Bourdieu Language And The Media

This book engages with key theoretical and analytical issues in the field of media, communication and cultural studies. Using case studies of radio, internet, text messaging and photojournalism, it deploys Bourdieu's ideas to reveal how language in the media is implicated in broader social patterns of 'symbolic violence'.

Pierre Bourdieu is one of the key social theorists of the century. For the past forty years his many publications have defined a new approach to the study of such diverse fields as Education, Political Science, Cultural Studies, Gender, Sport, Language and the Media. There have been many commentaries on his work. This book is the first to offer a number of empirical studies conducted by researchers working with his ideas.

Building on and extending Pierre Bourdieu's critique of our media-saturated culture, this work presents case studies of such diverse phenomena as media coverage of the AIDS-contaminated blood scandal in France, US youth media activism, and political interview shows on both sides of the Atlantic.

As scholars of media and communication begin to think more frequently and more carefully with Pierre Bourdieu's ideas, this book offers a wealth of points of contact between Bourdieu's ideas and research topics concerning media and communication.

Kramsch combines insights from linguistics, anthropology and sociology to show how language represents and constructs social reality.

A surprising bestseller when it was first published in France, this little book by Pierre Bourdieu offers a brilliant critique of television and its consequences for social and political life. Rather than simply denouncing television as a misrepresentation or trivialization of the social world, Bourdieu shows that television journalists are part of a journalistic field that shapes their actions and imposes a particular vision on the public, a vision that is grounded in the very structure of the journalistic field and that, through a variety of mechanisms specific to this field, produces a general disenchantment with politics.

This volume brings together Pierre Bourdieu's highly original writings on language and on the relations among language, power, and politics. Bourdieu develops a forceful critique of traditional approaches to language, including the linguistic theories of Saussure and Chomsky and the theory of speech-acts elaborated by Austin and others. He argues that language should be viewed not only as a means of communication but also as a medium of power through which individuals pursue their own interests and display their practical competence. Drawing on the concepts that are part of his distinctive theoretical approach, Bourdieu maintains that linguistic utterances or expressions can be understood as the product of the relation between a "linguistic market" and a "linguistic habitus." When individuals use language in particular ways, they deploy their accumulated linguistic resources and implicitly adapt their words to the demands of the social field or market that is their audience. Hence every linguistic interaction, however personal or insignificant it may seem, bears the traces of the social structure that it both expresses and helps to reproduce. Bourdieu's account sheds fresh light on the ways in which linguistic usage varies according to considerations such as class and gender. It also opens up a new approach to the ways in which language is used in the domain of politics. For politics is, among other things, the arena in which words are deeds and the symbolic character of power is at stake. This volume, by one of the leading social thinkers in the world today, represents a major contribution to the study of language and power. It will be of interest to students throughout the social sciences and humanities, especially in sociology, politics, anthropology, linguistics, and literature.

Pierre Bourdieu is regarded as one of the foremost social philosophers of the twentieth century. His output included extensive studies of education, culture, art and language. He went beyond being a sociologist to being regarded in the same 'public intellectual' role as Sartre, de Beauvoir and Foucault. Issues surrounding language permeate Bourdieu's entire oeuvre. Although he did undertake empirical studies on language in a range of contexts, very little of this was published. This book redresses this balance; it sets out what Bourdieu has to say about language and why, and exemplifies this approach through a series of empirical language studies. This book will appeal to researchers across the world in fields such as sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, anthropology but is of especial interest to language and linguistics scholars.