Discourse, Communication and Media (DCM)

The research group Discourse, Communication and Media’s (DCM) main interest is how discursive and journalistic practices construct different conditions for meaning making in different contexts. The group focuses on how discourses are communicated and how discourses are used to construct seemingly self-evident ‘truths’, and to reproduce attitudes, ideals, norms and values about people, situations and developments in different mediated contexts. DCM also investigates processes of convergence, social networking and technology use in various journalistic settings. DCM’s studies concern questions regarding the role of communication and media in society, especially in times of societal and technological change. Methods that are used range from content analysis to different types of text(discourse) analysis, interviews and observations, where media and communication phenomena are studied from detailed, critical and multimodal perspectives. Examples of current research questions that engage researchers in the DCM group are how gambling advertising is designed in order to attract audiences while attempting to be ‘moderate;’ how healthy and sustainable lifestyles are communicated and what underlying discourses shape such communication; how billionaires are portrayed in the media and how their discursive representations contribute to neutralizing existing oppositions within contemporary class societies; how nationalism and gender are managed in mediated memories in military magazines; the role of alcohol in country music songs, and how newsroom practices are changing after ‘the Arab Spring.’