Browsing by Author "Phelan S"

Now showing 1 - 14 of 14
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    Critical discourse analysis and media studies
    (Routledge, 2017-07-18) Phelan S; John Flowerdew, JF; John E. Richardson, JR
    This chapter focuses on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), but embeds the discussion in some general reflections on the place of the concept of discourse in media studies. It reflects on the emergence of CDA as a distinct approach in the 1980s and 1990s, especially as it resonated with the theoretical division between political economy and cultural studies in media studies. The chapter considers possible future iterations of media discourse studies, in ways that go beyond the notion of a prescriptive CDA paradigm. Philo voices a criticism that, in its most benign form, is implicit in the media researcher's decision to combine CDA and political economy. The methodology suggests an obvious division of labour: CDA will be used to analyse media texts, while political economy will be used to explain their structural production and circulation. G. Philo's argument recalls J. Blommaert's critique of CDA for its "linguistic bias".
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    Critiquing “Mainstream Media” on Twitter: Between Moralized Suspicion and Democratic Possibility
    (USC Annenberg Press, 2023-06-30) Phelan S; Maeseele P
    How can we understand the critique of mainstream media (MSM) in a political moment where intense suspicion of media and journalism has been normalized in reactionary discourses? This article addresses this question from a discourse theoretical perspective that is supported by a corpus-assisted interpretivist analysis of how the terms “MSM” and “mainstream media” were articulated in a January 2021 sample of more than 11,000 tweets from different time zones. We begin by clarifying the political stakes of our argument and situating the historical emergence of “mainstream media” as a discursive category. Our Twitter analysis highlights the “logic of equivalence” established between mainstream media and other identities and the normalization of a moralized representation of media as a corrupt ally of government. We conclude by speculating on how we might affirm a radical democratic conception of media critique in a cultural context where anti-MSM rhetoric can float easily between different discourses and ideologies.
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    Friends, enemies, and agonists: Politics, morality and media in the COVID-19 conjuncture
    (SAGE Publications, 31/05/2022) Phelan S
    The radical democratic theorist Chantal Mouffe has long criticized the moralization of politics in its neoliberalized Third Way form. The argument informs her analysis of the rise of the far right, which she suggests has partly been enabled by moralizing antagonisms that inhibit a culture of agonistic political contestation. This paper uses Mouffe to think about the current condition of mediatized public discourse, extending her critique of moralized politics to a wider set of targets. I illuminate the argument through an analysis of a BBC Newsnight report that thematizes the ‘toxic’ nature of public debate about the science of COVID-19. I show how the report internalizes sedimented ‘culture war’ discourses about the polarized nature of today’s public culture and, in the process, offers oblique insights into how far-right discourses are normalized. I end by considering some of the limitations of Mouffe’s work as a resource for thinking about how to counteract the far right.
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    Journalism ‘fixers’, hyper-precarity and the violence of the entrepreneurial self
    (1/07/2023) Ashraf SI; Phelan S
    The figure of the so-called journalism ‘fixer’ has received overdue academic attention in recent years. Scholars have highlighted the role played by fixers in international news reporting, a role historically obscured in the mythos of the Western foreign correspondent. Recent research has produced useful insights about the work done by fixers in ‘the shadows’ of the international news economy. However, it has also tended towards a domestication of the role, where the local ‘fixer’ finds their place in a collaborative relationship with those officially consecrated as ‘journalists’ from elsewhere. This article presents a critical theoretical analysis of this functional role, building on the image of the fixer as a kind of ‘entrepreneur’. Rather than interpreting the latter designation as a source of empowerment or agency, we approach it as a euphemism for the hyper-precarious and exploitative underpinnings of fixer-labour. Our argument draws on different theoretical sources, including Foucault-inspired work on the entrepreneurial rationality of the neoliberal self, Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence, and Rancière’s concept of politics. The theoretical argument is supported by the first author’s reflections of working as a Pakistani-based ‘fixer’ during the U.S-led war on terror.
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    'Just doing their job?' Journalism, online critique and the political resignation of Metiria Turei
    (SAGE Publications, 18/03/2019) Phelan S; Salter LA
    Abstract When Metiria Turei resigned as co-leader of the Green party of Aotearoa New Zealand in August 2017, there was clear disagreement about the role played by journalism in her resignation. The controversy began after Turei confessed to not disclosing full information to the authorities about her personal situation as a welfare recipient in the 1990s. Journalists insisted they were simply ‘doing their job’ by interrogating Turei’s story, while online supporters accused the media of hounding her. This article examines the media politics of the controversy by putting Carlson’s concept of metajournalistic discourse into theoretical conversation with Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, especially their concept of antagonism. We explore what the case says about traditional journalistic authority in a media system where journalism is increasingly vulnerable to online critique from non-journalists.
