Drawing on insights from linguistics, multimodality and media studies, this book explores the ideological dimensions of media representation and its function in discursively constructing public understandings of, and attitudes toward, civil disorder.

Drawing on insights from linguistics, multimodality and media studies, this book explores the ideological dimensions of media representation and its function in discursively constructing public understandings of, and attitudes toward, civil disorder.

Based on the author's in-depth research with children diagnosed with behavioural difficulties, this book provides a thorough critique of today's practices and explores the effects of this epidemic, questioning whether what we're doing is right for the child and right for society.

This edited volume includes studies of discourses about bodily and psychiatric illness in modern China, bringing together scholarships that reconfigure the fields of history, literature, film, psychology, anthropology, and gender studies by tracing the pathological path of China through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the new millennium.

An original and timely study of men's experiences of depression in which the author tackles the discursively constructed relationship between the self and depression showing its linguistic and social complexity and analyses the relationship between depression and masculinity.

Disorders of Discourse offers an innovative approach to understanding communication and its barriers, in a variety of institutional contexts such as the outpatient clinic, the courtroom or the school. The study presents a new theory which Ruth Wodak terms 'discourse sociolinguistics' which is not only explicitly dedicated to the study of text in context, but places equal emphasis and importance on both factors. Ruth Wodak's approach identifies and describes the underlying mechanisms which help to construct speech barriers. Often embedded in a certain context - in the structure and function of the media, or in institutions such as a hospital or government ministry - these barriers inevitably affect communication. They depend on gaps between distinct cognitive worlds, the gulfs that separate outsiders from insiders, members of institutions from clients, and they are traceable not only to the use of unfamiliar professional or technical jargon but also to the immanent structure of the various discourses themselves. The result is 'frame conflict' in which worlds of knowledge and interest collide with one another. Those who possess linguistic as well as institutional power invariably prevail.

Material Discourses of Health and Illness applies discursive approaches to the field of health psychology, in stark contrast to the bio-medical model of health and illness. The discursive approach uses the person's experience and feelings as the central focus of interest, whereas the more traditional models regarded these as coincidental and relatively unimportant. The book provides an accessible and compelling introduction to social constructionist and discursive approaches to those with limited previous knowledge of socio-linguistic theory and research. It provides practical examples of how these approaches can be applied to the field of health psychology with a collection of sophisticated discursive analyses which demonstrate the distinctive contribution that can be made by psychologists to a field that has been largely dominated by sociologists and anthropologists.