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This article explores the construction of national identity in the coverage of policy issues during the first two general elections after devolution, in Scottish and in English/UK daily morning newspapers. It focuses on a sample of the coverage of the most mentioned reserved and devolved issue in the 2001 and 2005 campaigns and examines the use of markers of location and deictic references to a national context. It finds that the distinction between reserved and devolved matters is not decisive in how these topics are constructed. The Scottish and English/UK coverage of the Iraq war, taxation and health debates at Westminster is relatively similar, written and presumed to be read in Britain. However, Scottish titles differentiate their output by constructing their readers as having little participation in these ‘UK’ issues, and by emphasizing the Scottish relevance of topics such as fiscal autonomy for Scotland and waiting lists at Scottish hospitals. Even in that coverage though, the relevant national context occasionally shifts between Scotland and Britain. By contrast, newspapers written in England consistently report from an Anglo-British perspective, making no allowance for the changes brought by devolution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing upon the notion of occidentalism, developed within cultural theory and critical ethnography, this article explores ways in which explicit and/or implicit assumptions about the West and Western self are implicated, in their conversational mobilization, to accountability management. The data analysed come from a study in Western Thrace (Greece), which included interviews and focus group with majority Greek educators about the Muslim minority historically residing in the region. The analysis presented employs tools from critical discursive social psychology. Building upon discourse analytic treatments within social psychology on the mobilization of national categories and accountability management in talk, it is argued that the banal indexicalization of national categories in talk opens the space for a critical interrogation of the banal indexicalization of an occidentalist cultural imagery that posits a hierarchical distinction between cultures of the West and the Rest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of location formulation in the expression of nationhood in six Scottish newspapers' coverage of a domestic political event The article thaws upon a corpus analysis comparing the incidence of `location lexical tokens' in the Scottish papers with a selection from the UK and England. It finds that the Scottish papers stress the national character of the political process, occasionally doing so alongside an inclusive rhetoric. The article also finds that the Scottish papers mobilize an internal political vocabulary around the expression of location, manifest in the widespread adoption of the political metonym `Holyrood' for the Scottish parliaments and in the use of localized political discourses. The article therefore suggests that explicit reference to the home nation is an important component of news discourse, and that the systematic study of location formulation also offers an insight into the generation of an internal and nation-specific political vocabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]