Bernhard Forchtner
Biographic Data
| ID | 247756 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bernhard Forchtner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bernhard |
| FAMILY NAME | Forchtner |
| SIGNATURE | FORCHTNER B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Leicester |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7782-9288 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 331 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Critical Discourse Analysis
Critical discourse analysis (CDA, nowadays also referred to as critical discourse studies) investigates naturally occurring written and spoken language beyond the sentence level, as well as other forms of meaning making, such as visuals and sounds, seeing them as irreducible elements in the (re)production of society. However, critical discourse analysis furthermore aims to demystify the role language plays in the (re)production of unjustified dom…
The Rise of (Affective) Obstruction: Conceptualizing the Evolution of Far-Right Climate Change Communication (1986–2018)
Research has illustrated that today’s far right in the Global North takes largely climate obstructionist stances, commonly featuring ageist/misogynistic/racist tropes. However, little is known about how this present became to be, how climate change was articulated in the 2000s and earlier. I therefore ask: how has far-right climate communication evolved between 1986 and 2018? Have there been notable changes at the level of both specific claims an…
The “Right” Atmosphere: Audiovisual Material and the Far Right
This commentary, first, looks both back at the contributions to the Special Issue Far-right Fictions: The Far Right and the Politics of Films, Series and Videogames and forward by pointing to future avenues for research on uses of audiovisual fiction by the far right. This is followed, second, by a conceptual suggestion regarding the notion of “atmosphere”. The latter speaks to the contributions by further highlighting the relevance of thinking a…
Prophet in the (degrowth) wilderness: Storytelling Herbert Gruhl as a far-right environmental lieu de mémoire
Against the promethean: Energy throughput and the far-right politics of degrowth
While criticism of growth by a diverse but overall left-leaning degrowth spectrum has become increasingly prominent, less is known about degrowth stances by far-right actors. While the far right is regularly viewed as ‘productivist’ and tied to fossil fuels, we point to a more complex relationship, taking the German New Right eco-magazine Die Kehre as a case study. Drawing on Bakhtin's concept of chronotope (time–space configuration), we identify…
Far-Right World Ordering from the Margins: Ethno-Ecological Degrowth and the Nation in the Swiss Democrats’ Discourse About the Natural Environment
Global environmental issues can give rise to globally shared, progressive narratives. Others, such as regressive far-right actors, have obstructed such responses by reproducing exclusionary narratives. However, while substantial work on such far-right obstruction exists, comprehensive case studies on pro-environment/pro-climate far-right actors are less common. To illuminate such far-right imagination of (un)desirable patterned relationships at a…
Imagining Alternative Worlds: Far-Right Fiction and the Power of Cultural Imaginaries
Imagining Alternative Worlds explores how the far right employs fictionality as a powerful political tool in the 21st century. It does so by examining the far right’s own cultural production and commentary through a large collection of its novels, novellas, short stories, and film reviews, illustrating how the ‘alternative worlds’ articulated in such cultural products convey its ideology. More specifically, the book identifies and analyses four d…
Far-right narratives of climate change acceptance and their role in addressing climate skepticism
As research on far-right climate change communication focuses on climate skepticisms, little is known about how the far-right justifies climate acceptance—and what this might mean for environmental education and counter-communication. To initiate a discussion of communicative strategies through which far-right actors might become more accepting of climate mitigation, we, first, reconstruct the narrative structure underlying far-right climate acce…
Theorizing exclusionary and inclusionary people-making: From narrative genres to collective learning processes
The article offers a normatively-informed theorization of people-making as a (blocked) collective learning process. More specifically, people-making, namely the mobilization of individuals into a collective actor, draws symbolic boundaries around the sovereign, thereby contributing to the imagination of ‘the people’ in more inclusionary or exclusionary ways. To account for differences along this continuum, Habermas’ notion of collective learning …
Scepticisms and beyond? A comprehensive portrait of climate change communication by the far right in the European Parliament
