Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications

This paper focuses on the display of identity on Facebook, and more specifically on how undergraduate students in Cardiff, Wales say they express identity on their profiles.  The theoretical context of this study are observed processes of change in the way we play out identity through what have been described as globalisation, deterritorialisation, and the rise of lifestyle consumer society.  The paper is based on an analysis of responses from a questionnaire and interviews with 100 students from Media and Communication degrees at the University of Glamorgan.  The data collection is designed to indicate what kinds of self categorisation are used.  This data is analysed using one tool from Critical Discourse Analysis, by Machin and Van Leeuwen (2008).  The paper shows that we find a range of identity categories, some that are based around a biological model of national identity, while others focus on a belonging to a territory, others on national cultural activities, and yet others link to lifestyle identity.  What is most notable in this Welsh sample is the high use of nationalist identity categories and biological ethnic classification alongside other lifestyle identities.

Bouvier, G. (2014) "British Press Photographs and the Misrepresentation of the 2011 "Uprising" in Libya: A Content Analysis", In: D. Machin (ed) Visual Communication. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 281-299. British Press Photographs and the misrepresentation of the 2011'uprising' in Libya: a content analysis

The wider field of discourse studies is still only beginning to turn its attention to social media despite a number of notable scholarly works. But as yet there has been little that has dealt specifically with issues of multicultural discourse – how language, identity, cross-cultural social relations and power play out in the rapidly evolving landscape of social media. In this paper, I show why discourse studies must engage with theories and empirical work on social media across academic fields beyond discourse studies and linguistics, at how these can help best frame the kinds of research that needs to be done, how to best formulate some of the basic questions of critical discourse analysis for this new communicative environment. I use this as a platform to point to the areas where multicultural discourse studies can work – where all the ambiguities of former studies of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ are present, but realised in new ways. Yet these new forms of communication are fused into wider patterns of changing cultural values about forms of social structure, knowledge itself and the kinds of issues that tend to form our individually civic spheres.

While there have been debates within gender studies on the gendering of the body and of the gendered nature of clothing, this paper shows that multimodality, with its attention to the  finer details of communication, can provide a way to help us to think more carefully about how fashion communicates ideas and identities through textile affordances such as form, texture, weight, durability, colour, etc. Taking hijab fashion in Egypt as a case in point, a multimodal approach is able to reveal how Muslim women use clothing to communicate a number of different discourses simultaneously. These include modesty, religious identity and tradition, on the one hand, and freedom, confidence and modernity, on the other.  This analysis allows us both to problematise the monolithic representations of Islamic clothing usually found in Western media, and also to think more carefully about the ways in which clothing both constrains and enables women’s agency.

Media scholars have called for more research to understand the consequences of news outlets becoming increasingly reliant on social media for sourcing stories, and how this is changing the nature of news and the role of the journalist. This also has high relevance for the Critical Discourse Analyst as regards processes of attributing the nature of ideology, where there is a shift away from stories derived from elite sources and official organizations. Using a sample of 26 news stories and a corpus of 40,000 tweets from a feed called #twowomentravel, which dealt with the journey of two women travelling from Ireland to the United Kingdom for an abortion, this paper uses Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to investigate how the discourses from the feed are taken up by the journalists. Findings show an erosion of some of the basic former aspects of journalistic practice related to verification and provision of context as what is “trending” becomes a news definer. Yet those with the skills to understand how it is integrated into news production may use this to disseminate their own ideology.

This article takes a multimodal discourse approach to women's fashion in the Middle East. It places the Islamic abaya in the UAE in the context of the wider literature on fashion and identity, exploring the way in which clothing features and forms can prescribe ideas, values and attitudes, and framing this discussion within newer ideas on globalization. As Roland Barthes argued, it is not so much personal choice or diversity in fashion that is of interest, but the kinds of values and expected behaviours that they imply. The abaya, on the one hand, represents a more newly arrived idea of traditional , local and religious identity, linking to some extent to an imagined sense of a monolithic notion of Islamic clothing. But, on the other hand, this is itself reformulated locally through international representations, ideas and values, and integrated with newer ideas of taste. K e y w O R D s

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a particular strand of discourse analysis that focuses on the role of language in society and in political processes, traditionally targeting texts produced by elites and powerful institutions, such as news and political speeches. The aim is to reveal discourses buried in language used to maintain power and sustain existing social relations. However, since the internet and social media have come to define much of the way that we communicate, this brings numerous challenges and also opportunities for CDA. The relationship between text and ideology, and between the author and reader, appears to have changed. It is also clear that new methods are required for data collection, as content takes new forms and also moves away from running texts to language that is much more integrated with forms of design, images, and data. Also, new models are required to address how the technologies themselves come to shape the nature of content and discourse.

This chapter reviews key themes that have emerged across scholarship on social media and political activism, focusing on Twitter in particular. This body of work looks at Twitter as a platform in terms of how it works and whether it offers much for the needs of activists. It looks at its potential to give voice to those formerly excluded by traditional top-down monolithic media and the extent to which this can increase citizen engagement, civic debate and democratic processes. The chapter also highlights concerns as to how social media can foster more restricted levels of debate, which may be rather insular and driven by influencers. And finally, it raises the need to question what it means when we give such platforms and the logics and forms of communication such a central role in how we run our societies.

