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AbstractThis study investigates the discursive devices deployed by the late former Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe, to represent social actors in his speeches, in order to unveil how these devices and the ideologies in them are mobilized to maintain political power and garner popular support. The data for the study comprise his: 2002 world summit on sustainable development speech in South Africa, 2005 party manifesto speech in Zimbabwe, 2003 Non-aligned speech in Malaysia, and 2007 UN speech in New York. These were subjected to qualitative analysis with insights from Teun A. van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of Critical Discourse Analysis. The study reveals that Mugabe uses discursive polarization strategies to emphasize positive things/de-emphasize negative things about his in-group (himself, Zanu-PF, the majority black, majority Zimbabwean supporters, and the third-world country allies), but emphasizes negative things/de-emphasizes positive things about the out-group (the minority white Zimbabwean land grabbers, the USA, the UK, Tony Blair, George Bush, etc.). The discursive strategies identified were used to pursue land ownership, anti-imperialist, revolutionary, and Marxist ideologies. The study concludes that these strategies were employed by Mugabe as linguistic, rhetorical and political strategies to maintain power and mobilize the support of majority black Zimbabweans for years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fadhma Aïth Mansour Amrouche scholars tend to victimize her, underscoring her submission to the patriarchal order, embodied chiefly through her husband Belkacem and the most famous of her sons, the poet Jean Amrouche, under whose instigation she wrote her autobiography, Histoire de ma vie. The purpose of this article is to refute such a reading by arguing that this autobiography challenges, rather than complies with, the patriarchal code. Instead of lamenting her poor luck or accepting her condition as a subaltern, the author seeks various empowering compensations, whether they be her advantageous looks, her education and ease with the French language--a rare asset in her time--or a set of idiosyncratic rhetorical strategies. These strategies include an intensive recourse to the trope of appropriation through the use of the possessive adjective "mon" (my) and verbs expressing agency and strong will. Simultaneously, Amrouche rejects features supposed to be intrinsic in women's writing, such as subjecttivity, modesty, and meekness of tone, displaying instead both pride and assertiveness. Finally, one major technique deployed by this autobiographer is the reversal of the traditional gender schema through feminizing male characters, particularly her husband and her father-in-law, while endowing women like her mother and herself with the "male" traits of courage and both physical and moral resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Synergies Afrique des Grands Lacs is the property of GERFLINT (Groupe d'Etudes et de Recherches pour le Francais Langue Internationale) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Since the entry of the far-right party VOX into the Spanish government administrations in 2018, Spain's political scene has gone through a deep transformation. The disparity in opinions among the different parties concerning migration seems to tear the country's democratic foundation apart. This paper is a study of the language and discursive strategies used by VOX's leader, Santiago Abascal, articulating the party's populist propaganda for a united country to "make Spain great again." The analysis was grounded on the theoretical underpinnings of Wodak's (2001) discursive strategies and Van Dijk's (1993) "Us" vs. "Them" framework. The data were based on Abascal's closing political campaign speech during the Madridlenian elections, which was televised in May 2021. The 30-minute video recording was transcribed, annotated, coded, and analyzed. The findings suggest a pattern of discursive practices aimed at diminishing other political parties and their representatives, vilify immigrants, and impugn government measures that were against VOX's authoritarian conservatism and nationalism. There was a predominant use of predication strategies to positively present VOX while denigrating its political rivals. Referential/nomination strategies were also used to divide the society between in-groups and out-groups. Strongly embedded in these strategies were perlocutionary acts used to incite hate toward the out-groups and evoke fear and anxiety toward the in-group, strategically employed as tools to gain votes in the elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how German media discourses reflect debates around integration, based on a newspaper corpus spanning the period 2008–2018. Considering these discourses, our research interest is focussed on how integration is constructed as a responsibility of those who are expected to integrate into society. To analyze how media might play a role in reproducing essentialist constructions of difference, we present a case study that combines methodologies of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, and that examines discursive practices and strategies linked to dominant discourses about integration in Germany. Our findings show that in the German context, certain ethnicities (here: people of Turkish background) are framed as "other" and these groups are constantly being assessed in terms of integration in ways that others are not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses electoral defeat suffered by the Peoples' Democratic Party (PDP) at the 