The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a unique global experience, arousing both exclusionary nationalistic and inclusionary responses of solidarity. This article aims to explore the discursive and linguistic means by which the COVID-19 pandemic, as a macro-event, has been translated into local micro-events. The analysis studies the global pandemic through the initial statements of 29 leading political actors across four continents. The aim is to examine discursive constructions of solidarity and nationalism through the social representation of inclusion/exclusion of in-, out-, and affiliated groups. The comparative analysis is based on the theoretical and methodological framework of the socio-cognitive approach to critical discourse analysis and is informed by argumentation theory and nationalism studies. The results of our analysis suggest that leaders have constructed the virus as the main outgroup through the metaphors of the pandemic-as-war and the pandemic-as-movement which have entered the national space. Faced with this threat, these speeches have discursively constructed the nation-as-a-team as the main in-group and prioritized (1) a vertical type of solidarity based on nationhood and according to governmental plans; (2) exclusionary solidarity against rule-breakers; (3) horizontal solidarity that is both intergenerational and among family members, and (4) transnational solidarity. It is not by chance that the world stands as a relevant affiliated group that needs to forcibly collaborate in order to face the main outgroup, the virus itself. A major consensus has been found in constructing the out-group. In contrast, the linguistic and discursive constructions of in-groups and their affiliates display a greater variation, depending upon the prevalent discursive practices and social context within different countries.
Reviewed by Nancy HenakuWomen Leaders and Gender Stereotyping in the UK Press: A Poststructuralist Approach is the latest of Judith Baxter's numerous works exploring the intersections between language, women and leadership. The six-chaptered book has four main purposes. First, it explores gendered representations of women leaders from varied professions (that is, politics, business and entertainment media) in selected UK newspapers. Second, it examines constructions of women leaders across the 'feminist agenda spectrum' , a framework that identifies a range of implied attitudes towards feminism in press representations of female leaders. Here, Baxter identifies articles that are profeminist, gender-neutral and antifeminist. Third, it explores the contributions of three critical perspectives -namely, Kanter's leadership stereotype, feminist agenda spectrum and the reflexive approach -in analysing gendered discourses. Finally, it explores the potentialities of the reflexive approach in examining newspaper texts.Informed by feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis (FPDA), Baxter examines samples of a corpus comprising a hundred articles, collected over twenty-four months, from three UK newspapers: the Daily Mail, a centreright tabloid newspaper; the Sunday Times, a middle-ground broadsheet and the Guardian, a centre-left, mid-sized newspaper. Baxter's selection of these newspapers is described as 'semi-ethnographic' (p. 13); thus, the selected texts are not meant to be representative of the politics and readership of all British newspapers (p. vii). However, Baxter's analysis reinforces (and
The hyper-circulation of people under contemporary globalism presents liminality as a sociocultural fact of our time-a situation that does not only necessitate a rethinking of contemporary sociolinguistic theory but also raises critical questions about identity, space/place, and their interconnections. Roberta Piazza's edited collection furthers this discussion in twelve chapters-some of which were presented at the 2016 conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics-that explore the complex construction of place-identity in narrative. The collection's interdisciplinary, multithematic, and transcontextual approaches are its main strengths. The collection makes two main interventions. First, while extant discussions emphasize place-identity in relation to migration, this collection captures a diversity of contexts in highlighting social inequalities that accompany processes of displacement. It includes analysis relating to tourism, heritage, and business (chapters 4, 10), mental health (chapter 11), language learning (chapter 8), media (chapter 12), mobility and diasporic identities (chapters 1, 2, 3, 5), geospatial/ geopolitical peripherality (chapter 6), and urban/language policy and planning (chapters 7, 9). Besides ideology and power, affect, memory, and economics are recurring themes in many chapters. Second, the collection's exploration of place-identity through the conceptual lens of 'liminality'-an emphasis that has also not been explored in existing scholarship-provides new ways of discursively examining the dynamism of identity in late modernity. It comprises two main sections. The first (chapters 1-5) explores the connections between identity, place/space, and liminality through Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotope. Here, chronotope becomes a resource for discursively constructing and negotiating identities, as in the case of Mapuche migrants in (urban) Santiago who deploy 'a chronotope of the South' to 'authenticate' their (rural) Mapuche ethnic identities (chapter 1), or that of a Portuguese returnee who expresses desire for relocation and association with her homeland pre-and post-return through deployments of 'narrating' and 'narrated' chronotopes (chapter 2). The second section (chapters 6-12) explores liminal place-identity in the context of institutional power. Many of the chapters here have implications for policymaking and implementation. This is evident in Judith Yoel's (chapter 9) discussion on road signage in Israel as a dimension of Zionist-informed language policy and planning that marginalises Arabic. The collection reimagines sociolinguistics research beyond immediate locality and temporality, typified in Tope Omoniyi's & Lukasz Daniluk's analysis of
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