Discourses of the Arab Revolutions in Media and Politics

Drawing on approaches from critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and cognitive linguistics, this book critically examines metaphorical language used in global media coverage and political statements on the events of the Arab Spring.

The volume begins by summarising key events of the Arab Spring, tracing the development of protests from Tunisia and Egypt to Libya and Syria as well as the wider impact on the region. Ullmann builds on this foundation to lay out the theoretical frameworks to be applied to an extensive corpus of natural language and actual discourse highlighting Western, Middle Eastern, and North African perspectives which integrate theoretical work on metaphor, blending theory, and semantic prosodies. Methodological considerations on corpus selection and different conceptualisations of politics and mass media, generally and across countries, are discussed, with the final chapters outlining the overarching themes across metaphors in the corpus and how these metaphors were ultimately framed in the mass media and political landscape.

This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in critical discourse analysis, language and politics, and corpus linguistics.

Stefanie Ullmann is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Humanities and Social Change. She has done extensive research on the use of language in discourse on the Arab revolutions. Her other research interests and current work include the social and ethical impacts of harmful language on social media, as well as information and algorithmic biases.