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    Media critique in a very online world
    (3/02/2021) Phelan S
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    Neoliberal Reason and the Displacement of Politics [William Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (revised edition) London: SAGE, 2017, 248 pp]
    (Counterfutures, 11/06/2019) Phelan S
    The last decade has seen the publication of many excellent books about neoliberalism that have challenged some of the glib stereotypes that attach themselves to the term. One of the most acclaimed has been William Davies’s 2014 book The Limits of Neoliberalism, and justifiably so. The book has already been published in revised edition in 2017, with a new preface reassessing the argument in light of the Euro-American political dislocations of 2016. A co-director of the Political Economy Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London, Davies has been a prolific author since the publication of the 2014 edition, publishing two more books that have given him a readership well beyond the academy, and becoming a regular contributor to publications like The Guardian, London Review of Books, and The New York Times. The praise for The Limits of Neoliberalism has been near universal. The writer and journalist Paul Mason cited it in 2018 as one of the five books that best explain the condition of the Left today. According to Mason, it sums up the way in which the ‘modern left’ has come to think about neoliberalism, particularly the reinvigorated Left programme of the UK Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn.
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    Neoliberalism and authoritarian media cultures: a Vietnamese perspective
    (1/03/2022) Yến-Khanh N; Phelan S; Gray E
    This study asks how the concept of neoliberalism can be adapted to a critical analysis of authoritarian political and media cultures that cannot be adequately understood through the Western-centric narratives that dominate the literature on neoliberalism. We examine the case of Vietnam, a country where the relationship between the media system and the political system is defined primarily by the power of the party-state autocracy. We explore the extent to which neoliberalism is a useful theoretical category for grasping the relationship between state, market, and civil society actors in Vietnam, especially as it relates to the media system. Supported by an analysis of how Vietnamese news media cover healthcare and education for people with autism, we conclude by extrapolating three theoretical-methodological guidelines that will be useful to researchers examining the relationship between neoliberalism and authoritarian political and media cultures in different countries.
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    Neoliberalism and media
    (SAGE Publications Ltd, 2018-03-01) Phelan S; Damien, C; Melinda, C; Martijn, K; David Primrose
    References to neoliberalism are commonplace in media and communication studies. As in other fields, the concept is normally invoked critically; to speak of neoliberalism usually suggests a disposition that is opposed to it. Yet, the concept is not always affirmed as a concept, even by critical scholars. Some interrogate its ready-to-hand authority as a critical keyword (Flew, 2008). Others refer to it with a casual weariness, as if its commonplaceness illustrates its lack of descriptive and explanatory value (Grossberg, 2010). Whatever we make of the concept, it is difficult to talk about the current condition of critical media and communication studies without talking about neoliberalism. If, as Ernesto Laclau (1990) suggests, all identities are structurally constituted by antagonisms, we might call neoliberalism the master antagonist – even more so than capitalism (Garland & Harper, 2012) – of critical research in the field.
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    Review of Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine
    (10/06/2020) Phelan S
    In his most explicitly philosophical book Pascalian Meditations, Pierre Bourdieu (2000) clarified what he meant by the notion of symbolic violence. Symbolic violence signifies more than simply forms of discursive power that mediate social relationships without the imposition of physical force. Rather, it signifies a form of violence that the target of the violence is themselves complicit in. “Symbolic power is exerted only with the collaboration of those who undergo it because they help to construct it as such” (p. 171).
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    Seven theses about the so-called culture war(s) (or some fragmentary notes on ‘cancel culture’)
    (1/01/2023) Phelan S
    How might we understand the forms of mediatized politics that are signified under the dreary heading of the ‘culture war(s)’? This article addresses this question in the form of seven theses. Informed by a distinct theoretical reading of Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of antagonism, I highlight the anti-political character of culture war discourses, particularly as amplified in a public culture dominated by the social media industry. The seven theses are prefaced by an overview of the category of ‘cancel culture’, in light of its recent prominence as an object of culture war discourse. I highlight the primary role of far-right actors in the normalization of culture-war conflicts that persecute different identities, but also critique the online left’s entanglement in sedimented antagonisms that primarily benefit reactionary actors. The theses stress the repressive effects of culture war discourses on our collective political imagination. They redescribe some of the fault lines of a familiar terrain by thematizing the differences between a moralized and radical democratic understanding of political antagonism.
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