Of War and Water: Metaphors and Citizenship Agency in the Newspapers Reporting the 9/11 Catalan Protest in 2012

Authors

  • Enric Castelló Universitat Rovira i Virgili
  • Arantxa Capdevila Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Keywords:

citizens’ agency, democracy, demonstrations, metaphor, nationalism, political conflict

Abstract

Metaphors, organized in superdomains and articulating scenarios, are a powerful tool in framing a given social or political conflict. This article studies the use of metaphors in the reports of the mass demonstration held in Barcelona on September 11, 2012, in favor of Catalan self-determination. The authors analyzed 917 extracts from the main Spanish and Catalan newspapers. The results show that the most frequent superdomains were nature-weather and war-fortress-battle schemes, and they were used to construct different scenarios about the meaning of the political event. The research reveals major differences in metaphor use between the Catalan and the Spanish dailies covering the demonstration. The authors conclude that metaphor scenarios articulated a diverse discourse about the influence of citizenship agency on the political process for greater autonomy or even the independence of the region.

Author Biographies

Enric Castelló, Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Enric Castelló is Associate Professor at the Department of Communication Studies in the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona, Spain). His research fields are media, national identities and political conflict. He has published in several international journals, among them European Journal of Communication (Best article of the year award 2007), Media, Culture & Society or Memory Studies. He is co-editor of The Nation on Screen. Discourses of the National on Global Television and founding editor of the Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies.

Arantxa Capdevila, Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Arantxa Capdevila is senior lecturer at the Department of Communication Studies in the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona, Spain). Her area of research and publication has been concerned with political communication and rhetoric. She is member of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric (ISHR), the Political Communication Association (ACOP) and the Spanish Association of Political Science (AECPA). She has published several articles about the application of rhetoric on the analysis of audiovisual political discourses.

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Published

2015-01-30

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Section

Articles