Amid the existing scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change (ACC), research on political ideologies and climate change indicates varying degrees of scepticism amongst conservatives and, especially, the far right, the latter ranging from the anti-liberal radical right to the anti-democratic extreme right. We contribute to this emerging literature by drawing a comprehensive portrait of far-right articulations of climate change to …
Negotiating euthanasia: Civil society contesting 'the completed life
Autonomy and independence have become crucial elements of end-of-life decision making. Opinions on the latter are, however, strongly contested in public discourses. This contribution analyses arguments in favour of and against a Dutch civil society initiative which promotes the extension of the legislation on euthanasia. The authors investigate Dutch newspapers associated with three groups: religious, liberal and humanist perspectives, and do so …
Climate Obstruction: How Denial, Delay and Inaction are Heating the Planet
In Climate Obstruction: How Denial, Delay and Inaction are Heating the Planet, Kristoffer Ekberg, Bernhard Forchtner, Martin Hultman and Kirsti Jylhä bring together crucial insights from environmental history, sociology, media and communication studies and psychology to help us understand why we are failing to take necessary measures to avert the unfolding climate crisis. They do so by examining the variety of ways in which meaningful climate act…
De/legitimising EUrope through the performance of crises: The far-right Alternative for Germany on “climate hysteria” and “corona hysteria
This article illuminates the far-right populist Alternative for Germany's (AfD) performances of delegitmisation vis-à-vis EUrope and legitmisation of itself/the nation by articulating two paradigmatic, transnational crises: climate change and COVID-19. It asks: ‘how does the far-right AfD perform these two crises to legitimise itself and delegitimize others?’ and ‘what similarities/differences exist between the performance of these two crises in …
Introducing ‘Narrative in Critical Discourse Studies’
Given that narratives are everywhere, this special issue aims to contribute to the field of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS, also known as Critical Discourse Analysis) by (a) considering the concept of narrative and showcasing some of its uses in CDS, (b) arguing for its prominent consideration within conceptual architectures in CDS, and (c) illustrating emancipatory potentials of the narrative form in line with CDS’ critical impetus. Indeed, whi…
Critique, Habermas and narrative (genre): The discourse-historical approach in critical discourse studies
Narratives are everywhere. We tell narratives about ourselves and we make the world meaningful through storytelling. We position others through the narratives we tell and are positioned by stories told about us. And yet, while narratives have, of course, been analysed in critical discourse studies (CDS), including in one of its most popular approaches, the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this article proposes to go a step further by systemat…
Towards a revised theory of collective learning processes: Argumentation, narrative and the making of the social bond
Societies change; and sociology has, since its inception, described and evaluated these changes. This article proposes a revised theory of collective learning processes, a conceptual framework which addresses ways in which people make sense of and cope with change. Drawing on Habermas' classic proposal, but shifting the focus from argumentation towards storytelling, it explains how certain articulations allow for collective learning processes (im…
The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication
Climate change and the far right
In recent years two crises have populated the imagination of publics: environmental crises, ranging from, for example, water and air pollution to climate change, and the crisis of liberal democracy, illustrated by the rise of far‐right actors across Europe, the United States and beyond. While these environmental and political crises have been analyzed on their own, little research has been done on their nexus. Against this background, this focus …
Circumcising the body: Negotiating difference and belonging in Germany
The circumcision debate in Germany in 2012 is an exemplary case for symbolic struggles over national boundaries. The debate became a site for the negotiation of traditions practiced by religious minorities. We ask, first, how the clinical gaze constitutes Muslim and Jewish others. Second, we investigate how ‘writing around’ the debate’s center, bodily integrity, became meaningful through analogies to other practices said to harm it. We compare ne…
Cultural imaginaries of the extreme right: An introduction
This special issue sheds light on what we call the ‘cultural imaginaries’ of the contemporary European extreme right. The focus on cultural imaginaries—a term we will explore more fully below—entai
Nation, nature, purity: Extreme-right biodiversity in Germany
