Submitted by mnowak on 4 December, 2013 - 10:58.
Dec. 11th (Wed), 18.30
Rm. 604
Sam Bennett
Whose line is it anyway? Pride movements in Southern contexts
Pride marches are becoming increasingly common and popular in the ‘Global South’ and can be seen as sign of progress towards greater social acceptance of sexual minorities. These movements often appropriate and mimic the semiotic symbols and discursive frames visible in Pride movements in the 'North' such as rainbow flags, and the promotion of individual human rights. However, there is also a degree of recontextualisation of these discourses so that they are relevant to local contexts. There is also a tension visible, both within these movements and between them and wider society.
This paper will focus on newspaper articles as a way of gauging how Pride movements are discursively constructed in the public sphere. I will critically analyse actor representations in a systematic sample of articles from three daily national newspapers from India and South Africa over a period of three years. By highlighting nominational and predicational strategies (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001) the paper will focus on three types of actors: the actual Pride movement, participants of pride and outside actors.
Scots and the politics of double-bind:
Language ideologies and identity constructions in a changing Scotland
Often associated with, inter alia, the rise of the Scottish National Party from the minority to the majority government (between 2007 and 2011), a considerable improvement in the official language policy on the Scots language could have been noted in recent years. However, despite those improvements, the perceived status of Scots is still an open issue subject to contestation, underpinned by common misconceptions of its alleged inferiority to English as well as its historical stigmatisation.
Corresponding with the landmark results of the census question on the Scots language and the Scottish independence referendum, the proposed research aims to investigate interrelated constructions of the Scots language in the contexts of bottom-up negotiation of personal identities (among the language users) and in top-down practices of (collective) nation-building and national self-imagining. After providing the audience with an insight into the characteristics of Scots’ sociolinguistic situation, the talk will discuss the theoretical and methodological design of the author’s PhD research project.
Everybody’s welcome!
