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The Platform for Linguistic and Epistemic Justice (PLEJ) aims to place socio-cultural linguistic research at the centre among the interdisciplinary areas of enquiry with social impact at SSEES, UCL, and beyond. Among the questions that stand at the heart of PLEJ’s explorations are: How are forms of domination and resistance conveyed through discourse and multi-modal forms of interaction? How can we address the impact of uneven local and global power dynamics? In the PLEJ Podcast series, Student Associate Hayley Anderson speaks to UCL’s students and early career researchers who strive to address these questions across disciplines, geographical and educational spaces, and time.
Hayley: Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Platform for Linguistic at Epistemic Justice, or PLEJ for short. My name is Haley Anderson and I'm the student associate here at PLEJ. I will give a little background on the Centre shortly, but first I would love to give a warm welcome to our guest, Cecilia Bertie. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Cecilia: Thank you very much for inviting me.
Hayley: So, before we jump into a conversation about how you've engaged with issues surrounding language in your research or everyday experiences, I'll provide a brief introduction to PLEJ and the centres aims and purposes. PLEJ was established in 2024 by three principal investigators at SSEES, Dr. Riitta Valijarvi, Dr. Jelena Calic, and Dr. Eszter Tarsoly. The platform engages with socio-linguistic research and themes relating to languages in practise including minoritisation, linguistic diversity and endangerment and marginalisation in social and linguistic forms. If you've ever wondered why some languages and forms of expertise gained precedence over others, and how we can best highlight the languages and their speakers who are often overshadowed, PLEJ is interested in exploring these questions. Sir? As we move into our
conversation today, Cecilia, would you be able to introduce yourself and your research interests and maybe give us a bit of an insight into what led you to this topic?
Cecilia: Yes. So, my name is Cecilia Bertie, I'm a first year PhD student in SELCS. That's the School of European Language and Culture at UCL. And I would say that my research interests broadly speaking are language and politics and how the two intersect. And sort of under ‘language’ I understand linguistics, I understand discourse, I understand language policy, so I take a slightly broader, more communicative, but also political view of what language itself is. An in terms of how this can then express itself in research questions, there's sort of a few forms. So, for example, in the past I've conducted socio phonetic studies on the Bath trap vowel flip in Scottish Labour politicians and Scottish national politicians. This was in the months before and following the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. So, that's looking at language in politics but also within the realm of group identity. Whereas my current PhD project looks at language and politics from a slightly different angle. So, I'm conducting a critical discourse analysis, which is looking to investigate critically how social power abuse, dominance and
inequality are enacted and reproduced by text and talk in the social and
political context. And I'm specifically looking at radical
right wing political women leaders and I need to find a catchier way of saying that, but they are Giorgia Meloni of Fratelli d'Italia, Marine Le Pen of Front National, now Rassemblement National, and Alice Weidel and Frauke Petry for Alternative for Deutschland. And the time frame that I'm interested in is sort of 2012, which is when Marine Le Pen becomes leader, until 2022, which is when Giorgia Meloni becomes Prime Minister. So that's up 10 year period where you have these women leaders of these political parties. That's where my focus is. And then specifically I look at how gender is used as a discourse theme and how gender is or is not
used in creating their political persona. So, in this case it's language in politics, but we're looking at collective and individual identity and we're also looking at questions of gender, again individually, but also from a point of political cultural values. An in terms of how I got into
that and to bring it to a concrete example, you may remember Giorgia Meloni made a very famous speech in 2019, where she says, I’ll say the English, “I'm Giorgia, I'm a woman, I'm a mother, I'm Italian, I'm Christian, and you can't take that away from me”. So she's sort of using these macro identity categories there of gender, but also of motherhood and how those two are linked together, of national identity, of religious identity. And that last bit of you can't take this away from me is working on the assumption that those categories are under threat.
And so I was very interested in how she, as leader of a nationalist right-wing party, which historically has had very masculinized views of nationalism, how she straddles this, how she can be both very proud and outgoing as a woman, at the same time, lead this party- and is there a contradiction? Or actually, there is no contradiction, but its various cultural biases which lead me to think that there is a contradiction in
these terms. So that's sort of how I got into that specifically, and so from the Italian side, that I also used to live in Germany. And I used to
live in Germany, during the period 2014 to 2016, which sort of cast our minds back, 2015 was when there was a really high number of refugees and asylum seekers coming to Europe and there was Merkel's open border policy. So there was a big demographic shift slash discussions happening in Germany and that was also coincided with the rise of the Alternative for Deutschland and and so sort of bringing those two strands together. And then obviously you can't forget Marina Pen because she's she was sort of this prima Donna of these women, if you like. And so this sort of PhD was an opportunity to bring those strands together.
