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Knowledge, power and discourses in Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis
94-112Views:125Critical Discourse Analysis (or Critical Discourse Studies – CDA/CDS) examines the relationship between texts, discourses and power, dominance, power abuses and social inequalities. Critical discourse analysis is a multidisciplinary research perspective, which not only examines the interactions between the text, the micro level and its surroundings, the macro level, but its main goal is to uncover social inequalities, expose the forms and modalities of abuse of power. The representatives of CDA are committed to social equality and justice. Present paper presents the work of one of the outstanding representatives of Critical Discourse Analysis, Teun A. Van Dijk, by presenting the history and possibilities of CDA, and also the key elements of Van Dijk’s approach. This study aims to show how knowledge, power and discourse are connected in Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis.
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„Women Question” in the Political Parties’ Discourse in Post-Revolution Tunisia (2011–2014)
127-145Views:54For more than fifty years, the Tunisian political system has been considered as a so-called secular system that had provided women with many rights in education, healthcare and in economic and political sectors, besides that woman friendly family laws reforms After the overthrown of Ben Ali regime on 14th of January 2011, the Tunisian society witnessed an economic, social and political significant transformation. A new Islamic-secular discourse have been raised debates both in public and private sphere, women’s rights have been one of the incendiary topics of these debates. Therefore, with the participation of the Islamists in political life, the country has faced a new political dynamic which made the pollical scene complex and ambiguous. In this context, discourse analysis is a very important and crucial to be used as a method to approach to the research main question. Some leaders’ speeches, events which took place during the democratic transition are examined and analyzed in order to serve the research’s analytic interest through the relevant materials.
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Hopes and concerns of democratization: Ideas about popular vote in Hungarian political discourse 1985–1989
5-27Views:85The article analyzes the political discourse concerning direct democracy between 1985–89, when the issue of introducing popular vote at local and national level became relevant, both as a general institutional reform of political decision-making, and as the result of some major initiatives launched by social movements. The analysis covers the related law journal articles, party-state documents, the writings of political and intellectual elites (including the opposition), and the wider public (mainly daily and weekly newspapers). The discourse analysis is based on the academic literature of direct democracy and some new aspects, like the timing of introducing direct democracy, its role and perspectives, the consideration of threats and benefits, and the relevance of international examples as possible models for reform. The paper finds that the opposition and the party-state regarded the introduction of popular vote differently: while the emerging opposition emphasised the function of controling the state power by popular votes, the party-state expected to stop shrinking its social legitimacy. Meanwhile, general public seemed to be indifferent about this remarkable democratic reform.
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Representations of induced abortion in the Hungarian online media
121-152.Views:72This study focuses on how induced abortion is represented in the Hungarian online media in
relation to the reception of the public debate on the new Polish abortion law. The study was aimed
at revealing the major themes, the embedding conceptual network and the framing of induced
abortion in the online press. Since the press is an essential influencing factor of public opinion
due to its broad publicity, research should focus on the characteristics of the discourse in whose
space the concerned individuals form their views and make decisions on abortion. A thematic
analysis of relevant press releases revealed eight major themes that framed abortion in a specific
manner: thematization of induced abortion as a social/demographic issue; legislative issues of;
and attitudes towards, abortion; abortion as an act of (physical) self-determination; contents
related to the abortion decision; to its causes and consequences; and depiction of women
choosing abortion. Furthermore, the analysis revealed the themes most frequently associated
with abortion and potentially related themes typically not associated with it. -
On the Roma issue again - Discourse analysis and reality
265-274Views:43At the end of the first decade of the new millennium, several works on the Hungarian Roma, their history, their current exclusion and their unresolved social situation, based on the same approach, partly on social history and partly on sociological surveys, appeared. Gábor Kertesi in 2005 ("On the margins of society. Roma in the labour market and in school") and Csaba Dupcsik in 2009 ("The history of the Hungarian Roma. History in the light of Gypsy studies 1890-2008") were published by Osiris Publishing House, while Tünde Virág's 2010 book ("Kirekesztve. Falusi gettók az ország margemén") was published by Akadémiai Kiadó as a result of a successful OTKA grant.
The most recently published work, presented at the 83rd Festive Book Week, is the first joint publication of Balázs Majtényi, a constitutional lawyer who is concerned with the protection of human rights, and György Majtényi, a historian who is particularly interested in the cultural and social history of the 20th century (including the Kádár era). The book, which can be ordered online with two different hardcover editions, was based on a 2003 study, which was later jointly expanded, combining the research results of several disciplines and "maturing" into a separate volume. However, it fails to provide the in-depth analysis of the subject of the title: it (also) fails to provide a factual social portrait of realities, of phenomena experienced and lived on a day-to-day basis, of phenomena examined from several perspectives, and of realistic alternatives to solutions. -
Exploring the possible expressions of social dominance in an online context: Discourse analysis below the video contents of the representatives of Finn’s Party
1-24Views:20In the course of the study, discourse analysis was used to examine the comments posted under the videos of three representatives of the Finns Party with the largest YouTube following. The aim of the research was to identify discoursive manifestations of social dominance in the comment field. In addition, we also aimed to validate a word list of socially dominant terms. To this end, we have identified four linguistic categories that could form the basis of socially dominant communication, based on the literature of social dominance. The words with the highest number of elements in each category were presented in a word cloud. After collecting the most frequent terms, three external groups were identified against which social dominance orientation may be relevant. These suggest that the European Union, immigrants and the domestic left may constitute the out-group category in the eyes of populist supporters. Finally, the hierarchical terms were not validated as they occured in a negligible number of items in the sample. The successfully validated categories were plotted on a cross-tabulation, from which we created four different types of Finns Party supporters based on the out-group they named and the dominant common words and phrases in the comment categories. The presence of authoritarian, political out-group category points to the spread of political polarization in Finland. Since social identity underlies both social dominance orientation and political polarization, it may be relevant to examine both together in future research. Nonetheless, social dominance was not expressed in the way that was initially assumed and commentators perceived “real Finns” as the sufferers of a socially dominant situation. The background to this phenomenon is presumably the populist political rhetoric of the Finns’ Party, which tries to portray Finns as people left behind in disadvantaged social positions.
