The Cyber-Discourse of Inclusion and Marginalisation: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Muslims in Ireland and Northern Ireland on Twitter 2010–2014

Abstract

This chapter examines the presence of Islamophobia in the context of Ireland and Northern Ireland, by analysing the cyber-discourse representation of Muslim communities in connection with the two most practised religions, Catholicism and Protestantism. The study is based on the analysis of a main corpus made up of 3250 tweets retrieved from Twitter and corresponding to the period 2010–2014. Using critical discourse analysis as the theoretical framework and corpus linguistics as the methodology, the authors analyse how the relations among the three religious groups are reshaped in the island’s new multicultural society and how concepts such as ‘Irishness’, ‘friend’, ‘enemy’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘marginalisation’ take on different and variable meanings.