Lifestyle migrants, the linguistic landscape and the politics of place (original) (raw)
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Narrative, Identities, and Experiences in Discourse Practices of Migrants
Spaces of Multilingualism
This innovative collection explores critical issues in understanding multilingualism as a defining dimension of identity creation and negotiation in contemporary social life. Reinforcing interdisciplinary conversations on these themes, each chapter is co-authored by two different researchers, often those who have not written together before. The combined effect is a volume showcasing unique and dynamic perspectives on such topics as rethinking of language policy, testing of language rights, language pedagogy, meaning-making, and activism in the linguistic landscape. The book explores multilingualism through the lenses of spaces and policies as embodied in Elizabeth Lanza's body of work in the field, with a focus on the latest research on linguistic landscapes in diverse settings. Taken together, the book offers a window into better understanding issues around processes of change in and of languages and societies. This ground breaking volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in multilingualism, applied linguistics, and sociolinguistics.
Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) is a transdisciplinary family of theoretical and methodological approaches, focusing on the analysis and critique of discursive practices in relation to broader ideological processes, as well as the material conditions that shape and are shaped by them (see Wodak and Meyer, 2016; Flowerdew and Richardson, 2017). A CDS approach can be seen as an extension of the Critical Linguistics framework (Fowler et al., 1979; Kress and Hodge, 1979) that developed in and out of Western European contexts. The main premise of the analyses developed from this perspective considers language not as a neutral descriptor of reality, but as an important instrument in the structuring of power relations in societies. Consequently, CDS strives to uncover how the legitimation of particular control mechanisms occurs, among others, through specific linguistic practices. In spite of its Western European core, and due to its decidedly problem- oriented nature, as well as the constant refinement and broadening of its analytical tools, CDS has progressively become appealing to the larger European continent, as well as to other Western and non- Western contexts such as the US, Australia, or China (Shi- Xu, 1999; Tracy et al., 2011).
Communication & Society, 2015
This article sheds light on the principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as an approach for uncovering power relations in the study of identity politics. To evaluate this approach, I draw from my experience investigating the role of language use and the meaning contained in the discourses reproduced in two main newspapers in Spain when referring to Spaniards in relation to immigrants from the Global South. Drawing from this case study, I argue that CDA is an invaluable approach when used to expose patterns of language use which allows for uncovering, vis-à-vis critical evaluation, the production of knowledge in society. However, using CDA involves developing a creative research design. A multidisciplinary and multimethodological approach, I argue, is desirable when researching in CDA to seek explanation, to fully uncovering and explaining obscured exploitative/unequal social power relations, and to enact social change.
This paper presents an analysis of discourses surrounding the representation of minority groups in newspapers and demonstrates how this discourse in turn constructs these groups" identity. The analysis took place in the context of a project looking at the representation of refugees and asylum seekers in UK newspapers. A corpus was built for the purposes of this study and comprises 140 million words (175,000 articles from 15 UK newspapers), spanning 1996-2005. The paper focuses on the contribution of corpus research to (critical) discourse analysis and, more specifically, on the collocational analysis of the words refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (RASIM). It does so by developing the notion of consistent collocates (akin to key keywords; i.e. collocates present in at least seven out of the ten annual subcorpora). Collocations are a suitable vehicle for the discoursal presentation of a group, because they can contribute to "a semantic analysis of a word" (Sinclair, 1991), and because "they can convey messages implicitly and even be at odds with an overt statement" . The analysis also employs the related notions of semantic preference, semantic prosody, and discourse prosody. The clustering of consistent collocations provides evidence of systematic semantic associations as well as metaphors commonly employed in racist discourse. Arguably, these patterns reveal elements of the underlying discourses relating to RASIM.
