Sociopolitical Keywords in Contemporary Debates: Addressing Methodological Challenges for Qualitative Approaches
(2024) MethodsNET Launch Events 2024 — Location: Louvain-la-Neuve (31.October.2024)
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- In recent years, discourse analysis has witnessed a growing interest in the study of ‘sociopolitical keywords'(Jeffries & Walker, 2012; Schröter & Veniard, 2016) -words that are highly prevalent in sociopolitical debates and characterized by meanings that vary depending on the speaking context or the status of the speaker (e.g. ‘populism', ‘woke', ‘sustainable'). Despite their pervasive use and their seemingly established meanings, these words are actually the locus of semantic struggles over what they truly (should) mean. As a result, sociopolitical keywords engage in processes of classification and categorization that are deeply intertwined with political ideologies: by including or excluding individuals, ideas, entities, etc. within the categories they circumscribe, they differentiate, hierarchize, and bestow legitimacy or disqualification upon such objects. As such, these sociopolitical keywords thus play a pivotal role in contemporary media and political discourses. While this specific role is of primary interest and should be further analyzed, the first step towards a better understanding of sociopolitical keywords is to uncover their pragmatic distinctiveness from other salient words. Existing studies on this topic predominantly rely on quantitative tools, such as collocations, often combined with qualitative analytical processes (e.g. Evans & Jeffries, 2015; Jeffries, 2003; Taylor, 2017). Although this mainly quantitative approach is valuable for unraveling the meanings of sociopolitical keywords, we propose to complement it with a qualitative yet systematic focus on how the different meanings are formalized in discourses and the argumentative and rhetorical effects they fuel. By conducting case studies on the use of ‘scientific' and ‘populism' in French, Belgian, and Spanish media and political discourses, the paper introduces a replicable qualitative framework for studying these aspects. In doing so, the presentation addresses the issues surrounding qualitative keyword analysis and the methodological challenges it raises.
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Rondiat, C., & Hambye, P. (2024). Sociopolitical Keywords in Contemporary Debates: Addressing Methodological Challenges for Qualitative Approaches. MethodsNET Launch Events 2024, Louvain-la-Neuve. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/274712