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Classification of depression-related online forums using Natural Language Processing
181-208.Views:70The study of the phenomenon of depression is not new in sociology, but since the depression
is becoming a wider social problem, it is still a relevant issue today. In addition to the biomedical and psychological aspects of depression, the sociological perspective is becoming more
noteworthy in the discourse about the causes of depression. In the research of the discourse
on depression, the online texts offer many new possibilities, as the forum’s anonymity and
accessability make the online seeking for help popular. In this research, natural language
processing (logistic regression) was applied to find patterns in the definition of depression
in lay discourses. These methods make it possible to analyze a large amount of text - which
would have been difficult to process with human resources. During the analysis, 67 857 posts of
English-speaking online forums were categorized along the categories of the scientific discourse
about depression. This study presents the first results, which shows logistic regression classifier
performs like the annotators. . Although the research has analyzed English-speaking forums, my
findings may be useful to anyone observing abstract sociological concepts in online texts written
by users. -
The Rethinking the public in Higher Education: Communitarian Engagement vs. Service-Based dependency
79-108Views:74There has been structural change in higher education due to the impact of institutions built or maintained in private public partnership. The aim of the paper is to give a deep insight into how these institutions could accomodate or shape the public higher education sector’s discouses, spaces, procedures. The research used mixed method to approach this complex question from a multidisciplinary perspective (sociology, education). Within this framework two residential halls were chosen and 17 interviews were carreid out with all relevant figure of the management. Due to the analytical tools of Maxqda 12 the qualitative results will be presented giving an insight into the differing discourses and practices of the public vs. private-public management. Based on the analysis of the managerial interviews it is safe to state that the public management struggles to balance a communitarian, democratic discourse and objectives with the requirements of efficiency and accountability. The presence of private-public management unintendedly shapes its public counterpart. The institutional analysis revealed that due to the swiftly changing institutional and policy environment residential halls are forced to be efficient leading to difficulties in managerial legitimacy and questions concepts such as community, conformity, commitment and action. Under the circumstances of increasingly growing institutional service-based dependency and control, academic consumers, institutions and students alike, paradoxically avoid integrating into macro groups. As a consequence, the institution encourage and educate student into a particular type of citizenship based on communication and consumerism rather than consensus.
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Hungarian Videoblogger Networks Online
43-67.Views:42The web 2.0 phenomenon and social media – without question – not only reshaped our everyday experiences, but they have established an environment for new types of social practices and social actors. The demotization (Turner 2010) effect of such technologies has created entirely new fields where celebrities might emerge from: one of them is videoblogging. Many video bloggers gained great reputation through peculiar micro-celebrity practices (Marwick 2015, Senft 2012), and, as a result, became key figures in distributing ideas, values and knowledge in today’s society. These cognitive patterns are disseminated with a discursive apparatus that is largely based on social media activity, including posts, tweets, self-imagery and the videos themselves, which are tied to a certain logic according to environmental affordances, creating the possibility for fans to interact (share, comment, like, retweet etc.) with artifacts of the celebrity. This mechanism puts the celebrity in a so-called expert system (Giddens 1990) position as they provide adequate schemas of attitude, mentality or behavior. Most importantly, all of these public interactions are accessible for scholars to conduct scientific research. With the help of the SentiOne application this research attempts to reconstruct online networks of video bloggers based on mentions, which either occurred in an artifact (post, video description etc.) or in a fan comment. Apart from the network itself, SentiOne enables us to get insights regarding each individual connection established in it with different types of aggregated data.
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Ethnic categories and the context of migration in Beregszász
120-137Views:58In the paper, we try to demonstrate what migration trends in Beregszász have been conducted
in focus group discussions on everyday ethnicity, and how ethnicity appears in these migration
processes. In the study, we mainly summarize the findings of the research, which we carried
out in the summer of 2016 and reflected in some descriptions of the changes that have taken
place since the summer of 2017. The study is primarily descriptive and only interprets issues
within ethnicity and ethnic categories, we do not aim to compare the conclusions with previous
migration research results. In the analysis, the social constructivism methodological approach
is applied. Our aim is to present the discourses: how the opinions are constructed and differing
opinions can form unity.
