Discourses of poverty across genres: Competing representations of the poor in the transitional context of Serbia

Abstract

This article examines representations of the poor across three genres – the government’s Bulletin on Social Inclusion and Poverty Reduction, online news and online user comments – during the period that immediately followed the expiration of the first Serbian Poverty Reduction Strategy (2010–2012). The results show differences in the actors’ representation, and in attribution of causal and treatment responsibility. The Bulletin is characterised by the discourse of social inclusion, activation and responsibilisation of the poor. This discourse does not reach the news, which portrays the poor as passive beneficiaries of the government actions, as individuals in extreme poverty, and as the agentic working poor protesting for wages. In the online user comments, poverty is articulated as the personal experience of the commenters. The news discourse of state responsibility is echoed in the comments sections and further recontextualised into the discourse of political responsibility.

A CiteSpace-based analysis of the application of Critical Discourse Analysis in news discourse

“…For example, Kumar and Jaggi (2020) take twitter handles of Al Jazeera and CNN’s Breaking News as the data-collection platform to conduct a study for news discourse of terror attacks of 2015 Islamic State Attacks in Beirut and Paris. Kleut and Drašković (2021) examine representation of the poor across three genres based on the government’s Bulletin on Social Inclusion and Poverty Reduction, online news and online user comments, enriching the scope of the application of CDA to a variety of news discourse.…”

Communicating change: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of China’s poverty reduction posters

“…These studies delve into the portrayal of poverty in media, focusing on its impact on public perceptions. Kleut and Drašković (2020) examine representations of the poor across three genres, the government's Bulletin on Social Inclusion and Poverty Reduction, online news, and online user comments during the period following the expiration of the first Serbian Poverty Reduction Strategy (2010Strategy ( -2012. Zheng and Hui (2022) analyze the differences between Chinese and Western media in the usage of three discourse strategies in Chinese poverty alleviation discourses and the differences in readers' perceptions of poverty alleviation discourses with or without discourse strategies of proximization.…”