Decolonising methodology
4.4. Data analysis
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through a combination of theoretical or purposive sampling and snowball sampling. For the African other interviewees, the first five or so interviewees were selected with the aim of, first, achieving diversity in terms of countries of origin, and second, with the aim to get interviewees who will yield relevant data (Deacon, Pickering, Golding and Murdock, 2010). Subsequent interviewees were approached mostly after recommendations by the initial interviewees. The broader aim has not necessarily been to build a representative sampling frame but to put together a sample frame that is “illustrative of broader social and cultural processes” (Deacon, Pickering, Golding and Murdock, 2010: 45) around representations and constructions of black African subjectivity in post-apartheid South Africa.
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effects revealed” (Mcdonald, 2003: 10). It has been argued that as much as events and relations exist outside discourse, they only come to mean “within the discursive, and subject to its specific conditions, limits, and modalities” (Hall, 1996: 165). In combining critical discourse analysis and ethnography, under an anti-colonial (postcolonial and decolonial) theoretical framework, I aim to better understand “the relationship between subjects and their histories as complex and shifting”
(Visweswaran, 1994: 11). There is a debate on discourse and ideology as most cultural critics have abandoned ideological analysis as they see it as “being too abstract and rigid to cope with the rapidly changing formations of social thinking in turn-of-the-century western societies”
(Mcdonald, 2003: 27). However, in this thesis aspect of ideology analysis is maintained because if it is totally abandoned “several aspects of media power become more difficult to explain”
(Mcdonald, 2003: 27).
4.4.1. News discourse and critical discourse analysis
In linguistics, discourse is considered as language in use; but a Foucauldian approach focuses on discourses as “ways of looking at the world, of constructing objects and concepts in certain ways”
(Baker and McEnery, 2015: 4‒5). For Bednarek and Caple, as much as discourses are language in use, they are also multimodal, combine two or more modalities such as visual and aural, and also multi- semiotic, that is combine two or more semiotic, that is meaning-making, systems such as image or language (2017: 7). As a result, news discourse in the contemporary era is multimodal and multisemiotic (Bednarek and Caple, 2012: 2). Bednarek and Caple define news discourse as
“the discourse that audiences encounter in news bulletins, news programmes, on news websites, or in the newspaper – discourse that reports on newsworthy events, happenings and issues”
(Bednarek and Caple, 2012: 2). In discourse studies, the focus is on text and structures within discourse used as objects of analysis, and it is a linguistically focused method that often use existing documents as data (Guest, Namey and Mitchell, 2013: 9). Texts that can be studied range from conversations between two people, or conversations in group interviews or focus groups. The analysis of the news stories from the English and IsiZulu newspaper is based mainly on the analysis of naming and transitivity and other descriptions as way of constructing subjectivity. In conducting a verbal analysis in CDA, according to Halliday (1985), one has systematically to examine lexicalisation, patterns of transitivity, the use of active and passive voice, the use of nominalisation,
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choices of mood, choices of modality or polarity, the thematic structure of the text, the information focus, and the cohesion devices. In the close reading of the news stories, I focus on the “existing discourses at work in society” and how, in the news texts, they are contested by “the struggle of alternative discourses to emerge” (Janks, 1997: 335). On lexicalization, I look for “patterns that emerge across these linguistic functions which confirm or contradict one another” (Janks, 1997:
335). Transitivity is defined by Halliday as consisting of “‘goings-on’: of doing, happening, feeling, being” (1985: 101). Janks notes that Halliday offers the following systems of transitivity:
Types of doing Material processes: actor + goal
Doing—e.g. Parents sometimes hit children, (active voice) doing to—e.g. Small babies should not be hit. (passive voice) Creating—e.g. The investigator does not have to make inferences.
Saying Verbal processes: sayer + what is said + (receiver) e.g. One of the workers suggested that I try some shebeen brew.
Sensing Mental processes: Senser + phenomenon Feeling—e.g. I like that one. The children feel angry.
Thinking—think, know, understand, interpret etc.
Perceiving—saw, noticed, stared at etc.
Types of being Relational processes
Being—x is y—e.g. Child abuse is terrible (or a terrible thing).
Having—x has y—e.g. This child has a dog.
Types of behaving—Behavioural processes Physiological—breathe, dream, sleep.
Psychological—smile, laugh.
Things that exist or happen Existential processes e.g.. The world is round. There was a man at the door.
Table 4.1. Systems of transitivity (Janks, 1997: 336; taken from Halliday, 1985).
