“She uses men to boost her career” : Chinese digital cultures and gender stereotypes of female academics in Zhihu discourses

Portrayed by the media as the story of “how a female PhD juggles intimate relationship with four male PhD academics”, the LM incident, named after the female main character of the story, was a high-profile case, which provoked public debates on Chinese social media in 2019. In this article, we explore how the stereotyping of female PhDs plays out in Chinese Internet users’ discussions about the LM incident. We collected a total of 632 relevant posts from the most popular Chinese community question-answering (CQA) site – Zhihu and analysed them by drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA). The research findings reveal how a sexualised portrayal of female PhDs, which is dramatically “different” from the traditional, asexual stereotypes of well-educated women, is established in Zhihu users’ postings. Many Zhihu users, including both women and men, mobilise an overwhelmingly sexualised portrayal of female PhDs, which speaks to the normalisation of patriarchal discourses in the status quo of Chinese academia and beyond. The research findings shed light on post-socialist gender politics, which facilitates the perpetuation of gender essentialism in China in the post-reform era

The Representation of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in British newspapers during the Balkan conflict (1999) and the British general election (2005).

This article is a CDA investigation into the representation of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants during two major events: the Balkan conflict in 1999 and the British general election in 2005 as reflected in British newspapers. The article is part of a larger project on the representation of these groups of people between 1996 and 2006 in British newspapers. The study shows that while there are major similarities in the micro-linguistic categories used in representations of these groups in these two periods, e.g. the metaphors, the overall communicated messages are not similar and the macro-structural contexts behind the processes of interpretation of these discourses play a determining role in transferring certain `meanings'. The research also shows that while newspapers have different strategies in their representations due to their political standpoints, in some important ways they all contribute to a similar construction of these people

Self and other representation in discourse : a critical discourse analysis of the conflict over Iran 's nuclear programme in the British and Iranian newspapers

The row over Iran's nuclear programme is one of the most publicized international political controversies. By January 2006, the stand-off between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the West extraordinarily intensified after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new president of Iran, makes some controversial and confrontational remarks against Israel and the West while the country re-opens its nuclear enrichment facilities. The present study attempts to account for this specific cross section of the stand-off and explain how either side of the row: Iran and the West positively construct and legitimate the position of Self while negatively construct and de-legitimate the position of the Other. The body of data analysed in the research is taken from a sample of British and Iranian newspapers. On the British side, The Times and the Guardian are selected to represent the country's conservative and liberal perspectives' while on the Iranian side, Keyhaan and Shargh are selected as representing the country's radical conservative and reformist perspectives respectively. The study adopts a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach in its overall structure while specifically focusing on the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) in terms of its discourse/text analytical methods. The DHA's analytical categories of Referential, Predicational and Argumentative strategies are investigated in detail in the entire British and Iranian selected texts to capture the main discursive trends in Self and Other construction and (de)legitimization. In the meantime, the implication of other linguistic analytical categories for example, the function of presupposition and recontextualization in discourses of Iranian and British newspapers are investigated. The overall findings emerging from the extensive textual analyses of the study indicate that there are two discursive/ideological approaches in legitimating the position of Self in the Iranian newspapers: a macro-legitimatory approach which encapsulates the issue of Iranian nuclear programme within a broad (global) ideological confrontation between Iran and the West and a micro-legitirnatory approach which isolates the issue and accentuates the (local) legitimatization of Iran's nuclear activities within the international frameworks such as the NPT. The overall findings emerging from the extensive textual analyses of the British newspapers indicate that the legitimation of the Self is largely pursued via construction and de-legitimation of the Other as an imminent threat. The construction of such threat relies, synchronically, on the news discourses emerging from Iran e.g. the hostile remarks of its president and diachronically, on a body of assumed shared knowledge which are treated as background information. The conservative approaches (advocated by the British, The Times and the Iranian, Keyhaan) generally rely on negative Other presentation and de-legitimation of the adversary rather than legitimization of the position of the Self. As a general trend, macro-political approaches, advocated by both (radical) conservative papers on both sides are the dominant tendencies in the row while more pluralistic and inclusive approaches of the (more) liberal papers function on the periphery. The study concludes that despite ardently drawing on the role of international organizations such as the UN and the IAEA, the row is essentially a political and ideological confrontation.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

The representation of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in British newspapers : a critical discourse analysis.

The paper is a CDA investigation on discursive strategies employed by various British newspapers between 1996-2006 in the ways they represent refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants. The period covers several world events which have impacted such representation, creating a large number of articles on and/or about these groups. A combination of quantitative and qualitative down-sampling technique is then devised to restrict the number of articles to a sensitive sample which takes into account the newspapers' ideological stands; conservative/liberal, their types; quality/tabloid and the relevant world events. The paper discusses some of the salient issues in the ways these groups of people are represented in British newspapers during these 10 years and shows that despite differences — arising from differences in ideological viewpoints and their types — in some important ways all the newspapers contribute to construct refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in similar ways

Actor descriptions, action attributions, and argumentation : towards a systematization of CDA analytical categories in the representation of social groups.

CDA studies on out-groups, i.e. immigrants, within Wodak's Discourse-Historical and van Dijk's Socio-cognitive approaches along other approaches, have suggested methods and analytical categories through which discursive representations of social groups are investigated. Consequently, several listings of relevant analytical categories have been proposed and applied to many subsequent studies. However, the variety of the proposed methods in representation of social groups by various scholars and the often unclear accounts for the links among various levels of discourse analysis seem to have created a multitude of discursive strategies that can be overwhelming if not confusing. This paper is an attempt to make explicit various levels of discourse analysis on representation of social groups from detailed textual analysis to discourse topics and tries to show how micro-level analytical categories are related to macro-structure within various levels of contexts. Specifically, a three-level analytical framework is suggested for textual analysis of the representation of social groups which divides the text analysis into three domains of social actors, social actions and argumentation. It is suggested that the analysis should look at what is (not) in the text in terms of the three domains mentioned, and investigate how these domains are linguistically realized through a set of linguistic processes/mechanisms

Cultural Value: Memorialisation as valuation - Examining public culture at the Chattri Indian Memorial, Brighton

Report to AHRC on project #AH/L005859/