The Great American Scaffold:intertextuality and identity in American presidential discourse

Based on extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses of a corpus of American presidential speeches that includes all inaugural addresses and State of the Union messages from 1789 to 2008, as well as major foreign and security policy speeches after 1945, this research monograph analyzes the various forms and functions of intertextual references found in the discourse of American presidents. Working within an original, interdisciplinary theoretical framework established by theories of intertextuality, discourse analysis, and presidential studies, the book discusses five different types of presidential intertextuality, all of which contribute jointly to creating a set of carefully manipulated and politically powerful images of both the American nation and the American presidency. The book is intended for scholars and students in political and presidential studies, communications, American cultural studies, and linguistics, as well as anyone interested in the American presidency in general.

Biologising parenting:neuroscience discourse, English social and public health policy and understandings of the child

In recent years, claims about children's developing brains have become central to the formation of child health and welfare policies in England. While these policies assert that they are based on neuro-scientific discoveries, their relationship to neuroscience itself has been debated. However what is clear is that they portray a particular understanding of children and childhood, one that is marked by a lack of acknowledgment of child personhood. Using an analysis of key government-commissioned reports and additional advocacy documents, this chapter illustrates the ways that the mind of the child is reduced to the brain, and this brain comes to represent the child. It is argued that a highly reductionist and limiting construction of the child is produced, alongside the idea that parenting is the main factor in child development. It is concluded that this focus on children's brains, with its accompanying deterministic perspective on parenting, overlooks children's embodied lives and this has implications for the design of children's health and welfare services.

Digital learning, discourse and ideology

In recent decades, digital technologies have seen widespread use across global society and adoption at all levels of education. Digital learning might therefore simply be described as learning that is facilitated by digital technologies, but to discuss digital learning only in this way obscures important complexities linked to language, culture, politics, and the economy. To talk or write about learning as if it were directly facilitated by technology of any kind, places a strong focus on what technology has, or seems to be, achieving. At the same time, this marginalizes, or reduces the visibility of, human roles within the academia and beyond (Hayes and Jandrić 2014).

James Paul Gee, How to Do Discourse Analysis: A Toolkit, New York: Routledge, 2011; ix + 206 pp., €25.00/US$33.00 (pbk)

Book reviews

Digital business discourse

Digital Business Discourse offers a distinctively language- and discourse-centered approach to digitally mediated business and professional communication, providing a timely and comprehensive assessment of the current digital communication practices of today's organisations and workplaces. It is the first dedicated publication to address how computer-mediated communication technologies affect institutional discourse practices, bringing together scholarship from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, including organisational and management studies, rhetorical and communication studies, communication training and discourse analysis. Covering a wide spectrum of communication technologies, such as email, instant messaging, message boards, Twitter, corporate blogs and consumer reviews, the chapters gather research drawing on empirical data from real professional contexts. In this way, the book contributes to both academic scholarship and business communication training, enabling researchers, trainers and practitioners to deepen their understanding of the impact of new communication technologies on professional and corporate communication practices.

Deconstruction-analysis-explanation:contextualization in professional digital discourse

It is already a truism that emerging communication technologies have changed the landscape of communication in every aspect of our lives, but this is specifically true for how we communicate at work. Advances in communication technologies have enabled a wide range of digital communication modes to be utilized for both internal and external business communication; including audio and visual communication and voice-over protocols, as well as text-based channels, such as email, forums, instant messaging and social media. In spite of the wide range of available audio-visual channels, and despite the ever-increasing popularity of email, real-time text-based communication technologies (instant messaging or IM) are also on the rise (see Mak, 2014; Pazos et al., 2013; Radicati & Levenstein, 2013; and Markman in this volume). The prominence of IM is evident in the rise of this mode of communication, not only as a tool for internal business communication, but as a front-stage channel, particularly for customer service encounters or professional-client conversations (Makarem et al., 2009; Pearce et al., 2013; L. Zhang et al., 2011).

The discourse of online consumer reviews

Review: The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews, Camilla Vásquez. Bloomsbury, London and New York (2014), 210 pp., £75, Hardback, ISBN: 978-1-4411-9628-6

Enjoying the third age! Discourse, identity and liminality in extra-care communities

Extra-care housing has been an important and growing element of housing and care for older people in the United Kingdom since the 1990s. Previous studies have examined specific features and programmes within extra-care locations, but few have studied how residents negotiate social life and identity. Those that have, have noted that while extra care brings many health-related and social benefits, extra-care communities can also be difficult affective terrain. Given that many residents are now ‘ageing in place’ in extra care, it is timely to revisit these questions of identity and affect. Here we draw on the qualitative element of a three-year, mixed-method study of 14 extra-care villages and schemes run by the ExtraCare Charitable Trust. We follow Alemàn in regarding residents' ambivalent accounts of life in ExtraCare as important windows on the way in which liminal residents negotiate the dialectics of dependence and independence. However, we suggest that the dialectic of interest here is that of the third and fourth age, as described by Gilleard and Higgs. We set that dialectic within a post-structuralist/Lacanian framework in order to examine the different modes of enjoyment that liminal residents procure in ExtraCare's third age public spaces and ideals, and suggest that their complaints can be read in three ways: as statements about altered material conditions; as inter-subjective bolstering of group identity; and as fantasmatic support for liminal identities. Finally, we examine the implications that this latter psycho-social reading of residents' complaints has for enhancing and supporting residents' wellbeing.