Kay Richardson

Ethics, advocacy and empowerment: Issues of method in researching language

Researching Language, the book-length study on which the following discussion is based, deals with questions about power and method in a range of social science disciplines (anthropology, sociology and sociolinguistics). To put ‘power’ and ‘method’ together in such an explicit way, and to foreground them as major concerns, is perhaps an unconventional move. Yet any social researcher who has undertaken fieldwork must at some level be aware that power relations exist in this context as in others; and those power relations are strongly affected by the methods we are constrained to adopt in ‘doing research’. That is, they are not entirely determined by pre-existing differences of status imported from other contexts. Something happens within the process of research itself.

Ethics, Advocacy and Empowerment in Researching Language

Researching Language, the book-length study on which the following discussion is based, deals with questions about power and method in a range of social science disciplines (anthropology, sociology and sociolinguistics). To put ‘power’ and ‘method’ together in such an explicit way, and to foreground them as major concerns, is perhaps an unconventional move. Yet any social researcher who has undertaken fieldwork must at some level be aware that power relations exist in this context as in others; and those power relations are strongly affected by the methods we are constrained to adopt in ‘doing research’. That is, they are not entirely determined by preexisting differences of status imported from other contexts. Something happens within the process of research itself.

Risk news in the world of Internet newsgroups

The coming of the Internet has provided those who are able to benefit from it new ways of giving and seeking information. These new contexts of communication include newsgroups, very much a text-based form of interaction with little visual enhancement. In the new era of ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992) people make use of newsgroups to talk about the risks which now confront the world, in their pursuit of trustworthy information and informants. Using the affair of Mad Cow Disease (BSE), with particular reference to the crisis in 1996, this article explores the dynamics of news exchange via the newsgroups as a process which is Interactive, International, Interested and Intertextual. These characteristics result in a form of discourse through which participants engage in the interpersonal social construction of risk. The credibility of the proposition that BSE poses a health risk to humans is the focus of their discussions: they are concerned with the nature of the evidence for that proposition and with the reliability of the sources responsible for endorsing it.

Political Imagery in the British General Election of 2010: The Curious Case of ‘Nick Clegg’

This article examines the figurative appropriations of Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, drawing on a selective audit from newspapers, television, radio and blogs during the 2010 general election period. The flurry of excitement produced by Cleggs sudden visibility during the election campaign offers a unique opportunity to observe the hasty moulding of a new political persona. Across the mediascape, political commentators and humorists employed an expressive range of critique and humour to reflect on Cleggs new-found appeal. We present analysis of the various mediated attempts to ascribe to Clegg certain characteristics and values through the use of labelling, metaphor and other popular culture allusions. It is especially in the unpicking of the prevalent sexualised metaphor that our research prompts wider queries about the current mediation of British political culture.

Multimodality and the study of popular drama

This article reviews a range of methodological issues in the study of dialogue in popular drama (film and television). First of all it discusses some of the factors that may until recently have acted to discourage such research, showing that there are no intractable difficulties. Secondly it compares two recent logocentric studies of dialogue-in-film, one emerging from stylistics itself (McIntyre, 2008) and one from film studies (Kozloff, 2000), both of which, despite a primary focus on interactive spoken language, recognize and address the multimodal character of film productions. Finally, it concludes that, subject to certain provisos, there is merit in approaching the multimodality of film and TV drama productions from a methodologically logocentric perspective.

Comedy, the Civic Subject, and Generic Mediation

This article explores the contribution of comedy to the mediation of politics in a number of genres outside the core forms of journalism. Using material collected during an extensive study of diverse media treatments of British politics, it raises questions about the functions that comedy performs within civic culture and civic subjectivity, giving emphasis to broadcasting. Selected accounts from respondent groups are used to investigate further the ways in which comedy contributes to the placing of politics within the everyday and to the naturalization, or questioning, of the power relations at work. The article concludes by suggesting that further work on comic treatments, alongside studies of other sources of political information and commentary, will be a valuable aspect of research on political culture.

Describing, analysing and judging language codes in cinematic discourse

In this short commentary piece, we want to stand back from many of the specific details in the seven papers which constitute the special issue, and offer some observations which attempt to identify and assess points of similarity and difference amongst them, under a number of different general headings. To the extent that the ‘sociolinguistics of cinematic discourse’ is an emergent suband inter-disciplinary specialism, it is not yet altogether clear what its overall ambitions might be, or how it might fit into the broader landscape of sociolinguistic study on the one hand, or film/television studies on the other. By organising the commentary along thematic lines, we hope at least to have indicated some of the contours of the current landscape, as represented in these particular contributions. For reasons of space limitations we have had to be selective in the themes that we have foregrounded. It is vexatious for research in this area that the default verb for referring to the consumption of audiovisual drama in either medium is watch ‘Did you watch that movie?’, and one of the commonest nouns for referring to its consumers is as ‘viewers’. In the world of mass communication, the verb listen tends to be reserved for practices of radio and music consumption. ‘Watching’ movies and TV shows mostly also includes listening/hearing, yet the verb does not semantically acknowledge the aural dimensions of the experience, let alone the specifically linguistic aural dimensions which are of interest to the contributors in this special issue (Petrucci’s account of subtitled versus dubbed translations here reminding us that for some consumers the linguistic part of the textual experience is visual rather than aural). If ‘watching’ is too narrow, then more general terms like ‘consuming’ or ‘receiving’ are too broad. We also consume goods and services generally, not to mention food, whilst ‘receiving’ and ‘reception’ are as often used for technological processes as for human ones. Thus, different items in this lexical reper-

Broadcast political talk—a discourse of licensed inauthenticity?

Authenticity is an awkward concept to use in relation to contemporary broadcast political discourse. Not only are political speakers constantly challenged on the authenticity of their performance by their opponents and by journalists: there is also, and perhaps as a result of this, widespread skepticism from the general public. This article reviews the performance of a number of political actors in British public life—Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, John Gummer—with particular reference to the identities and claims they sought to promote, in virtue of which their authenticity was called into question.

Keywords revisited: The present as history

(1995). Keywords revisited: The present as history. Social Semiotics: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 101-117.

The Political World in Print — Images and Imagination

This chapter looks at a selection of printed, non-news mediations of British politics collected during our research period.1 We give particular emphasis to a category that we have called ‘colour writing’, of which parliamentary sketches are a core example, and to that long-standing vehicle of critical political expression — the editorial cartoon. We also give briefer attention to other forms, including newspaper ‘leaders’, a genre of writing in which it is opinion rather than information as such which is given priority and where the newspaper’s own identity, as well as its views, are given strong visibility. We conclude with some examples of parody from the satirical magazine Private Eye, examples which take a more elaborate and sustained approach to comic design than most of the other work we examine.