In this article, Forchtner investigates the construction of an ‘ideal’, extreme-right, ecologically sensitive subject. A concern for the natural environment is in no way new to the extreme right, and has long been part of its ideological make-up. In particular, claims that the laws of nature are applicable to the social world and that a community is embedded in an ecosystem have long been features of a right-wing ecological imaginary. Through an …
Being Skeptical? Exploring Far-Right Climate-Change Communication in Germany
This article explores climate-change communication by the German far right – spanning a continuum which ranges from anti-liberal democracy radical-right populists, to the extreme right and to anti-democratic neo-Nazis – and asks: how do these actors articulate the phenomenon of climate change? In responding to this question, we conduct a discourse network analysis which identifies relations between actors, objects, phenomena, and processes, and p…
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics
Discourse-analytical research on climate change is not only fully justified, but badly needed. Proposing and deciding what this wicked issue is about and what ought to be done about it involve discursive struggles between a range of social actors in science, politics, business, civil society and other domains. Humanity has never been faced with an environmental crisis of the type and scale of climate change. The development of the climate change …
Critical Discourse Studies
This chapter presents research conducted within the framework of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), which deals with political issues of various kinds, exploring how it draws on a range of theories in its multi-, inter-, transor post-disciplinary empirical work. While focusing on how research in CDS has drawn on a range of theoretical frameworks and disciplinary fields (including sociology, history, and so forth), the chapter first looks at the mo…
Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics
Climate change and the far right
In recent years two crises have populated the imagination of publics: environmental crises, ranging from, for example, water and air pollution to climate change, and the crisis of liberal democracy, illustrated by the rise of far‐right actors across Europe, the United States and beyond. While these environmental and political crises have been analyzed on their own, little research has been done on their nexus. Against this background, this focus …
Critique, the discourse-historical approach, and the Frankfurt School
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) stands on the shoulder of giants - different giants - in order to answer how its critique, its ethico-moral stance, is theoretically grounded and justified. Concerning this question, this article explores the role of the Frankfurt School in the discourse-historical approach (DHA). Although references to the Frankfurt School can regularly be found in the DHA's canon, I argue that an even more comprehensive discuss…
Extreme right images of radical authenticity: Multimodal aesthetics of history, nature, and gender roles in social media
Over recent years, the German extreme right has undergone significant changes, including the appropriation of symbols, styles, and action repertoires of contemporary (youth) cultures, sometimes even taken from the far left. In this article, we investigate extreme right visual communication through Facebook, focusing on claims to truth and authentic Nazism in relation to ‘history’, ‘nature’, and ‘gender roles’. These themes were central in Nationa…
Embattled Vienna 1683/2010: Right-wing populism, collective memory and the fictionalisation of politics
The victory of a Christian coalition over Ottoman forces besieging Vienna in 1683 marked the beginning of the end of the Ottoman presence in Central and Eastern Europe and the simultaneous rise of the Habsburg Empire in this region. Memories of these events still circulate in present-day Vienna and provide an emotional reservoir for anti-Turkish sentiments. Current tendencies to fictionalise politics support the dissemination of such anti-Turkish…
Narrating a ‘new Europe’: From ‘bitter past’ to self-righteousness
The 1990s and 2000s saw a memory and remembrance boom at both the national and supra-/transnational level. Crucially, many of these emerging memory frames were not simply about a glorious and heroic past, as in, for example, traditional nationalist narratives. Rather, groups started to narrate their symbolic boundaries in a more inclusive way by admitting past wrongdoings. In this article, we look at a corpus of so-called ‘speculative speeches’ b…
The interplay of language ideologies and contextual cues in multilingual interactions: Language choice and code-switching in European Union institutions
This article analyzes multilingual practices in interactions inside European Union (EU) institutions. On the basis of our fieldwork conducted in EU organizational spaces throughout 2009, we explore different types of communication in order to illustrate how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and officials at the European Commission practice and perform multilingualism in their everyday work. In our theoretical and methodological framework,…
