scholarly journals A critical discourse analysis of selected news reports of South Africa xenophobic attacks of Nigerians

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 62-69
Author(s):  
Gideon Abioye Oyedeji ◽  
◽  
Nabila Idoko Idris ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
South African ◽  
News Media ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Colonial Experience

The incessant xenophobic attacks of Nigerians and other foreign nationals in South Africa have generated a unique discourse in the Nigerian media and in fact, other mainstream media on the African continent and international scene. These attacks are viewed by the international community as incompatible with 21st century civility. This paper therefore, engages the reports of selected news media in Nigeria, South African and other media houses with a view to explicating the ideologies that underpin each report seeing through the insight of Van Dijk, Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak’s models of Critical Discourse Analysis. A total of 10 report on the 2015-2019 xenophobia were purposively selected from the online outlets of these media houses. The study therefore found that the use of language by the Nigerian media shows that the polarisation tilted towards emphasising the positive ‘in-group’ description of the heinous acts visited on innocent Nigerians in South Africa whereas the South African and other news media brought to perspective the negative ‘out-group’ description of “some” Nigerians who are engaged in illegal businesses in their South Africa. The lexical choices contribute in significant ways to show the ideologies each reporters represent. The study submits that, these attacks by South Africans on fellow African Nationals are nefarious, iniquitous, atrocious and roguish perhaps because of their colonial experience.

Resisting corruption in the Nigerian legislature: A critical discourse analysis of news and opinion articles on legislators’ salaries

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 519-541
Author(s):  
Innocent Chiluwa
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
Public Response ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
News Reports

This study analyses news reports of public reactions to the controversial legislators’ monthly/annual income in Nigeria in 2019, which was presumed to far exceed the salaries of legislators worldwide. Data for this study are news and opinion articles published between 2017 and 2019 that represent public response to the salary scandal involving public officers and National Assembly members. Critical discourse analysis is adopted in the analyses of media representations of the main actors in and situations of the scandal. Hence, discursive strategies identified in the resistance discourse of the news media are qualitatively analysed. The study argues that lack of accountability and widespread corruption in the Nigerian political economy is a reflection of weak political institutions, such as those that empower legislators to enrich themselves.

scholarly journals Axing the Rainbow

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Irina Turner
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
South African ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Academic Institutions ◽  
African Nation ◽  
Current State ◽  
Systemic Discrimination ◽  
Social Disparity

Today, the Rainbow Nation as the central metaphor for postapartheid South Africa falls short of serving as a unifying identification marker due to its tendency to gloss over contrasting living realities of diversified identities and ongoing systemic discrimination. The South African Fallism movements – the student-driven protests against neocolonial structures in academic institutions – spearheaded public criticism with the current state of ongoing social disparity in South Africa and revived the critique of so-called rainbowism, i.e., the belief that a colour-blind society can be created. In an application of Critical Discourse Analysis focusing on mythical metaphors, this article asks to what extent the new president Cyril Ramaphosa in his maiden State of the Nation Address projected a post-Zuma South African nation and answered to the challenges posed by Fallists.

A local discursive dimension in a specific historical context: Students’ narratives of police experiences during South Africa’s #FeesMustFall protests

Multilingua ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 431-450
Author(s):  
Lynn Mafofo ◽  
Sinfree Makoni
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
South African ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Private Policing ◽  
African Higher Education ◽  
South African Higher Education

AbstractMost studies on campus and private policing take on political, anthropological, sociological, and criminological perspectives. Although there were investigations on policing in South Africa during apartheid, scant research has focused on how students in South African higher education (SAHE) relate their experiences of campus policing. Due to recent unrest on SAHE campuses and radical changes that include the militarization of police forces, examining how students perceive the legitimacy and integrity of campus policing is vital. As such, this paper presents a discourse analysis focused on descriptions of students’ campus experiences in the aftermath of the #FeesMustFall (#FMF) protests. Combining critical discourse analysis (CDA) with systemic functional linguistics, through transitivity, it offers insight into the ideological power struggles between students and police. It shows the types of voices students reveal as an aggrieved group in the hope of identifying non-aggressive approaches to address emotionally charged events (such as protests). Adding transitivity analysis to CDA provides a solid framework for decoding radical meanings at the peak of chaotic situations in which social change in post-apartheid South Africa can be facilitated by understanding marginalized groups.

scholarly journals Representation of People with HIV/AIDS in The Jakarta Post and Jakarta Globe: A Critical Discourse Analysis