Hayley: This is really interesting and super relevant as well. I mean, especially within the time frame that you're working within. We've kind of already started to go into this. But among other topics, PLEJ engages with the way in which language is being used as a tool of oppression to perpetuate systems of domination. But also how language has the potential to enhance the social and democratic participation of oppressed and marginalised groups. Why do these things matter to you, and how have you begun to explore them in your research?
Cecilia: Yes. So I'd say that my current work and which is also how I came across PLEJ initially, is through the former. So, language is a tool of oppression and one which perpetuates systems of domination. And I think this is one of the most important themes if we are to critically reflect on power imbalances in our societies as these political ideologies are then expressed through language and we all do this, this is not just something which is unique to politicians. Even when discourse appears to be neutral, it won't be because language and society are in a
tightly bound dialectical relationship and so any societal inequalities
will also then be expressed through discourse. If you're interested
in critically analysing society, discourse is one of the most important an accessible ways to do this. And I don't mean accessible just in terms of data collection, but I mean accessible in the terms of this is also how we as citizens and members of society experience these inequalities. And then when I use discourse, I also mean it beyond the extra linguistic level. So I'm also thinking of it as a multimodal approach. So I'm taking
into account images and so on. And all of these reinforce various political ideologies and biases in our society, and so language is sort of, or discourse, rather, is fundamental in being able to analyse our society. And sort of another overlap is through the sociologist Sara
Farris’s femonationalism. She talks of how right-wing groups, also some feminist groups, but obviously I focus on right wing groups, use women's rights arguments to further nativist and racist aims. At PLEJ’s Inaugural symposium: ‘Challenging Whiteness in Europe: Linguistic citizenship and social inclusion’, Professor Milani spoke about the presence of ideologies in the civic orientation programmes in Sweden, and the question of whether this is state feminisms or femonationalism. So that sort of questions of how women's rights can be abused to oppress
other groups is a strand which is running through a lot of PLEJ’s work, but also through my own. So sort of that co-option of feminist values is to the detriment of migrant communities. I've recently written a chapter on the Cologne New Year's Eve attacks and the leaders responses to it. So for context, the Cologne New Year’s Eve attacks was at the end of December 2015 going into 2016. So again, it's in that context of high levels of migrations, partly as a result of the Syrian civil war. So within the attacks, just for further context, there was a high number of sexual assaults allegations by German women and from the outset these accusations were levelled against the migrant male population. Unfortunately, also the arrests, of which there have been very few, but the arrests sort of supported that argument and gave a veneer of truth to the radical rights argument that migrant men are sexual predators and are a threat to the domestic women, both in terms of abuse but also in terms of women's rights and liberties. So that's sort of a concrete example of how women's rights can be manipulated in this example to further an anti -migration, islamophobic sentiment and ultimately especially the AfD they are using that to then lobby and request for bans on migrant men coming into the country to restrict their movement because they're saying, well, you know, German women are having to have their liberties restricted, but the migrant man is able to roam around Germany freely in there, sort of painting that as in opposition to each other. When actually, obviously, the situation is far more complex and there sort of extrapolating the actions of a couple of 100 men to an entire demographic group, which is obviously grossly unfair.
Hayley: Yeah, for sure. And you express loads of interesting points there, but something that stood out for me in particular was when you describe the societal qualities and realities are expressed in political discourse, and I wanted to ask you a bit more about what is it in particular about analysing political discourse that allows you to learn more about let's say the realities for people living in the society and also about the language that they're using. And then on top of that, what angle does then exploring it through the lens of gender provide?
