This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which digital communication facilitate and inform discourses of legitimization and delegitimization in contemporary participatory cultures. The book draws on multiple theoretical traditions from critical discourse analysis to allow for a greater critical engagement of the ways in which values are either justified or criticized on social media platforms across a variety of social milieus, including the personal, political, religious, corporate, and commercial. The volume highlights data from across ten national contexts and a range of online platforms to demonstrate how these discursive practices manifest themselves differently across a range of settings. Taken together, the seventeen chapters in this book offer a more informed understanding of how these discursive spaces help us to interpret the manner in which digital communication can be used to legitimize or delegitimize, making this book an ideal resource for students and scholars in discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, new media, and media production.

Sociology of Discourse takes the perspective that collective actors like social movements are capable of creating social change from below by creating new institutions through alternative discourses. Institutionalization becomes a process of moving away from existing institutions towards creating new ones. While discourses entail openness and enable the questioning of what is instituted, institutions offer continuity and stability to social mobilizations. This dual movement of openness and stabilization explains how social struggles ensure their continuity, without completely assuming the logic of the dominant order. The book proposes an analytical model of social change, which is unfolded through three intertwined areas: discourse, communication, and institution. Collective experiences of social change, from the anti-globalization movement to Occupy, illustrate the main theoretical points and concepts. Through the example of the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, the book concludes by analyzing how social change from below is possible.

Introducing the key questions and challenges faced by the researcher of digital discourse, this book provides an overview of the different methodological dimensions associated with this type of research. Bringing together a team of experts, chapters guide students and novice researchers through how to conduct rigorous, accurate, and ethical research with data from a wide range of online platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and online dating apps. Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis focuses on the key issues that any digital discourse analyst must consider, before tackling more specific topics and approaches, including how to work with multilingual or multimodal data. Emphasizing concrete, practical advice and illustrated with plentiful examples from research studies, each chapter introduces a new research dimension for consideration, briefly exploring how other discourse analysts have approached the topic before using an in-depth case study to highlight the main challenges and provide guidance on methodological decision-making. Supported by a range of pedagogical tools, including discussion questions and annotated further-reading lists, this book is an essential resource for students and any researcher new to analyzing digital discourse.

This book explores the linguistic patterns of conflict, crisis and threat generation in Polish political rhetoric that have been at the heart of state-level policies since the Law and Justice (PiS) Party came to power in October 2015. Analysing a vast corpus of speeches, statements and remarks by prominent Law and Justice Party politicians, this book sheds light on internal parliamentary and presidential discourse against opponents of the government, before widening its lens to Poland's strained relations with the EU regarding refugee distribution and immigration. Drawing on theories from contemporary critical discourse studies and critical-cognitive pragmatics, the book shows how the crisis, conflict and threat elements in these discourses produce public coercion and strengthen the Party's leadership. Piotr Cap extends his argument further to examine discursive examples from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Austria, Italy and the UK, highlighting the correlation between the Law and Justice Party and broader socio-political and rhetorical trends in contemporary Europe. The result is an authoritative panorama of the mutual dependencies and shared discursive strategies of European right-wing groups.

Discourse and Social Media is a unique and timely collection that breaks ground on how discourse scholars, coming from a range of disciplinary perspectives, can critically analyse different social media, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and News. The book fills a gap in the market for a multi-disciplinary collection for analysing the discourse of social media. In providing a thorough review of the field to date, the opening chapter considers some of the common and divergent interests and priorities that exist in social media discourse analysis. It also discusses the wider methodological and theoretical implications which social media analysis brings to the process of discourse analysis, as new forms of connections and communication call us to re-think the static models that we have been using. The rest of the collection draws on different traditions in discourse studies, including Critical Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, Foucaultian analysis and Multimodality, to bring several unique approaches to critically analysing social media from a discourse perspective. Each ground-breaking chapter shows how different forms of social media data can best be selected, analysed, and dealt with critically. As a whole, Discourse and Social Media provides a go-to resource for social media scholars, as well as graduate students. The book is a significant contribution to the development of the field at this present shifting time. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Multicultural Discourses.

This edited volume offers new insights into contemporary political discourses in Slavic speaking countries by focusing on discursive and linguistic means deployed in relevant genres, such as parliamentary discourse, commemorative and presidential speeches, mediated communication, and literal and philosophical essays. The depth of the linguistic analysis reflects different levels of linkage between language and social practice constituting the discourse. The theoretical and methodological approaches discussed range from interactional pragmatics over corpus linguistics to CDA. The chapters contain original language material in Russian, Polish, Czech, Croatian, Serbian and Macedonian, and the authors address issues such as the affiliation to different political and social groups within parliamentary settings, national identity, gender and minorities, as well as cultural memory and reconciliation.

This book explores the impact of new media on politicians’ construction, presentation, and dissemination of their political selves, focusing on the social media presence of US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to offer new insights into the landscape of contemporary political discourse. Drawing on work from corpus linguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, and critical discourse analysis, Aiello charts the ways in which the politician employed a range of discursive strategies via social media in her first campaign to introduce her political identity to a wider audience, and the subsequent responses by media outlets. The volume examines how she continued to solidify her political agenda throughout the course of her tenure, unpacking her crafting of counterattacks and “clapbacks,” in particular, in counteracting delegitimizing attacks from both mainstream media outlets and user-generated content. Aiello brings these insights together to offer a more holistic understanding of American political discourse but also the intersection of language, power, ideology, and the role of social media in modern political campaigns and populist discourses. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in digital communication, political communication, critical discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics.