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In:Doing Politics: Discursivity, performativity and mediation in political discourse
Edited by Michael Kranert and Geraldine Horan
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 80] 2018
► pp. 179–208

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Chapter 8
Disciplining the unwilling

Normalisation of (demands for) punitive measures against immigrants in Austrian populist discourse

Published online: 12 December 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.80.08rhe
Abstract
In the context of mediatised politics in general and of recent shifts toward populist agendas in European politics in particular, publicly performed policy changes warrant close analysis. From a discourse-historical perspective, the notion of discourse strands conceptualises such discursive shifts to be studied with corpus-linguistic and qualitative methods. Austrian populist discourse in early 2015 provides a striking example of the normalisation of far-right demands and associated rhetoric with calls for punishing migrants identified as “unwilling to integrate”. Shifting the discussion from (usually assimilationist) criteria to a speculative “willingness”, mediatised politics thus forced public attention on an issue of terminology. Beyond media, this chapter traces the history of associated terms in specialised discourses of legislation, jurisprudence, parliamentary debates and extreme-right agitation.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Discourses of national identity: Research context
    • Integration as (cultural and linguistic) assimilation
    • Mediatised politics in the Austrian context
  • Disciplining the unwilling: The discourse strand
    • Achievement, language and punishment: New arguments and narratives of integration
  • An archaeology of knowledge: Recontextualising the term(s)
    • Terminology in the legal framework
    • Terminology in jurisprudence
    • Terminology in parliamentary discourse and far-right agitation
  • Conclusion and outlook
  • Notes
  • References
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