Bringing Temporality into Political Discourse Analysis

Language and politics are intimately connected, with changes to language having dramatic and often unobserved impacts on politics and policymaking. Careful analysis of language reveals that some aspects of language are progressively changed over time. These changes are not always intentional but can have dramatic impacts. An example of this that I have previously explored is how the emergence of'extremism' has resulted in evermore repressive counter-terrorism policies that are not only antidemocratic but may actually be counterproductive by promoting rather than preventing political violence.

The Fellowship will allow me to develop and publish a methodology for analysing discursive change over time, with the intention that this will inform better policymaking in the future. Having already published analysis of changes to 'extremism' over time, the Fellowship will enable me to continue this analysis for other aspects of language that my earlier research has indicated may be having an adverse effect on policymaking.

The approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA) that I developed in my PhD thesis is informed by Fairclough's Dialectical Relational Approach. As a major development is the addition of a temporal dimension to the analysis, it is referred to as the Temporal Dialectical Relational Approach or TDRA. Understanding that there are mechanisms internal to language itself that have tangible impacts on the world necessitates the study of the ontology of language, so the TDRA is also informed by critical realism. This follows posthumously published proposals made by Bhaskar on how CDA might be informed by critical realism. This was a characteristically prescient observation by Bhaskar and offers the possibility of further analysis that I proposed in my thesis and in publications that I made while I was carrying out my PhD.

Studying discursive change over time is necessary to understanding the current political climate that we inhabit, not least as my research has indicated that language has made a major contribution to the political hegemony of neoliberalism under which we now live.

Following Laclau and Mouffe, this hegemony is counterproductive to a flourishing political sphere and democracy. By using the TDRA to analyse political discourse, it is hoped that aspects of the discourse that have contributed to this hegemony will be critiqued and that this will contribute to the increased fecundity of our politics, the academy, and democracy more generally.

By not being aware of how language has changed we become subject to it and in my PhD research I identified a number of possible avenues for investigation. To name three, 'the market', 'change' and 'globalisation' have all seen an exponential increase in usage over the last half century while they have also tended to become nominalised. That is to say that they have changed their usage from being processes to being entities. This not only depoliticises them but also makes us subject to them. A profound impact of this can be seen in the 2008 credit crunch and subsequent programmes of austerity. Despite an abundance of resources, people have been denied access to them by the market - a process that is only made possible by the market being represented in language as an entity that we are subject to rather than a political process that we control.

By combining the close reading of selected political texts with the computer aided analysis of billions of words, the Fellowship will enable me to test the working hypothesis that the nominalisation of certain words has resulted in us becoming subject to a destructive political logic. The act of revealing aspects of this logic that are internal to the language that we use is the first step in releasing us from its grasp and towards a more emancipatory political landscape and a better functioning democracy.