2015 presidential polls and the communicative character of blame and avoidance of responsibility as evident in the Nigerian media political discourses. Discourse analysts are yet to study the linguistic aspects of blame and avoidance of responsibility in great details. This work is intended as a contribution towards filling this lacuna in knowledge by examining the conversational discursive practices adopted by Nigerian politicians in the circumstances of blame risk to achieve the twin goals of positive self-presentation and consolidation of political capital (Hansson, 2015). Some PDP members enlisted the discursive strategies of blame avoidance, in which blames and denials are carefully and strategically planned to serve positive self-representation (semantic macro-strategy of in-group favouritism) and negative other-representation, that is, semantic macro-strategy of derogation of out-group, (https://www.hse.ru/en/). We illustrate the linguistic mechanism of blame and avoidance of responsibility and how it thrives as a dominant recurrent theme in conflict talk and public communication discourses. The findings tend to enrich and enliven the literature on discourse studies and by extension open fresh vistas of critical research into language use in politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Acta Universitatis Lodziensis: Folia Litteraria Romanica is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Lodzkiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Climate change and the concerns it raises for the environment and all those inhabiting planet earth, human and nonhuman alike, have prompted waves of activism since the last decades of the twentieth century. Over the last few years, however, a novel form of activism has emerged, apparently led by children and youth from all over the world. This article studies how one of its most prominent leaders, Greta Thunberg, and her climate activism may be read as a life-writing project. Drawing on traditions of social movements and testimony, rights discourse, rhetoric and strong emotions are strategically deployed to generate affective and effective engagement and action. The self that is in the making in Thunberg's audiovisual and written life-writing texts is arguably a testimonial "I" to lay bare injustice. Her self-construction hinges upon the denunciation of broader systemic causes than mere lack of attention to the climate crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper attempts to demonstrate that a better understanding of the changes of national/cultural perceptions and representations of the Iranian community is possible by approaching the complex meanings of religious ritual practices in the country. Through a systematic interpretive discursive analysis of a sample of Traditional and Non-traditional religious Eulogies, this article figures out how the juxtaposition of new and old contexts and use of Pop and Hip-Hop genres provides discursive opportunities for the Iranian younger generation to express their version of national/cultural tendencies and to articulate both Shi'a Iranian and global identities simultaneously. While there is a gap in the analysis of religious discourse from a critical discourse study perspective, I draw on the theoretical assumptions from the Discourse-Historical Approach of Critical Discourse Analysis to explore the implications of the discursive strategies that are employed to associate the religious discourse of Shi'a Eulogies to the socio-political context of Iran and how the youth would transform these narratives of grief and sorrow into an evocative narrative that captures the imagination of the contemporary audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My commentary on Held (2020) aims at offering a broader perspective about epistemic violence in psychology while critically examining her positions concerning objectivity and essentialism. Following Michel Foucault, who developed the idea of episteme, that is, the codification and structure that determines the knowledge formation of a given epoch, I suggest that psychology can be regarded as an ideological sociocultural formation and as a discursive practice. In line with these premises, Held's article can be regarded as a "text," which, in reproducing the divides between objective versus subjective, folk versus scientific conceptions, relativism versus realism, and so forth, is functional to the maintenance of hegemony. I will focus on the argumentative and discursive strategies that Held adopts in her defense of an objectivist ontology and epistemology against Indigenous and critical psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of a qualitative study of a subgroup of diversity professionals, external diversity and inclusion (D&I) consultants, we explore D&I consultants' discursive strategies and practices situated within organisational structures, relations, and interactions of power and knowledge. Theoretically, the research reveals how D&I consultants' own discursive strategies interact with existing organisational and societal discourses of diversity, incrementally shaping their continual evolution. A classification is developed, which sets out four approaches taken by consultants with regard to their discursive strategies in relation to clients. The findings suggest that HR practitioners need to work in tandem with external consultants to develop strategies to improve the status and legitimacy of diversity work if the field is to progress the organisational D&I agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deconstructs how religious musical eulogies, as the most important discursive practices of Shi'a rituals (Ghaffari 2019), were used as "war songs" serving