Chapter One, “Domestic Violence, Violence Against Women, and Patriarchy,” examines heterosexual domestic violence with a female victim from a patriarchal perspective. This chapter argues that two forms of patriarchally styled violence-“patriarchal terrorism” (Johnson, 1995), which is an accounting of physical violence, and “coercive control” (Stark, 2007), which is an accounting of emotional violence-must be brought together in order to understand the depths and terror of domestic violence. This chapter, which is primarily theoretical rather than analytical, argues strongly that police officers need to pay closer attention to “verbal” or “noncriminal domestic” calls, because they involve real forms of violence.

In the introduction, I review literature on domestic violence, policing, discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, and more. This chapter is intended to provide a backdrop for the analysis that is to come. In this chapter, I situate my arguments in the existing scholarship on domestic violence and law enforcement.

Chapter Three, “Storying the Victim/Survivor: Identity, Domestic Violence and Discourses of Agency,” combines an argument about indexicality and iconization with an argument about agency. The analysis shows that police hold a particular idea about agency in regard to the law—people do things on purpose, and they have the ability to choose to do or not to do things. This view of agency, what I call sovereign agency, following Foucault, allows the police to arrest, believing that a person knowingly or purposefully broke the law. Translated in the context of victims, however, this view of agency is entirely problematic. Police believe that victims can just leave an abusive relationship at will and that leaving would bring a swift end to the violence. Victim views on and performances of agency are far more practical and contextual. They are making situated decisions about how to survive every day. I position both models of agency in a theory of discursive agency, to show how the police officers’ more institutionally powerful discourse acts on and erases portions of victim identity. Their discourse “iconicizes” () a particular victim and victim agency, thereby erasing aspects of victim/survivor identity that are performed in their narratives about domestic violence.

Chapter Four analyzes police officer identities performed and assumed in both the victim/survivor and police officer interviews. For police, there are a number of identities emergent, constrained, and enabled by the network of social meanings and ideologies circulating in the domestic violence field of indexicality. I focus on analyzing police narratives and emergent identities. Most of the narratives told by police are either about procedure, police, and law, or about domestic violence victims. Their identities, then, largely emerge in relationship to an/other, a victim/survivor, who is storied as uncompliant with police wishes and expectations. This chapter argues that identity is formed and emerges via stories told about prior interactions and others. The identity that emerges is one of frustration and adherence to protocol but also of caring. In some moments of empathy, police demonstrate concern for victim/survivors and a desire for victim/survivors to get and stay safe.

This chapter teases out key developments in discourse studies that have involved a radical rethinking of how stories and identities are being conceptualized and studied. First, we focus on how the role of the teller has been rethought by discussing the shift to interactional approaches to identities (cf. identities-in-interaction), including positioning analysis and small stories research. We then discuss how the personal story and story ownership have been reconceptualized with a focus on the uses and mobilization of stories in public arenas, especially politics. Third, we move to the reexamining of the role of space in the constitution of identities in stories, by focusing on work on mobile and migrant populations and on chronotopes as a concept increasingly employed for exploring the contextualization of stories. Finally, we discuss the implications of digital environments and media affordances, including the actual design and “curation” of stories, for how we tell stories and present ourselves online.

Research into the way that linguistic and other semiotic signs are displayed in public space has opened up a productive field for social language analysis. Often focused on the policy implications of public signage, at both institutional and grassroots levels, linguistic landscape research has, from the very beginning, engaged with issues of politics, ideology and cultural representation and thus, indirectly, discourse. In recent years, it has also begun to theorize the material experience of landscapes and the ways in which semiotic artifacts and practices generate meaning by interacting in explicitly dialogical ways. To date, however, theorizing that is directed specifically at the relationship between linguistic landscape studies and discourse studies has been slight. This chapter explores the nature of this relationship by focusing on select case studies that exemplify the ways in which acts of linguistic and semiotic display in the public arena operate as key sites for political regulation and contestation and as sites of affect. These short case studies also examine how meaning is generated through the complex layering of contexts, the interplay between multiple signs, the narrative and affective potential of landscapes and the dialogic possibilities presented by social media. This discourse-based approach to linguistic landscapes allows insights into how local meanings get upscaled and reconfigured, pulling site-specific semiotic events into much broader discourses and materialities.

