Difference and Political Legitimacy: Speakers' Construction of “Citizen” and “Refugee” Personae in Talk about Hurricane Katrina

Abstract

Public talk about mainstream U.S. news journalists' use of the term “refugee” in the wake of Hurricane Katrina constituted a social drama that illuminated widely held beliefs about two categories of person in some American public settings: the “citizen” and the “refugee.” This study examines a corpus of 193 mass media texts that contested the symbols, meanings, premises, and rules for public talk about “citizens” and the differences between them. Using the perspective of speech codes theory, this study expands upon the cultural codes underlying a rule of speaking identified by Philipsen (2000) in the “discourse of difference.”

Keywords:

• Citizen
• Hurricane Katrina
• Personae
• Refugee
• Speech Codes

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Gerry Philipsen and Lisa Coutu for their support and inspiration. She also thanks Tabitha Hart, Mary Lynn Veden and Chris Gamble for their insights as readers, and Brian Ott and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and critiques.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Louisa Edgerly

Louisa Edgerly received her doctorate from the University of Washington.