A B S T R A C T. Like fast food and fizzy drinks, discourses are globally marketed by powerful multinational corporations. In this article we look at discourses about women which are distributed around the planet by the 44 different national versions of Cosmopolitan. These versions are localized, but still transmit the Cosmo brand, resulting in similarities between the versions. We apply a multimodal discourse analytic approach to understand this global branding, the type of analysis which is lacking in existing accounts of globalization, and ask, what exactly does remain the same across the localized versions? What this article offers is not an analysis of the magazine per se, but an analysis of the discourses that underpin it. We show how the magazine creates a fantasy world through the use of low modality images, which allow a particular kind of agency, mainly sex, to signify power. The multimodal realizations of Cosmo discourse enable women to signify their alignment with the Cosmo world through such things as the cafes they frequent, the clothes they wear and the way that they dance. Cosmo presents these not as real, but as playful fantasies, something which existing literature on women's magazines has missed. In these fantasies, women act alone and rely on acts of seduction and social manoeuvreing, rather than on intellect, to act in and on the world. K E Y W O R D S : branding, globalization, multimodal analysis, women, women's magazines

Public participation broadcasting has recently become the focus of attention in media studies, as well as from the social interactional perspectives of discourse and conversation analysis, and it has been argued in particular that the talk show genre has given new and enhanced status to the `authentic' voice of lay members of the public. What remains largely unexplored is how lay participants discursively construct authentic positions for their own knowledgeable participation in such discourse. Expert speakers in public participation broadcasts are typically attributed names, rank, institutional affiliation and status, which legitimizes their position, and in so doing provides their warrant to talk about whatever issue they have been brought in to discuss. Lay participants typically do not have this status attributed to them, but need to establish their own position from which to talk. In this article I examine the public identities that lay speakers build for themselves in these broadcasts, and show how they routinely draw on a range of discursive resources to construct situated, local identities which provide a warrant for what they have to say.

This article examines the management of participation in calls to radio phone-in programmes. In the broadcast media, there are increasing occasions for interaction between `professionals' and lay members of the public, particularly within what have come to be known generically as public participation programmes (talk shows, phone-in programmes and the like). People call in to phone-in programmes for various reasons; to give opinions, to get advice, and often to ask questions. In the particular phone-ins analysed here, callers are invited to put questions to leading politicians of the day about their election policies. In many institutional contexts for talk (e.g.courtrooms, classrooms, political interviews) the role of questioner has been found to be a more powerful interactional position than the role of answerer. Through an analysis of the organization of the phone-in calls, this article argues that the potentially powerful discourse role of questioner is interactionally `defused' through the participatory framework of the call. The author shows how the mediated interactional structure of these calls limits the range of possible actions available to callers in their institutional position as questioners, and thus produces constraints on what callers can actually achieve in this particular context for institutional talk.

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This article offers new ways of conceptualising style in right wing populist communicative performances, by foregrounding a structured and conceptually informed use of "style" that moves beyond the descriptive sense routinely employed in political communication. Specifically, it explores how a discourse-analytic approach to mediated populist discourse can inform and advance the current understanding of populist 'style' by analysing some contextually produced linguistic and discursive choices in populist rhetorical repertoires -i.e., the communicative strategies that are deployed in mediated contexts for right-wing populist political communication. Taking three illustrative examples of right wing populist party performances on TV news and current affairs broadcasts in Greece (GD), France (FN) and the UK (UKIP), the speakers' use of a range of rhetorical devices is examined using models from socio-linguistics and discourse analysis: aspects of register shifts by GD in blame attribution speeches, interactional 'bad manners' in a French political debate, and Nigel Farage speaking 'candidly' in three different contexts of news reporting from the UK. In taking such a qualitative approach, it is argued that populist style cannot be defined in terms of one single feature, or set of features, common to all right wing populists and transferrable from one socio-cultural context to another, but more usefully as a set of motivated choices among alternative semiotic resources (linguistic/discursive, interactional and visual), which have social and cultural resonance. This focus on micro-level features of mediated interaction thus offers a more fine-grained understanding of style than is currently the case, as it shows how right-wing populist politicians' performative styles are situated within specific (here European) socio-cultural and political communicative contexts; in this study, this is to say, the various television broadcasts in which they occur.