to construct the Iranian national identity during the 1980–1988 Iraq-Iran war. These musical practices (in)formed the wider ideological and persuasive rhetoric of Iranians. In this paper, I analyse the textual and musical features of the audio-recorded versions of ten well-known war songs. The Discourse-Historical Approach (Reisigl and Wodak 2016) is used to analyse the discursive strategies and persuasive rhetorical tools within the lyrics. I draw on Machin (2010), Machin and Richardson (2012) and van Leeuwen (1999) to analyse various features of voice and the modality of sounds. This paper concludes that, by reflecting the power of religious discourse in the non-religious and highly nationalistic occasion of war, Iranian war songs were inspired by the religious eulogies in encouraging the Iranian nation to attend the war fronts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research looks into how homosexual Muslim men in Malaysia convey their experiences regarding their sexual and romantic lifestyle in relation to their Islamic faith. For this research, four respondents who identify themselves as homosexual and Muslim were subjected to in-depth, semi-structured interview to gauge their experiences, thoughts and beliefs in regard to their sexual and religious experiences. Discursive Psychology (DP), more specifically, the Discursive Action Model (DAM) as proposed by Edwards and Potter is used as analytical tool to explicate the data of this research. The analysis reveals several recurring themes which appear throughout the participants' discourses, which are (1) Disrupted Construction of Cohesive Identity, (2) Indomitable Nature of Same-sex Desire and (3) Downplaying the Severity of Same-sex Relation in Islam. The findings of this research provide novel insights into the way the homosexual Muslim's phenomenon is perceived and thus, complicates the notion of homosexuality in Islam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discursive analysis of criminal organizations’ family dynamics and ideological devices may provide important insights into the inner functioning of these groups. In this article, we describe and analyze a specific set of discursive strategies and the thematic narratives emerging from a TV interview with Giuseppe Riina, a member of Cosa Nostra and the son of one of the most important mafia bosses. Our analyses demonstrate the existence of recurring ideological devices such as reductionism, amoralism, familism, verticalism, normalism, victimism and religious relativism. The results are discussed in light of previous research that examines how discursive strategies and narratives may represent powerful tools for understanding criminal organizations. Family-related discourses, in particular, reveal meanings, values and ideas that contribute to constructing criminal organizations’ internal structure, as well as their relationship with the external world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study adopts a critical discourse analysis approach to Chiang Kai-shek's (CKS) internal nationalist propaganda and authoritarian discourse practices, investigating his New Year and National Day speeches in the 1950s. Authoritarian characteristics are evident in strategies such as legitimation, reification, or myth-making, in the antagonist categorisation of Self versus Other, in Self-glorification and the idolisation of the dead, in the hegemonic creation of commonality and unity, and in the metaphorical conceptualisation of reality. Patterns of idolising the dead serve to impose and legitimise CKS's worldview among his citizens. Another pattern is CKS's invention of imaginary compatriots within the "enslaved China" waiting for the best time to overthrow the "bandits" rule. Reference to these imaginary agents indirectly presents to his audience a false but better impression of the Self, and a dimmer view of the communist bandits. A third pattern is CKS's metaphorical use of language, such as references to communist China as a puppet regime of Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses findings of a qualitative study on strategies of othering observed in antiimmigrant discourse, by analysing selected examples from the UK and Polish media, together with data collected from interviews with migrants. The purpose is to identify discursive strategies of othering, which aim to categorise, denigrate, oppress and ultimately reject the stigmatised or racialised 'other'. We do not offer a systematic comparison of the data from the UK and Poland; instead, we are interested in what is common in the discursive practices of these two countries/contexts. In using newspaper together with interview data, we are combining representation and experience in identifying not only strategies of othering, but also how these are perceived by and affect the othered individuals. The paper uses the following data: 40 newspaper articles - 20 from the UK and 20 from Poland, and 19 interviews - 12 from Poland and 7 from the UK. The analysis that follows identifies five shared strategies of othering: a) Stereotyping; b) Whiteness as the norm; c) Racialisation; d) Objectification; e) Wrongly Ascribed Ethnicity. We conclude with the research limitations and outlining possible next stages, such as working with a larger corpus, investigating frequency, or including other media genres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article exploits the synergy of critical discourse studies and Corpus Linguistics to study the pervasive representation of Islam and Muslims in an approximate 670,000-word corpus of US news media stories published between 2001 and 2015. Following collocation and concordance analysis of the most frequent topics or categories which revolve around the representation of Islam and Muslims in US news stories, the Discourse-Historical Approach to critical discourse analysis was adopted to investigate how the discursive strategies of nomination (construction of in-groups and out-groups) and predication (labeling social actors more or less positively or negatively) are used in US news media stories. The findings indicated that, in general, Islam and Muslims are associated with violence, religious radicalism, and Islamic extremist militants. Finally, the article discusses the discursive themes resulting from the analysis of personal pronouns as well as the educational implications of the findings for social studies and multicultural education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws upon thirteen months of ethnographic research in a Chicago pawnshop to show how prices of objects in pawnshops are actively, socially negotiated using what I term discursive strategies of valuation. Three kinds of discursive strategies of valuation emerge repeatedly in the data: a. references to the specific material attributes of the objects, b. references to the unique biographical histories of the objects, c. reference to the financial need and (relative) social positioning of the customer involved in the negotiation. Examining these strategies reveals the relationship between socially contingent and culturally constructed perceptions of value and the production of price. I find that rhetorical strategies can and do affect price, within limits. Perhaps most surprisingly, the data show that discursive strategies emphasizing a lower socio-economic status can inflate the value, and ultimately the price, of an object during negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper attempts to conceptualize Djebar's progressive struggle and dissatisfaction with the notion of language, identity, and gender. It appropriates the tradition of the “Trickster's techniques of deviating discourses”. In Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1980), So Vast the Prison (1995), and Woman Without Sepulcher (2002), elements of a deviating stance are displayed, hence offering a subversive and conspirational account at the very heart of the oppressive authorities. It will be suggested that Djebar's works implicitly juxtapose comparable models of “Intellectual Trickster” resistance to all kinds of tyrannies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to determine the comprehension difficulties adults have regarding the information provided by over-thecounter pharmaceutical products leaflets that contain paracetamol as an active principle. For this purpose, 20 adults were interviewed with a survey especially designed for this research. Following important linguistic comprehension studies, comprehension difficulties were recognized and analyzed. The analysis shows difficulties with lexical, propositional, and micro-structural strategies. However, it is necessary to continue carrying out studies on comprehension to identify difficulties that over-the-counter drug users have to understand information pamphlets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to promote teacher reflection on the use of discursive strategies. Four biology professors participated in the study; content analysis was used to categorize each professor's reflection on his or her teaching practice. First, we found it necessary for the four teachers to understand the student's learning-related interests as well as the intention of self-recognition and the monitoring of their own practice. Secondly, we found that the reflection of three of the four professors concerned the contextual deficiencies of the classroom, their questioning of the instrument in relation to their practice and, lastly, their self-justification for not using some strategies, promoting discursive changes in their teaching practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research attempts to navigate the dominant ideologies, the mechanism of their construction and 'the processes' which create ideological climate for constituting imaginary and discursive identities in the fabric of colonial discourse of the novel 'A Passage to India' The reading of the novel interrogates the stereotypical representation and ideological framings of Indian Muslims in the web of the discourse. The identities given to the colonized Muslims by the colonizers are permanent and stable but the researchers being postcolonial readers view them as inscribed identities which are fragmented, temporal and unstable in their nature. Through stereotypical assumptions and discursive strategies like reduction, simplification, universalization and naturalization, ideological climate has been created which appropriates the imaginary beliefs and values as universal and natural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The institutionalized whiteness: a strategy of discourse genres called label. This article aims to analyze the speeches institutionalized by the industry of beauty and aesthetics as discursive tools that meet the logic of legitimizing identity. The paper attempts to establish the saying as true, causing a chain of meaning that discriminates not only products, as people, contributing to the standard of whiteness. It also intends to discuss the relations of power as category of circulation exercised by individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent European Union (EU) directives in the environmental field have promoted sustainable development alongside new modes of environmental governance for achieving this elusive goal. These modes are characterised by integrated, participatory and transparent decision-making processes. This paper provides a conceptual clarification of this new environmental governance and then examines the extent to which it is being promoted, through Europeanization, in one of the impending south-eastern enlargement countries, Turkey. Empirical data is taken from an analysis of Turkey's progress in adopting the Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive which – potentially at least – embodies features of the new environmental governance. A key finding is that there are close links between the adoption of the new modes of environmental governance and the power of ‘Europeanization discourses’ in national policy making processes, but these are insufficient to forge significant changes in inter-sectoral working around environmental issues, or markedly expand opportunities for public participation. