Discourses in Action What Language Enables Us to Do Shaping Inquiry in Culture, Communication and Media Studies Series

This interdisciplinary collection brings together leading and emerging scholars of discourse, conceptualizing how discursive practices shape social, political, and even material realities today.

Discourses in Action presents a wide range of essays that explore fundamental concerns for the social consequences of text, talk, and discursively informed actions and possibilities of discursive engagement. It opens new perspectives on what language does and the differences that scholarly and practical contributions can make. Chapters cover diverse topics, ranging from political struggles, climate change, social revolutions, ethnicity, violence and other often unexpected patterns of discursive consequences. Its essays also explore the cultural contingencies that underlie discourse practices which are usually ignored when analysed from within a taken-for-granted culture.

Providing a useful examination of current discourse studies, this interdisciplinary volume is ideal for students and researchers within media, communication, discourse analysis, linguistics, cultural studies, and the sociology of knowledge.

Introduction:

Why Discourses in Action

Klaus Krippendorff

PART I Divergent Approaches to Discourse Analyses

Rachel Stonecipher

Analysing the Politics of Denial:

Critical Discourse Studies and the Discourse-Historical Approach

Ruth Wodak

Discourse as Ventriloquy:

A Pragmatic/Relational Analysis of Media as Agents

François Cooren

Discursive Construction:

A Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse Analysis

Reiner Keller

Discursive Psychology:

A Non-Cognitivist Approach to Practices of Knowing

Jonathan Potter

PART II Three Prototypical Studies of Discourses in Action

Nour Halabi

Re-Contextualizing Visual Representations:

The Videos Of and About Police Accountability in Three Competing Discourses

Mary Angela Bock

Discourses for Transformation?

Activism, Climate Change, Power and Pathways to the Future

Anabela Carvalho

The Circulation of Constitutional Discourse

Greg Urban

Cultural Contingencies of Discursive Practices

Kate Zambon

Competing Discourses of Power and Resistance:

The Cultural Contexts of the Shifting Revolutionary Rhetoric in Egypt

Sahar Khamis

One Case, Two Verdicts:

The Vertical Interplay of Authoritative Discourses in China

Hailong Tian

Discourses of Dissent:

The Role of Speech and Action in Israeli Grassroots Activism

Tamar Katriel

Klaus Krippendorff (Ph.D., Ph.D.h.c) is the Gregory Bateson Professor for Language, Cybernetics, and Culture at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. He pioneered work on communication theory, content analysis, and methods of design semantics. As a critical scholar he examines discursive constructions of realities and paths of liberation from oppression.

Nour Halabi (Ph.D.) is a Lecturer of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds and the Vice-Chair of the MeCCSA Race Network. Her interdisciplinary research examines the interactions between mobility, social movements and global media. She received her doctorate from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and her Masters from The London School of Economics.