Discourses of Corporate crime as natural disaster: the case of the Paddington Rail Crash

Drawing on the literature in criminology and media studies on the nature of social understandings of corporate crime and its representation in the media, this paper takes one small but important step in this direction by carrying out a linguistic case study on the news coverage of one sequence of events which resulted from corporate negligence – the Paddington rail crash, a sequence of news events that were important as they led to legal change as regards corporate responsibility in Britain. The paper concludes by showing that while the news coverage played an important part in leading to a change in the law regarding corporate responsibility, although this received little coverage in the press.

Discourses of Demonisation: Chechens, Russians, and the Stavropol’ Riots of 2007

In the summer of 2007, the geopolitics of Russo-North Caucasian relations were once again manifest in inter-ethnic violence. During the course of six weeks of rioting between ethnic Russian (russkii) and non-ethnic Russian (rossiiskii) citizens, three students were killed (one Chechen and two Russians) and pogroms were conducted widely. This article addresses these events through a focus on the nature and politics of the riots and those involved. I argue that a range of tensions came together to form a localised geopolitics, and that this contributes to an understanding of why these events took place. Ultimately, the riots are important as an event which reveals much about the complexity of power, space, and identity in contemporary Russia.