This collection makes the case for existing critical discourse analysis theory and methods to meaningfully engage with the new communicative parameters, power dynamics, and technological affordances of contemporary digital spaces. // The volume lends a critical focus on discursive practices operating through the paradigm of social media communication, arguing that the critical discourse social media research must go beyond the notion of the simple analysis of social media data. The volume features chapters highlighting a diverse range of methods, including multi-sited ethnography, multimodality, argumentation, and topic modelling, as applied to a global range of case studies to present a holistic portrait of the latest methodological and theoretical debates in this space. The book demonstrates the ways in which questions of identity run through these conversations and their subsequent re-shaping of existing societal discourse. In so doing, the collection advocates for a new tradition in critical discourse research, one which is rigorous in accounting for both solid discursive frameworks and the evolving complexity of digital platforms, to fully make sense of contemporary digital practices on the participatory web and advance the field forward. // This book will be of interest to students and scholars in critical discourse studies, digital communication, media studies, and anthropology.

Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) aims to enhance our understanding of how discourse figures in social processes, social structures, and social change. This book is in response to specific changes in mediation technologies of discourse, brought about by the significant concentration of discursive practices within the paradigm of social media communication. This book addresses this participatory media context against a broadly defined tradition in CDS, its aspirations, assumptions, and critique. It views discourse as forms of structured representations across a range of modalities of communication including the emerging meaning-making artefacts and practices across social media. It aspires to provide an overview of the key considerations in doing CDS on social media spaces. The book firstly provides a set of aspiration signposting the parameters of doing social media CDS followed by critical explorations of a number of contemporary case studies of digital discourses around identity, politics and representation. It includes various social media communication including YouTube, Instagram, Wikipedia, and Twitter. The book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of linguistics, politics, sociology, communication studies, media and cultural studies, and science and technology studies. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Discourse Studies.

This book demonstrates the importance of understanding how political rhetoric, financial reporting and media coverage of austerity in transnational contexts is significant to the communicative, social and economic environments in which we live. It considers how aspects of moral storytelling, language, representation and ideology operate through societies in financial crisis and through governments that impose austerity programmes on public spending. Whilst many of the debates covered here are concerned with UK economic policy and British social contexts, the contributions also consider examples from other countries that reflect similar concerns on the ideological operations of austerity and financial discourse. The multiple discursive contexts of austerity demonstrate the breadth of social concerns and conflicts that have developed in societies and institutions following the global economic crisis of 2008. Through its interdisciplinary focus on this topic, this book provides an important contribution across multiple subject areas, with shared interests in critical and analytical approaches to discourse, power and language in social contexts reflecting the healthy collaborative scope of critical discourse studies as a field of research. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Discourse Studies.

This book demonstrates the importance of understanding how political rhetoric, financial reporting and media coverage of austerity in transnational contexts is significant to the communicative, social and economic environments in which we live. It considers how aspects of moral storytelling, language, representation and ideology operate through societies in financial crisis and through governments that impose austerity programmes on public spending. Whilst many of the debates covered here are concerned with UK economic policy and British social contexts, the contributions also consider examples from other countries that reflect similar concerns on the ideological operations of austerity and financial discourse. The multiple discursive contexts of austerity demonstrate the breadth of social concerns and conflicts that have developed in societies and institutions following the global economic crisis of 2008. Through its interdisciplinary focus on this topic, this book provides an important contribution across multiple subject areas, with shared interests in critical and analytical approaches to discourse, power and language in social contexts reflecting the healthy collaborative scope of critical discourse studies as a field of research. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Discourse Studies.