TEKNOSASTIK ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Gigit Eklesia ◽  
Akhyar Rido
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
News Media ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Hiv Positive ◽  
Systemic Functional Grammar ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Material Process ◽  
Hiv Aids

This study aims to understand representational meanings from the transitivity choices used by news reports from The Jakarta Post and Jakarta Globe in reporting people with HIV-positive cases and exposing the underlying ideology behind the representation. Fairclough’s three-dimensional concept in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was applied in this study. The study also relied on Halliday’s systemic functional grammar, particularly in the transitivity analysis. Two selected articles were collected from The Jakarta Post and Jakarta Globe newspapers. The findings revealed that both news media dominantly report people with HIV/AIDS through material process, then followed by verbal process and relational process. Next, the study found that people with HIV/AIDS are represented as discriminated and threatened group in The Jakarta Post; meanwhile, they are represented as a mistreated group in Jakarta Globe. Last, the study found that The Jakarta Post attempts to construct that people with HIV/AIDS need to be more accepted and protected; meanwhile, Jakarta Globe attempts to construct an idea that people with HIV/AIDS need to be given more attention. To sum up, the combination of the both theories is substantially advantageous in the discourse to expose ideology.

Constructing undesirables: A critical discourse analysis of othering of Fulani nomads in the Ghanaian news media

2021 ◽  
pp. 175048132098209
Author(s):  
Mark Nartey ◽  
Hans J Ladegaard
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
News Media ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Analysis Framework ◽  
News Reporting ◽  
Media Attention ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Content Organization

The activities of Fulani nomads in Ghana have gained considerable media attention and engendered continuing public debate. In this paper, we analyze the prejudiced portrayals of the nomads in the Ghanaian news media, and how these contribute to an exclusionist and a discriminatory discourse that puts the nomads at the margins of Ghanaian society. The study employs a critical discourse analysis framework and draws on a dataset of 160 articles, including news stories, editorials and op-ed pieces. The analysis reveals that the nomads are discursively constructed as undesirables through an othering process that centers on three discourses: a discourse of dangerousness/criminalization, a discourse of alienization, and a discourse of stigmatization. This anti-nomad/Fulani rhetoric is evident in the choice of sensational headlines, alarmist news content, organization of arguments, and use of quotations. The paper concludes with a call for more balanced and critical news reporting on the nomads, especially since issues surrounding them border on national cohesion and security.

Constructing the myth of protest masculinity in Chinese English language news media

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yating Yu ◽  
Mark Nartey
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
News Media ◽  
English Language ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Social Harmony ◽  
Chinese Media ◽  
Research Attention ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
News Reports ◽  
The Media

Although the Chinese media’s construction of unmarried citizens as ‘leftover’ has incited much controversy, little research attention has been given to the ways ‘leftover men’ are represented in discourse. To fill this gap, this study performs a critical discourse analysis of 65 English language news reports in Chinese media to investigate the predominant gendered discourses underlying representations of leftover men and the discursive strategies used to construct their identities. The findings show that the media perpetuate a myth of ‘protest masculinity’ by suggesting that poor, single men may become a threat to social harmony due to the shortage of marriageable women in China. Leftover men are represented as poor men, troublemakers and victims via discursive processes that include referential, predicational and aggregation strategies as well as metaphor. This study sheds light on the issues and concerns of a marginalised group whose predicament has not been given much attention in the literature.

scholarly journals Legitimation of Poverty in School Economics Textbooks in South Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jugathambal Ramdhani ◽  
Suriamurthee Maistry
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
South African ◽  
Function Analysis ◽  
Further Education ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Critical Knowledge ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
Selection Of

In South Africa, the school textbook remains a powerful source of content knowledge to both teachers and learners. Such knowledge is often engaged uncritically by textbook users. As such, the worldviews and value systems in the knowledge selected for consumption remain embedded and are likely to do powerful ideological work. In this article, we present an account of the ideological orientations of knowledge in a corpus of school economics textbooks. We engage the tenets of critical discourse analysis to examine the representations of the construct “poverty” as a taught topic in the Further Education and Training Economics curriculum. Using Thompson’s legitimation as a strategy and form-function analysis as specific analytical tools, we unearth the subtext of curriculum content in a selection of Grade 12 Economics textbooks. The study reveals how power and domination are normalised through a strategy of economic legitimation, thereby offering a “legitimate” rationale for the existence of poverty in the world. The article concludes with implications for curriculum and a humanising pedagogy, and a call for embracing critical knowledge on poverty in the South African curriculum.

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