De/legitimising EUrope through the performance of crises: The far-right Alternative for Germany on “climate hysteria” and “corona hysteria
This article illuminates the far-right populist Alternative for Germany's (AfD) performances of delegitmisation vis-à-vis EUrope and legitmisation of itself/the nation by articulating two paradigmatic, transnational crises: climate change and COVID-19. It asks: ‘how does the far-right AfD perform these two crises to legitimise itself and delegitimize others?’ and ‘what similarities/differences exist between the performance of these two crises in …
Introducing ‘Narrative in Critical Discourse Studies’
Given that narratives are everywhere, this special issue aims to contribute to the field of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS, also known as Critical Discourse Analysis) by (a) considering the concept of narrative and showcasing some of its uses in CDS, (b) arguing for its prominent consideration within conceptual architectures in CDS, and (c) illustrating emancipatory potentials of the narrative form in line with CDS’ critical impetus. Indeed, whi…
Scepticisms and beyond? A comprehensive portrait of climate change communication by the far right in the European Parliament
Amid the existing scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change (ACC), research on political ideologies and climate change indicates varying degrees of scepticism amongst conservatives and, especially, the far right, the latter ranging from the anti-liberal radical right to the anti-democratic extreme right. We contribute to this emerging literature by drawing a comprehensive portrait of far-right articulations of climate change to …
Theories and concepts in critical discourse studies: Facing challenges, moving beyond foundations
This article emphasises the need to devote more attention to concepts and theories in critical discourse studies (CDS). We are particularly eager to emphasise that CDS theory of the second decade of 2000s – often known as the post-crisis era or as the period of ‘late neoliberalism’ – faces a number of challenges that are both real world (social) and academic in nature. On the one hand, CDS theory must be reconsidered from the point of view of soc…
Critique and argumentation: On the relation between the discourse-historical approach and pragma-dialectics
At the core of critical discourse analysis lies its emancipatory agenda: arguing for social equality and against discrimination. In the case of the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this stance has been theoretically justified mainly through references to Habermas’ language-philosophy. At the same time, the analysis of actually occurring argumentative speech requires more than a theoretical underpinning of one’s critique and, here, DHA has ben…
Towards a revised theory of collective learning processes: Argumentation, narrative and the making of the social bond
Societies change; and sociology has, since its inception, described and evaluated these changes. This article proposes a revised theory of collective learning processes, a conceptual framework which addresses ways in which people make sense of and cope with change. Drawing on Habermas' classic proposal, but shifting the focus from argumentation towards storytelling, it explains how certain articulations allow for collective learning processes (im…
Collective learning in social fields: Bourdieu, Habermas and critical discourse studies
As societies have become increasingly differentiated and discourses have turned increasingly heterogeneous, field theory and critical discourse studies (CDS) have become ever more popular in the social sciences. Responding to this development, we propose a synthesis of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and theories of collective learning inspired by Jürgen Habermas. Embedding this exploration within the framework of the discourse-historical approach…
Critique, Habermas and narrative (genre): The discourse-historical approach in critical discourse studies
Narratives are everywhere. We tell narratives about ourselves and we make the world meaningful through storytelling. We position others through the narratives we tell and are positioned by stories told about us. And yet, while narratives have, of course, been analysed in critical discourse studies (CDS), including in one of its most popular approaches, the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this article proposes to go a step further by systemat…
Rhetorics of judge-penitence: Claiming moral superiority through admissions of past wrongdoing
Over recent decades, public admissions of our past wrongdoing have become increasingly widespread. Usually, these practices are viewed as facilitating more inclusive modes of assimilating collective memories into collective identities. However, this article argues that such admissions can enable claims for having learnt the lessons which ultimately justify discrediting an external other as morally inferior vis-a-vis us . I do so by drawing on Alb…
