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This article contributes to the theoretical discussion of the historical legitimacy of single mothers by examining the construction of relationships between single motherhood and welfare policy. Specifically, the study analyses the changing discourse regarding single mothers, and the social policy designed for them, in the US, UK and Israel from the 1970s to the 2000s. These three countries are similar in terms of the embeddedness, extension and institutionalization of neoliberal ideology in their welfare policies and public discourse, together with welfare legislation affecting single mothers, yet they differ in terms of policy implementation and the history of policy development. The study examines institutional intersectionality along with cultural perceptions of single mothers in each country. Looking at both the development and the withdrawal of social rights over time, we deepen understanding of how the image of the single mother is created in the neoliberal welfare regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Swales' 1986 article 'Citation analysis and discourse analysis' was the first to apply citation analysis to describe in-text citations in the field of discourse analysis. Howard White's 2004 article 'Citation analysis and discourse analysis revisited' was written by an information scientist and primarily focused on citation analysis and discourse analysis. Here, we cast a wider net by conducting a bibliometric analysis of discourse analysis to sketch its scientific landscape between 1978 and 2018. Our findings show that discourse analysis has emerged as a major, and increasingly distinctively sociological, contribution to the analysis of language in social life. It is evident that discourse analysts are increasingly interested in such topics as corpus linguistics, digital conversation analysis, discursive news values approach, membership categorization analysis, multimodal analysis and social media. It is a general trend that the United States is no longer the only dominating publication powerhouse in the field. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia and China are wielding a growing share of research output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that metalinguistic documents in historical archives are a useful source for political discourse analysts to explore. With reference to the archives of the British Ministry of Information in World War II, it shows that such documents are revealing of the orders of discourse and the language ideologies that contribute to the production of political discourse. Archival documents can help us to understand the ways in which political actors conceive of the linguistic strategies that are typically the focus of our discourse analytic work. In a field which places great theoretical emphasis on the contextual significance of political language, archival documents thus represent a crucial, but hitherto overlooked, source of evidence. More specifically, the article demonstrates that the Ministry of Information's civil servants paid a great deal of attention to language, working in highly reflexive ways to produce their discourse, and that one of the linguistic strategies that was particularly intensely discussed was the use of informal and personalised language. Those civil servants were working on a 'synthetically personalised' language half a century before discourse analysts began paying sustained attention to such a strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the US run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the pro-war US–British opinion press adopted a ‘subservient’ role by religiously endorsing the US official perspective about the ‘Saddam Peril’ and the Anglo-American ‘humanitarian’ mission in Iraq through the systematic muffling of the opposing views of anti-war protestors. The US–British pro-war arguers tried to cast doubt on both the motivations and identity of the anti-war demonstrators by categorising peaceful protest within the discourse of ‘deviance’, ‘ignorance’ and ‘incivility’. Therefore, anti-war protest was trivialised, disparaged and depoliticised. Anti-war political protest was relegated to the realm of ‘disorder’, ‘spectacle’ and ‘violence’, despite its global geopolitical reach. This article examines how ‘strategic manoeuvring’ functions in opinion press instrumentalised moral reasoning. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, I propose to demonstrate how the US–British mainstream media were closely wedded to elite interests and how opinion press argumentation was clearly structured in dominance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideas that the quality of parental nurturing and attachment in the first years of a child’s life is formative, hard-wiring their brains for success or failure, are reflected in policy reports from across the political spectrum and in targeted services delivering early intervention. In this article we draw on our research into ‘Brain science and early intervention’, using reviews of key policy literature and interviews with influential advocates of early intervention and with early years practitioners, to critically assess the ramifications and implications of these claims. Rather than upholding the ‘hopeful ethos’ proffered by advocates of the progressive nature of brain science and early intervention, we show that brain claims are justifying gendered, raced and social inequalities, positioning poor mothers as architects of their children’s deprivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]