Discourse Theory

Although they belong to different spheres, popular culture and populism can in some cases become intertwined and interlocked because they are both built around the antagonism between people and elite. Populist parties are often happy to associate themselves with popular culture as this allows them to strengthen their bond with the (signifier) people. This article looks at an inverse movement: the contestation of a populist party's claim on the people through popular culture. It analyzes the discursive struggle between the Flemish extreme-right populist party Vlaams Belang and 0110. On 1 October 2006, a series of concerts “for tolerance, against racism, against extremism, and against gratuitous violence” featuring many of Belgium's most popular artists from all kinds of genres, were held in four Belgian cities. The article shows how the organization behind the 0110 concerts managed to turn popular culture against the Vlaams Belang, thus questioning this party's claim on the signifier “people”.

Creating a mechanism for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD+) in tropical developing countries has become, from 2005 onward, a central element in international climate protection discourse. The goal is to create financial incentives for forest protection by making avoided deforestation a tradable good that can be sold on the carbon market or to government funds. A discourse-analytical perspective on the process of commodification and market creation is developed in order to assess how avoided deforestation is being made tradable. Going beyond existing approaches, such a perspective enables us to highlight the contestedness and contingency of the commodification and market creation process. The extent to which on-going qualification and commensuration practices can result in a disentanglement of avoided deforestation as tradable good is discussed, and one of the consequences of a successful commodification of avoiding deforestation – the carbonification of forests – is highlighted.

"Community informatics (CI) is a form of activism that involves the application of information and communication technologies in pursuit of community development within localities. This article draws on discourse theory (DT) to re-evaluate activists’ self-interpretations that rely on community, and to make sense of the political struggles at the heart of CI. It is argued that activists’ community discourse constructs, through articulation, locally “resistant” collective identities and an associated collective agency capable of appropriating technology in pursuit of unfulfilled social demands. However DT also suggests that the socially progressive nature of CI is not guaranteed by recourse to the social ideal of community."

European marriage rates have been steadily declining since the 1960's, a part of the second demographic transition largely attributed to the individualization of values. In 1998, Swedish marriage rates reversed into an incline, surpassing the European average in 2004. This reverse is particularly interesting as Sweden has been an international forerunner in the second demographic transition since the 1960’s. As Sweden remain highly individualized, a theoretical gap in the relationship between marriage rates and individualization is exposed. This thesis argue that ideational individualization is insufficiently theorized if understood as a set of erosive values, and must instead be considered a mode of discursive organization to account for its complex consequences. To demonstrate this empirically, three focus groups of young Swedish adults were employed to produce normative discourse data. Analysis of this data shows how the contemporary Swedish marriage is discursively organized in such a way that it cannot be understood as endangering individualized values. Due to the individualization of the marriage institution, and social organization in general, it may no longer be a matter of about marrying in spite of individualization but because of individualization.

"In media studies, the phrase “media discourse” has been used frequently in recent years. However, despite the numerous (predominantly successful) attempts to define the discourse in Czech and Slovak media studies, the meaning of media discourse remains unreflected. Contemporary media are evolving so dramatically, that referring to the media discourse as a conceptually neutral entity, as a base for consistent media theory, can be found problematic. Despite the power of media organizations, compared to individualised nature of audiences, is indisputable (so media has power to promote “its” discourse effectively), working with the concept of homogeneous media discourse can be considered to naturalise the perspective of media as the only originator of its discourse, thus masking the fact, that media are rather specific mediators of discourses articulated across culture. In this article, author considers the current options of the definition of media discourse (mainly by confronting it with related terms, briefly discussing the interdiscursive relations and explaining the mediation/mediatization difference) and he argues for the preferring the terms mediated/mediatized discourse instead in a contexts specified.

Kewords: media discourse – mediated discourse – mediatized discourse – interdiscursivity – mediatization – terminology"

This chapter aims to develop an approach which provides methodological justifications for an analysis of hegemonic construction of Kemalist discourse in the context of Turkish political history. The proposed approach, basing itself on Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory and their concept of hegemony, attempts to display the discursive construction of Kemalist identity and the ways in which the discursive formations articulate themselves into a collective imaginary of identity. To realize this objective, the chapter is divided in three sections. The first section delineates the key concepts and assumptions of the discourse theory. The second one is organized around the question of why Kemalism should be analyzed through the key concepts and tools of discourse theory, and attempts to justify the theoretical position taken concerning this question. It also explains the basic assumptions behind the thesis that Kemalism is to be understood as a hegemonic discursive formation. Final section focuses on the theoretical and empirical implications of the proposed approach to Kemalist discourse.

"
This chapter examines the relation of discourse and media by staging an encounter between heterodox Marxisms. In recent decades, a body of theory known loosely as “autonomism” has emerged out of Post-Operaist movements and debates in Italy. Autonomism can be seen as a reading of Marx paralleling and occasionally engaging with Post-Marxism (more specifically, Ernesto Laclau). This chapter puts these traditions in sustained dialogue around key concepts (language/materiality, hegemony, constituent power, antagonism). It then presents an analysis of contemporary media practices stemming from the theoretical engagement. What types of media subjects, forged via antagonism and striving towards democracy, emerge from these engagements with (post)Marx?
"

When Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe published an elaborate version of their discourse theory in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), they were met with fierce resistance by a unified front of traditional Marxists and anti-poststructuralists. The debates on post-Marxism dominated much of the book's reception. This focus, combined with discourse theory's rather abstract nature, its lack of clear methodological guidelines, and its more natural habitat of Political Studies, caused discourse theory to remain confined to this realm of Political Studies, despite the broad ideological definition of the political preferred by the authors. This article aims to revisit discourse theory and bring it into the realm of Media Studies. A necessary condition to enhance discourse theory's applicability in Media Studies is the re-articulation of discourse theory into discourse theoretical analysis (DTA). DTA's claim for legitimacy is supported in this article by two lines of argument. Firstly, a comparison with Critical Discourse Analyses (CDA) at the textual and contextual level allow us to flesh out the similarities — and more importantly — the differences between CDA and DTA. Secondly, DTA's applicability is demonstrated by putting it to work in a case study, which focuses on the articulation of audience participation through televisional practices. Both lines of argument aim to illustrate the potential, the adaptability and the legitimacy of DTA's move into media studies.

"This paper focuses on questions of interdisciplinary exchange regarding methods for collecting research material. The specific focus is on initiating a creative dialogue between political discourse theory (PDT) and contemporary socio-cultural anthropology. The aim is to highlight the need for the extension of the critical work already being undertaken in political discourse theory at the levels of epistemological grounding, theory construction and political analysis, to the practice of doing fieldwork, i.e. the moment of the researcher’s setting off on a journey from the desk to an—always puzzling—out there in the field of research.

Key words:
Political discourse theory, socio-cultural anthropology and cultural critique, fieldwork and ethnographic sensibility, interdisciplinarity and research methods, articulation"