Cecilia: So, I think it's extremely important to look at political discourse, especially in the context of I'm looking at where it’s the democratic systems. So they're using political discourse as a way to attract our attention to certain issues, give those issues salience and
Then lobby before our votes based on what those, what according to them the salient issues are. So, I think in this particular case with these leaders of radical right parties, it's their drawing our attention to issues which closely align with their values. They have a very traditionalist, conservative, gender essentialist view of society, so starting from that as their the nuclear of their values all of the policies therefore are going to ripple out from that. So I think it is particularly pertinent to study the political discourse in this case because when as a society we are casting votes for them or whichever
political party, we need to understand that their policies are coming
from those core beliefs, and do we want that to be the central of our political and societal value system? I think this is particularly true with the case of populist discourse, which is an element of all four of these women leaders, engage a lot in populist discourse and populist discourse has the added element that the leaders need to be charismatic, that it's very us and them, it’s very black and white. There's no space for nuance, and everything is painted in opposition to something else. So when it comes to these sort of core values. These core values are then being presented as in opposition to something else. There isn't a sort of compromise of, well, these are my values and let's work together on creating something which could potentially be more cohesive for our society. To bring in gender- so this is twofold. One, is the general essentialist element within it. Secondly, I think that coming back to that veneer that women will talk differently. So I think
we saw this a lot in the COVID-19 pandemic. There were a number of journalistic articles which said countries with women leaders had a
better COVID-19 response, and that's because women can communicate better. So there's a societal, at least in the European context, there is a societal expectation that women are going to be better communicators, being more empathetic. And so I think that adds an additional layer to this because, as a society, we're viewing these women with this bias that women communicate better or more empathetic and so on. And so therefore the Islamophobic, nativist principles which is actually underpinning what they're saying become slightly more obfuscated than they would be if a man were presenting the same arguments.
Hayley: For sure. And you mentioned a bit earlier that there is this cultural bias and a societal bias and it produces this seeming contradiction between what we expect women leaders to say and maybe the reality and then you also kind of questioned whether there was a contradiction at all and could you explore that a bit further?
Cecilia: Yeah. So there's been a number of studies. So Deborah Cameron and Sylvia Shaw to name one, they were looking at it in British Parliament where they were looking at whether there was a civilising effect by women politicians and they found that there wasn't
particularly but even the women politicians themselves when interviewed felt like there could be one. And so despite there being like a number
of studies, for example, looking at interruptions and so on, it doesn't necessarily play out that there is a communication difference, but there is an expectation that these women will talk differently, and that is just as important as if there were a communication difference because that expectation is the basis of how we evaluate and how we judge them. So it's all then also then being reflected back, because it's, even if they don't speak very differently, the expectation that we that they will, will then influence how we assess what they're saying. So there's
this is a double bind basically an that sort of feeds into why I'm so interested in these women leaders who also have this strong ideological layer on top of being politicians and being women.
Hayley: Yeah, that's super interesting how expectations about discourse materialise into a certain reality. And is this particular to the years that you're studying? Is it a new phenomenon or has this always sort of existed? Or are we seeing an era where it's particularly prevalent because of social media or because of the certain, I don't know, maybe the compounding of all these different issues and ideologies, whether it comes to gender or the ‘refugee crisis’ or ideologies, specifically populist ones.
Cecilia: So with regards to the social media point, yes, I do think it's louder because of social media. Especially because you get less
space, for example, is an Instagram post, you know, well, I mean Twitter is obviously the more extreme version, but there's an Instagram or Facebook post. And the period that I'm looking at, Facebook was the predominant social media. You have much less room to express something. So I think it is going to be slightly more binary, less nuanced in how you present it. There's also the fact that with Instagram, with Facebook, and also some degree with Twitter slash now X, you can include photos and within that photo you've got, you can embody something which might take you 3 sentences to do, for example. So because so much more is open to interpretation with an image, you could communicate something or rather, which is potentially slightly more problematic in an image than you can in words. So I also think that that plays into it, the fact that you've got less space and that you can support that with visual materials. And I think the other thing is that it's unmediated. So these leaders are communicating with the general public without there being a spokesperson in between, without there being a journalist in between, and I definitely think that that changes the way that the communication happens, and I definitely think that that leads it to become a more emotive form of communication. And again, if we're linking this back to expectations an there's been a long-standing cultural belief that women are more emotional. And so you know, that will also play into what is “permissible” for these women leaders to how they present an argument on social media which perhaps would be less permissible for a man to do.
