Discourses Of 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.

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.

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.

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.

Fathers, Fatherhood and Mental Illness provides the first book-length study of fathers' experiences of mental illness, arguing that a discourse analytic focus upon the experience of mental illness is relevant both to social scientists and mental health scholars and practitioners.

This book offers a critical perspective of the dominant discourses within the field of psychological trauma. It provides a challenge to normative western constructs and unsettles assumptions about accepted notions of universality and the nature of trauma. Traditionally the concept of psychological trauma has been widely accepted within mental health professions. However, in a post-positivist era, the language of mental health is shifting and making room for alternative discourses that include wider contextual influences, such as the impact of sociological, cultural, and technological developments. These wider discourses are illuminated as the authors draw together some of these arguments into one accessible text. Rather than claim definitive answers to the issues raised, readers are invited to engage with the discussions presented in order to position themselves in relation to the range of trauma discourses available.