The transitivity aspect is a rich space for analysing how subjects are represented and therefore constructed. Naming is also important in discourse analysis and points our attention to whether subjects are constructed as passive or active (Janks, 1997: 338). This reading of the texts is against the background and contextual as set out in background and theoretical chapters. Fairclough (1982) argues that situational and intertextual contexts are central to the process of text interpretation.
112 4.4.2. Thompson (1990)’s ideological analysis
Ideology has had a troubled and a contested history that can be traced back to Marx whose writings on it do not offer a single, coherent view (Thompson, 1990: 28 - 29). Thompson offers two conceptions of ideology, that is, the neutral and the critical.
General modes Some typical strategies of symbolic construction
Legitimation Rationalisation Universalisation Narrativisation
Dissimulation Displacement Euphemisation
Trope (e.g. synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor)
Unification Standardisation Symbolisation of unity
Fragmentation Differentiation
Expurgation of the other
Reification Naturalisation Ertenalisation
Nominalization/passivisation
Table 4.2. Modes of ideology (Taken from Thompson, 1990: 60)
The neutral conceptions of ideology characterize phenomena as ideology or ideological without suggesting they are misleading or illusory (Thompson, 1990: 53). In the critical conception, ideology is viewed as implicated in the ways that meaning is mobilized in the social world to serve power (Thompson, 1990: 56). Similar to studying discourse, the socio-historical context is important in studying ideology in symbolic forms that include images and texts produced by subjects recognized by them and others as meaningful constructs (Thompson, 1990: 59).
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Thompson (1990) proffers modes of operation of ideology as illustrated in Fig 4.2 above.
Thompson, however, warns that the five modes are not the only ways ideology operates and do not operate individually but reinforce each other and so may overlap (1990: 60).
4.4.3. Semiotics and visual analysis
This thesis also involves the analysis of visual material where I study photojournalism pictures and photographs taken around Yeoville, Berea and Hillbrow suburbs. This is the ethnographic site in Johannesburg, South Africa. These are pictures of painting and photographs on buildings walls and a park. Visual semiotics in Cultural Studies is based on the “idea of layered meaning, of images consisting first of all of a layer of representational or denotative meaning” (Van Leeuwen and Jewitt, 2004: 2). The first layer concerns who and what is represented, which is denotative and is followed by the connotative or symbolic meaning layer where focus is on what it means (Van Leeuwen and Jewitt, 2004: 2 – 3). Lister and Wells note that Cultural Studies centres not only on texts and artefacts, but the holistic “study of the forms and practices of culture” (2004: 61). In the late twentieth century there has been an explosion in the visual culture especially with the explosion in “imaging and visualizing technologies” (Lister and Wells, 2004: 62; Mirzoeff, 1998:
3).
The study of visual culture means paying attention to contexts of viewing, production, form, meaning and identity (Lister and Wells, 2004: 63) as illustrated by the questions in Fig 4.3 in the previous page. Any visual text must be analysed within the context of its viewing. Here the questions revolve around the location of the image and where it is viewed from (Lister and Wells, 2004: 65). The important question here is why the viewer is looking at the photograph in the first instance and what they seek to get out of this viewing. The second level of analysis looks at the context of the production of the photograph or image and how the image got where it is.
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1. We are interested in an image’s social life and its history.
2. We look at images within the cycle of production, circulation and consumption through which their meanings are accumulated and transformed.
3. We pay attention to an image’s specific material properties (its ‘artifactualness’), and to the
‘medium’ and the technologies through which it is realized (here, as photographs).
4. While recognizing the material properties of images, we see these as intertwined with the active social process of ‘looking’ and the historically specific forms of ‘visuality’ in which this takes place.
5. We understand images as representations, the outcomes of the process of attaching ideas to and giving meaning to our experience of the world. With care and qualification, much can be gained by thinking of this process as a language-like activity – conventional systems which, in the manner of codes, convey meaning within a sign using community.
6. We temper point 5 with the recognition that our interest in images and other visual experiences (and, indeed, lived and material cultural forms) cannot be reduced to the question of ‘meaning’ and the intellectual processes involved in coding and decoding. As human beings, and as the members of a culture, we also have a sensuous, pleasure-seeking interest in looking at and feeling ‘the world’
including the media that we have put in it.
7. We recognize that ‘looking’ is always embodied and undertaken by someone with an identity. In this sense, there is no neutral looking. An image’s or thing’s significance is finally its significance for some-body and some-one. However, as points 1 to 6 indicate, this cannot be any old significance, a matter of complete relativism.
Table 4.3. A Cultural Studies visual analysis approach (From Lister and Wells, 2004: 64 – 65).