![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The myriad ways in which spatiality, or socially produced space, impinges on media texts is the overarching concern of this study. Responding to Edward Soja’s call for an assertive foregrounding of a critical spatial perspective, this article is an ontological reassertion of space in relation to news media discourse and argues that the socially constructed spatiality of a journalistic text is just as revealingly significant as its historicality and sociality. Introduced here is Critical Spatial Discourse Analysis (CSDA), a methodological framework that employs the spatiocultural theory of Bill Richardson to enable a mapping of the various aspects of spatiality informing media texts. Edward Said’s imaginative geographies is also drawn upon to advance a geographical notation and mapping of the territorial imaginations underlying news media texts. The fundamental assumption of CSDA is that space is not only actively constituted in media texts but also constitutes and that it can, and indeed must be read and interpreted as any other text. A sample column from Turkey’s Sabah newspaper will be used to illustrate the application of CSDA to press coverage of democracy to see what might be revealed of those real-and-imagined spaces that are interposed and obscured in the text’s background.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (Citation1991) is foundational in the theorisation of space as socially constructed and directly impacting perceptions and practices. Space is viewed not as an inert, empty container or as either real/imagined, objective/subjective, material/mental, but as their actively constructed and fully lived fusion.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Fulya Vatansever
Fulya Vatansever is a PhD candidate at Southern Cross University, Australia. Her doctoral thesis explores representations of democracy within the Turkish press from a critical spatial perspective. She holds a degree in Communications with a specialisation in Journalism from Monash University, a Graduate Diploma of Education from Charles Sturt University, and a Master of Arts in Islamic Studies from the University of New England. She worked for many years as a teacher, educational leader and public speaker in Australia, and as a journalist/columnist at Turkey’s leading English newspaper. As an experienced translator, her contributions to date encompass a wide repertoire of works from the fields of poetry and literature, Ottoman history and architecture, religion and spirituality, political science, and the media, particularly within the Turkish context. Her research interests include media and democracy, critical spatial theory, critical geopolitics, and media, politics and culture in contemporary Turkey.