Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture – serie

This book addresses an under-researched area within populism studies: the discourse of supporters of populist parties. Taking the 2019 European elections as their case study, the authors analyse how supporters in eleven different countries construct identities and voting motivations on social media. The individual chapters comprise a range of methods to investigate data from different social media platforms, defining populism as a political strategy and/or practice, realised in discourse, that is based on a dichotomy between “the people”, who are unified by their will, and an out-group whose actions are not in the interest of the people, with a leader safeguarding the interests of the people against the out-group. The book identifies what motivates people to vote for populist parties, what role national identities and values play in those motivations, and how the social media postings of populist parties are recontextualised in supporters’ comments to serve as a voting motivation.

This book offers a critical discourse analytical perspective on the phenomenon of men who voluntarily abstain from relationships with women. Based on a case study of the online Reddit community known as ‘Men Going Their Own Way’, the author engages in qualitative examination of the argumentative and discursive strategies used to justify and legitimise an antifeminist, male separatist ideology. Methodologically, the book draws on the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse studies and investigates how members of this online community represent themselves, relationships with women, and the broader gendered social order. It considers male separatism as part of the new antifeminist social media network known as the manosphere, as well as part of a broader legacy of backlash against feminism and women’s rights. Overall, the book contributes to the growing body of literature on the manosphere and should be of interest to scholars in discourse studies, feminist media studies, and digital communication.

This volume extends research on ideology in the news into the historical sphere, spanning discourse from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century. The chapters investigate the ideological representation and assessment of political events across three continents, such as uprisings, independence, and genocide, but also of pervasive socio-cultural aspects like gender and language. For this, they rely on a wide range of sources, from handwritten news letters via general daily papers to specialized magazines, and from classical editorial content to letters published in newspapers. The geographical and linguistic focus of the texts investigated comprises British, American, Italian, German, and Polish discourse. The articles use both qualitative and quantitative corpus-based methodology, such as keyword or collocational analysis. The book is of interest for scholars in (historical) linguistics, history, and journalism studies.