DISCOURSE AS SOCIAL PRACTICE: DISCOURSE ANALYIS, AUTHORITARIAN POPULISM AND THE NEWS MEDIA
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Description
Marianna Patrona's talk will develop the theoretical premises of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and critical discourse studies (CDS) as a broad framework for investigating the relationship between discourse and social processes, with the aim of highlighting the methodological contribution of critical discourse studies to the study of mediated politics and political communication. More specifically, the talk will focus on the application of qualitative, critical analysis of discourse to the systematic inquiry into authoritarian populism in the news media, and present the advantages of this approach for unravelling 1) political performances and their mediated representations, 2) the complex, subtle, and often contradictory, normalization processes at work in the news media for authoritarian populist actors, discourses, and agendas, and 3) the attendant challenges and critical tasks for contemporary news journalism.
Marianna Patrona will present data and findings from the upcoming book Authoritarian Populism and the Challenges for Journalism: A Discourse Approach (Ekström and Patrona, in preparation/2024, Routledge). Drawing upon case study examples from various genres and sub-genres of news, such as print and online news, televised news, and opinion journalism, the talk illustrates current practices of news journalism against the backdrop of surging right-wing populism, and shows that discourse analysis can help illuminate the problematic intersection between authoritarian populism and mainstream news.
During her time in Brussels Marianna Patrona will also give a workshop for PhD students. The workshop will present hands-on, data-driven applications of Conversation Analysis to the study of political interviewing, with a view to illustrating how the interviewer’s question design, and the interactional dynamics between the interviewer and interviewee can shed light on the social organization of interviewing as a media practice and public space primarily oriented towards the elicitation and display (or not) of political accountability. Attendees will have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with and work on interview data with authoritarian populists, showing how authoritarian populism has currently undermined the authority of mainstream journalism and institutionalized relationships. Finally, attendees will have the chance to present and discuss interactional data from their ongoing PhD and other research projects.
About the speaker
Marianna Patrona is Associate Professor in the division of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Hellenic Army Academy, Greece. She has published extensively in various discourse analysis and communication journals, and has recently edited Crisis and the Media: Narratives of crisis across cultural settings and media genres (John Benjamins 2018, Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture series). She is currently co-author of Authoritarian Populism and the Challenges for Journalism: A Discourse Approach (Ekström and Patrona, in preparation/2024, Routledge). Her research interests include Critical Discourse Analysis and Conversation Analysis of media discourse and communication; political interviewing; discourse & political communication; changing communication practices in broadcast news; journalism & crisis; populism in the news media.