Cultural imaginaries of the extreme right: An introduction
This special issue sheds light on what we call the ‘cultural imaginaries’ of the contemporary European extreme right. The focus on cultural imaginaries—a term we will explore more fully below—entai
Nation, nature, purity: Extreme-right biodiversity in Germany
In this article, Forchtner investigates the construction of an ‘ideal’, extreme-right, ecologically sensitive subject. A concern for the natural environment is in no way new to the extreme right, and has long been part of its ideological make-up. In particular, claims that the laws of nature are applicable to the social world and that a community is embedded in an ecosystem have long been features of a right-wing ecological imaginary. Through an …
Kalashnikov and Cooking-spoon: Neo-Nazism, Veganism and a Lifestyle Cooking Show on YouTube
Food consumption has always been a deeply symbolic, identity-related issue. But contrary to the intuitive assumption that links meat-free diets to peace-loving, left-leaning actors and ideologies, this article illustrates how a group of (German) neo-Nazis, Balaclava Küche (Balaclava Kitchen), appropriates vegan diet in its YouTube cooking videos. Analyzing these videos, supported by an interview with the group, the article inquires into the vario…
Far-Right World Ordering from the Margins: Ethno-Ecological Degrowth and the Nation in the Swiss Democrats’ Discourse About the Natural Environment
Global environmental issues can give rise to globally shared, progressive narratives. Others, such as regressive far-right actors, have obstructed such responses by reproducing exclusionary narratives. However, while substantial work on such far-right obstruction exists, comprehensive case studies on pro-environment/pro-climate far-right actors are less common. To illuminate such far-right imagination of (un)desirable patterned relationships at a…
Theorizing exclusionary and inclusionary people-making: From narrative genres to collective learning processes
The article offers a normatively-informed theorization of people-making as a (blocked) collective learning process. More specifically, people-making, namely the mobilization of individuals into a collective actor, draws symbolic boundaries around the sovereign, thereby contributing to the imagination of ‘the people’ in more inclusionary or exclusionary ways. To account for differences along this continuum, Habermas’ notion of collective learning …
Circumcising the body: Negotiating difference and belonging in Germany
The circumcision debate in Germany in 2012 is an exemplary case for symbolic struggles over national boundaries. The debate became a site for the negotiation of traditions practiced by religious minorities. We ask, first, how the clinical gaze constitutes Muslim and Jewish others. Second, we investigate how ‘writing around’ the debate’s center, bodily integrity, became meaningful through analogies to other practices said to harm it. We compare ne…
Against the promethean: Energy throughput and the far-right politics of degrowth
While criticism of growth by a diverse but overall left-leaning degrowth spectrum has become increasingly prominent, less is known about degrowth stances by far-right actors. While the far right is regularly viewed as ‘productivist’ and tied to fossil fuels, we point to a more complex relationship, taking the German New Right eco-magazine Die Kehre as a case study. Drawing on Bakhtin's concept of chronotope (time–space configuration), we identify…
Critique, the discourse-historical approach, and the Frankfurt School
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) stands on the shoulder of giants - different giants - in order to answer how its critique, its ethico-moral stance, is theoretically grounded and justified. Concerning this question, this article explores the role of the Frankfurt School in the discourse-historical approach (DHA). Although references to the Frankfurt School can regularly be found in the DHA's canon, I argue that an even more comprehensive discuss…
Narrating a ‘new Europe’: From ‘bitter past’ to self-righteousness
The 1990s and 2000s saw a memory and remembrance boom at both the national and supra-/transnational level. Crucially, many of these emerging memory frames were not simply about a glorious and heroic past, as in, for example, traditional nationalist narratives. Rather, groups started to narrate their symbolic boundaries in a more inclusive way by admitting past wrongdoings. In this article, we look at a corpus of so-called ‘speculative speeches’ b…
The interplay of language ideologies and contextual cues in multilingual interactions: Language choice and code-switching in European Union institutions
This article analyzes multilingual practices in interactions inside European Union (EU) institutions. On the basis of our fieldwork conducted in EU organizational spaces throughout 2009, we explore different types of communication in order to illustrate how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and officials at the European Commission practice and perform multilingualism in their everyday work. In our theoretical and methodological framework,…
