Bringing Discourse Theory into Media Studies

Abstract

When Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe published an elaborate version of their discourse theory inHegemony and Socialist Strategy(1985), they were met with fierce resistance by a unified front of traditional Marxists and anti-poststructuralists. The debates on post-Marxism dominated much of the book’s reception. This focus, combined with discourse theory’s rather abstract nature, its lack of clear methodological guidelines, and its more natural habitat of Political Studies, caused discourse theory to remain confined to this realm of Political Studies, despite the broad ideological definition of the political preferred by the authors. This article aims to revisit discourse theory and bring it into the realm of Media Studies. A necessary condition to enhance discourse theory’s applicability in Media Studies is the re-articulation of discourse theory into discourse theoretical analysis (DTA). DTA’s claim for legitimacy is supported in this article by two lines of argument. Firstly, a comparison with Critical Discourse Analyses (CDA) at the textual and contextual level allow us to flesh out the similarities — and more importantly — the differences between CDA and DTA. Secondly, DTA’s applicability is demonstrated by putting it to work in a case study, which focuses on the articulation of audience participation through televisional practices. Both lines of argument aim to illustrate the potential, the adaptability and the legitimacy of DTA’s move into media studies.

A climate for reduction? Futures imagined in newspaper coverage of UN climate summits

“…The most common combination within the actor-categories was two politicians representing nation-states (4%) 15 . .…”

“…The future was articulated in a binary dichotomy between a desirable future deriving from the treaty and an undesirable future deriving from the 15 An important limitation of this type of study of the potential of journalism to create dialog is that the unit of analysis in the quantitative study was a single story. The tendency in modern (Finnish) journalism is to report major issues in several hierarchical stories.…”

“…18,[5][6][7][8][9][10]. The approach derives from the work of political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe [11][12][13][14] but it has also been developed as an applicable approach for media research [15,16]. In discoursetheory, the discursive is a theoretical horizon that highlights the linguistic and symbolic nature of reality, in other words, the discursive component of reality is emphasized without equating discourse and reality [15, p. 267].…”

Kaikki yhdessä yhteisen ilmaston puolesta? Yksimielisyys ja erimielisyys Helsingin Sanomien ja Ilta-Sanomien ilmastokokousuutisoinnissa

“…Ilmestyessään se oli -kuten nimestä saattaa päätellä -poliittis-teoreettinen pelinavaus uudenlaiselle vasemmistolaiselle politiikalle. Teoksen käsitteistö sekä tapa lukea ja purkaa vasemmistolaista politiikan teoriaa ovat kuitenkin tuottaneet mittavan määrän niitä koettelevaa sekundaarikirjallisuutta (Torfing 1999;Jørgensen & Phillips 2002;Howarth 1995;Howarth & Torfing 2005;Howarth, Norval & Stavrakakis 2000;Dahlberg & Phelan 2011;Palonen 2008), jossa on käsitelty myös diskurssiteorian hyödyntämistä mediatutkimuksessa (Carpentier & De Cleen 2007;Carpentier & Spinoy 2008). Tämän artikkelin lähtökohtana on se, että diskurssiteorian lähestymis-tapaa ja käsitteistöä on syytä koetella myös mediatutkimuksen työkalupakkina (Carpentier & De Cleen 2007, 266).…”

“Flemish Friends, Let us Separate!”: The Discursive Struggle for Flemish Nationalist Civil Society in the Media

“…However, even if discourse theory has rarely taken media themselves as an object of analysis (but see Carpentier and De Cleen 2007;Carpentier and Spinoy 2007;Dahlberg and Phelan 2012;Torfing 1999;Uldam and Askanius 2013), mainstream media are of crucial importance to the discourse-theoretical analysis of most discursive struggles. Media are one of the main public spaces 3 in which meaning circulates in contemporary society.…”