244 research outputs found
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Electronic supplement analysis of multiple texts: Exploring discourses of UK poverty in Below the Line comments
This paper adapts OâHalloranâs (2010) electronic supplement analysis (ESA) to investigate debates about UK poverty in online newspaper articles and reader responses to those articles. While OâHalloranâs method was originally conceived to facilitate close reading, this paper modifies ESA for corpus-based discourse analysis by scaling it up to include multiple texts. I analyse (key-)keywords and concordances to compare seven articles from the Mail Online (2010-2015) with their 2354 reader responses generated using the newspapersâ Below the Line (BTL) comments feature. The analysis provides a snapshot of the discourses BTL commenters draw upon when writing about UK poverty. Unemployment, benefits receipt, and single parenthood were repeatedly referred to in the newspaper articles and their comments, but BTL commenters also drew on personal narratives and (fictional) anecdotes to index notions of flawed consumerism, scroungers, and the deserving and undeserving poor
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[Book Review] Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University: Feminist Flights, Fights, and Failures edited by Yvette Taylor and Kinneret Lahad (2018) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 368pp
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Mapping Austerity: Geographical Text Analysis of UK Place-Names in <i>The Guardian</i> and <i>The Daily Telegraph</i>
By analysing corpora of newspaper articles from The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph this chapter uses a modified form of geographical text analysis (GTA) to investigate whether (and in what form) mass media texts express a relationship between austerity and UK places. Concordance geoparsing is used to detect the use of place-names occurring within a set span of key terms, such as austerity, policy, crisis, measures and spending. The geoparsing process generates Place-Name Co-occurrences (PNCs), which are comprised of a search term, a place-name, its coordinates, and its surrounding co-text. The coordinates of PNCs can be plotted on maps using GIS (Geographical Information Systems) software, to show patterns in place-name mentions, while the co-text is well-suited to linguistic analysis. Ultimately, GTA facilitates the visualisation of corpora and adds the consideration of physical space to language analysis. The results of GTA show that coverage of UK austerity focuses overwhelmingly on England and that both newspapers are London-centric
Does Money Talk Equate to Class Talk? Audience Responses to Poverty Porn in Relation to Money and Debt
This chapter focuses on transcripts collected for the Benefits Street project at Sheffield Hallam University, which elicited audience responses to clips of poverty porn programming. We conducted four focus groups with members of the public from different social backgrounds across the north and Midlands of England and asked our participants what they thought of the representations of the working class that were shown on screen. Using techniques from corpus linguistics (specifically the use of semantic tagging software) and discourse analysis, we focus here on how our participants used terms associated with money and debt. Our analysis aims to ascertain whether talk of money in relation to benefits claimants actually equates to talk about their social class
Decision-making about complementary and alternative medicine by cancer patients: integrative literature review
Non-sexist Language Policy and the Rise (and Fall?) of Combined Pronouns in British and American Written English
This paper focuses on the use of combined pronouns (s/he, his or her, him/her, etc.) as an example of late twentieth-century non-sexist language reform which had an overt democratizing aim. Within the scope of second-wave feminism, the use of combined pronouns increased the visibility of women in discourse by encouraging the use of feminine pronouns (she, her, hers) alongside masculine pronouns (he, him, his). Despite their promotion, however, the use of combined pronouns is relatively rare. This paper uses the LOB and Brown families of corpora to diachronically and synchronically study patterns in the use of combined pronouns in written American (AmE) and British English (BrE) from the 1930s to the early 2000s. The analysis not only determines what forms these patterns take, but questions whether combined pronouns are influenced by (a combination of) syntax and/or semantics, and questions whether combined pronouns are really democratic at all
Negotiating stance within discourses of class: reactions to Benefits Street
In this article, we examine the way that audiences respond to particular representations of poverty. Using clips from the Channel 4 television programme Benefits Street we conducted focus groups in four locations across the UK, working with people from different socioeconomic backgrounds who had different experiences with the benefits system. Benefits Street (2014) is an example of reality television where members of the public are followed by film crews as they perform everyday tasks and routines. Our choice to focus on this particular programme was prompted by the huge media response that it received when it was broadcast; Benefits Street generated 950 complaints to regulatory watchdog Ofcom (2014) and was referred to as âpoverty pornâ (Clark, 2014). We focus on the way that viewers of this programme produce assessments of those on benefits, analysing the discursive strategies used by our participants when evaluating representations of those on benefits. Specifically, we consider how the participants in our study construct their own stance and attribute stance to others through naming and agency practices, the negotiation of opinion, and stake inoculation.
We invited our participants to judge the people they saw on screen, but they went beyond this. They used clips of the programme as stimuli to collaboratively construct an overarchingly-negative stereotype of those on benefits. We conclude that Benefits Street is not just an entertainment programme, but is rather a site for ideological construction and the perpetuation of existing stereotypes about benefit claimants. The programme (and others like it) invites negative evaluations of those on benefits and is thus a worthy site for critical linguistic analysis
Opposition as victimhood in newspaper debates about same-sex marriage
In this paper, we take a queer linguistics approach to the analysis of data from British newspaper articles which discuss the introduction of same-sex marriage. Drawing on methods from CDA and corpus linguistics, we focus on the construction of agency in relation to the government extending marriage to same-sex couples, and those resisting this. We show that opponents to same-sex marriage are represented and represent themselves as victims whose moral values, traditions, and civil liberties are being threatened by the state. Specifically, we argue that victimhood is invoked in a way that both enables and permits discourses of implicit homophobia
Identity and naming practices in British marriage and civil partnerships
This article demonstrates the continued prevalence of traditional, heteronormative practices regarding marriage and naming practices in Britain, and also considers the complex choices made by same-sex couples who marry in relation to whether there are any benefits in changing their surname. The study draws on data from an online survey of 1,000 UK respondents, and reveals that it continues to be viewed as more ânormalâ for a woman to take her husbandâs surname in a heterosexual union than for her to make any other choice. Whilst other options (such as the woman retaining the surname given to her by her parents, for instance) are often considered in relation to heterosexual marriage, these continue to be seen as a deviation from the norm. We find that the role of tradition is critical to heterosexual womenâs decisions over what to do with their surname, whether they follow the culturally expected route or consciously deviate from it. Same-sex couples are broadly perceived to have comparably more freedom than heterosexuals regarding their names, and here we analyse whether this is the case. Through qualitative critical analysis of the discursive responses of those completing our survey, and some quantitative discussion of the data, we demonstrate that heteronormative assumptions about a womanâs role in a heterosexual relationship have continued salience and that this leads to a conscious and often difficult negotiation of her own identity as both an individual and a wife
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Lake surface temperature [in âState of the Climate in 2017â]
Observed lake surface water temperature anomalies
in 2017 are placed in the context of the recent
warming observed in global surface air temperature
by collating long-term in situ lake
surface temperature observations from some of the
worldâs best-studied lakes and a satellite-derived
global lake surface water temperature dataset. The
period 1996â2015, 20 years for which satellite-derived
lake temperatures are available, is used as the base
period for all lake temperature anomaly calculations
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