Description
What does resistance look like for critical terrorism studies? How do methodological approaches influence normative commitments? This abstract responds to these prompts in the CST working group’s call for conference papers.
Drawing on a survey of all articles published in Critical Studies on Terrorism over fifteen volumes, I note narrowness in the methods critical terrorism scholars employ to assess ‘terrorism’/counter-terrorism. Discourse analytic methods occupy a central place in critical terrorism studies, accounting for the majority of CSoT’s empirical treatments. Yet, the version of ‘discourse analysis’ operationalised in CSoT is an overwhelmingly linguistic one. Amongst hundreds of articles employing discourse analytic methods, only a handful approach ‘discourse’ in multimodal terms. That is, in terms of the diversity of ‘modes’ by which discourses take shape. I consider conceptual grounds for a ‘multimodal’ approach to discourse analysis: rooted in the writings of Michel Foucault, whose scholarship occupies a similarly central place in CSoT literature. I end with thoughts on the sensitivity to resistance and oppositional agency multimodal discourse analysis affords. I demonstrate this sensitivity in an assessment of multimodal data from Northern Ireland: considering spatial and visual materials associated with Belfast ‘peace walls’. The peace walls manifested state security discourses in their effects for Belfast spatiality. However, they also represented a canvas for paramilitaries and local groups to reimagine Northern Irish politics – in a way that diverged from state discourses. Not only can multimodality bring methodological plurality to CTS, then. It can also illuminate how non-state agents take ownership of, or reimagine, ‘security’.
