Integrating a Nexus: the history of political discourse and language policy research

ABSTRACT

Historians of political discourse and language policy researchers should join forces to develop methods of textual analysis that help to integrate political and intellectual history. They could do so by focusing their analysis on interconnections between material realities, human physical action, practices and structures, as well as institutions and ideologies as discursive constructs. Such a version of soft constructivism underscoring the discursive nature of much of politics encourages historians to analyse past political discourses more systematically. Concepts such as nexus, historical body, mobility and discursive transfers borrowed from language research deepen our analytical understanding of the multi-level dynamics of policy-making, directing attention to links between various debates as well as to transnational transfers. Our empirical examples are derived from Swedish and Finnish constitutional debates in the last phase of the First World War, but similar research strategies are applicable to the analysis of political discourse in any context.

KEYWORDS:

• Methodology
• political history
• intellectual history
• conceptual history
• transnational history
• history of political discourse
• language policy research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pasi Ihalainen

Dr Pasi Ihalainen is Professor of Comparative European History at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He has published widely on the secularisation of political discourse, the discursive construction of national identities, the conceptual history of democracy, and parliamentary and constitutional history since the 18th century, applying comparative and transnational perspectives. He has cooperated with political theorists and language policy researchers to develop methods for the empirical study of the history of political discourse. His recent books include Parliament and Parliamentarism: A Comparative History of a European Concept, co-edited with Cornelia Ilie and Kari Palonen (Berghahn, 2016), and The Springs of Democracy: National and Transnational Debates on Constitutional Reform in the British, German, Swedish and Finnish Parliaments, 1917–1919 (Finnish Literature Society, 2017).

Taina Saarinen

Dr Taina Saarinen specialises in applied language studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, where she is currently working as Senior Researcher and Head of the Centre for Applied Language Studies. She is particularly interested in ‘discursive operationalisation’ of policy (specifically on language education) and currently works on the theoretical conceptualisation of policy as multi-sited and material. Her recent articles deal with the use of textual methodologies in higher education policy studies, the conceptualisation of policy change, and the invisibility of language in Finnish internationalisation policies for higher education. Her research curiosity is mostly sparkled by multidisciplinary research settings, which often make visible new issues and unobserved gaps in existing research.