Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Corpus construction: a principle for qualitative data collection

We argue that the presence of a word in an utterance serves as starting point for a relevance guided inferential process that results in the construction of a contextually appropriate sense. The linguistically encoded sense of a word does not serve as its default interpretation. The cases where the contextually appropriate sense happens to be identical to this linguistic sense have no particular theoretical significance. We explore some of the consequences of this view. One of these consequences is that there may be many more mentally represented concepts than there are linguistically encoded concepts.

The mapping between the mental and the public lexicon (Reprint of Sperber & Wilson 1998)

Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines

Social influence and discourse similarity networks in workgroups

What is a research article?: genre variability and data selection in genre research

Despite their growing presence within the business sector, women have long been under- and misrepresented in business media, with negative consequences for their entrepreneurial and other work aspirations. Research into the frequency with which women are featured and cited in business media, as well as the dominant discourses in terms of which they are represented, has repeatedly found patriarchal biases that undermine women’s position in the world of business. However, most of these studies are now outdated and many focus only on female entrepreneurs, are non-representative small-scale case studies, or do not subject business media coverage of women to fine-grained linguistic analysis. In this paper, therefore, we document how women (in general) are represented in three top-selling American business magazines (Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Forbes, Fortune) between 2015 and 2017. First, we compare the frequency with which men and women are mentioned across all articles published in this time period (n=2,317), to determine any statistically significant variation Second, using a representative subset of sample articles (n=63), we identify the number of times women are mentioned per article, to gauge the level of prominence accorded to them. Third, we use Hallidayan (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004) transitivity analysis and van Leeuwen’s (1996) representation of social actors framework to document the level and types of behavior ascribed to women, as well as the category labels used to depict them. Lastly, drawing on current business studies scholarship and related grey literature, we situate media portrayals of women within twenty-first century North American business culture. This paper contributes to a growing literature on media representations of powerful women and provides gender equality advocates – including those within both business and business media – with valuable information about how media coverage of women can better reflect and construct women’s position in the business world.

https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:38f1213/UQ38f1213_OA.pdf

Women in business media: a critical discourse analysis of representations of women in Forbes, Fortune and Bloomberg Businessweek, 2015-2017

The first female bishop in the Anglican Church of the UK and Ireland was consecrated on November 30, 2013. For many within the Anglican Communion, the appointment of Reverend Pat Storey as Bishop of Meath and Kildare represented the opening of a longawaited new chapter in the history of Anglicanism. It is also potentially an occasion of considerable interest for both Irish historians and discourse analysts. For, although questions of gender and language have been widely considered in recent years, relatively few studies address the intersections of gender, language and religion – and fewer still examine the nexus of gender, language, religion, and power in contemporary Ireland. In this paper, therefore, I analyze news representations of Bishop Storey’s consecration – drawing critically on both the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) to critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA), as well as relevant religious studies literature – with a view to identifying both old and new discursive construals of one of contemporary Ireland’s powerful public female figures. In sum, I observe that news reporting of Bishop Storey is broadly positive, but displays residual gender bias, with repeated references to her marital and parental status, age, education, emotions and other personal behaviours depicting her chiefly as a woman, rather than as the right person for the position. This case study also illustrates my methodological argument that DHA and PDA can be complementary analytical frameworks for investigating underlying ideologies around religious, gender and other social identifications.

/pdf/church-trailblazer-rev-pat-storey-on-weight-watchers-218d433v6l.pdf

“Church trailblazer Rev Pat Storey on Weight Watchers, caffeine and how she named her dog after former New York Mayor”: News representations of the first female Anglican Bishop in the UK and Ireland

This article describes a fieldwork case study which integrates religious studies with various discourse analytic methods, to examine how contemporary Christian identities are represented in conversation. Based on interviews and focus groups with 46 residents of a small town in rural Canada, this research is primarily concerned with religious talk - in particular, with the "social practice" (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997: 258) of "talking [religious] identity" (Hadden and Lester, 1978). In this article, I will review briefly how "identity" is conceptualized in contemporary discourse analysis studies, before describing both the challenge of selecting appropriate linguistic methods for the investigation of religious identity, and the impact upon my research of adopting particular methods.

Kate Power

Papers

What is a research article?: genre variability and data selection in genre research

Women in business media: a critical discourse analysis of representations of women in Forbes, Fortune and Bloomberg Businessweek, 2015-2017

“Church trailblazer Rev Pat Storey on Weight Watchers, caffeine and how she named her dog after former New York Mayor”: News representations of the first female Anglican Bishop in the UK and Ireland

Investigating Religious “Identity”: the promise and problem of discourse analytic methods for religious studies inquiries

‘Sustainability’ and the performing arts: Discourse analytic evidence from Australia