Hayley: Yeah. And this moves quite smoothly into a question I had about your research methods. How does this multimodal era of discourse play into your own PhD research? And when it comes to data collection and analysing images, how do you negotiate this? Because it's a lot I can imagine.
Cecilia: Yes, it is a lot. So my data sources are primarily Facebook, the posts from the leaders Facebook page. So that's the blue tick certified- it's them. Instagram if they have it, but timing wise it sort of doesn't fit neatly into that period. And obviously Twitter now X. And I will take the text and I will take any accompanying images. And I also use the official, their official website, sorry, and any additional material that they have online. So for example, Marine Le Pen has a blog, and I also take extracts from that, if they've written opinion pieces, I will also use that. So the social media forms the bulk, and then the long form blog or opinion pieces of support the data, but that's by far the minority. And in terms of how I work through it, I tend to do it thematically. So I take a within critical discourse analysis, I take a discourse historical approach and so within that there's various strategies for analysing language, or discourse rather. And I tend to work through the text, and images. Looking at what strategies are evident and then folding those strategies into themes. So for example, with Cologne I will look at what, where can I find evidence within this body of data which is presenting the migrant male as a sexual predator? OK. And how are they doing it? Like what cases of metaphor can I find within their discourse? And so I sort of work through it first on like a content basis, then I apply this, the discourse strategies to it to then run and present an analytical narrative of everything I find within that data set.
Hayley: And there are obviously going to be discrepancies between the countries depending on their specific contexts, but have there been any key similarities of narratives that just seem to kind of come up time and time again, metaphors that seemed to be shared amongst the case studies that you analyse?
Cecilia: Yeah. So, a lot of the shared narratives relate to the political ideology, so. There's obviously in each case a strong anti-migrant sentiment. There's also Islamophobic sentiment present in all of them. Where I tend to find discrepancies between them is more in the persona elements. So how comfortable, well, comfortable perhaps is not the right word, but, strategically, how do these women want to place themselves
within this discourse? So, for example, with Giorgia Meloni in the quote that I gave earlier, her stressing that she's a mother. And then you see the images of her on Instagram and it's her with her daughter and she's making speeches at the Congress, like international Congress for the family. Whereas Marine Le Pen, so she's a single mother, and she was stressed about how the state needs to support single mothers. So that sort of moving away from her embodying traditional, conservative sort of nuclear family dynamic in her self-presentation. She is also for example on her blog she will and in various speeches to the party, she does present herself as the captain of the ship. So, you know, that's not a traditional feminine role. She's not going back to the mother. You know she's going for more of an androgynous leader figure, which sort of implies a strength, whereas a mother implies an intimacy. So those are differences in political persona which are being created there. And then with regards to the two German women, Alice Weidel and Frauke Petry, that can fluctuate, though I would say that especially Alice Weidel, she's far more reticent to bring in her own personal story into her political persona. That could be because, as many have already pointed out, it is seemingly at odds with a number of principles of the AfD. For example, she's in a lesbian partnership with two adopted children and semi- permanently resides in Switzerland. But the AfD is very much for the traditional family structure, of the mother and father. And so, you know, I can see why she's reticent to fold her own personal life in any way into the into the political. Frauke Petry for example, she will, there's billboards of her for the AfD, with her own child and I can't remember the exact quote but it's something along the lines of, “what do you do for Germany?” And so there's a strong nativist and play, on her part, on motherhood there as well. So within the categories of them being leader, with them being women, with them sharing a political ideology, there's a lot of fluctuation of how they present themselves. And that was also something which was quite important to me was that I didn't want to fall into the trap of assuming that because they are women, they were all acting the same way. I think too much literature has had that standpoint and women are not homogeneous group and we need to that should be reflected. We shouldn't also expect them as leaders to, but I think that how they navigate that is of interest.
Hayley: For sure, that's super interesting. I didn't realise just how
many I guess like divergences there is not only between each other, but I guess even let's say between what Marine Le Pen puts out on Instagram compared to maybe her blog post, like I guess there's been discrepancies there depending on what sort of language. Yeah, really interesting stuff, and I think this next question really has answered itself through hearing you speak, but what is the impact and relevance of your research more generally and what holes and gaps are you aiming to fill in your research
area?
