26.5245, Diss: Discourse Analysis: Franco Zappettini: 'The Discursive Construction of Europeanness: A Transnational Perspective'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-5245. Mon Nov 23 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.5245, Diss: Discourse Analysis: Franco Zappettini: 'The Discursive Construction of Europeanness: A Transnational Perspective'

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Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2015 16:54:20
From: Franco Zappettini [franco.zappettini at gmail.com]
Subject: The Discursive Construction of Europeanness: A Transnational Perspective

 
Institution: University of London 
Program: PhD Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2015 

Author: Franco Zappettini

Dissertation Title: The Discursive Construction of Europeanness: A
Transnational Perspective 

Dissertation URL:  https://www.academia.edu/18810403/THE_DISCURSIVE_CONSTRUCTION_OF_EUROPEANNE

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis


Dissertation Director(s):
Lisa Atalianis

Dissertation Abstract:

This thesis examines the construction of European identity in the discourses of members of European Alternatives (EA), an association of citizens which characterizes itself as committed to the grassroots construction of a better society beyond the nation-state.

By taking bottom-up and transnational perspectives, this study intends to fill a gap in the field of Critical Discourse Studies that seems to have largely underestimated the value of social action and the need to move away from methodological nationalism in conceiving of how Europeanness is transformed and enacted. 

The study applies the Discourse Historical Approach (Wodak 2001) to a corpus of data comprising of four focus groups and nine individual interviews with EA members from 10 different branches across Europe. The results suggest a complex and very dynamic picture of how European identities are constructed, challenged and transformed by members who, typically, adopted strategies of dismantling of nationhood, and strategies of imagining new communities, spaces and social orders.

Two key linguistic features conspicuously drive the members' discourses of belonging to Europe/being European. One is the metaphorical scenario of spatial dynamics that, by and large, makes sense of the European space as unbounded and interconnected with the world and whereby the European society is seen as progression and expansion of an imagined community towards certain cosmopolitan ideals. The second element is the indexicality of transnationalism and Europe, two terms that members invested with a range of meanings including ideals of democracy, diversity, and equality but that were also constructed through the recontextualisation of historical discourses of nationhood. This thesis thus suggests that, for EA members, the transformation of Europeanness is not a linear process (as for example some theories of the Europeanisation of society would have it but, rather a dialectic one which relates to one's situatedness within temporal, spatial, and social dimensions and which is achie
 ved via multiple and dynamic identification processes with different communities of relevance.



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