#RC21 Charlotte Taylor: Fear and pride: Emotion talk in UK migration debates

Join us for the RC21 Project Symposium, where invited speakers and project team members will present their work on methodology and applications of concordance analysis!

Charlotte Taylor: »Fear and pride: Emotion talk in UK migration debates«

Abstract:
 
This paper offers an example of the application of concordance analysis in the field of discourse analysis. Here, I focus on one element of public discourses around migration; the use of emotion-talk in parliamentary debates. Following Bednarek (2008), I use the term ‘emotion talk’ to refer to talk about emotions, as opposed to ‘emotional talk’ which is talk in which emotions are displayed. Both ‘emotion talk’ and ‘emotional talk’ can perform persuasive appeals to emotions or discursive (de)legitimization (Reyes 2011). To date, emotional talk has received more attention, given the centrality of a) emotion to conceptualisations of populism, and b) securitisation to the discursive framing of mobility. In this paper, I turn to emotion talk and identify which emotions are explicitly referenced in the UK parliamentary debates and what function use of these terms performs. Asking about function rather than just frequency means that a more nuanced approach is required – and this is why the analysis was carried out at the level of the concordance line. The concordance lines of emotion talk (e.g. ‘proud’ or ‘grateful’) were coded according to who was the using term, who was being described as experiencing this emotion, and what the target of the emotion was (e.g. what people are described as being ‘afraid’ of). These then feed into that overarching question of whether these references to emotions in discussion of migrations are used for different argumentative functions by different political parties and genders.