Abstract Education in post-revolutionary Iran has long served as a means to reinforce the state ideology. This study examines the overt and covert presence of state socio-political agenda in a series of Iranian locally-produced English language textbooks (ELT) ( Vision ) by analyzing textual and visual representations of Iranian and global societies, employing Machin and Mayr’s Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA). Findings reveal a distinctive form of state-imposed cultural resilience through three key discursive patterns: (1) selective global engagement, (2) absence of modern Iranian urban life, and (3) selective inclusion of state-defined nationalist values. Rather than an organic preservation of cultural identity, these patterns emphasize state-approved traditional, religious, nationalistic, and security-based aspirations while downplaying or excluding global, modern, and individualistic elements. Unlike the engagement with globalization seen in ELT textbooks elsewhere, the Vision series actively counters perceived cultural homogenization to uphold the state’s ideological stance and socio-political agenda.
Despite the strong interest in populism, the Slovak case has received inadequate research attention. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico presents himself as a charismatic leader, a protector of the Slovak people and a victim of anti-government forces, especially the media. His party, SMER-SD, has been radicalising its rhetoric in recent years, turning towards Russia and against the West, particularly the European Union and NATO. An analysis of Robert Fico's discourse reveals three levels of discursive shift towards the normalisation of pro-Russian rhetoric in today's Slovakia, which culminated before Robert Fico visited Moscow to mark the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War II.
This study examines how domestic violence (DV) is discursively constructed in Chinese divorce judgments. Drawing on Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA), it analyses a corpus of divorces judgments involving domestic violence to show how legal reasoning recontextualizes violence through linguistic practices of naming, explanation, and evidentiary evaluation. The analysis identifies three recurring discursive shifts. First, acts of violence are frequently reframed as "family conflict," embedding them within a relational frame that obscures the asymmetry of power between perpetrators and victims. Second, perpetrator responsibility is mitigated through psychologizing and contextual explanations, such as emotional stress, economic pressure, and intoxication. Third, elevated evidentiary thresholds and moralized assessments reshape credibility, placing heightened burdens on survivors' testimony. These practices relocate domestic violence from the domain of public harm to that of private family conflict management. The findings show how routine judicial language can reproduce gendered power relations through apparently neutral forms of legal reasoning.
Education in post-revolutionary Iran has long served as a means to reinforce the state ideology. This study examines the overt and covert presence of state socio-political agenda in a series of Iranian locally-produced English language textbooks (ELT) (Vision) by analyzing textual and visual representations of Iranian and global societies, employing Machin and Mayr's Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA). Findings reveal a distinctive form of state-imposed cultural resilience through three key discursive patterns: (1) selective global engagement, (2) absence of modern Iranian urban life, and (3) selective inclusion of state-defined nationalist values. Rather than an organic preservation of cultural identity, these patterns emphasize state-approved traditional, religious, nationalistic, and security-based aspirations while downplaying or excluding global, modern, and individualistic elements. Unlike the engagement with globalization seen in ELT textbooks elsewhere, the Vision series actively counters perceived cultural homogenization to uphold the state's ideological stance and socio-political agenda.
The study examines the role and linguistic repertoire of political implicatures in online media discourse. A case study of Kommersant's Telegram channel, based on a one-month feed, demonstrates that contributors employ multiple linguistic means of implicature expression to balance the legal restrictions on media coverage with the publishing house's long-standing tradition of objective reporting. The current political climate in Russia encourages the use of political implicatures, which serve not only the purposes of politeness and cooperative communication but also, and primarily, the authors' self-protection. In addition to classical expressive means such as irony, metaphor, and euphemism, contributors make use of creative neologisms, wordplay, and 'talking' photographs, which function as supplementary channels of implicature transmission. Through the use of political implicatures, Kommersant's journalists cultivate a distinctive reporting style readily recognized by their readership. The perceptual assessment of Kommersant's political implicatures by four reader groups differing in age and experience revealed a strong agreement with the explicitated meanings.
Existing research examines representations of power and ideology in ELT textbooks, focusing on themes of culture, identity, and more recently how they carry neoliberal values around the world. Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper analyses Japanese ELT textbooks for elementary and junior high school students. The analysis reveals such neoliberal visions of society and individuals through individualized Westernized middle-class lifestyles and consumerism. Yet the contents are also to be understood as shaped by a current tension in Japanese education policy, which promotes more involvement in the global economy as well as retaining some former isolationist and nationalist notions. Analysis indicates how the Japanese education materials seek to discursively foster a sense of citizenship to engage with a sanitized and idealized version of the global economy dominated by neoliberal rationalities.
