Discourses of disorder is an edited volume aimed at understanding the role of media in the transmission and production of societal disorder. It brings together ten discursive studies, analysing representations of disorders in various media from different perspectives. Part 1, ‘Language’, focuses on written texts and comprises a series of qualitative studies (chapters 1–5), followed by a quantitative one (chapter 6), discussing attributions of responsibility and motive(s) to social actors, and how political stance is assigned to news reporters. Part 2, ‘Multimodality’, gathers four studies analysing news photography (chapters 7 and 9), caricature (chapters 7 and 8), and film (chapter 10).

The chapters in Part 1 use different types of linguistic analysis. Using corpus-based qualitative analysis, Gerrit Kotzur (chapter 4) looks at how, in absence of explicit evaluations in news reports, nomination and predication strategies allow for perspectivation, thus building a story's news value. Juhani Rudanko (chapter 1) and Boitshwarelo Rantsudu (chapter 5) analyse the role of word-choice and grammar. Rudanko shows how word choices and grammatical constructions allow for authors to give a political spin to a news report. Relying on Appraisal Theory, Rantsudu discusses, among other phenomena, structures of reported speech to understand authors’ stance-taking. Darren Kelsey (chapter 2) looks at the roles of myth, metaphor, and ideology in the categorization of social actors in the 2011 England riots. With a focus on grammar and syntax, Carolina Pérez-Arredondo (chapter 3) analyses attribution and construction of motives in Chilean student movement. Using corpus methods, she shows (a) that attribution of motives is central to the legitimation of action, and (b) ‘how differently motive can be realised in the text’ (71). Matt Davies & Rotsukhon Nophakhun (chapter 6) analyse the way strikes are described in terms of war in the news press, using ‘semantic prosody’ relying on word collocates.

Part 2 focuses on multimodality, beginning with Christopher Hart's critical semiotic analysis (chapter 7) of multimodal-metaphorical war framings, produced through intertextual relations between written text and photographs or caricatures. Analysing Arab Spring political cartoons, Rania Elnakkouzi (chapter 8) not only shows how cartoonists use knowledge shared with their public to make their messages understood; she also develops a pragma-dialectic model to reconstruct the ‘final standpoint which cartoonists aim to defend’ (155). From a combined ethnographic discourse analytic approach, Andrea Mayr (chapter 9) analyses how social media activism by the ‘urban poor of Rio de Janeiro’ (175) is incorporated into the mainstream press. She understands this activism as a strong resource for empowerment. In the analysis of body postures in live footage of the L. A. Riots in 1992, Serjoscha Ostermeyer & David Sittler comprehend the human body as an additional semiotic structure, allowing an understanding of violent actions as ‘media practices’ (194).

Besides showing the fertility of a methodologically wide range of discursive studies, this volume particularly points at the power of language in media news reports and shows the importance of analysing the interplay between several modalities in the analysis of new media.