A growing number of companies, both multinationals and local firms, have begun to adopt the idea of sustainability development, and develop and market their green products/services with green advertising in developing countries. However, in the context of China where the idea of commercial environmentalism or green consumption is emerging and transported from the West, it is not clear that how the green consumption is advocated and how consumption practices are connected to environmental protection, and how the meaning of green consumption is constructed by firms operating in China. This study explores the Internet as a rich text for environmental marketing by analyzing the ways firms showcase details of their green products/services, production methods, business philosophy and other facets of their environmental practices and values. The online promotional information can be seen as corporate green advertising. Focused on the advertisings from corporate websites, and through the analytical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (e.g., Faircloug, 1992; 1995(a) (b); Wodak and Chilton, 2005), this study presents how a number of environmental conscious firms in China are portraying and promoting their environmental responsible image and green products/services, and aims to examine what firms are really telling and how they are discursively constructing corporate “greenness”. Based on the analyses of green advertisements from websites of four case companies (two MNCs in China: General Electric in China, Unilever in China, and two Chinese local firms: BYD automobile, and Landsea Real Estate), the study suggests that corporate green advertising discourse plays an active role in defining “reality” of greenness and imbuing meanings of consumption into environmentalism, as well as in achieving the hegemonic construction of corporate greenness. In addition, the corporate greenness is anthropocentric and embraces consumerist and post-materialist values. Instead of endorsing the environmentalism which appeals for a change of the current over-consumption lifestyle in capitalist development, the corporate green advertising strategically integrates lineages from green discourse of ecological modernization and political discourse of neoliberalism. In addition to similarities, dissimilarities existing between discourses from MNCs’ and Chinese local firms are identified in two aspects: greenness integration and greenness level. The differences in advertising discourses derive from both organizational resources and firms’ embedded economic, historical, and social-cultural contexts. Such differences prove the mutual constitutive or dialectical relationship between language and society and develop the argument that although firms play active role in constructing discourse, and green advertising discourse can be seen as corporations’ discursive approach to achieve environmental governance, their discourse is nevertheless constrained by both organizational internal and external influences.

This thesis argues that narratives about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) act as the central point of contact between conspiracist and popular millennial fields. Their confluence has come to form a field here termed ‘metaphysical conspiracism’, combining teleological narratives, the promise of soteriological knowledge and the threat of occluded malevolent agencies. I argue that metaphysical conspiracism offers a unique perspective on the interplay of knowledge, power and the construction of the other in contemporary popular discourse. Narratives about UFOs (and their extra-terrestrial occupants) have their roots in the Cold War period, but from the 1980s were increasingly constructed within a supernatural framework. Discourse analysis of popular literature from this period reveals a process of discursive transfer as the UFO narrative is contested and negotiated between conspiracist discourses concerning powerful, hidden agencies and popular millennial discourses of personal and planetary transformation, including ‘New Age’, 'Ascension' and '2012'. Using historical discourse analysis, supported by small-scale ethnographic sampling, I examine this discursive transfer in the work of three popular writers who together offer a broad overview of the field. Whitley Strieber was a central figure in the 'alien abduction' narrative in the 1980s, but his speculations on its meaning led him increasingly towards millennial and conspiratorial narratives. David Icke's well-known theory that a conspiracy of reptilian extraterrestrials has secretly seized control of the planet is demonstrated to have developed in the 1990s from a post-Theosophical narrative of benevolent UFOs as harbingers of the 'New Age'. Although less well-known, David Wilcock's work demonstrates that UFOs were also instrumental in the incorporation of conspiracist material into the recent '2012' millennial narrative. I seek to answer two questions with this thesis. Firstly, what is the common mechanism which facilitates the hybridisation I uncover between conspiracy narratives and popular millennialism? Secondly, how do the resulting metaphysical conspiracist narratives serve their subscribers? Despite a number of structural similarities, I argue that the common mechanism is the mobilisation of counter-epistemic strategies; that is, those predicated upon access to non-falsifiable sources of knowledge. The UFO narrative is particularly well-suited to suggesting sociological uncertainty about the boundaries between scientific and other strategies for the legitimisation of knowledge, encouraging its adoption by both conspiracist and millennial discourses. Secondly, metaphysical conspiracism reconciles the utopian vision of popular millennial discourse with the apocalyptic critique of modern global society announced by conspiracists. I therefore argue that metaphysical conspiracism supplies an effective popular theodicy with a Gnostic flavour in which these millennial prophecies did not ‘fail’, but were prevented from arriving by hidden malevolent others.

