Recent analyses examine the role of crisis in the emergence of the populist/anti- populist discourse and the confluence of populism and Euroscepticism at the party level. In this article, the study focuses on the analysis of the main political actors in the EU institutions, by examining the channels and discourses adopted by different actors in the (de)legitimation of the EU. The focus is on the transnational contestation (DiEM25, Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 and VOLT), following the model of analysis of the mutual construction and reproduction. The analysis shows that the antagonized discourse used by the mainstream narrative further reinforces populism and provides a breeding ground for populism to consolidate itself, while weakening the possible impact of the legitimizing representation of Euroscepticism in the EP.
This research examines the reception of J. H. Pierneef's art in Afrikaner press articles between 1912 and 1938 to shed light on the interpretation of his depictions of the South African landscape as social and political symbols of identity and entitlement amid emergent Afrikaner nationalism. The research investigates the historical intersections between art and nationalism and the nature of the early twentieth-century Afrikaner press in relation to Afrikaner nationalism, before employing the Discourse Historical Approach to analyse the discursive construction of Pierneef's landscapes as what Anthony Smith terms "ethnoscapes", i.e. poetic and "authentic" renditions of the landscape serving as a unifying symbol of ethnic identity and a naturalisation of belonging and ownership. The research maps recurrent themes in the corpus of press articles and identifies underlying topoi through which the poeticised landscape is rendered an expression of national identity and ownership.
This paper is a Discourse Analysis investigation on discursive hysteresis, a phenomenon that occurs when there is a chronological mismatch between a political actor's discourse and the present social context he operates upon, whereby elements from a previous discursive structure persist even though they have become outdated. Even though the concept of hysteresis has long been applied in the fields of Economics and Sociology, it remains surprisingly overlooked among political scientists. The paper will introduce the notion of 'discursive hysteresis' through two case studies. The first focuses on Silvio Berlusconi and his relationship with the threat of Communism, while the second examines Nathalie Arthaud's fixation with the working-class as a prominent political subject. Additional examples of hysteresis will be tangentially explored to expand this preliminary typology of the phenomenon.
This study examines blame avoidance (BA) strategies used by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in the 2023 U.S. congressional hearing. Integrating BA framework with speech act theory, the analysis proceeds from manual coding to a comparison of strategies across political parties, followed by a qualitative analysis of the speech acts employed. Results reveal that act-denials were significantly more frequent in responses to Republican members. Aside from literal denial, Chew also used transformative, subjective, and interpretive denials to mitigate political risks and demonstrate innocence. When addressing Democratic inquiries, Chew diverted topics from concrete content regulation failures to abstract corporate effort, commitment, policy, and attitude to construct an image of integrity. The findings suggest that Chew strategically adapts linguistic defenses to partisan contexts, prioritizing the projection of a politically insulated and morally upright persona over mere factual rebuttal.
In this conceptual essay, we propose an expansion of a performative perspective on sustainability communication by applying Epstein's (2015) concept of trans- and counterformatives as paradoxical speech acts. While established speech act theory (Austin 1975; Searle 1975) has an analytic emphasis on how the performativity of communication is contingent upon iteration and compliance with contextual felicity conditions, Epstein, in his reflections on trans- and counterformatives, shifts the analytic focus on speech acts that subversively provoke contradictions to these conditions to enable their fundamental renegotiation. We point at sustainable economics, activism, and learning as promising discourses for future empirical inquiry of trans- and counterformatives in action. In doing so, we respond to recent criticism of a hegemonic "smooth", i.e., incremental, progress-, and growth-oriented sustainability discourse of corporate capitalism, by expanding the conceptual repertoire toward speech acts capable of enacting unsettling communicative events for urgent and fundamental change.
