between the top-down policies informing the current integration model that mandates the use of one of Canada’s official languages (English or French) for settlement and the social multilingualism where multiple languages are spoken by the Indigenous peoples and immigrants (Haque, 2012; Lopez, 2007; Raza, 2021). Chiras and Galante (2021) argued that such settlement practices are informed by monolingual ideologies that consider the use of a “common” language necessary for socio-economic integration and, thus, run the risk of marginalizing those who do not possess acceptable proficiency in that “common” language or speak it as a second/additional language. Similarly, by not recognizing and supporting “other” languages important for successful integration, this model discriminates between dominant languages (English and/or French) and less-dominant languages (Indigenous and immigrants’ languages) (Cummins, 2014; Galiev; 2013). Finally, restricting socio-economic integration to English and/or French is a missed opportunity to benefit fully from the linguistic diversity of Canadian societies that can contribute to economic development, stronger relations among different language groups, and making Canadian immigration system a role-model for other countries to follow (Grin; 2003; Heller; 2003; Raza & Chua, forthcoming). My study aims to explore how a linguistically inclusive integration model can be designed and implemented that gives equal representation to official, Indigenous and immigrant languages, and promotes linguistic equity, social justice and diversity.