Discursive analysis of emotions across genres

The paper proposes a discourse analysis methodology for analyzing emotions within climate policy. Our analysis is situated within a theoretical framework that recognizes emotions as socially and culturally embedded phenomena that are intimately tied to questions of power, identity, and meaning-making (Ahmed 2004; Wetherell 2012). Discourse is defined as social practice, as it both represents and constitutes reality through specific textual strategies (Fairclough 1992). We will focus on emotions encoded in the text (Hall 1980) that are designed to elicit affective responses from the audience. Thus, we will, above all, focus on what Hall (1989) calls the dominant-hegemonic and negotiated decoding positions that is, the desired meaning encoded into the text, as well as the openings for alternative interpretations. Our analysis will be attentive to emotions related to climate change (e.g., fear and anxiety about the future), as well as those related to policy discourse around climate change (e.g., distrust of political actors and institutions). We hypothesize that both will be present and perhaps even intertwined in the texts. We will explore how emotions are embedded across different textual genres (policy documents, press releases by policy-makers, media coverage, opinion pieces by stakeholders and activists). This approach acknowledges that genre conventions – ranging from the formal, structured language of policy documents designed to project objective expertise to the more immediate, emotive expressions in media – affect how emotions are conveyed and interpreted (Tardy & Swales 2014). The paper brings together the models of emotion discourse analysis proposed by Simon Koschut (2022) and affective discourse analysis (Boler et al 2024) with traditional tools from critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1995). We will test our methodology on a series of multi-genre texts generated around the Estonian discussions of The Climate Resilient Economy Act: explanatory memorandum to the draft bill, related press releases from the Estonian Ministry of Climate, related opinion pieces by politicians and related media articles. The analysis of these texts will explore how emotions related to climate policy are shaped by and in turn shape broader political and societal discourse on climate change. References: Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press. Boler, Megan et al. 2024. Digital Affect Culture and the Logics of Melodrama: Online Polarization and the January 6 Capitol Riots through the Lens of Genre and Affective Discourse Analysis. Social Media and Society, 10: 1. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241228584 Hall, Stuart. 1980. Encoding/Decoding. In Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 128-138. Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity. Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Longman. Koschut, Simon. 2023. Emotion Discousre Analysis. In Patrick A. Mello and Falk Ostermann (eds), Routledge Handbook of Foreign Policy Analysis Methods. London: Routledge Tardy, Christine M. and Swales, John M. 2014. Genre analysis. In Klaus P. Schneider and Anne Barron (eds), Pragmatics of Discourse. Berlin, München, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 165-188. Wetherell, Margaret. 2012. Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London: Sage Publications