The current energy transition is a contested terrain where conflicting ideological projects clash over its meaning and implementation. This paper critically examines how two economic expert institutions in Southern Italy articulate renewable energy sources (RES) as a driver of economic growth, geopolitical strategy, and industrial modernisation. Combining Discourse Theory with Social Studies of Economics and a critical understanding of energy and decarbonisation, the paper performs a Discourse-Theory analysis of expert reports, press releases, presentations, and public speeches from 2019 to 2024 to reveal how the transition towards RES is tied to productivist and colonial logics. Findings highlight the social and political logic of expert discourses that enforce hegemonic energy imaginaries, urging a radical rethinking of energy transition beyond growth paradigms.
The aim of the article is to analyse the mechanisms through which the right-wing Polish newspaper Gazeta Polska consolidated the identity of "the people" during the 2020 presidential election campaign by othering sexual and gender minorities and their allies, securitising the latter with the aim of legitimising their marginalisation. Based on the assumption that "the people" is an empty signifier whose meaning is moulded to serve political interests, the article builds on research on the discursive construction of "the people" that analyses the articulation of the in-group by shifting the focus to the articulation of the out-group as a means to consolidate the boundaries between the Self and Other.
Textbooks have been widely studied as ideological apparatuses that shape and are shaped by social orders. In the present paper we consider the specific nature of this process in Pakistan, in regard to English Language textbooks produced as part of the National Curriculum (SNC) beginning in 2020 under the slogan "one nation, one curriculum" to end the educational disparity in the country. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, we analyze a sample of textbooks produced by the Punjab textbook board (PTB) to be used in government-run schools across the Punjab province. In this paper we focus on how the textbooks foreground a singular view of Islamic based national identity, backgrounding religious, ethnic and socio-economic diversity. This nationalism is infused with militarism.
This study critically examines how racist representations of migrants are subtly normalized in Greek parliamentary, media, and NGO narrative texts, often under the guise of empathy and solidarity. Drawing on Krzy & zdot;anowski's (2020) model of discursive shift and De Fina's (2020) narrative-as-practice approach, the analysis reveals how migrants are recurrently portrayed as vulnerable victims and ideal objects of assimilation. These narrative representations serve to enact, perpetuate, and normalize a subtle form of racism, i.e. liquid racism (Archakis and Tsakona 2024), which emerges in ostensibly anti-racist texts. By unpacking the discursive processes that sustain this normalization, the study seeks to contribute to debates on language and politics, highlighting how discourse can implicitly legitimize racist norms about who is (not) "deserving" support and acceptance.
The concept of ecological civilization (EC) has been proposed by China as a paradigm to reconcile economic growth with environmental protection. The paper investigates the discursive shifts of EC in Chinese news media from October 2007 to September 2024 through dynamic topic modeling (DTM) and corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. Quantitative analysis identifies 16 themes undergoing recontextualization over time, manifested as transformations in the form of addition, deletion, splitting, merging, and continuation. Different concepts and discursive strategies are employed to normalize EC. This paper further elucidates the contextual and ideological dynamics underpinning the shifts. The normalization of EC is driven by China's development models and international pressure regarding environmental pollution, and reinforced through discursive construction of the antagonism between industrial civilization and EC, as well as sociotechnical imaginaries fostering collective identification. This paper contributes to the literature by showcasing the utility of DTM in tracing discursive shifts of a new idea.
This study examines how Spanish political parties, Partido Socialista Obrero Espa & ntilde;ol (PSOE), Partido Popular (PP), VOX, and Unidas Podemos (UP), construct and contest representations of Ukrainian refugees on X using Natural Language Processing (NLP), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and statistical validation. PSOE exhibits higher positive sentiment and lower hate speech; PP shifts toward greater positivity; VOX displays negative sentiment, fear-related emotions, and elevated hate speech; UP supports refugees while criticizing systemic inequalities. Linguistic analyses of deixis, modality, and verb voice complement these patterns: inclusive pronouns and active constructions align with humanitarian discourse, whereas passive voice, deontic modality, and distancing deixis index securitization. The Spanish case is examined due to the implementation of the EU Temporary Protection Directive and relatively favourable public framing, enabling analysis of how inclusionary and exclusionary logics manifest in digital discourse. Integrating affective/structural cues, the study shows how political actors shape perception and legitimize inclusion or exclusion.
