10 research outputs found
Dialogicality and imaginings of two 'community' notice boards in post-apartheid Observatory, Cape Town
This article undertakes a poststructuralist multisemiotic analysis of posters and notices
found on two 'community' notice boards in the trendy, multicultural neighbourhood of
Observatory in Cape Town, South Africa. An analysis of the two notice boards endeavours
to reveal different strategic uses of English as well as varying constructions of
(transnational) place-making and community in Observatory. The two notice boards
reveal voices of transient and permanent groups alike and index new imaginative
constructions of this changing neighbourhood. Furthermore, this paper explores the
implications of strategic linguistic processes in self-marketisation of transnational
and 'local' community members in Observatory. We conclude by expounding on the
new perspective of transcultural capital and what it means to the sociolinguistics of
a super-diverse neighbourhood in the post-apartheid neighbourhood of Observatory
in Cape Town, South Africa.IS
The construction of identity through visual intertextuality in a Bohemian early modern travelogue
Cultural historians have long been concerned with visual sources. Their research has centred on ways of reading images and how they can most accurately be interpreted. This article focuses on an alternative aspect of these visual sources: on how images were made and used. It analyses how the identity of a Bohemian Catholic, Bed?ich z Donín, is constructed by his use of images in a travelogue based on his pilgrimage in the early 17th century. Highlighting the process of ‘visual intertextuality’, it claims that the ways in which Donín adopts and adapts visual images reveals his association with various affinity groups. The distinction between ‘actual’ and ‘habitual’ intertextuality is applied to the analysis of this historical source and shows how competing voices are present in the images. This article is an example of how historians can use the methodologies of semioticians to benefit their research
Revoltierende Frauen: Subversion und Medienrepräsentation in der Bundesrepublik und in Großbritannien
Revoltierende Frauen: Subversion und Medienrepräsentation in der Bundesrepublik und in Großbritannien
Shopping for a New Identity: Constructions of the Polish–German border in a Polish Border community
This article aims to show the varying constructions of the Polish–German border in the Polish border town of Zgorzelec. We are interested in how informants from three generations discursively position the frontier itself and the two towns on its either side: Polish Zgorzelec and German Görlitz. The data comes from a Europe-wide ethnographic project studying communities living on the borders between the European Union (EU) and its ascendant nations, funded by the European Commission's Fifth Framework Programme. We suggest that the inhabitants of Zgorzelec construct the border on two planes: public and private. In the public sphere, the border is constructed as a means of identifying ‘us Poles’ against all those living on the other side. In those nationalized terms, the border is also constructed as protecting Poland and Zgorzelec's (Polish) community. On the other hand, in the private sphere, the border is represented as virtually invisible allowing the individual to cross it for shopping or entertainment. The border becomes a gateway in which the individual becomes a customer, a shopper with his or her national identity pushed to the background. We also show that the two spheres intersect, creating spaces in which the two orders of discourse are made to co-exist and the discursive mechanisms of separation run next to the mechanisms of inclusion. We explore our informants’ discourses as mediated by the historical context of common experience (eviction, displacement, communism) pertaining mostly to the older generation and by the cultural-economic context (shopping, entertainment) largely in the case of our younger informants. (Sage Publications
A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press
This article discusses the extent to which methods normally associated with corpus linguistics can be effectively used by critical discourse analysts. Our research is based on the analysis of a 140-million-word corpus of British news articles about refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (collectively RASIM). We discuss how processes such as collocation and concordance analysis were able to identify common categories of representation of RASIM as well as directing analysts to representative texts in order to carry out qualitative analysis. The article suggests a framework for adopting corpus approaches in critical discourse analysis