ABSTRACT

This interdisciplinary collection brings together leading and emerging scholars of discourse, conceptualizing how discursive practices shape social, political, and even material realities today.

Discourses in Action presents a wide range of essays that explore fundamental concerns for the social consequences of text, talk, and discursively informed actions and possibilities of discursive engagement. It opens new perspectives on what language does and the differences that scholarly and practical contributions can make. Chapters cover diverse topics, ranging from political struggles, climate change, social revolutions, ethnicity, violence and other often unexpected patterns of discursive consequences. Its essays also explore the cultural contingencies that underlie discourse practices which are usually ignored when analysed from within a taken-for-granted culture.

Providing a useful examination of current discourse studies, this interdisciplinary volume is ideal for students and researchers within media, communication, discourse analysis, linguistics, cultural studies, and the sociology of knowledge.

chapter |13 pages

Introduction

Why discourses in action?

part I|72 pages

Divergent approaches to discourse analyses

chapter 1|18 pages

Analysing the politics of denial

Critical discourse studies and the discourse-historical approach

chapter 2|14 pages

Discourse as ventriloquy

A pragmatic/relational analysis of media as agents

chapter 3|20 pages

Discursive construction

A sociology of knowledge approach to discourse analysis

chapter 4|16 pages

Discursive psychology

A non-cognitivist approach to practices of knowing

part II|52 pages

Three prototypical studies of discourses in action

chapter 5|15 pages

Re-contextualizing visual representations

The videos of and about police accountability in three competing discourses

chapter 6|16 pages

Discourses for transformation?

Climate change, power and pathways to the future

part III|48 pages

Cultural contingencies of discursive practices

chapter 8|15 pages

Dueling discourses of power and resistance

The cultural contexts of the shifting revolutionary rhetoric of three Egyptian political actors

chapter 9|15 pages

One case, two verdicts

The vertical interplay of authoritative discourses in China

chapter 10|14 pages

Discourses of dissent

The role of speech and action in Israeli grassroots activism