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Encouraging a dialogue between Literary Theory, Discourse Analysis and Testimonial Studies, this paper discusses conversationally recollected experience in French and Greek novels of First World War testimonial literature. The present analysis gives special emphasis to the way in which combatants reconstitute their knowledge of the trenches and the battlefront in the course of their conversations with civilians. Instead of a scrupulous reminiscence, such conversationally formulated testimonies present a specific version of combatants' reality, compatible with their recipients' beliefs on the war. The whole recollection process appears then to be the result of an underlying tension between combatants' testimonial identity and their competence to defend it before those who are expected to be the recipients of their recollected experience. The analysis of the discursive practices they use proves sufficiently that such a testimony is in fact a meta-memory which appropriates combatants' experiences to their identity claims. Oscillating between the transmissibility of combatants' life and their need to be present in the testimonial field, such a testimony finally formulates an eccentric discourse on the war, indicative of the representational dilemmas which are inherent not only in the narrative it is part of but in almost any literary testimony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines discursive forms of resistance used by a splinter group of a U.S. airline pilots' union in its campaign against a contract settlement supported by union leaders. Forms of resistance included oppositional tensions, military metaphors, and dualities that surfaced in central themes of the campaign. These discursive strategies revealed ironies of advocating unity while promoting division and arguing to eliminate a two-tiered pay scale while supporting class distinctions between pilots. These tactics were similar to and different from approaches that oppositional groups within conventional unions typically used. Overall, these strategies pitted pilots against pilots, professionals against professionals, union against union and suggested that organized resistance is constructed discursively, ironically and in tandem with routine resistance practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The power relationships and discursive strategies inherent in the interview as a mode of conversation, production and presentation are fundamental conditions for politics in the mediated public sphere. The journalistic interview sets the terms for politicians' public communication and appearances. This article is based on analyses of 124 broadcast news items which included interviews with Swedish politicians. The analyses are inspired by conversation analysis of news interviews. Discourse analysis, particularly the concepts of decontextualization and recontextualization, has also contributed to this study The results show that it is a widespread practice in television news to divorce answers from the preceding question. In news stories, political interviews are presented in a fragmentary form. This article focuses on four discursive strategies in the recontextualization of interview answers, whereby the original question is removed and substituted by something else. The analyses show how the recontextualization influences the meaning of both the answers and the interviewee's actions and character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community renewable energy promises to play an important role in reducing the generation and consumption of high carbon sources of power, as well as in demonstrating the viability of novel business models within a transformed energy system built on principles of locality and democracy. The paper argues, however, that community renewable energy, in England at least, remains marginal, undermined by changing government policies and underplayed institutional factors connected with technology and organisational legitimacy. The paper reports on interviews with 29 actors connected with community renewable energy in England. The analysis identifies themes implicating various types of legitimacy with the partial and uneven institutionalisation of community renewable energy. These are bound up with continuing and new institutional rules and the deployment of strategies for (de)legitimising community renewable energy, including associated technologies and organisational forms, adversely impacting on the potential contribution of community renewable energy to energy system transformation. • Novel focus on legitimacy-building in institutionalising community renewable energy. • Identifies legitimacy gaps faced by community renewable energy in England. • Uniquely analyses organisational and technology legitimacy and discursive practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]