Is Manuela Carmena a politician? Spanish journalists and politicians in the spotlight

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to better understand how the participants involved in a specific radio interview use categorization to (re)produce a dominant discourse in the Spanish political arena. In this discourse, politicians are seen as untrustworthy, and certain journalists are portrayed as serving specific political interests. The interview needs to be analysed within its sociopolitical context. The wider context is one in which two new political parties claim to represent a new way of doing politics: old politics is described as opaque and untrustworthy, and they want to create a politics of renewal. The more specific context is the reason behind the interview. It occurs right after the publication of a book of interviews by Maruja Torres, the interviewee, with Manuela Carmena. Manuela is the current mayor of Madrid and an important figure in one of the new parties mentioned above. But most importantly, the interview takes place after several Spanish newspapers focused on a specific statement in the book, in which the mayor admits she feels overwhelmed and tired. This article aims to show the categorial and positioning mechanisms employed by the participants in the interview to co-construct a given discourse regarding the various social actors involved in contemporary Spanish politics. Spanish politics is not just made up of big events; it is also the accumulation of small affairs like this one. When people read these newspaper articles or listen to a radio interview, they must position themselves in relation to the small event, and it is the sum of these stances that configure people’s political beliefs.

KEYWORDS:

• Spanish politics
• membership categorization analysis
• discourse analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Xavier Martin-Rubió received his PhD in English philology from the Universitat de Lleida (UdL) in 2011. He is currently working as an Assistant Professor at UdL, where he teaches in the Audiovisual Communication and Journalism and English Studies programmes. He is interested in Membership Categorization Analysis and Narrative Analysis at the methodological level, and in the sociocultural SLA and internationalization of higher education research areas. He has recently published articles in journals including The Language Learning Journal and Language and Intercultural Communication. Email: [email protected]

Maricel Oró-Piqueras is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Linguistics at the Universitat de Lleida. She also has been a member of the research group Dedal-Lit since it began working on the representation of fictional and cultural images of ageing and old age in 2002. Within Dedal-Lit, she is deputy treasurer of the European Network of Ageing Studies. She has presented her research at national and international conferences and has published articles in journals such as the Journal of Aging Studies and Journal of English Studies and in international collections of articles. Email: [email protected]

ORCID

Xavier Martin-Rubió http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9643-9530

Maricel Oró-Piqueras http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6868-9113