Chapter 7
Taking stances on the Greek crisis
Evidence from Facebook interaction
In this paper I explore informal conversations about the Greek crisis on the social network site of Facebook, drawing on Du Bois’ (2007) theory on stance, as well as on methods of discourse-centred online ethnography and corpus linguistics. I closely analyse a particular discursive episode between three Greek Facebook users (two male students of International and European Studies and one female Law student) and investigate how they take stances towards austerity and towards one another. Focusing on two interactional stance-taking activities, positioning and (dis)alignment, I argue that while the participants express divergent stances, they also show heightened awareness and criticality of both the crisis context and Facebook’s generic context.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Crisis, discourse and reflexivity
- 3.Stance
- 4.Facebook affordances and stance-taking
- 5.Data and methods
- 6.Analysis
- 6.1Positioning
- 6.1.1Expressing beliefs
- 6.1.2Invoking sources of knowledge
- 6.1.3Claiming ignorance
- 6.2(Dis)alignment
- 6.2.1Direct challenging
- 6.2.2Indirect challenging
- 6.2.3Delaying criticism
- 6.2.4Making denials
- 6.2.5Recycling linguistic elements
- 6.3Conclusions on stance-taking strategies
- 6.4Stance-taking patterns
- 7.Conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References
-
Appendix
References (62)
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