Critique, Habermas and narrative (genre): The Discourse-Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Studies

Narratives are everywhere. We tell narratives about ourselves and we make the world meaningful through storytelling. We position others through the narratives we tell and are positioned by stories told about us. And yet, while narratives have, of course, been analysed in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), including in one of its most popular approaches, the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), this article proposes to go a step further by systematically integrating the concept of narrative into the core of the DHA. More specifically, I consider narrative from the perspective of the concept of narrative genre. That is, I propose a focus on how meaning arises via the narrative genres of romance, tragedy, comedy and irony, i.e., through (modes of) emplotment. Such an integration does not contradict the DHA’s (and CDS’) focus on detailed textual analysis or reject existing foci, e.g. on argumentation, but recognises the centrality of the narrative form for social life and offers further concepts for empirical analyses. This focus on narrative genre contributes, furthermore, to the critical study of meaning-making by revising Jürgen Habermas’ Critical Theory and offering a novel integration of the latter into the DHA, thus providing a theoretically justified, immanent foundation for its critique.</div

Negotiating euthanasia: civil society contesting “the completed life”

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Far-right narratives of climate change acceptance and their role in addressing climate skepticism

As research on far-right climate change communication focuses on climate skepticisms, little is known about how the far-right justifies climate acceptance—and what this might mean for environmental education and counter-communication. To initiate a discussion of communicative strategies through which far-right actors might become more accepting of climate mitigation, we, first, reconstruct the narrative structure underlying far-right climate acceptance. Drawing on insights this reconstruction provides and assuming that such acceptance contains lessons for persuasive communication with far-right skeptics, we, second, discuss a number of axioms for counter-communication to be used in environmental education and teaching practice.</p

Far-right world ordering from the margins: Ethno-ecological degrowth and the nation in the Swiss Democrats’ discourse about the natural environment

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Far-right world ordering from the margins: Ethno-ecological degrowth and the nation in the Swiss Democrats’ discourse about the natural environment

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Against the promethean: Energy throughput and the far-right politics of degrowth

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Scepticisms and beyond? A comprehensive portrait of climate change communication by the far right in the European Parliament

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Prophet in the (degrowth) wilderness: Storytelling Herbert Gruhl as a far-right environmental lieu de mémoire

In this article, we further the understanding of the contemporary far right’s politics of theenvironment by analyzing the (re)construction of a key figure in the history of the modernenvironmental movement in Germany, Herbert Gruhl (1921-1993). The latter co-founded the Greenparty and, subsequently, two further right green organizations, as well as authoring bestsellingbooks on the environmental crisis. Articulating themes also found in today’s degrowth movement,Gruhl eschewed green capitalism, ‘globalism’, and technological fixes while advocating for arelationship between humans and the environment consistent with traditional conservativeprinciples of moderation and rootedness. Focusing on the far right’s storytelling of Gruhl-as-unheard-prophet – Gruhl as a lieu de mémoire of the contemporary German far right – we offer afirst systematic interrogation of stories regarding the prophet as a type in far-right environmentalcommunication more generally and, more specifically, on how his memorialization as a ‘sacredcenter’ reproduces contemporary far-right (eco-)politics, that is, the legitimation of such an agendaand the identities built through it. In so doing, we illuminate the far right’s story of the lostopportunity for a conservative/far-right ecology, one which was betrayed by the left-wing Greens, aswell as its own vision of an alternative eco-future.</p

Extreme right images of radical authenticity: multimodal aesthetics of history, nature and gender in social media

Over recent years, the German extreme right has undergone significant changes, including the appropriation of symbols, styles and action repertoires of contemporary (youth) cultures, sometimes even taken from the far left. In this article, we investigate extreme right visual communication through Facebook, focusing on their claims to truth and authentic Nazism in relation to ‘history’, ‘nature’ and ‘gender roles’. These themes were central in National Socialism, but today need to be (re)negotiated vis-a-vis contemporary (youth) cultures. We show that while a traditional notion of ideological authority is enabled through their visuals, there is also a strand of imagery depicting and celebrating ‘intimate’ communion. While this simultaneity leads to tensions within the ’ideal extreme right subject’, we argue that such dilemmas can be productive, allowing for the (re)negotiation of classic National Socialist doctrine in the context of contemporary (youth) cultures, and thus, potentially, for a revitalisation of its interpellation of followers

De/legitimising EUrope through the performance of crises: the far-right Alternative for Germany on “climate hysteria” and “corona hysteria”

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