Re/Thinking Chickens: The Discourse around Chicken Farming in British
Newspapers and Campaigners' Magazines, 1982-2016 has major social
relevance as it focuses on one of the most forgotten and yet most
exploited farmed animals, chickens, who now have a combined mass
exceeding that of all other birds on Earth. Dr Elena Lazutkaite
demonstrates that the planet's most numerous birds, with a population of
23 billion at any one time, are trivialised in public discourse.
This book applies the analytical framework of Critical Discourse
Analysis in combination with corpus linguistics tools to present a
detailed empirical case study. In total, the study corpus comprises 1754
texts published over the period of 34 years in broadsheets The Guardian
and The Daily Telegraph, tabloids the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail
(including their Sunday editions Sunday Mirror and Mail on Sunday) and
magazines produced by animal advocacy groups Compassion In World Farming
and Animal Aid.
This book will be of particular interest to university students of
critical animal studies, human-animal studies, discourse studies,
cultural studies, communication studies, sociology, (eco)linguistics, in
addition to animal advocacy groups and media practitioners.