The aim of this research study is to analyse the nature of undergraduate media studies in England, necessarily from the inside, and document the social practices that constitute the subject in the light of its historic and contemporary challenges and the influence of changing public higher education discourses over the period of the fieldwork, 2012-2013. Conceptually, media studies is regarded as socially constructed and enacted through discursive practices that reveal the nature of the power relationships that are the basis of the ways ‘things get done’. This approach is based on Foucault’s (1984, 2002a, 2002b, 2002c) conception of power and discourse and dovetails with a substantial part of the sociology of higher education. The fieldwork consisted of a series of semi-structured face-to-face interviews with a range of participants drawn from media studies lecturers, other university professionals, media studies graduates and a secondary school headteacher with experience of advising university applicants. This provided examples of discursive practices from both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ media. The thematic analyses of the data show a complex set of interacting oppositional discourses that are skilfully managed by these professional practitioners to maintain a balance of Foucauldian power. This ensures that public policy changes are assimilated and ‘delivered’ whilst sometimes also mitigating their impact and maintaining a prevailing rationale for media studies. The study concludes by contrasting the findings with the emerging discourses of Critical University Studies (CUS). With a declared position (Williams, 2012a) in opposition to higher education public policy reforms, CUS is considered as a set of academic discursive practices that are distinct from the more nuanced balance of oppositional discourses evidenced through the participant responses here.

No description available.

This project explores the social meaning potential of creaky voice using a third wave variationist approach in order to uncover what motivates speakers to deploy this vocal quality. Intraspeaker variation in the use of creak is quantitatively and qualitatively examined in case studies of one male and one female individual who come from a similar social group. In recordings from a range of casual settings, both the male and female speaker are found to use creak at similar rates, for similar purposes. However, creak is found to vary across social settings: the greater the speakers’ self-reported intimacy with their interlocutors, the lower the frequency of creak. This suggests that creaky voice is used for interactional functions, and is conditioned by conversational context. Qualitative discourse analysis of instances of creak further reveals that it has a high frequency of cooccurrence with linguistic features used for epistemic stancetaking. I suggest that creak is an interactional resource available for taking an authoritative position in interaction, especially in situations where speakers feel less intimately connected to their interlocutors. / Graduate / 2017-08-02 / 0290 / 0291 / nchildebrand@gmail.com

M.A. / This study explores the narratives of six women who were subjected to peer abuse, or bullying, during their school years and attempts to discover the legacy of such persecution. The literature on bullying is discussed together with gender differences in the expression of bullying, various hypotheses about these differences, and the importance of peer relationships during childhood and adolescence. The process of enquiry is embedded in a social constructionist perspective, in particular within a narrative frame, and uses narrative analysis of the content of participants’ stories to elicit common themes. Themes that emerged relate mainly to participants’ social interaction. Use of a variety of defensive techniques in social settings, vigilance extending to hypervigilance, inability to trust, inability to accept from others, social anxiety, wariness around females and self-esteem issues surfaced. Other manifestations of distress, for example depression and loneliness, are not experienced by all participants. Some of the discourses around bullying that may inform participants’ stories and the researcher’s interpretations are explored. Similarities to other forms of abuse and psychological trauma are considered, for example loss of memory, hypervigilance and emotional numbing. The implications for therapy are considered, together with the importance of peer relationships in childhood and adolescence. The need for unequivocal adult intervention in preventing peer abuse is emphasised.

This thesis concludes that the discourse surrounding the Arctic in the Norwegian press has a prevailing focus on resource extraction and resource demands, and that the term “sustainable development” is rarely being employed. At the same time, there is an increase in the amount of times the topics climate change and environment are discussed in the same articles that discuss oil, gas and resource extraction. This indicates that in the post-petroleum and “green shift” era that Norway has entered, these discourses now demand a joint discussion, rather than two separate discourses and topics. Looking at how Norway might act in the Arctic in the future, this can indicate that these focus areas will lay the foundation for possible action in the region as well. The background of the study was to obtain an understanding of how Norway deals with its conundrum of contradictory roles as an advocate for sustainable development and as an oil and gas producer. This was done through an investigation of how the Arctic, and especially sustainable development in the Arctic, is framed in the Norwegian press. By looking at the media discourse surrounding the topic, it is possible to get an understanding of how the region is framed in Norway, and subsequently how Norway as an Arctic actor will act in the future. Social constructionism, critical discourse analysis, mediatisation and framing theory make up the theoretical underpinnings of the thesis, and content analysis with a sequential process of three steps is employed to analyse the material from a bird’s-eye view to a very specific analysis.

