The cult of the victim: an analysis of the collective identity of the English Defence League

Since its creation in 2009 the English Defence League has become the largest street-based social movement in contemporary Britain. Its demonstrations have led to violence and community tensions in town and city centres throughout the country. While these street demonstrations have attracted some attention in academia, as of yet there has been no attempt to analyse the statements of the EDL as an organization. Oaten analyses the EDL's outgoing communicative transmissions and argues that the EDL as a movement is based on a sense of collective victimhood. By drawing on conceptions of collective victimhood from post-conflict studies, he suggests that only by understanding the EDL's collective victimhood can we understand its anti-Muslim and anti-establishment stance. His article stresses that collective victimhood is a zero sum identity, and highlights the fact that, as such, the EDL and its members continuously seek to portray themselves as the ‘true’ victims of abuse by government and British Muslims. Oaten concludes, in light of EDL leader Tommy Robinson's departure, by looking at the potential future trajectories of the EDL. He argues that, despite the fact that Robinson was central to the movement's collective victimhood frame of reference, the EDL continues to utilize the collective victimhood narrative in order to explain Robinson's departure. This suggests that collective victimhood had become a powerful category of self-identification for the movement, and that the movement can continue without Robinson.     

Human rights and discourse theory: some critical remarks

In this short piece, I suggest that Seyla Benhabib’s discourse-theoretic account of human rights succeeds in avoiding the charge of anti-parochialism only at the cost of failing to provide concrete and plausible enough guidance in identifying the holders, duty-bearers, and objects of human rights. I then conclude with a few reflections on what type of guidance may be plausibly expected from a discourse-theoretic approach.     

“They might read a fly speck”: musical literacy as a discursive resource in Louis Armstrong's autobiographies

Jazz has been described as a music in which the “oral” element plays a crucial role, in opposition to Western “classical” music, seen as a chiefly “written” tradition. Although such an image is frequently advocated by critics and musicians themselves, it is also true that it can generate ambivalence and negative outputs, such as the persistent myth of “primitivism” and “naivety,” often associated with jazz music. Building on Social Semiotics and Critical Discourse Analysis, this study aims at analyzing how the representations of “orality” and “literacy,” that emerge in some autobiographical narratives by Louis Armstrong, are generated, and how they can work as semiotic and discursive resources. It argues that the different depictions of musicians, and the attitude displayed toward musical literacy, are sensitive to the historical, societal, and political context in which texts have been produced and published, as well as to the narrator's willingness and ability to resist or subvert dominant discourses. Moreover, the characterization of a musician (or a category of musicians) as able or unable to access musical literacy can also serve local purposes, such as expressing the narrator's stance toward narrative characters.     

哈贝马斯的合法性理论中的现代性

本文对哈贝马斯的合法性理论进行了分析和检测 ,指出了其与自由民主秩序的内在关联。在深入分析了合法性证明水平的现代性蕴涵及哈耶克的知识观后认为 ,宗教对自由民主秩序的形成及合法性的证明仍有积极的功能和实质的意义 ,自发 (自由民主 )秩序的内在规则的正当性先于交往对话而存在 ,哈贝马斯提出的交往对话的形式条件无法承当合法性证明的重负     

Brexit Means Brexit—or Does It? The Legacy of Theresa May's Discursive Treatment of Brexit

With the looming reality of Brexit drawing closer, it is the intention of this article to explore Theresa May's post‐referendum communicative behaviour on Brexit—the very issue that came to define her premiership agenda—and uncover what legacy it has left behind. Building upon, extending and updating the emerging literature on May's discourse, the inquiry helps us understand how May acted through language in order to influence and change other people's attitudes towards and ways of looking at Brexit. The article argues that there are at least seven ways, closely interrelated and feeding into each other, in which her discursive construction of Brexit has left a somewhat bitter legacy, contributing to the Brexit political paralysis and inspiring substantial levels of confusion and exasperation, both within the UK and abroad.     

Civil Society and the Authoritarian State: Cooperation,Contestation and Discourse

Contemporary authoritarian regimes frequently coexist with a range of non-governmental associations, while resisting any trajectory towards democratization. This article reviews three major explanations for such political interactions, before proposing an alternative explanatory framework, using Young's dualistic approach to civil society. This approach stresses that the discursive role of civil society needs to be understood in order to explain the dynamics of coercion and cooperation faced by civil society organizations under authoritarian rule.     

A Dialogic Analysis of Audiences’ Interactions on Online Media Sites in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Zimbabwean mainstream media has been profoundly polarised by two significant camps, namely the pro-government and anti-government media. Public opinion has primarily split between the binary ideological alignments of these two camps. The heavily censored political environment in Zimbabwe since the imposition of the Public Order and Security Act 11:17 (and regulated in a multiplicity of overt and covert ways) resulted in political expressive space being constrained. Online media, however, has created alternative media spaces and contexts that are far more enabling to audiences when it comes in dialogic co-production of meaning and new or alternative value positions to those advanced by traditional media. This article explores the negotiation of meaning by online readers of the state-owned daily, The Herald. Dialogism theory is used to explore discourse and ideological interaction occurring between mass media and its audiences in the news website comments section and how online communication is in fact a reciprocal social practice that is both modelled and remodelled through processes of co-production and negotiation of meaning. The research also takes into account the naming practices that the participants employ in their online interaction.     

谣言、流言和传说——人类意义生产的三种非常信息传播形态

人是符号的动物。人类创造符号在于发现、生产和表达意义。在人类的表意系统中,反事实性的社会话语体裁占有相当重要的份量。从传播学的角度讲,反事实、非科学的社会话语主要是由三种非常规的信息传播形态——谣言、流言和传说——构造而成。三种信息传播形态的共性即非常性在于其传播脉络超脱于经验事实的约束而又很可能有用且可信。与此同时,三种非常的信息传播形态各有其独特的传播情境、功能和内容。     

Evicting the Speaking Subject: A Critique of Latvian Concepts of Language

This paper highlights some peculiarities of the nation–language conflation in Latvian linguistics and traces their evolution. Treating language as the perfect structure consolidating ideal speakers, linguists perceive native speakers as a homogenous community whose task is to reproduce the normative language structure. Speaking subjects are denied social agency, and divergence from the norm in communication is treated as an error. The paper argues that empirically observed language use can be explained by taking into account the pragmatic intentions of speaking subjects.     

我国近30年“依法治税”的理论言说——基于法律话语的分析

改革开放30年以来,"依法治税"在我国税法学以及税收实务界获得了广泛认同。通过法律话语分析可知,"依法治税"是上世纪80年代后期以来在我国形成的独特话语现象,其理论言说的话语主体为政府官员,其言说的内容是使用法律(包括政策)"治"理税收。这样一种自上而下加以推行的"依法治税"模式在改革开放之初具有一定的进步性,但是随着"税收法治"的发展,"依法治税"理论言说开始式微,并且成为阻碍进一步推动税收法治的话语障碍。