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Article published In: Discourse Theory and the Turn to Practice
Edited by Benjamin De Cleen, Nico Carpentier, Jason Glynos, Jana Goyvaerts, Maximilian Grönegräs and Yannis Stavrakakis
[Journal of Language and Politics 24:1] 2025
► pp. 115–141

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When performance studies meet discourse theory

The political performance analysis protocol as an interdisciplinary methodological tool

ORCiD logo with link | University of Burgundy
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

This article was made Open Access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license through payment of an APC by or on behalf of the author.

Published online: 7 January 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.24196.aio
Abstract
Despite its versatility as a methodological tool, discourse analysis suffers from a logocentric bias, a tendency to primarily focus on text while ignoring the non-textual components of discourse. Although poststructural approaches to discourse analysis like Discourse Theory (DT) have developed an understanding of discourse going beyond language, there are few practical methodological tools for scholars from these traditions to engage with these non-textual elements. This article fills that gap by providing an original qualitative methodological tool, the Political Performance Analysis Protocol (PPAP) which adapts one of the signature methods of Performance Studies to political performances. It does so by describing the four constitutive elements of political performances — background symbols and foreground scripts, actor, audience and mise-en-scène — and empirically illustrating them through the case of Greta Thunberg’s “How dare you?” performance at a United Nations to show the PPAP’s relevance as a tool complementing other forms of discourse analysis.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Discourse Theory and empirical analysis
  • 3.Performance and discourse
  • 4.Performance analysis
  • 5.From artistic to social performances
  • 6.The Political Performance Analysis Protocol
    • 6.1Background symbols & foreground scripts
    • 6.2Actor
    • 6.3Audience
    • 6.4Mise-en-scène
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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