On the 22nd of July 2011, Norwegian lone actor Anders Behring Breivik decided tocarry out his life mission; a mission, which resulted in two separate terrorist attackskilling 77 individuals linked to the Norwegian Labour Party. The attacks directlycontributed to launch the second violence wave of the modern right-wing extremistmovement, turning it into the most violent movement of today in Western Europe. Theyalso contributed to establish Breivik as a template and a hero for many of theindividuals active in the right-wing extremist movement, making other right-wing loneactors follow Breivik's methods and committing crimes in the name of the sameideology as him. But which specific moral arguments did Breivik use in order to justifyand promote "his" ideology, and beyond that, his crime? In order to answer thatquestion, in this thesis, Breivik's manifesto was analysed using the situational actiontheory as a moral base. A simple discourse analysis framed by the intersectionalperspective was used as a method, and the analysis resulted in three main themes -Ethnicity, Religion, and Gender - as well as six sub-themes that highlighted the fight-forand the fight-against dimensions of each theme. In the discussion, the violent languageand the hierarchical order of the themes were examined, which demonstrated that acriminological perspective is needed when the connection between ideology and crimeis to be understood. The thesis was thereafter concluded with the notion that ideologyneeds to be seen as an independent risk factor in order for these types of crimes to beprevented. / <p>2016-06-01</p>

Based upon anthropological fieldwork and contemporary literature as well as an analysis of media reports and statements by government officials such as current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, this thesis explores the interrelations between political discourses, lifestyle, and identity construction in contemporary Turkey. In the thesis, it is depicted how certain lifestyle choices are legally limited or (drawing on moral, religious, and nationalist discourses) labeled as 'bad' or 'wrong' by the current AKP government and certain parts of society. The informants interviewed for this thesis, mostly well-educated, young Turkish urbanites, feel like these restrictions of lifestyle choices limit their possibilities to freely construct and express their identities, which leads to feelings of resentment, unhappiness, and discomfort. By analyzing political developments in the 20th and 21st century, it is furthermore illustrated that authoritarianism has been a substantial part of the Turkish state project ever since the founding of the Turkish Republic. The current political events and conflicts about lifestyle and identity construction, it is argued, have to be understood in this context rather than depicting them as based upon a strict dividing line between 'secular' and 'religious' parts of society, as it is often depicted in Western media.

Magister Artium - MA / This thesis focuses on the genre of municipal documents (application forms) and the variety of written and visual languages that make up their corpus to reveal the various lexical semantics used in the forms as communication tool between individuals and the larger organisations. It was important to review not only how other researchers have dissected such documents, but also what they have used to study their corpus. The thesis also provides a thorough overview of literature pertaining to forms from the municipal and governmental sector as it relates to social semiotics, genre, corporate identity, branding and multimodality. As there was not enough empirical data or research from the African or non-European perspective, a wider literature review was needed to enable me to use a number of complimentary models that could fit the study area. Drawing on a theoretical framework based on the fields of Social Semiotics (Kress 2010; 2014), Applied Linguistics (Brumfit 1996) and Visual Communication (Tam 2008) as well as analytical tools like the genre and multimodality model (GeM), as described in Bateman (2008) and the grammar of visual design (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006), branding and language ideology, the study offers an analysis of the language of particular forms used widely by the City of Cape Town (CCT). The language of forms in essence is as unique as a dialogue held between two people to obtain information. Misunderstanding and communication can easily occur if the questions and sections are not formulated correctly. Although both the textual and visual modes were investigated, the aim was to uncover the corpora used on forms with which a basic set of standard words, phrases and sentences could be designed. If the language of forms in a particular organisation like the CCT can be standardised, the amount of effort on the language practitioners will decrease, and the textual components can be made available in all three of the official languages (Afrikaans, isiXhosa and English) in as simple a language structure as possible.