Misrepresentation+By+Use+Of+Language

To continue with my research and to further narrow in on a topic I first did two things. First of all I spoke with my race and poverty professor who had mentioned in class before the usage of the term freedom in America. This class discussion had originally sparked my interest in this topic. I sat down with him and he gave me some starting points, and a scholar who’s work he thought would be helpful. He recommended reading Pierre Bourdieu’s material entitled “Language and Symbolic Power” as a starting point. In this text Bourdieu speaks about how those in power use language for regulatory purposes.

After speaking with my professor I continued to try academic searches through Temple’s Online Library system, but this task ended up going nowhere, this brought me straight to the librarian. He pointed out that I was probably using the wrong words in the wrong order while searching the databases. After explaining what I was looking for he suggested using words like rhetoric and discourse, along with freedom and terrorism as a starting place for research. After a primary search, we moved on to skimming the articles and then using key words from those articles to create a new search, such as left and right wing political parties.

I have many times in the past used the same exact database for searching for articles, but he showed me how to broaden my searches by finding a variety of different words to explain my topic. By doing this I all of a sudden had access to a variety of different articles. He also pointed out different ways in which I could narrow my search and find exactly what I was looking for. By using parentheses around certain words, or using the words “and” and “or” in between keywords I was able to refine my searches even more. He also showed me how to exclude certain key words from a search, this was probably the most beneficial thing I learned in that session. By the end of the session we came up with a few good sources, including "The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections On 9/11 And The War On Terror" by Marc Redfield, "The West, The Rest, and The 'War On Terror': Representation of Muslims in Neoconservative Media Discource" by George Kassimeris and Leonie Jackson, and "Legitimizing the 'War on Terror': Political Myth in Official-Level Rhetoric" by Joanne Esch.

Although it has been very hard to find research on the topic of how American politicians and American media use the terms freedom and terrorism to shape our views of the Middle East, I did find and author who was interested in this same topic. While searching on EBSCOhost database I found a summary of conference papers entitled "The Problem of Freedom and Evil in Modern Political Society" by Christopher Roelofs. The summary of these papers explores this issue. He uses the words freedom and evil and how they have continually been used in opposition to each other in the rhetoric of today's US foreign policy. He believes that because of the way these terms are understood it was used as a foundation to attempt to spread democracy in the Middle East and start the War On Terror. I have not been able to obtain a copy of this article yet, but I will be heading back to the library and asking the librarian for suggestions.

Thanks for sharing your library research adventure, Kristina. When we explore new topics, we often have to "kiss a lot of frogs." This is a natural part of the research process. You are learning to discover the vastly different approaches that scholars take in investigating important problems. In office hours, we discussed the idea of staying in the communications field rather than getting into political theory, even though there is a rich treasure trove of stuff about this topic there. Instead, we identified two more focused ideas: (1) the idea of focusing on gaps in public opinion between those who have strong attitudes about terrorism but little knowledge and (2) a careful look at the TV show, "24" which uses dramatic storytelling to communicate specific ideas about terrorism.

GRADE: B