Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review 2010, 46(4): 619-642 | DOI: 10.13060/00380288.2010.46.4.06

9/11 Revisited: 'Doing history' in political discourse

Jiří Nekvapil, Ivan Leudar
Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy, Praha
The University of Manchester, Velká Británie

Drawing on ethnomethodology, this article addresses what participants do as 'practical historians' - how they use and produce history in and through their activities. Specifi cally, it studies how historical contingencies are built into antagonistic political talk and to what effect. To that end, the authors revisit three of their own papers, all of which analysed how the 9/11 attacks in the United States were represented. The authors reanalyse the texts focusing on how the protagonists in the confl ict (Bush, Blair and bin Laden) 'did history'. The analysis reveals two related methods of 'practicing history': one is to situate contemporary events relative to historical antecedents and so provide them with history-contingent meanings; the other is to constrain the historical understanding of the events in future.

Keywords: political discourse, historicity, use of history, practical historian, ethnomethodology, reanalysis of discourse, 9/11, Bush, Blair, bin Laden.

Published: August 1, 2010  Show citation

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Nekvapil, J., & Leudar, I. (2010). 9/11 Revisited: 'Doing history' in political discourse. Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review, 46(4), 619-642. doi: 10.13060/00380288.2010.46.4.06
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