Critique and argumentation: On the relation between the discourse-historical approach and pragma-dialectics
At the core of critical discourse analysis lies its emancipatory agenda: arguing for social equality and against discrimination. In the case of the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this stance has been theoretically justified mainly through references to Habermas’ language-philosophy. At the same time, the analysis of actually occurring argumentative speech requires more than a theoretical underpinning of one’s critique and, here, DHA has ben…
Rhetorics of judge-penitence: Claiming moral superiority through admissions of past wrongdoing
Over recent decades, public admissions of our past wrongdoing have become increasingly widespread. Usually, these practices are viewed as facilitating more inclusive modes of assimilating collective memories into collective identities. However, this article argues that such admissions can enable claims for having learnt the lessons which ultimately justify discrediting an external other as morally inferior vis-a-vis us . I do so by drawing on Alb…
Embattled Vienna 1683/2010: Right-wing populism, collective memory and the fictionalisation of politics
The victory of a Christian coalition over Ottoman forces besieging Vienna in 1683 marked the beginning of the end of the Ottoman presence in Central and Eastern Europe and the simultaneous rise of the Habsburg Empire in this region. Memories of these events still circulate in present-day Vienna and provide an emotional reservoir for anti-Turkish sentiments. Current tendencies to fictionalise politics support the dissemination of such anti-Turkish…
The Nature of Nationalism: Populist Radical Right Parties on Countryside and Climate
This article inquires into how contemporary populist radical right parties relate to environmental issues of countryside and climate protection, by analyzing relevant discourses of the British National Party (BNP) and the Danish People's Party (DPP). It does so by looking at party materials along three dimensions: the aesthetic, the symbolic, and the material. The article discusses to what extent the parties' political stances on environmental is…
Saying sorry’ in Turkey: The Dersim massacre of the 1930s in 2011
Dominant self-complacent national narratives (not only) in Turkey have long silenced past wrongdoings. Among these, the massacre of thousands of Kurds in Dersim during the 1930s, being part of the wider suppression of the Kurdish minority until the present day, is a particularly significant example. However, against the background of an almost global emphasis on recognising past crimes, the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, offered an…
Collective learning in social fields: Bourdieu, Habermas and critical discourse studies
As societies have become increasingly differentiated and discourses have turned increasingly heterogeneous, field theory and critical discourse studies (CDS) have become ever more popular in the social sciences. Responding to this development, we propose a synthesis of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and theories of collective learning inspired by Jürgen Habermas. Embedding this exploration within the framework of the discourse-historical approach…
Theories and concepts in critical discourse studies: Facing challenges, moving beyond foundations
This article emphasises the need to devote more attention to concepts and theories in critical discourse studies (CDS). We are particularly eager to emphasise that CDS theory of the second decade of 2000s – often known as the post-crisis era or as the period of ‘late neoliberalism’ – faces a number of challenges that are both real world (social) and academic in nature. On the one hand, CDS theory must be reconsidered from the point of view of soc…
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics
Discourse-analytical research on climate change is not only fully justified, but badly needed. Proposing and deciding what this wicked issue is about and what ought to be done about it involve discursive struggles between a range of social actors in science, politics, business, civil society and other domains. Humanity has never been faced with an environmental crisis of the type and scale of climate change. The development of the climate change …
Critical Discourse Studies
This chapter presents research conducted within the framework of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), which deals with political issues of various kinds, exploring how it draws on a range of theories in its multi-, inter-, transor post-disciplinary empirical work. While focusing on how research in CDS has drawn on a range of theoretical frameworks and disciplinary fields (including sociology, history, and so forth), the chapter first looks at the mo…
Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics
Kalashnikov and Cooking-spoon: Neo-Nazism, Veganism and a Lifestyle Cooking Show on YouTube