Poststructuralism has brought social, cultural and political theories into a productive exchange with methods and tools for analyzing text and talk. My contribution outlines the contours of poststructuralist discourse studies (PDS), which is an interdisciplinary field of discourse research inspired by poststructuralism. It gives an overview of poststructuralism, tracing its evolution and identifying its key questions. I then spell out the consequences of poststructuralism for discourse studies, where it has given birth to the new field of PDS. PDS critically relates to the structuralist, top-down tendencies that have characterized some of the pioneering “French School” and “Critical” strands in discourse studies. It defends posthumanist and antiessentialist views on power and knowledge. Perceiving language as a socially constitutive practice, it places emphasis on the critical and reflexive dimensions of discourse research. Situated at the interdisciplinary intersection of language and society, PDS aims to bridge structure- and practice-oriented strands of discourse research and to overcome the divisions between linguistics and other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.

The widespread incorporation of online communicative practices in the repertoires of language users has profoundly affected the structure of communicative ecologies around the world, thus compelling us to adjust some of our core vocabulary accordingly. This chapter therefore critically reexamines one of the key notions in discourse studies: context. Treating context as inextricably connected with meaning-making has historically set discourse studies apart from more formal branches in the study of language. This, however, has not necessarily led to overly sophisticated notions of context, and the mainstream modes of usage of context in much discourse analysis can be characterized as vague and imprecise, grounded in and biased by a default image of spoken, dyadic offline (“local”) discourse events as the most natural and fundamental ones. Such views of context have been imported in studies of online communication, leading to highly questionable but influential insights such as those on “context collapse.” In this chapter, I review some of the conceptual problems related to context in online–offline communicative ecologies. I argue that, in order to avoid the bias described earlier (spoken, dyadic and offline discourse as the “zero point” of language use), we might wish to shift to taking communicative action as our unit of analysis, and address this unit in its fullest ethnographic sense as characterized by normatively circumscribed sets of resources and participants brought into specific time-space constellations enabling and constraining the deployment and uptake of specific lines of activity, leading to effects that are effects both of meaning and of moral and identity valuations. Actions are here defined as chronotopically organized and ordered, with on- and offline chronotopes having particular characteristics and interactions between such chronotopically described “contexts” involving complex shifts in resource valuation, participation frameworks and normative codes of conduct, previously described as shifts in footing. Taking this approach, I argue, enables us to avoid the spoken-dyadic-offline bias inscribed in mainstream notions of context, forcing the analyst not just to approach new online forms of interaction as “abnormal” or “exceptional” interactions, even if they are characterized by the deployment of written/designed resources and directed at “networked publics” rather than at the individual interlocutor of dyadic interaction, and even if they appear not to respect clear boundaries between the online and the offline world. The chronotopic character of contexts for communicative action enables, I suggest, a new imagination of “society” as the necessary backdrop for any consideration of discourse, its means and effects, and in that sense invites a broad range of alternative theoretical and descriptive revisions.

This chapter explores how tools from discourse analysis can contribute to our understanding of digital surveillance. It lays the groundwork for this exploration by first examining the role of discourse analysis in our understanding of surveillance more generally. It then goes on to discuss the mediated nature of all surveillance and the different affordances and constraints that different media bring to it. Next, it provides an overview of the main discursive processes involved in digital surveillance, including participation, pretexting, entextualization, recontextualization and inferencing, showing how they occur differently when mediated through digital technologies. A range of key issues and ongoing debates around digital surveillance related to discourse analysis are then identified and elaborated upon, specifically identity, agency and power. Finally, the chapter discusses the implications of a discourse analytical approach to digital surveillance for the professional practices of applied and sociolinguists and suggests some future directions for research on discourse and digital surveillance.

