Analysing Political Language

'We create realities… by dubbing with titles, by naming, and by the manner
in which words invite us to create “realities” in the world to correspond with them.
Constitutiveness gives an externality and an apparent ontological status to the concepts
words embody; for example, the law, gross national product, antimatter, the Renaissance. …
The constitutiveness of language… creates and transmits culture and locates our place in it…'
Jerome Bruner (1986: 64, 65)

The ‘interpretive turn’ in mid- to late 20th century social sciences brought with it renewed attention to the role of language in social and political life. The ‘linguistic turn’ built on the established idea that in (re)presenting lived experience, language is not, and should not be seen as, an exact ‘mirror of [human] nature’ (to invoke Richard Rorty’s title) or a transparent referent of those experiences, but needs to be understood as an interpretation of them. As researchers, we ‘translate’ others’ and our own experiences into language – what Charles Taylor (1971) called ‘text analogues’ (see also Ricoeur 1971) – for purposes of analysis. Consider, for example, field notes that render persons, events, interactions, and the material world of research settings and the artifacts in it as written texts. Additionally, these days, the notion of language needs to be taken not only in a literal sense – referencing research-relevant documents, whether contemporary or archival, or field conversations, including interviews – but also with respect to repertoires of visual and nonverbal ‘languages.’

But 'turning' to language and taking it seriously meant, and means, more than just attending to linguistic elements, such as textual and spoken discourses, in everyday and other worlds. Conceptualised in the 1930s as an extension of phenomenology’s critique of 'subject/object dualism and the assumption of a psychological foundation of experience' (Deetz 2003: 422), the linguistic turn was intended to go beyond looking at texts and talk to seeing how texts and talk produce those worlds. That idea rests on certain philosophical-methodological points of view, which propose that language goes a far way to constituting everyday and other social realities, that it has the capacity 'to stipulate and create realities of its own,' as Jerome Bruner put it (in the epigraph).

This course will explore several methods or approaches that have been developed to analyse political language: metaphor analysis, category analysis, narrative and storytelling analysis, framing analysis, and visual analysis. Each day’s session is intended to introduce one of these ways of looking at the topic, theoretically, and includes a set of empirical articles or papers that use that method.  We will touch briefly on language and the politics of science (e.g., 1976 articles by Richard Harvey Brown and by Joseph Gusfield), but the course will not cover rhetoric, discourse analysis or some other topics that might well fit under this broad umbrella. (For discourse analysis proper, see the self-standing course offered in the ECPR Summer Methods School. But please note that some of the confusion over what ‘discourse analysis’ means includes the analysis of discourses, and some of the topics we will take up fall within that understanding.) 

Reference
Bruner, Jerome S. 1986
Actual Minds, Possible Worlds
Cambridge: Harvard University Press

1. This course presumes some knowledge of interpretive methodological presuppositions, including the so-called ‘linguistic turn,’ an aspect one dimension of the interpretive turn, described in the long course outline. We are not likely to have sufficient time to go into this background in depth. If you have missed out on these ideas, you can find them in the following key readings:

Geertz, Clifford. 1973
The Interpretation of Cultures, esp. ch. 1
NY: Basic Books

Hawkesworth, M.E. 1988
Theoretical Issues in Policy Analysis, chs. 1–4
Albany: SUNY Press

Hiley, David R., Bohman, James F., and Shusterman, Richard, eds. 1991
The Interpretive Turn
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press

Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1980
Metaphors We Live By [although focused on metaphor, this book includes arguments in re. the character of language underlying this course]
Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Polkinghorne, Donald E. 1983
Methodology for the Human Sciences, esp. the opening chapter
Albany: SUNY Press

Rabinow, Paul and Sullivan, William M., eds. 1979, 1985
Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, 1st and 2nd eds
Berkeley: University of California Press

Ricoeur, Paul. 1971
The Model of the Text
Social Research 38: 529–62

Taylor, Charles. 1971/1979
Interpretation and the Sciences of Man
In Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, eds., 1979, Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, 25–71 [also in the 2nd ed.]
Berkeley: University of California Press

Schwartz-Shea, Peregrine and Yanow, Dvora. 2012
Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes
NY: Routledge

Yanow, Dvora and Schwartz-Shea, Peregrine. 2014/2006
Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, 2nd ed, especially book introduction, part introductions, chs. 1–7, 24–25
Armonk, NY: M E Sharpe

Additionally, the (relatively) new field of linguistic ethnography, developed in the UK, articulates a perspective that encompasses the approach used in this course. See, e.g.:

Copland, Fiona and Creese, Angela. 2015
Linguistic Ethnography
In Fiona Copland and Angela Creese, with Frances Rock and Sarah Shaw, eds., Linguistic Ethnography, 13–27
London: Sage

Rampton, Ben, Maybin, Janet, and Roberts, Celia. 2015
Theory and Method in Linguistic Ethnography
In Julia Snell, Sarah E. Shaw, and Fiona Copland, eds., Linguistic Ethnography: Interdisciplinary Explorations, 14–50
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Shaw, Sarah E., Copland, Fiona, and Snell, Julia. 2015
An Introduction to Linguistic Ethnography
In Julia Snell, Sarah E. Shaw, and Fiona Copland, eds., Linguistic Ethnography: Interdisciplinary Explorations, 1–13
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Articles in Special Issue on linguistic ethnography
Journal of Sociolinguistics 11/5 (2007)

2. Those students who have already conducted field research and have their own ‘word data’ to analyse are likely to benefit the most, in a practical sense, from this course, although it is not a prerequisite for the course. Those who have not yet generated their own research data will also gain knowledge of this range of ways of looking at linguistic materials