Discourse & Society

Drawing upon conceptual blending theory and the notion of mental context models, this paper analyzes a small-sized corpus of 10 political cartoons on genocidal acts in Gaza. The analysis shows that the cartoonists blend the GAZA frame with input mental spaces such as BILLIARDS, BOXING, BLENDER, CHESS, CHRISTMAS, FORBIDDEN EXPERIMENT, GRILLING, THE SCREAM, SPIDER, and TITANIC. These results demonstrate that cartoonists sought to attribute responsibility for the ongoing genocide to three main factors: condemning Europe’s and USA’s involvement in the killing of Palestinians, criticizing the Arab world’s inaction, powerlessness, and conspicuous absence, alongside pointing to the imbalance between the Israeli forces and the Palestinian civilians. These blends reflect the influence of distinct cultural and political contexts in shaping the representation of genocide in Gaza. The paper has implications for critical cognitive discourse analysis and multimodal communication.

This project examines the role values played in early US Cold War discourse, focusing on the use and function of the morpheme free in President Truman’s and President Eisenhower’s State of the Union addresses. I examine the occurrence of free relative to similar values and demonstrate that both presidents privileged free in conceptualizing the conflict and justifying policies. I also analyze the forms through which free manifested and consider the constitutive role they played in shaping the Cold War environment. I argue that by placing free at the heart of the conflict—as the target of the Soviet “threat”—both presidents construed the geopolitical environment in a way that rendered the Cold War as inevitable and as necessarily geographically and temporally expansive. This project contributes to our understanding of the role a rhetoric of values played in Cold War discourse and the material implications of what is often deemed “mere rhetoric.”

This article uses AI-generated images to consider patterns in the way refugees and migrants are visually represented on the internet. AI text-to-image generation is treated as a diagnostic tool enabling the identification and analysis of recurring features in the visual representation of social groups. The theoretical departure point is the notion of multimodal constructions developed in cognitive linguistics. 144 images are generated by prompts instantiating a [refugees/migrants + motion verb] construction. The images are then analysed through the lens of Cognitive Critical Discourse Analysis to establish the visual correlates of these verbal forms and to reveal their ideological and (de)legitimating functions in reproducing stereotypes, stoking fear and ultimately sustaining power differentials. The results show that the image most likely to be entrenched as part of a multimodal construction is of a large mass of people moving on foot toward the viewer. The ideological implications of this and other patterns detected are discussed as are differences in the visual representations associated with people designated as ‘refugee’ versus ‘migrant’.

Festivals and events are becoming an increasingly important part of economies around the world. However, they can result in negative impacts to the environment via waste and carbon emissions. Wonderfruit, a popular annual arts and music festival held in Thailand, espouses eco-friendliness and environmentalism among its key tenets. Perhaps in line with these principles, Wonderfruit is also one of the few festival organizers that publishes corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. This study utilizes corpus linguistic and discourse analytical frameworks to explore Wonderfruit’s social responsibility reports published between 2019 and 2024 in order to understand how the festival navigates this form of corporate communication. The analysis of key grammatical and semantic tags from the festival’s CSR reports indicates that over this period the festival moved away from sustainability and environmental discourses toward a more promotional form of discourse. Methodological implications for approaching small datasets using corpus linguistic methods are also discussed.

In the context of autism and ADHD, tensions exist between medical and social model framings of disability. This article explores neurodivergent police accounts of how aspects of their conditions intersect with their occupational identity and what this means for a disability positioning. Using critical discursive psychology, we illuminate three ideological dilemmas from reflective interviews with 37 autistic police or those with ADHD: (1) tensions between the medical and social identity; (2) tensions between constructing ability and disability; and (3) tensions between remaining invisible and being an advocate. We conclude that a focus on discourse illustrates that organisations need to move away from binary thinking in relation to ability and disability and reconcile some of the tensions navigated by police employees.