The collection of chapters on Twitter brought together in this volume each addresses a nexus of pressing research challenges in media and communication studies. At the core lies matters related to media consumption of reconfigured social lives with social media at their heart, new formations of citizenship, and shifts in how we go about social and political debate. This collection of chapters seeks to make a key contribution to these pressing issues that our societies simply need to understand as it is the very quality of our civic culture that is at stake. This cuts across media production, distribution and consumption, reconfigured social lives with social media at their heart, new formations of citizenship and shifts in how we go about social and political debate.

In this paper, we use Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to look at the posts of influencers using parenting hashtags on Chinese Weibo. It has been observed that motherhood more widely has become a site of discursive tension, often played out online. In this case, we find such tension between former, more Confucian roles of motherhood, related to duty and knowing one’s place, and a more recently arrived influence of neoliberalism. On the one hand, the hashtags provide a sense of community for stay-athome mothers who have given up their careers, but on the other, the influencers configure this duty and obligation into something based on striving, individual success and self-management. They appear to play a role in helping this ideology enter into the family.

Gendered identities are communicated in places as frequent and ordinary as food packaging, becoming mundane features of everyday life as they sit on supermarket shelves, in cupboards and on office desks. Multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) allows us to investigate how such identities are buried in packaging in relation to health and fitness. Despite observed broader changes in gendered representations of the body in advertising, in particular relating to the arrival of ‘power femininity’, the products analysed in this article are found to carry fairly traditional and prototypical gender representations, and products marketed at both men and women highlight the need for more precise body management. For women, however, this precision is related to managing the demands of everyday life, packaged as a moral imperative to be healthy, responsible and successful.

Twitter campaigns attacking those who make racist or xenophobic statements are valuable, raising the public profile of opinions that will not tolerate racism in any form. They also indicate how our major institutions are failing to address important matters of social justice. But there is concern that social media, such as Twitter, tends to extremes, moral outrages, lack of nuance and incivility, which shape how issues become represented. In this paper, using Critical Discourse Analysis, we look at three Twitter hashtags calling-out racist behaviour. We ask how racism and anti-racism is represented on these hashtags? We show how these misrepresent fundamental aspects of racism in society, distracting from, what race theorists would argue, is the most important thing these incidents tell us about racism at this present time. The findings have consequences for all such Twitter social justice campaigns.

This paper uses a social semiotic approach to analyse the posts of women fitness experts/influencers on Chinese Weibo. On the posts, we find a harmonized world where all parts of life can be managed by making the right choices and by having a striving attitude. Here, success and happiness become tasks to be worked on. Yet this is a decontextualized world, where there is no room for actual situations and dispositions. We discuss how these representations can be related to rising neoliberal ideas, values, and identities among the new Chinese middle classes, which, in these instances, are used to create a rather overdetermined stance against more traditional Confucian women’s roles with an emphasis on caring, knowing one’s position, and kinship obligations. But the one-size-fits-all rhetoric of empowerment, getting-ahead and choice leaves little room for sharing the actual restrictions, conflicts, and struggles faced by these women.

Social media content is diverse, ranging from political and social commentary to more mundane, every day, ‘soft’ content. Here we argue that all of this content, at core, is ideological and political. Communication about everyday events, actions, issues and people articulates dominant (and sometimes alternative) ideological discourses about the nature of our society. Arguably, even the most banal comments are infused with norms and values, with scripts about what should be done, what is important and what is not, based on discourses about how we should run our societies. It is in these banal and everyday instances of communication that deeper senses of who we are, and values and judgements about the social order, reside. Using a range of examples from Weibo, such as anti-Trump posts, women fitness influencers, and posts about gender inequalities in the workplace, we argue for the importance and value of looking for politics in all kinds of social media comments and platforms, not so much in terms of formal politics, but a more banal and everyday kind. This means looking deeper at all individual instances, even if at first glance they appear to represent a counter point or marginalised voices.

Studies point to the positive role Twitter can play in social justice campaigns. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper looks in detail at one such case: a racist call-out in Canada, which trended on Twitter in many countries leading to its coverage in mainstream media outlets. It had the characteristics, labelled at the time by critics, of ‘cancel culture’, where there were calls for sackings and boycotts. This analysis demonstrates that there should be caution in regard to how social media platforms such as Twitter are able to lead in such matters of social justice. The paper shows how its affordances can work against coherent and careful discussion, fostering fast, simplified, contradictory commentary, where individual tweets load a range of different concerns onto a specific instance. In this particular case, this results in an individualization of racism, which therefore becomes decontextualized and depoliticized. While those tweeting revel in and enjoy their shared moral position, actual endemic structural racism in society remains invisible, and they misrepresent, arguably, the key question that this racist outburst raises.

From the news photographs of Alabama police officers setting dogs on African American civil rights marchers, to the images of women throwing their make-up into trashcans outside the Miss America pageant in New Jersey, to the pamphlets used by 1980s anti-nuclear war demonstrators to disseminate word about the next protests: technology has always played an important role in social movements. With the advent of social media, the role of technology has not only become more important but has also fundamentally changed how people communicate. This has resulted in a shift in the organization and dissemination of activist ideas and subsequent mobilization to action. This shift has been described and critiqued in a variety of ways but the framework that best captures how activism and our understanding of it has changed, and that forms the starting point of this Themed Section, is the logic of connective action …