Negotiating Identity: Discourses of Migration and Belonging
2008
This study examines how highly proficient adult second language (L2) users of English in Australia construct and negotiate social belonging and exclusion. The data comes from a yearlong interview study of eight people who had migrated to Australia as adults and had spent a significant portion of their lives in Australia. The work takes a discourse analysis approach in order to examine how participants reify and contest belonging, including an examination of L2 learning success and Australian national identity. The research argues that the study of identity and L2 use must consider socio-historical context. It shows that even for highly proficient speakers, success in L2 learning is contested in interaction. In addition, through the examination of how participants see themselves in relation to the nation, it offers an insider perspective that has much to offer the development of language and migration policy in Australia.
M igrants and issues around immigration in the UK have attracted increased press attention in the last fi fty years. In academia, ample studies have been carried out on immigration from the sociological, political, journalistic and of course, discourse analytical point of view. Immigration discourses and their representation in media need to be considered in the light of new political, economic and social developments in the world,, e.g. the shifts from a bipolar world order to what came to be known as new world order, the emergence of new north-south constellations along with (real and/or constructed) threats of terrorism. Recent economic crisis in the 'north', increased critique of multiculturalism model and tensions in reconciling economic imperatives and socio-political ideologies have contributed to a tendency in the political spectrum of various European countries to shift towards more conservative orientations, identity convergence and foregrounding market orders , van Dijk 1991 for the most recent overview). This, in
Introduction. Contested Cultural Identities in Public Discourse
Contesting Europe's Eastern Rim, 2010
Europe's eastern rim has been in constant flux ever since the watershed year of 1989. Autocratic regimes have been replaced with stable democracies, and planned economies have given way to a free-market system comprising most of the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Whereas most of these nations swiftly embarked on a course toward EU accession, the countries of the former Yugoslavia plunged into ethnic and religious infighting that left the region paralyzed for years and has left a problematic legacy until today. Further east, Turkey's longheld ambitions to join the EU received yet another setback when it was sidelined during the 2004/2007 round of enlargement. These political and economic transformations have triggered fundamental redefinitions of cultural identity. Nations and social groups have had to reposition themselves and their relationship to others within newly emerging political landscapes. Although the enlarged EU has created a new closeness between neighbors that were formerly separated by impenetrable physical and ideological barriers, at the same time it has excluded others that feel like outsiders being left behind. The break-up of the former Yugoslavia has necessitated reformulations of statehood and international relations in the Balkans. We chose to call the area for this endeavor 'Europe's eastern rim'. With this metaphorical expression, we tried to avoid the widely used terms Mitteleuropa, Central Europe and Eastern Europe because each of these seems to imply different political and ideological conceptions for the countries from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean. Mitteleuropa is a historically loaded term that focuses on the eastern part of Europe from an Austrian and German perspective, with explicit or implicit hegemonic intentions. The term Central Europe, invented in the revolutions of 1848, designates a Central European federation without Prussian or Russian domination. It reemerged in the 1980s as a kind of spiritual home for many intellectuals. However, as Maria Todorova and other Balkan experts have shown, this term is also divisive. It does not include the regions of the Balkans, but pushes them further east toward present-day Russia. Eastern Europe, in turn, clearly suggests Russian and Soviet hegemony. Furthermore, in a purely geographical sense, Eastern xi xii Contesting Europe's Eastern Rim Europe extends to the Ural Mountains and includes countries outside our scope. We, on the other hand, explicitly wanted to include the area of the former Yugoslavia, most of which, as of 2009, does not have European Union membership. In this macro-region with its overwhelming diversity of ethnic, linguistic and religious groups, one can study, as though under a magnifying glass, how the still virulent backward movement of ethnocentric xenophobia has led to internecine conflicts and ethnic cleansing. Nonetheless, in each of these newly established countries, one can also observe that media and literature are making key contributions in the interchange of ideas toward a modern and tolerant form of civil society. Public discourse has been the main platform for negotiating transformations of