ABSTRACTThis study examined student teachers’ and teacher educators’ discourses about multiculturalism in an international English-medium teacher education programme in Finland. An analysis with discursive pragmatics of semi-structured interviews revealed four positioning strategies for initial responses to multiculturalism: stereotyping and othering, distancing oneself, verbalizing experiences and downplaying multiculturalism. Although the same strategies were present to a large extent among both student teachers and teacher educators, these have different implications. The teacher educators’ lack of a shared critical understanding of interculturality created uncertainty when considering multicultural issues and can lead to a situation where the coherence between the objectives, implementation methods and assessment in the program suffers. The student teachers had difficulties transferring their immediate experiences of multiculturalism into reflections of how these may contribute to their future work as teachers. Student teachers seemed dependent on teacher educators’ support in recognizing challenges with diversities as learning opportunities. Teacher educators should be provided with opportunities to compare and contest their conceptions of interculturality so that they would be able to guide student teachers in reflecting on theirs.

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the presence of multilingualism as an academic practice within the field of research in multilingualism by examining the citation practices of research publishing in key English-language journals in the field. It investigates how researchers make use of material published in other languages as a component of their research writing and thus of their conceptualisation of the field of research to determine to what extent multilingualism itself is actually present in multilingual research communicated in English. This article argues that, although some research published in languages other than English may be cited in multilingualism research, multilingualism as a visible research practice is largely absent from the study of multilingualism. This means that research into multilingualism largely constructs multilingualism as a subject to be studied from a perspective that lies outside the phenomenon of multilingualism itself and normalises monolingualism as the standard form of academic practice within the English-speaking world. It can therefore be argued that multilingualism research is a site in which a monolingual habitus predominates and that this represents an epistemological dilemma for the field.

ABSTRACTMy paper uses theories of acculturation in order to analyze the attempts of transnational individuals to synthesize original and host cultures, Eastern and Western identities. I demonstrate that in Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir Persepolis and the relating film adaptation the narrating self assumes the role of a mediating person who maintains the integration strategy of acculturation. Nevertheless, Satrapi only partly explains how the experiencing self acquires the necessary in-between position which makes the integration or synthesis between the two cultures possible. The memoir details only how the protagonist experiences the superficial aspects of Western culture, the initial honeymoon and culture shock phases of acculturation, and maintains a sharp distinction between the narrating and experiencing selves of the narrator. Thus, Persepolis leaves the question unanswered in which way she synthesizes her Iranian and Western identities. To explain this conundrum, I apply contemporary theories of exile and place the memoir in the context of Iranian exilic cultural production. Such theories and memoirs stress that the oscillation between various cultures does not only drive exiles into depression, but it also contributes to their intellectual and artistic activities by positioning the narrator as a privileged individual with a unique, in-between point-of-view and liminal position.

ABSTRACTInteraction between images and cultural references can make illustrations, and especially book covers, become more than mere supplements to texts. In this study I analyze the topics, paratextual presentations and covers of Korean literature translated into English and published in the USA after the Korean War. I organize topics, discourses and images into four categories of analysis (Modernity, Tradition, Religion and Struggle) and I look into the relations between the four. I aim to discern, first, the main image presented of Korea in this corpus of publications. Second, I want to uncover to what extent these three categories, which may correspond to the three stages of the creation of a literary translation (selection – translation – marketing), have a common focus. Third, based on the results, I draw conclusions regarding the different visions of Korea and the agents involved in the translation of Korean literature. The results show contradictory presentations of the different agents involved with a common hidden discourse: Struggle.

The aim of this article is to show that economic experts are not the product of one single social field, with one identity and one role. They are rather the product of a trans-epistemic discursive field. By a combination of discourse analytical tools from post-structuralism and a theory of symbolic power derived from Bourdieu's work, the contribution explores how economists occupy a powerful, hegemonic position in the global political economy. While classical approaches in Political Economy reduce power mainly to money and violence, this paper takes the recent debates on the cultural turn in Political Economy as a starting point to develop the idea of a Discursive Political Economy of Economics. In the first step it is shown how discourse and power interact. In the second step the paper explores the discursive power logic of economic expert discourses at the interface between academia, politics, media and the economy with illustrations from empirical research. The claim of this paper is that the power of economic expert discourses in the media, politics and the political economy is based on an elitism dispositif which emerged in the academic world of economics in the USA as an ‘excellence myth’.

The wider field of discourse studies is still only beginning to turn its attention to social media despite a number of notable scholarly works. But as yet there has been little that has dealt specifically with issues of multicultural discourse – how language, identity, cross-cultural social relations and power play out in the rapidly evolving landscape of social media. In this paper, I show why discourse studies must engage with theories and empirical work on social media across academic fields beyond discourse studies and linguistics, at how these can help best frame the kinds of research that needs to be done, how to best formulate some of the basic questions of critical discourse analysis for this new communicative environment. I use this as a platform to point to the areas where multicultural discourse studies can work – where all the ambiguities of former studies of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ are present, but realised in new ways. Yet these new forms of communication are fused into wider patterns of changing cultural values about forms of social structure, knowledge itself and the kinds of issues that tend to form our individually civic spheres.

Research on securitization – the process of politicization aiming to increase security – stresses how important it is for security authorities to gain public support for their representation of threats and security measures. However, there is little research on how people understand and respond to securitization and even less so via social media. Research on security and antiterrorism discourse has rather focused on policy documents and journalism. This article analyses attitudes on Twitter in the wake of the Norwegian terror alert in July 2014. Using discursive psychology it provides novel insights into securitization as an argumentative process that has entered social media. The study analyses all tweets with the hashtag #terrortrussel (Eng. #terrorthreat) from individual users and, in addition, the initial statements by the Norwegian authorities. The results demonstrate that Twitter users are creatively using social media in response to securitization, endorsing attitudes regarding a number of themes: (1) the authorities’ announcement and ways of representing the terror alert; (2) the diffusion of responsibility to lay people for monitoring suspicious events and actors; and (3) the issue of ethnicity and blame. The study contributes to two research streams: studies of securitization and studies of antiterrorism discourse in discourse analytical research.

This paper shows how a multimodal discourse analysis of the changing visual designs of a science news website between 2009 and 2013 can reveal fundamental changes in visual forms of address, which must be acknowledged alongside shifts being observed at the level of linguistic address. Designers deploy design features in a shift from presenting science as official, formal, and authoritative, where communicative style is a monolog, to one which must suggest a sense of a conversation, of accessibility, of engagement, with a reader presumed to have opinions and needs. This is shift from a culture of transmission of information to a culture which rather formulates, channels, and retrieves information and which is dominated by scan-and-go media use. The analysis describes the changes of design details. It places these observations within the scholarly debate about the consequences of the Internet and social media for science communication.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes on contributorJan Blommaert is Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization and Director of the Babylon Center at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He also holds appointments at Ghent University (Belgium), University of the Western Cape (South Africa), and Beijing Language and Culture University (China), and is coordinator of the Max Planck Sociolinguistic Diversity Working Group. Major publications include Language Ideological Debates (Mouton de Gruyter 1999), Discourse: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press 2005), Grassroots Literacy (Routledge 2008), The Sociolinguistics of Globalization (Cambridge University Press 2010), and Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity (Multilingual Matters 2013).

I appreciate this opportunity to respond to ‘Constructing the “Other”: Construction of Russian Identity in the Discourse of James Bond Films’ (Lawless, 2014), a contribution that I think makes head...