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This paper aims to provide a situated critical discourse analysis of the public debate around India’s 2013 National Food Security Act (NFSA), describing its rhetorical characteristics and the context within which it has taken place.

Using Wodak’s (2001) Discourse Historical Approach (DHA), the authors examine media coverage of the NFSA, attending to perspectivization, intensification and mitigation and representational and argumentational strategies. The authors also consider this coverage in light of its intratextual, intertextual, situational and wider socio-political and economic contexts. The corpus consists of 29 English-language Indian newspaper and magazine articles, published in print and online between 2011 and 2014.

This paper explains the rhetorical purchase of the term “food security” in contemporary Indian public policy debates by comparing the leftist, right wing and centrist arguments.

Owing to the detailed qualitative analysis presented here, the corpus is necessarily limited in size. Newspaper articles contributed by one of the authors were omitted from the study.

The DHA claims to be an interdisciplinary framework, but relatively few studies involve true cross-disciplinary research. By contrast, this study relies on close collaboration by scholars active in economics and applied linguistics – thus, demonstrating both the potential for, and the value of, working coherently across academic disciplines. Also, unlike most DHA studies, which interrogate dominant discourses, this paper compares diverse discourses competing for influence.

The purpose of this study is to examine the most frequent countries and prevalent discourses in the context of homosexuality in the headlines of Arabic-language media outlets.

This study combined both corpus linguistic (CL) quantitative and critical discourse analysis (CDA) qualitative approaches to analyse five thousand two hundred news headlines that were retrieved from the Factiva news database from 2010 to 2019.

There were six main categories of subjects covered by the media in the context of homosexuality, namely crime, extremist groups, legislation, authority figures and scandals, culture and countries. The analysis showed that the countries whose laws criminalize homosexuals were more frequent than those seen to be supportive of homosexuals. The findings revealed that homosexuals are under-covered in the Arab media, and whenever they are present in the news reports, they are depicted negatively.

This study examined the representation of homosexuals in Arabic headlines from 2010 to 2019. Future researchers may investigate their construction in the body of the articles in different periods and languages.

The present research has implications regarding the necessity of objectivity in covering news about minority groups without being influenced by the stock of ideas circulating in the culture where media outlets report.

The social implications include enhancing the principles and values of solidarity and respecting all groups in society.

Although there is considerable literature on the representation of homosexuals in media outlets, the number of articles that investigated the same concept in the Arab region is relatively limited to the best knowledge of the researchers. Therefore, this study can add great significance to existing knowledge as it tackles a limitedly investigated topic in the Arab world.

Public acts of self-criticism in Eastern Europe – a genre cultivated and extorted by the communist parties – did not disappear with the end of communism. In the young democracies of the region self-criticism has become an attempt to diagnose society’s ‘backward’ character and to develop ‘self-correction’ scenarios in order to participate in the Western modernising discourse. On the one hand, conservative and right-wing elites suppose that public acts of self-criticism (performed by politicians, artists or scholars) can endow the vetting procedures of the ancien régime with a sense of social catharsis and retroactive justice. On the other hand, liberal and left-wing intellectuals subject themselves to collective self-reckoning, not only with their choices made in the transition period, but also with the memory of WWII, in order to shape a civil society free of anti-Semitism and intolerance. An analysis based on the discourse-historical approach in critical discourse analysis, Reinhart Koselleck’s historical semantics and Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse, and carried out on the text corpus of selected acts of self-criticism in Poland, aims to diagnose the role these acts had in shaping public discourse on the troublesome past.

This paper presents research that sought to understand how the National Library of Australia engages with soft power in its Annual Report 2019–20. Driving the analysis was the research question: How is soft power discourse reproduced and enacted in the National Library of Australia's Annual Report 2019–20? The research recognises the significance of Australia's soft power, cultural diplomacy, and regional relationships to national interest in the context of a library's contributions to these areas.

The study employs a qualitative discourse analysis, with constructivist and interpretivist perspectives. A critical discourse analysis was undertaken that applied a discourse-historical approach.

The findings suggest that the National Library of Australia primarily engages with soft power discourse through the construction and preservation of an Australian national identity. National identity is framed as key to the Library's collection development, with Australian knowledge prioritised.

This study extends on research addressing the roles of galleries, archives, and museums in cultural diplomacy, but rarely examines soft power and libraries explicitly or in a contemporary context. It contributes to broader understandings of libraries in international relations and the role they can play in soft power attraction and cultural diplomacy.

The purpose of this paper is to answer two main research questions. First, the authors ask the degree to which the UK corporate governance code has changed in response to both systemic perturbations and the subsequent enquiries established to recommend solutions to perceived shortcomings. Second, the authors ask how the solutions proposed in these landmark governance texts might be explained.

The authors take a critical discourse approach to develop and apply a discourse model of corporate governance reform. The authors draw together data on popular, corporate-political and technocratic discourses on corporate governance in the UK and analyse these data using content analysis and the historical discourse approach.

The UK corporate governance code has changed little despite periodic crises and the enquiries set up to investigate and make recommendation. Institutional stasis, the authors find, is the product of discourse capture and control by elite corporate actors aided by political allies who inhabit the same elite habitus. Review group members draw intertextually on prior technocratic discourse to create new canonical texts that bear the hallmarks of their predecessors. Light touch regulation by corporate insiders thus remains the UK approach.