cultural identity, both self-referentially and in relation to others. The aim of this book is to analyze some central themes of cultural identity construction and its transformation in public discourse. It develops the ideas of an international group of researchers on discourse analysis, initially discussed at various symposia and research projects organized by the editors (Manz et al., 2004). Our main concern in this book is discursive modes of identity construction (deconstruction, reconstruction, reformulation and invention) in the light of recent political changes in Europe, European Union enlargement and EU policy regarding southeast Europe. We focus on national and cross-national rhetorical strategies related to issues of transition within Europe. Our book examines issues surrounding the discursive creation of cultural identity and combines theory-oriented and empirical approaches. The analyses of specific national discourses also address general methodological questions concerning rhetorical strategies and national and crossnational characteristics that play a role in the discursive presentation of identity construction. The contributions to this volume provide a multinational and multilingual perspective on discourse analysis and discursive identity formation, focusing on how issues of identity formation arise in several European languages, particularly among less-studied languages such as Slovenian, Lithuanian, Polish and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Three closely connected issues surrounding the linguistic means of identity construction and reconstruction constitute the chief topics of this volume: (1) the relationships between 'insiders' and 'outsiders' in the ongoing process of EU enlargement, (2) the perception of southeast Europe and its various nationalities as 'good guys' and 'bad guys' and (3) European insiderness and outsiderness in literary representations. These topics naturally arise from the larger historical and political framework. Since the early 1990s, actual and potential enlargement has been a key issue in debates surrounding the EU. The former East Germany made an entry through the 'back door' during the German unification process in 1990. Five years later, Austria, Sweden and Finland followed. Except
The discursive construction of place-identity: british lifestyle migrants in the Algarve
2011
Chapter 4 Methodology, research site and exploratory research …………………..…. 66 4.1 Research orientation and methodological framework …………………………………………… 66 4.1.1 Research orientation and underlying assumptions ………………………………………..…. 66 4.1.2 The (socio-)cognitive approach to doing CDA ………………………………………………..…. 68 4.1.3 Incorporating Positioning Theory into the methodological framework ……….….… 70 4.2 Research design ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 73 4.2.1 Issues in qualitative research design …………………………………………………………..……. 73 4.2.2 Research design for this study ………………………………………………………………….……… 74 4.3 Research interviews: epistemological perspectives and methodological considerations……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 76 4.4 The research site …………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 79 4.4.1 The 'Golden Triangle' ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 80 4.4.2 Locating lifestyle migrants in the linguistic landscape of the Golden Triangle ….. 83 4.5 Profiling lifestyle migrants in the Algarve ………………………………………………………………. 89 4.5.1 Constructing the questionnaire ……………………………………………………………………….. 90 4.5.2 Questionnaire survey findings …………………………………………………………………….……. 93 Chapter 5 The interview data and methods of analysis …………………………………….. 101 5.1 Selecting research participants ……………………………………………………………………………… 101 5.1.1 Criteria for selecting participants ……………………………………………………………….…… 102 5.1.2 Other characteristics of the sample …………………………………………………………….….
European Identities in Discourse: A Transnational Citizens’ Perspective
European Journal of Communication, 2020
Given a relative lack of empiricism in the study of silence and absence so far, this collection, to a large extent, contributes to 'promote the empirical study of phenomena of discursive absences and to incorporate silence and absence as a line of enquiry in discourse studies' (p. 2). As a whole, it is an inspiring and well-organized volume. On the one hand, it is wide-ranging and diverse in content. Aside from bringing together a broad selection of essays pertinent to silence and absence, ranging from various media discourse to police interviews, it also presents cross-disciplinary studies on multiple issues, such as migration, national images, Middle East and North Africa (MENA) uprisings, discrimination of sexual minorities and environmental problems. On the other hand, it employs both quantitative and qualitative research in most chapters, and it also provides multitudinous methodological approaches, encompassing but not limited to content analysis, semiotic analysis, corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), framing, conversation analysis and diachronic analysis. Nevertheless, it would be more comprehensive and persuasive if more cases of meaningful silence discourse were offered and analysed, since 'most of the contributions deal with absence' (p. 10) on the basis of media discourse.