Cecilia: But first, I would say that public discourse, particularly with its lurch towards populism is becoming increasingly more performative. So that's also it's populism, but it's also to do with social media and it's now about embodying a value, a narrative, a stance. And it's less about policy details. And we only need to look at recent political elections and votes to see this. And these women, to varying extents, engage in a performance of their own political persona. I say the other thing is this widespread belief that women communicate differently. That's something which we see it resurging, you know, like I said in the example of COVID-19 before. So I think it is important to actually examine communication to say whether this is a cultural bias, whether it is true, and you know, how does one impact and interact with the other? And you know, I saw, I do see it as a sort of, there's a relationship between them in that maybe they don't speak that differently, but the expectation might alter the way that they present themselves. And so I think I think that that plays a role. And lastly, which is this is more of like an academic literature review point. There hasn't been many cross cultural studies before. So there's many studies on Marine Le Pen. There's many studies on Jalan, Giorgia Meloni, but these focus on them individually. In the case of Marine Le Pen, it might be comparative against her father, but they rarely tend to be cross cultural comparison. However, for example, you can find studies which compare Millais of Argentina and Bolsonaro of Brazil for example. So there is precedence to do cross cultural discourse communication, but it seems that with these women there isn't substantial research yet which has this border cross cultural approach.
Hayley: Why do you think that is? What is the reason for this, and I guess what to we gain from it?
Cecilia: Yes, so I think. It’s partly, partly timing in that it's fairly recent that these women have become leaders. You know, in the case of the AfD, they only passed the threshold to get into parliament in 2017, I believe. So sort of them being a political presence has only really developed relatively recently and the same with Giorgia Meloni. The party was founded not too long ago and she's only been Prime Minister for three years. So I think that. That is part of it. I think that, what do we gain from this? So that's also question that I often have to ask myself to make sure that I remain on the right track and the way that I justify or I present the argument to myself is that: this is a trend, especially across Europe. So in the, I forget what it's called, but the Danish National Radical Right Party also elected a woman leader, in fact I think she predates all of them. Pia Kjærsgaard- I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly. And in Norway as well. They also had a woman leader. So, there's a trend, especially in Europe, of women becoming radical right
Women leaders and I think if we only examine their discourse in isolation, I think that we aren't seeing, we aren't potentially picking
up on trends, patterns, divergences which form part of a broader tendency
within this political bloc. So I do think it's important to take a broader view.
Hayley: For sure. And I can only reiterate that this is relevant and impactful for that reason. And as we draw the podcast to a close, what is next for you in regards to future research or engagement with languages? And is there anything that foresee in your own PhD research in terms of how things may evolve?
Cecilia: So in terms of what's next, So as I said in my first year. And I've only written 1 main content chapter. So next is picking up other themes or events to act as a lens through which to analyse this women's discourse. So currently I'm sort of thinking of clothing as one
because obviously there's within that anti-migrant and Islamophobic discourse, there's a lot that comes upon especially in Muslim women's dress, which again falls back into the gender element. So that sort of next directly with regards to my PhD research. Then I think more broadly, I obviously come across other sort of research questions and I'm sort of taking note for much further on down the line an so I would definitely stay within the realm of political discourse. Something which I've often wondered, which I would like to look into is obviously with Trump's unique style of speech, I mean that in terms of syntax and in terms of prosody, whether that has, whether there's a ripple effect, whether, you know that unique syntax is being replicated by other politicians or even other commentators, so podcasts, hosts and so on. Are they beginning to adopt that, talking exclusively in sort of superlatives and so on. That would that's something which I thought could be interesting. And also on the American right. There's obviously been the trad wife movement and so on, and I think that that could be an interesting avenue to go down to do sort of comparative- how much difference is there in terms of how trend wise talk about family and gender issues versus how politicians of radical right parties talk about gender and family structures and so on? Those are some floating ideas. Don't hold me to them that there are things that I have thought about.
Hayley: Well, if you were to produce something out of those ideas, I
would be very keen to read them. And I can only wish you all the best as well for the rest of the PhD journey. And on that note, thank you so much Cecilia for joining us today and for giving us an insight into what's super interesting and relevant research.
Cecilia: Thank you very much.
Hayley: And if you're listening and interested in learning more about the
platform for linguistic and epistemic justice, you can find us on the SSEES website with the links provided in the description. And stay tuned for more episodes of the podcast coming soon. Thank you so much for listening. Bye.