This is one of the first applications of critical discourse analysis in the accounting literature and the first to have conducted a discursive analysis of corporate governance reports in the UK. The authors present an original model of discourse transitions to explain how systemic challenges are dissipated.

This research explores the standard language ideology in Chinese foreign language education policies. The most substantial in relation to language policy and management in regard to language ideology are beliefs associated with the values on the named language and its varieties (Spolsky, 2009). In the standard language ideology, the standard is treated as being valuable linguistic capital and possessing prestige as well as authority. Mandarin is the most well-accepted standard Chinese, and similarly, UK English or US English is the most popular and Standard English (SE) in China.

The theoretical framework in this research is critical discourse analysis (CDA) and discourse-historical approach (DHA) to guide the data collection and data analysis. This research will review recent and seminal literature obtained from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) on language policy in China in relation to standard language ideology. The literature also investigates Chinese state's English language ideologies using official language education policies (FLEPs).

The results show that standard language ideology is a common mindset found within official state policies in regard to SE. The authors argue that the Chinese trust on the ideology of standard language appears to not be aligned to recent worldwide trends such as globalization and multilingualism.

This research can provide insights into future language planning and language policy in China and shows that the future research could do more on language planning in China.

Building on the proposition that Bernstein's ideas are due for a revival in higher education research, the call for studies in which theory is put to use and for policy studies to engage in textual analysis, this chapter argues for the affordances of the theoretical underpinnings of Bernstein's pedagogic device and critical discourse studies in investigating connections between policy and practice. Drawing on the sociology of pedagogy and applied linguistics, this chapter aims to explore the theoretical complementarities of the chosen approaches for exploring how policy ideas move through time and space. A focus on the notion of recontextualisation enables an understanding of how influences beyond the discipline itself, including policy discourses, can shape learning, teaching and assessment practices. The illustrating case examines policy on learning and teaching and how these ideas are recontextualised from national policy through to institutional policy and individual practices. The critical or questioning angle of both approaches in seeing ideas, including policy, as never value-free but as situated within their sociopolitical context can shed light on how policy ideas make their way into universities and in whose interests.

This chapter offers a pedagogical, analytical and heuristic framework for the critical analysis of higher education policy texts, and of the processes and motivations behind their articulations, grounded in considerations of relationships and flows between language, power and discourse. Theoretically the framework draws on critical discourse analysis, which provides a systematic framework for exegesis, analysis and interpretation, uncloaking the ways in which language (and other semiotic modes) work within discourse as agents and actors in the realisation, construction and perception of relations of power. The framework itself comprises two elements: one concerned with contextualising and one with deconstructing. The contextualisation element of the frame comprises three parts: temporal context, policy levers/drivers and warrant. The second element of deconstruction engages with text and discourse using a number of analytical lenses and tools derived from critical discourse analysis and critical literacy analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the social debate on women, health and smoking in the New York Times from 1870 until 1929. The paper aimed to establish whether smoking for women was a form of oppression and whether it was publicly known that smoking is harmful in decades preceding the “Torches of Freedom” campaign run by Edward L. Bernays. This criticism for engineering women’s smoking, and thus harming women’s health up to today causes harm to the reputation of the public relations (PR) industry.

Articles were analysed per decade and a total of 294 articles from the New York Times was analysed. The coverage was analysed using two themes, smoking and health and women and smoking and discourse analysis have been carried out on articles in these themes to explore what was known of smoking and whether the social perception of women smoking was oppressive and could be seen as a woman’s issue that “Torches of Freedom” addressed.

Findings show that it was not known that cigarettes were harmful to health and that smoking can be seen as constituting part of women’s oppression in the US before the “Torches of Freedom” campaign. The oppression of women who smoked intensified during the 1920s and Bernays’ Torches of Freedom campaign directly addressed an existing social issue rather than engineering a campaign and manipulating women to start smoking.

The paper highlights the revolutionary potential in Bernays’ campaign. This could inspire researchers and consumers to keep on critically reflecting on PR campaigns while still appreciating any progressive agenda they might contribute to. Simultaneously, PR practitioners may take away from the article that a message of social relevance may just be more memorable than the advertised brand itself.

This paper engages with the coverage of the New York Times, a newspaper that is often mentioned in the context of the “Torches of Freedom” campaign success and explores in detail what the debate on smoking, health and women were in nearly 60 years preceding the much-criticised campaign.

This chapter explores the use of critical discourse analysis (CDA) within higher education research. CDA is an approach to studying language and its relation to power, ideology and inequality. Within CDA, texts are not analysed in isolation, but as part of the institutional and discoursal practices in which they are embedded. Within the broad field of educational research, CDA has been increasingly used to explore the relationship between language and society; higher education research appears to be experiencing a similar turn to CDA. The chapter begins with an overview of CDA, outlining its origins, and discussing its position as both a theory and a method. A review of CDA-related higher education research follows. The review aims to show the scope and potential of CDA in the study of higher education. The chapter closes with recommendations for future work to develop and extend the use of CDA within higher education research.