This paper examines textbooks for teaching Serbian as a foreign language, revealing ideological shifts from their production in socialist Yugoslavia to post-socialist Serbia. Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, it explores how these materials reflect a move from collective socialist identity to individualized, neoliberal subjectivity. The analysis situates linguistic and cultural changes within broader socio-political transformations, highlighting the role of language education in shaping national and ideological narratives.
Textbooks provide learners with a particular version of social reality by indexing dominant discourses, values and aspirations. Situated in Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies (Machin 2013), this paper analyzes the visual representation of social relations and social actors in three nationally-produced/adapted English Language Teaching series in Uruguay from 1933 to 2023. Drawing on social actor analysis (van Leeuwen 2008; Ledin and Machin 2020), I examine the ideological implications of these representations and how they index broader sociopolitical contexts. Findings point to differences in how social categories such as class, gender and race are foregrounded/backgrounded in each period. However, they also point to a covert ideological continuity through time: collectively, all three series consolidate a progressive shift from a capitalist to a neoliberal ideology.
This introductory article to the special issue on representing societies in language teaching textbooks lays out how to analytically approach the data using multimodal critical discourse analysis. Foremost, it explains that we must place the texts into the socio-political context of the societies where they are produced. Doing such critical multimodal analysis is not about the texts per se, but is concerned rather with their role in the social and political functioning of a particular society at a particular time. This is a form of text analysis which is deeply informed by knowledge of those societies and the political and economic situations where texts are being created and deployed. To illustrate this point, the introduction reviews the classic as well as the contemporary studies of textbooks. It ends by laying out how multimodal critical discourse analysis can be used to understand the operation of textbooks within socio-political processes.
Within English language textbook (ELT) research, studies across national contexts show that neoliberal ideology pervades the textual and visual content of textbooks. However, little attention has been paid specifically to social class and how its representations fit within the neoliberal discourses of ELT textbooks. In this paper, drawing on multimodal critical discourse analysis, we consider how ELT textbooks in Korea represent social class in their visual content. Contrary to earlier research that highlighted the aspirational worlds depicted in ELT textbooks as uniformly middle-class, we show that both white- and blue-collar occupations are represented, but in way that entirely decontextualize them from labor, social relations, and the broader class structures in which they are embedded. We explain this pattern in the context of English language learning in Korea, its huge success as part of neoliberal reforms, and in the current labor-market.
Resilience is promoted as a positive virtue for adaptation to changes that need perseverance to new conditions, often worse. However, highly-skilled immigrants - especially from Sub Sahara Africa -seeking employment in Finland experience a prolonged and uncertain cycle of new demands for resilience. By drawing on research interviews with highly-skilled black Africans, the article illuminates the negative aspects of resilience for negatively racialised immigrants in the global North. The findings of the thematic analysis bring forth the how skilled jobseekers understand, navigate, and give meaning to the resilience demanded of them as the Finnish labour markets keep shifting goal posts and adding barriers of exclusion and precarity. Accordingly, resilience can further and uphold injustice and for those having to perform resilience it can become a curse, antithetical to positive change.
This study contributes to the field of research into discursive representations of female versus male politicians by applying Appraisal theory to a natural experiment provided by the publication of two almost identical newspaper articles, where the source of the information was either a female or male political leader. The investigation focuses on the readers' comments, and reveals that they tend to attribute less agency to the female leader, and to rarely address her using, on the one hand, positive, and on the other hand, abusive language. This is in contrast to her male counterpart who is seen as more agentive and receives some praise, but who is also disproportionately targeted for abuse. The findings provide evidence that gender bias against women in politics persists although it may take less conspicuous forms. They also inform studies into perceptions of gender discrimination which might be less sensitive to its subtler manifestations.
This article analyses how the US military constructs dangerous Others through the language of neurobiology, with reference to the resilience and plasticity of human brains. To explore this, we conduct a Laclau and Mouffe inspired discourse analysis of the neurobiological research supported and disseminated by the US Department of War's Strategic Multilayer Assessment (SMA) programme. Our focus is on the racialised imaginary of the SMA programme, and we analyse how neurobiological research is enlisted to distinguish between populations on account of perceived brain differences. Violence in both the Global South and among ethnic minorities in the Global North is seen to emanate from these differences according to the SMA. Revealing the racialised underpinnings of this discourse, including its eugenic genealogy, this article challenges critical approaches invested in the emancipatory potentials of neurobiology with respect to race and racism, as well as violence and colonialism.
