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Part of
Doing Politics: Discursivity, performativity and mediation in political discourse
Edited by Michael Kranert and Geraldine Horan
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 80] 2018
► pp. 301–329

Chapter 13
Cross-talk in political discourse

Strategies for bridging issue movements on Democracy Now!

editor

This chapter examines the ways that speakers connect movements through language use as they build support for their cause, and position it in a broader understanding of the political terrain. Using a corpus of spoken word transcripts aired between 2003–2013 from US broadcast news programme Democracy Now!, we developed a dictionary of named issue movements using corpus linguistics techniques. Semantic network analysis of issue-movement co-mentions revealed that the civil rights movement occupied a central role in facilitating cross-movement talk, and a purposive sub-sample of those stories was examined using qualitative discourse analysis tools to understand how and why. Several language strategies are explored that participants used to make relational connections between issue movements, and I offer some suggestions on how to approach the mixed methods analysis of cross-issue movement talk as political discourse.

Keywords: social movements, corpus linguistics, network analysis, critical discourse studies, independent media, news, spoken word, grammar, issue movements, cross-talk
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Doing politics: Talking across issue movements
    • Issue movements
    • Cross-issue organising
    • Strategies for cross-issue talk
  • Case and methods
  • Analysis: Talking across issue movements on Democracy Now!
    • Issue movements
    • Issue movement networks
    • Cross-issue talk
    • Positioning issue movements in a multi-issue world
      • Movements start movements
      • Movements work together
      • We need to work together
    • What movements share
      • Same structural problem
      • Same tactical challenge
      • Same ethos or faith
    • People connect issues
    • Success can happen again
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 12 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.80.13tof
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