Ethical issues are of central importance in the study of discourse, as in other fields. In some respects, these issues are given greater emphasis today than in the past, partly as a result of the rise of ethical regulation, but also because of some fundamental debates among researchers about the politics and ethics of their work. While the issues vary somewhat across the discourse field, here, as elsewhere, there are certain central values that underpin the practical decisions that researchers make. In this chapter, a distinction is drawn between epistemic and non-epistemic values. The first concern the process of enquiry itself – for example, the obligation to pursue worthwhile knowledge, and to do this effectively; to provide sufficient evidence in publications; to be honest about how the research was done; and to engage genuinely with critics. Non-epistemic values include minimizing harm; respecting autonomy; and maintaining reciprocity; and these represent essential constraints on how research is pursued. The chapter examines how all these values relate to discourse research, exploring the complexities involved. It is emphasized that ethicality is not a matter of following a set of rules; rather, it necessarily involves judgment, in which relevant values, along with prudential and methodological considerations, are taken into account, as they relate to the specific situations faced. The chapter ends with a consideration of ethical regulation and the problems generated by the proceduralist approach to research ethics that it tends to encourage.

In this chapter we will discuss how scholarly understandings of academic discourse have shifted over the past thirty years in response to increasing globalization and changes in theorizations of language. We will look at how the definition of and boundaries around academic discourse have widened, shifting from a singular academic discourse to plural discourses, and from a focus on language to a focus on practices, in the process of accommodating more diverse Englishes. In particular, we will consider how the study of academic discourse has exposed the increasingly blurry boundaries not only between languages but also between modes, and how discourse includes not only text but also other resources for making meaning, such as images, sound, gesture and material artifacts. We will consider how English’s role as the academic lingua franca has influenced these shifting definitions and concepts. Finally, we will consider the implications of this diversification for pedagogy and for frameworks for future discourse studies.

A consideration of the “materiality of discourse” necessarily implicates a reexamination of some fundamental contributions to sign theory. Here, I first review the theoretical writings of Saussure, Volosinov and Peirce, comparing their various approaches to the problem of the sign and to semiosis. Peirce’s insistence on the importance of “secondness” (i.e. sigsigns, indexes, dicents) suggests a way of thinking about discourse that does not involve positioning it, either as representational medium or as social effect, in isolation from the material contexts in which it is used (and of which it is, in fact, a part). Drawing on some contemporary work in linguistic anthropology, I aim to illustrate this approach through a discussion of a few particularly perspicuous, ethnographic examples.

Increasingly, bodies and emotions have become a topic of systematic engagement in a number of academic disciplines. Starting from psychology and neuroscience, this interest – sometimes framed in terms of “affective turn” or “body turn” – has made its way into social and cultural studies and, to some extent, into applied linguistics. The recent “rediscovery” of bodies and emotions can, however, draw on earlier conceptions linking body, emotion and language such as the emotive function of language, the interactional enactment of bodies and affects, the notions of hexis and habitus, the discursive production of bodies and of emotions, the bodily rootedness of metaphors or the distinction between (perceived) body-object and (perceiving) body-subject. The interest of applied linguistics in emotions and embodiment can be seen as clustered around three basic questions: (1) How are bodies and emotions performed in verbal interactions? (2) How are they formed or constructed in social practices and discourses? (3) How are they involved in processes of experiencing and enregistering communicative events? As I argue, these three aspects cannot be dealt with separately as, in all of them, power relations and language ideological processes of positioning oneself and being positioned by others are at stake. The interrelations between discourse, emotions and embodiment will be approached from different epistemological angles: interactional approaches focusing on the observation of situated communicative events on a micro level; discourse theory approaches investigating the discursive objectification of subjects and subjectivities in a historical perspective; phenomenological approaches taking the idea of the acting and experiencing body-subject as starting point. Special attention is given to issues currently debated such as the production of racialized, gendered or disabled bodies as well as to concepts such as emotion in positioning or in stancetaking, embodied sociolinguistics or the lived experience of language.