Discourse and crisis contains a collection of studies on the discursive construction of ‘crisis’ in a wider sense, exploring how crises are ‘being essentially socially produced and discursively constituted’ (4), using a broad range of methods including Conversation Analysis and Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis. Methodologically dominant are, however, various forms of Critical Discourse Analysis. The volume is divided into three main parts, each containing chapters on one major context of crisis discourse: organisational discourse, political discourse, and media discourse. The three parts are framed by a two-chapter introduction and an epilogue that give the volume a thorough theoretical base.

In their introduction, the editors develop an overview of the discursive object of crisis, and provide a detailed summary and justification of the research contained in the chapters. In the second chapter, Lin Chalozin-Dovrat discusses the conceptual history of crisis discourses.

Part 1 of the collection focuses on organisational discourse, analysing coping mechanisms in interactive crisis solution. Chapter 3 analyses and emphasises the role of context in successful police crisis negotiations through an analysis of transcripts and based on background interviews. It employs the context model of Systemic Functional Linguistics and suggests an improved method for negotiators to categorise their background data. Applying Conversation Analysis to transcripts of emergency calls in Finland, chapter 4 demonstrates how asymmetries between the knowledge and the emotional state of an emergency caller and the call handler can misalign the collaborative effort to establish the facts of an emergency. In chapter 5, the same methodology is used to establish the complex causes for the failure to collaboratively identify friend and foe in a friendly fire incident during the second Iraq War.

Part 2 contains critical analyses of political discourses in the wider sense. While chapters 6 and 9 explore discourse produced by politicians, chapters 7 and 8 analyse less official and formal political discourse in a radio show and in interview material collected by the researcher herself.

In Part 3, the focus lies on the representation of different crises in the global media, including genres such as online discussions on the 2010 political unrest in Thailand (chapter 10), TV news reports on the 2008 urban riots in Greece (chapter 11), Spanish newspaper articles on the Spanish economic recession (chapter 12), and Malaysian newspaper articles on the terrorist attacks in London and Mumbai (chapter 14), as well as Mexican newspaper opinion pieces on the H1N1 crisis in Mexico. All chapters in this section employ versions of Critical Discourse Analysis focusing on different phenomena. While chapter 10 analyses agonism and antagonism in online forums using the Discourse Historical Approach, chapters 11 and 13 apply Theo van Leeuwen's theory of discourses as recontextualization of social practices to their corpora. Chapter 12 studies quotations as intertextual elements in order to reveal argumentative strategies on immigration in the 2008 economic crisis in Spain.

The main merit of the volume is in the presentation of analyses of a broad variety of most recent crisis discourses from very different national discourse communities including non-Western communities such as Thailand, Malaysia, and Kenya.