Historical politics is usually an institutionalised top-down phenomenon, in which the government or the cultural elites selectively formulate a historical narrative to unify and homogenize the imagined nation-state. Yet, there are also grassroots movements in the public sphere, which participate in the uses and abuses of history for identity politics. We focus on one such case: the football supporters’ commemoration activism. While football supporters’ social activism and the role of football matches as lieux de mémoire have received significant scholarly interest, their commemoration activism is as yet poorly described. In this paper we investigate how two regional newspapers of differing political position report this issue. The DHA-inspired qualitative analysis shows that Gazeta Wyborcza writes about it relatively rarely and views it as an appropriation of collective memory. Głos Wielkopolski on the other hand constructs football supporters as a rejuvenating force in local identity and memory politics.

Abstract-This paper presents the results of a comparative study of corpora gathered from newspaper articles on the 2010 Polish Air Force TU-154 crash in Smolensk, Russia. We investigated the main concepts around which the narrative structure of the articles was built using the text network analysis. For the analysis we gathered articles from two mainstream Polish newspapers, Gazeta Wyborcza and Nasz Dziennik, and transformed the texts from the resulting corpora into corresponding graphs. Each graph consisted of nodes based on the words included in the text, and edges between the nodes based on the proximity relations between the words. Resulting graphs were then filtered to show the most important nodes, which acted as junctions for meaning circulation in the texts. After comparing the graphs from both corpora we found that the articles from Gazeta Wyborcza focused more on the aspects of Polish-Russian dialog, while articles from Nasz Dziennik focused on the national aspects of the tragedy. These findings show that the text network analysis can be successfully used as an alternative to other statistical corpus methods for discourse analysis.

This article is devoted to the question of the recontextualization of populist topoi in the public sphere. Recontextualization is a process by which a change in the author, recipient, or context of a communication alters its meaning. Populism is understood as a discursive strategy in reference to a limited number of topoi, such as values (for in stance, freedom); criticism of authority; appeals to emotions (for example, the sense of threat and fear); and reference to national identity and history to obtain social support. The authors of the article analyze how these topoi change during their flow between various channels of communication: the internet forum of the Lech Poznań fan club, the local press (Głos Wielkopolski and a local supplement to Gazeta Wyborcza), the blog of the city mayor, and the facebook page of a municipal official. The research, based on a historical, critical analysis of the discourse, shows that when the press and local politicians’ discuss topics with the fan forum, the result is the legitimation of the fan forum’s position and its broader effect in the public sphere.