Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1049

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

The language of racism and anti-racism: constructing ideology on the web

Authors: Ioannidou, Elena (1); Christou, Miranda (2)
Submitted by: Ioannidou, Elena (University of Cyprus, Cyprus)

This paper analyzes and compares racist and anti-racist discourse in media texts in order to lay out the discursive strategies used by different groups in describing, defining and defending their ideology. The paper focuses on the way these groups use language to establish boundaries between the self and the other and to construct their social identities as members of the specific electronic communities. More specifically, we analyze and compare the website content of 2 self-identified nationalist/racist youth groups and 2 self-identified anti-racist groups in Greece and Cyprus to examine how language is used as a means of positioning, and to construct and promote their ideological space. Both countries have recently experienced big waves of economic and political migration especially in the urban centres, which resulted in the surface of new political discourses regarding dichotomies such as national/global, local/foreign, purity/multiplicity. At the same time, various electronic communities emerged which adopted a racists or anti-racists discourse and claimed opposing social identities.

Data collection and analysis was theoretically informed on the interplay between language, ideology and power (Fairclough, 1995a), focusing specifically on one type of discourse (media text) and its ideological construction of reality. While we focused mostly on website material, our analysis of textual meaning was not divorced from the contexts of production and consumption (Jiwani & Richardson, 2011). A multi-modal approach in the analysis of visual grammar (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001) was also employed especially in the cases of racist websites (Richardson & Wodak, 2009). Furthermore, we point out that while many studies have analyzed racist talk (e.g. Reisigl & Wodak, 2001) fewer publications have examined anti-racist arguments or compared them with racist strategies.

Data analysis was conducted based on the framework of Reisigl & Wodak’s (2001) work on discourse and discrimination:

1.    Referential Strategies
2.    Predicational Strategies
3.    Argumentation
4.    Perspectivization
5.    Explicitness of utterances.

Our preliminary analysis shows that there are similarities (victimization) but also differences (appeal to the rule of law by anti-racists vs appeal to local history by racists) between the discourse strategies used by the two groups. We also point out how the use of commonplaces, that is, principles which speak for themselves (Billig 1987) is an effective strategy by anti-racist groups that aims at overcoming their inherently contradictory arguments.

References:

Billig, M. (1987). Arguing and Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Castells, Manuel (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Fairclough, N (1985) Critical Discourse Analysis. Harlow: Longman

Fairclough, N (1995) Media Discourse. London: Arnold.

Jiwani, Y. & Richardson, J.E. “Discourse, Ethnicity and Racism” in T.A. van Dijk (Ed.) Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. London: Sage.

Kress, G.R. & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Reading images: the grammar of visual design. New York: Routledge.

Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2001). Discourse and Discrimination. Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. London: Routledge.

Richardson, J.E. & Wodak, R. (2001). The impact of visual racism: visual arguments in political leaflets of Austrian and British far-right parties. Controversia, 6 (2): 45-77.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

The language of racism and anti-racism: constructing ideology on the web