Food consumption has always been a deeply symbolic, identity-related issue. But contrary to the intuitive assumption that links meat-free diets to peace-loving, left-leaning actors and ideologies, this article illustrates how a group of (German) neo-Nazis, Balaclava Küche (Balaclava Kitchen), appropriates vegan diet in its YouTube cooking videos. Analyzing these videos, supported by an interview with the group, the article inquires into the vario…
Global Media Studies
Extreme right images of radical authenticity: Multimodal aesthetics of history, nature, and gender roles in social media
Over recent years, the German extreme right has undergone significant changes, including the appropriation of symbols, styles, and action repertoires of contemporary (youth) cultures, sometimes even taken from the far left. In this article, we investigate extreme right visual communication through Facebook, focusing on claims to truth and authentic Nazism in relation to ‘history’, ‘nature’, and ‘gender roles’. These themes were central in Nationa…
Being Skeptical? Exploring Far-Right Climate-Change Communication in Germany
This article explores climate-change communication by the German far right – spanning a continuum which ranges from anti-liberal democracy radical-right populists, to the extreme right and to anti-democratic neo-Nazis – and asks: how do these actors articulate the phenomenon of climate change? In responding to this question, we conduct a discourse network analysis which identifies relations between actors, objects, phenomena, and processes, and p…
The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication
Climate change and the far right
In recent years two crises have populated the imagination of publics: environmental crises, ranging from, for example, water and air pollution to climate change, and the crisis of liberal democracy, illustrated by the rise of far‐right actors across Europe, the United States and beyond. While these environmental and political crises have been analyzed on their own, little research has been done on their nexus. Against this background, this focus …
Circumcising the body: Negotiating difference and belonging in Germany
The circumcision debate in Germany in 2012 is an exemplary case for symbolic struggles over national boundaries. The debate became a site for the negotiation of traditions practiced by religious minorities. We ask, first, how the clinical gaze constitutes Muslim and Jewish others. Second, we investigate how ‘writing around’ the debate’s center, bodily integrity, became meaningful through analogies to other practices said to harm it. We compare ne…
Cultural imaginaries of the extreme right: An introduction
This special issue sheds light on what we call the ‘cultural imaginaries’ of the contemporary European extreme right. The focus on cultural imaginaries—a term we will explore more fully below—entai
Nation, nature, purity: Extreme-right biodiversity in Germany
In this article, Forchtner investigates the construction of an ‘ideal’, extreme-right, ecologically sensitive subject. A concern for the natural environment is in no way new to the extreme right, and has long been part of its ideological make-up. In particular, claims that the laws of nature are applicable to the social world and that a community is embedded in an ecosystem have long been features of a right-wing ecological imaginary. Through an …
Critique, Habermas and narrative (genre): The discourse-historical approach in critical discourse studies
Narratives are everywhere. We tell narratives about ourselves and we make the world meaningful through storytelling. We position others through the narratives we tell and are positioned by stories told about us. And yet, while narratives have, of course, been analysed in critical discourse studies (CDS), including in one of its most popular approaches, the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this article proposes to go a step further by systemat…
Towards a revised theory of collective learning processes: Argumentation, narrative and the making of the social bond
Societies change; and sociology has, since its inception, described and evaluated these changes. This article proposes a revised theory of collective learning processes, a conceptual framework which addresses ways in which people make sense of and cope with change. Drawing on Habermas' classic proposal, but shifting the focus from argumentation towards storytelling, it explains how certain articulations allow for collective learning processes (im…
Introducing ‘Narrative in Critical Discourse Studies’
Given that narratives are everywhere, this special issue aims to contribute to the field of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS, also known as Critical Discourse Analysis) by (a) considering the concept of narrative and showcasing some of its uses in CDS, (b) arguing for its prominent consideration within conceptual architectures in CDS, and (c) illustrating emancipatory potentials of the narrative form in line with CDS’ critical impetus. Indeed, whi…
Sociology (28 works) · Political science (25 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Linguistics (10 works) · Narrative (10 works)