Leudar2004

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Leudar2004
BibType ARTICLE
Key Leudar2004
Author(s) Ivan Leudar, Victoria Marsland, Jirí Nekvapil
Title On membership categorization: 'us', 'them', and 'doing violence' in political discourse
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Membership Categorization, Violence, Political Discourse, Terrorism
Publisher
Year 2004
Language
City
Month
Journal Discourse & Society
Volume 15
Number 2-3
Pages 243–266
URL Link
DOI 10.1177/0957926504041019
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

This article concerns the attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001. We use Membership Categorization Analysis to establish how the key figures involved in the conflict represented these events and the participants in them. We analyse public addresses made soon after the attacks by the US President George W. Bush, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden of Al Qaeda. Each speaker distinguished ‘us’ from ‘them’ and formulated this distinction so as to justify past violent actions and to prepare grounds for future ones. Bush and Blair both distinguished ‘us’ from ‘them’ in social, political and moral terms, whereas bin Laden did so in religious terms. The categorizations were not done in isolation from each other, but were instead networked. We discuss the relation between membership categorizations, presentations of happenings and violent actions, prior and subsequent and we extend our concept of a ‘dialogical network’.

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