Email this article African climate activism, media and the denial of racism: The tacit silencing of Vanessa Nakate
Abstract
Critical social studies have highlighted the varied methods by which climate activism is reproduced in discourse. This paper examines an incident in which an African youth climate activist, Vanessa Nakate, had her image cropped out of a media photograph taken at the World Economic Forum. Our analysis focuses on three media-based interactions with Vanessa, including two interviews with local (Ugandan) television stations and one interview with a South African broadcaster. Our analysis utilizes discursive psychology (DP) and conversation analysis (CA) to highlight and problematize the discursive and interactional strategies employed by speakers in these interviews. We note three discursive methods by which Vanessa’s activism is challenged: a challenge to her ability to represent ‘African’ climate activists; an undermining of Vanessa’s claim that her exclusion was racially motivated; and a discourse of emotionality as foregrounding irrationality and incompetence. These three discursive strategies serve to delegitimize Vanessa’s larger claim of a racially motivated act, positioning her as a naïve subject acting alone from a point of self-interest. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research in community psychology and African climate activism.
References
Atkinson, J. M., & Heritage, J. (1984). Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge University Press.
Baarsch, F., Granadillos, J. R., Hare, W., Knaus, M., Krapp, M., Schaeffer, M., & Lotze-Campen, H. (2020). The impact of climate change on incomes and convergence in Africa. World Development, 126, 104699. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104699
Barnes, B. R. (2018). Politics and activism in the water and sanitation wars in South Africa. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 6(2), 543-555. http://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.v6i2.917
Barnes, B. R., & Milovanovic, M. (2015). Class, resistance, and the psychologization of development in South Africa. Theory & Psychology, 25(2), 222-238. http://doi.org/10.1177/0959354315573546
Berger, G. (2001). Problematising race for journalists: Critical reflections on the South African Human Rights Commission Inquiry into media racism. Critical Arts, 15(1&2), 69-96. https://doi.org/10.1080/02560240185310081
Due, C. (2011). "Aussie humour" or racism? Hey Hey It's Saturday and the denial of racism in online responses to news media articles. Platform: Journal of Media and Communication, 3(1), 36-53. https://doaj.org/article/c0c362d1a7d1498f9bba5654e6aed588
Dunn, K., Pelleri, D., & Maeder-Han, K. (2011). Attacks on Indian students: The commerce of denial in Australia. Race & Class, 52(4), 71-88. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396810396603
Durrheim, K., Quayle, M., Whitehead, K., & Kriel, A. (2005). Denying racism: Discursive strategies used by the South African media. Critical Arts, 19(1-2), 167-186. https://doi.org/10.1080/02560040585310111
Edwards, D. (1999). Emotion Discourse. Culture & Psychology, 5(3), 271-291. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354067x9953001
Edwards, D., & Potter, J. (1992). Discursive Psychology. SAGE Publications.
Frith, H., & Kitzinger, C. (1998). `Emotion Work' as a participant resource: A feminist analysis of young women's talk-in-interaction. Sociology, 32(2), 299-32 http://doi:.org/10.1177/0038038598032002005
Hagren, K. I. (2019). “She has promised never to use the N-word again”: Discourses of racism in a Swedish media debate. Discourse, Context & Media, 31, 100322. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2019.100322
Jefferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In G. H. Lerner (Ed.), Conversation analysis: Studies from the first generation (pp. 13-23). John Benjamins.
Peräkylä, A. (2004). Reliability and validity in research based on naturally occurring social interaction. In D. Silverman (Ed.), Qualitative research: Theory, method and practice (pp. 283-304). Sage Publications.
Peräkylä, A., & Sorjonen, M-L. (Eds.) (2012). Emotion in interaction. (Studies in Sociolinguistics). Oxford University Press.
Pomerantz, A. (1986). Extreme Case Formulations: A way of legitimizing claims. Human Studies, 9(2-3), 219-229. http://doi.org/10.1007/BF0014812
Rafaely, D. (In press). Cropped out: the collaborative production of an accusation of racism. Discourse Studies.
Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on Conversation (Vol. 1 & 2). Basil Blackwell.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007a). Sequence organization in interaction. Cambridge University Press.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007b). A tutorial on membership categorization. Journal of Pragmatics, 39(3), 462-482. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2006.07.007
Scheibman, J. (2007). Subjective and intersubjective uses of generalizations in English conversations. In R. Engelbretson (Ed.), Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (pp. 111-138). John Benjamins.
Sealey-Huggins, L. (2018). In Sharpe, C., & Yancy, G. (Eds.). The fire now: Anti-racist scholarship in times of explicit racial violence. Zed Books Ltd.
Simmons, K., & LeCouteur, A. (2008). Modern racism in the media: Constructions of ‘the possibility of change' in accounts of two Australian riots'. Discourse & Society, 19(5), 667-687. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926508092248
Titley, G. (2019). Racism and media. SAGE Publications.
Tumushabe, J. T. (2018). Climate change, food security and sustainable development in Africa. In The Palgrave handbook of African politics, governance and development (pp. 853-868). Palgrave Macmillan.
Van Dijk, T. A. (1992). Discourse and the denial of racism. Discourse & Society, 3(1), 87-118. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926592003001005
Van Dijk, T. A. (2000). Media, racism and monitoring. Media Development, 47(2), 7-10. http://www.discourses.org/OldArticles/Media,%20Racism%20and%20Monitoring.pdf
Wasserman, H. (2010). ‘We're not like that’: Denial of racism in the Afrikaans press in South Africa. Communication: South African Journal for Communication Theory and Research, 36(1), 20-36. https://doi.org/10.1080/02500160903525015
Whitehead, K. A. (2009). “Categorizing the Categorizer”: The management of racial common sense in interaction. Social Psychology Quarterly, 72(4), 325-342. http://doi.org/10.1177/019027250907200406
Whitehead, K. A. (in press). On Sacks and the analysis of racial categories-in-action. In R. Smith, R. Fitzgerald, & W. Housley (Eds.), On Sacks: Methodology, materials and inspirations. Routledge.
Full Text: PDF
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
