Spor o občana: kritická analýza diskurzu o Klinice
Dispute over a citizen: A Critical Analysis of the Discourse on the Clinic

Summary/Abstract: The paper is devoted to a critical analysis of the discourse on Autonomní sociální centrum Klinika (Autonomous Social Centre Klinika) that was of high relevance in the Czech public sphere in 2014–2019. The Klinika centre was founded in Prague by a group of civic activists in a building owned by the Czech state which had long fallen into ruin. In 2014 they entered it without the owner’s consent. Both demonstrations in support of the centre and repeated police interventions attracted intense media attention, while control over identities, meanings and relations was disputed until the police clear-out in 2019. We aimed to discover what discourse strategies were chosen by particular social actors and what meaning configurations were created in their texts. Based on a) a set of qualitative analyses of nomination and predication strategies (Wodak, 2001; Wodak & Reisigl, 2009) in five initial discourse phase texts and b) frequency analysis of two large corpora representing Klinika supporters and media mainstream, we carried out a detailed concordance analysis of the relation between the activists’ group and the citizen category. Using the methods of corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis (e.g., Baker, 2006; Baker et al., 2008), we focused on the question of to what extent, in which contexts and via which discourse processes Klinika ended up outside or inside the ingroup. The main finding is that by keeping control over the concept of citizen, Klinika’s final displacement in January 2019 did not mean its discursive defeat. In fact, activists managed to keep their story about a civic opposition against an incompetent power. State violence terminating the existence of the Klinika centre only confirmed its discursive victory.

• Details
• Contents