Analysing Citizenship Talk

Book excerpt: Citizenship talk refers to various types of discourse initiated to make citizens take part in politically and socially contested decision-making processes ('citizen participation'). 'Citizenship' has, accordingly, become one of the dazzling key words whenever the democratic deficit of modern societies is moaned about. Asking for citizenship to be conceived of as a communicative achievement, the present book shows that sociolinguistics and pragmatics can essentially contribute to this interdisciplinary up-to-date issue of research: the volume offers a theoretically innovative concept of communicated citizenship and it presents a set of methodological approaches suited to deal with this concept at an empirical level (including contributions from Conversation Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, Social Positioning Theory, Speech Act Theory and Ethnography). Furthermore, concrete data and empirical analyses are provided which take up the case of decision-making processes around the application of modern 'green' biotechnology ('GMO field trials'). The volume thus illustrates the kind of findings and results that can be expected from this new and promising approach towards citizenship talk.