ABSTRACTThis study investigates the multimodal strategies used in social marketing to emotionally manipulate and persuade children and their parents to adopt healthier lifestyles. The UK government's anti-obesity ‘Change4Life’ campaign is an example of the increasing reliance on ‘nudge’ tactics in public policy. This approach seeks to develop a range of intervention strategies, inspired by behavioural psychology, in order to change people's behaviours without them necessarily recognising this has happened. I argue it is a form of governmentality which uses subtle semiotic (...) techniques to secure voluntary compliance with policy goals. I bring the concepts of biopolitics and governmentality into dialogue with multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine how this is realised in a series of cartoon government adverts. Three intersecting strategies are identified: the representation of lifestyles as delinquent a discourse of risk and threat mobilised through emotional manipulation and a discourse of ‘smarter’ consumerism. The increasing popularity of nudge over the last decade coincides with a sustained programme of fiscal austerity which disproportionately penalises the poor, while food poverty and social inequality have increased. I argue that it helps legitimate and instantiate neoliberal political rationalities by privatising responsibility for public health care. Despite the importance it places on communication strategies, critical scholarship on nudge has not yet investigated the linguistic techniques it uses in practice. This paper addresses that omission with a detailed multimodal analysis of the UK's longest running policy nudge. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe 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. (shrink)

Critical Discourse Analysis/studies has been applied in the study of news discourse for more than 30 years. In order to gain an in-depth understanding of the research in this field, this article uses the Web of Science core database to investigate their evolution and envision of the application of CDA/cds in news discourse. Moreover, CiteSpace is employed to draw visualization maps of scientific knowledge of this field, hoping to provide the meaningful guidance for the later research. The results are as (...) follows: The diversification and multi-dimension of theoretical approaches and analytical methods is a highlight of CDA applied in news discourse; Various theories of other disciplines combined with CDA have been embraced by news discourse such as journalism, ecology, politics, sociology, and cognitive psychology, which shows the advancement and diversification of interdisciplinary trends in news discourse; The application of CDA in news discourse covers various research domains from people’s livelihood issues to national strategic issues; The availability of emerging corpus analysis tools has helped the application of CDA in news discourse to spur on further discourse excursions with corpora, promoting the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the research advances in this field. (shrink)

Underpinned by the polemical idea that governments have redefined their role as a penal actor that prioritizes the practices of repressing, punishing, and confining people (instead of tackling the very complex root causes), this study scrutinizes how the press discursively collaborates with the State in ‘governing through crime’ (Simon, J. (2007). Governing through crime: How the war on crime transformed American democracy and created a culture of fear. Oxford University Press.). Drawing upon a corpus of Thai newspapers, the study analyzes (...) representational choices and identifies polarizing strategies in execution reports that serve to legitimize and neutralize the harshness of executions. The findings reveal that state-inflicted violence is mystified and downplayed by agent suppression and non-aggressive, judicially administered material processes. In contrast, executed individuals are dehumanized and their agency in sensational material processes foregrounded, which in turn constructs ideal victims. It is argued that this exaggerated, at times disturbing, dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’ serves to project an image of the State as the champion of citizens’ and victims’ interests. A shift from the use of fault-assigning and consequence-imposing discourses to more holistic ones that attend to offenders’ and victims’ commonalitiesshould be adopted. (shrink)

This paper discusses the role of reality television in the ongoing transformation of Swedish working-class discourse. This transformation is linked to a neoliberal political project and concerns a shifting relationship between discourses of exclusion and inclusion. The key argument is that working-class people are now portrayed through ‘a moral underclass discourse’ in which the working class is devalued and delegitimized, and given moral blame for their own structural situation. This discussion is based on a multimodal critical discourse analysis of participants (...) who appear to be ‘ordinary’ working-class people in Ullared, a docu-soap that follows the goings-on at, and in the vicinity of a popular, rural low-cost outlet. Hence it puts participants' consumption and consumer behaviour in the foreground, and these activities are ridiculed through a mode of production best described as the ‘middle-class gaze’. Ordinary participants are presented as flawed or pathological consumers and become signifiers of a morally flawed lifestyle. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study addresses the need for more research on news media representations of sexual assault within Critical Discourse Analysis. It focuses on the discursive links between victim-blaming in mainstream news coverage, on the one hand, and a neoliberal ideology that backgrounds structural issues while implicitly emphasizing an ethic of ‘personal responsibility’ for risk-management, on the other. The existing research in feminist media studies points to the way that media misrepresent gendered crime by individualizing cases and focusing on victim behaviour rather (...) than connecting sexual assault to systemic social issues based on power imbalance. Using coverage of the highly publicized 2013 Steubenville, Ohio rape as a case study, this article builds on existing research by performing a systematized, grammar-based analysis of transitivity and agency in news reports and demonstrating their often subtle connection with neoliberal notions of victimization and risk that align with the interests of perpetrators, especially when they are privileged social actors while placing the onus on victims, whose agency is used to imply blame. (shrink)