PhD student in Linguistics, Faculty of Philology, Institute of Polish Philology
Universiteit van Amsterdam, Department of Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities
University of California, Berkeley, African American Studies
Ph.D. student
Institute of Polish Studies
Thesis Title: Racial discourse in the Polish media
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Stephen Small
Teun van Dijk |
About
The primary goal of my research is to provide a discourse analytical study of the representation of race and ethnicity in the Polish press, and thus contribute both to the literature on Black people in Europe as well as to developments in linguistics and discourse studies.
I intend to identify, describe and interpret the cultural archive from which the polish media draws its terminology and lexicon for describing Black people, including items drawn from national and international sources.Unlike Western European countries with a colonial history and significant Black Diaspora, Poland only has a very small Black population. Yet, Black people have recently become a significant presence in the Polish press. In my research I explore the ways in which underlying beliefs about race and ethnicity frame media discourse, and thus may contribute to the (re)production of racism in Poland. In this way I expect to contribute to some of the most important analyses in the field of linguistics in Poland at present.
The theoretical framework of my dissertation is multidisciplinary and based on international research on the role of public discourse in the reproduction of ethnic prejudice, discrimination and racism. This research combines (i) insights on racism from the social sciences, (ii) the social psychology of prejudice and (iii) linguistic studies of discriminatory language use and other discourse strategies that exhibit racist ideologies about Black people.
The method of my investigation is largely qualitative discourse analysis, systematically describing lexical, syntactic and semantic structures of media discourse on Black people, their actions and characteristics. This analysis will not be limited, as is usual in superficial content analysis, to explicit racist words, but especially also focus on implicit and indirect meanings of discourse structures at various levels. Such implicit meanings are inferences derived from the specific uses of language in the current communicative context of the Polish press, on the one hand, and in Polish society at large, on the other hand.
