Professor María Isabel Kalbermatten and James Ramsburg (18) received the Presidential Faculty-Student Collaboration Grant 2017-2018 for their project titled “Manipulation and Representation of Reality in Cristina Kirchner’s Political Discourses from 2007 to 2015.” The main goal of the project is to show how audiences could be manipulated through the speeches of the former president of Argentina. During the summer, Professor Kalbermatten and James Ramsburg will analyze how Cristina Kirchner’s political discourses try to direct the mind of the recipients (i.e., their knowledge and beliefs and, indirectly, their acts) in her favor and against those of the “others” (e.g., the media, the judiciary, the financial services industry and “vulture funds,” imperialism, etc.), by using certain discursive strategies.
Professor Kalbermatten is excited to be working in this project. “This project will continue my previous research on ideology, manipulation and discourse. In this new project, I would like to more explicitly explore the relationship among ideology, manipulation and representation of reality in political discourses such as those of the former president of Argentina. I want to analyze how the reality is represented in those speeches through the use of specific linguistics strategies. I have been doing research on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which is an interdisciplinary approach to discourse that views language as a form of social practice and focuses on the ways social and political domination are reproduced by text and talk. I have also been doing research on Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis that focuses on how gender ideology and gendered relations of power are produced, negotiated and contested in representations of social practice, in social relationships among people, and in an individual’s social and personal identities in text and talk.”
Professor Kalbermatten also pointed out that, “The discursive analysis of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner requires a well-suited collaborator and provides an opportunity for me to engage in student-faculty research. James Ramsburg is ideal for working on this project. He has taken my class Spanish Thru Linguistics (Spa 370) in the fall of 2016. He is an excellent student, and his passion for linguistics and discourse analysis is admirable.”
James Ramsburg, who is a double major in Spanish and LALACS, said: “I am incredibly excited to be working on this project with Professor Kalbermatten as it represents a unique undergraduate opportunity to connect theory with practice and because it is an invaluable hands-on experience to prepare me for graduate school and beyond. The knowledge I gain through working on this investigation will also serve as the foundation for my LALACS senior capstone project, which will employ applied linguistics in the Latin American context – most likely in the form of discourse analysis.”
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