Doctoral thesis: Cultural Identity and Social Advocacy Rhetoric: The Palestinian Cause Through a Socio-Cognitive Lens
The study investigates the dynamic interplay between the cultural identity of advocates and the advocacy rhetoric of social movements, particularly the Palestinian Cause. It explores the impact of social advocates’ cultural identity on shaping their linguistic and rhetorical techniques to contest power structures and address dominant social norms and ideologies. This study employs Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of Critical Discourse Analysis to conduct a cross-cultural qualitative analysis of ten speeches delivered by two influential advocates: Khaled Beydoun and Richard Barret. The analysis consists of two steps: a microstructure and a macrostructure analysis. The microstructure analysis revealed marked and discursive choices of syntactic structure (e.g., passive and active voice, pronouns, and nominalization), the fusion of both culture-generic and culture-specific terms, and the use of distinguished rhetorical strategies (e.g., storytelling, parallelism, historical analogy, rhetorical questions, and enumeration). As to the macrostructure analysis, it revealed how cultural identity influences the advocates’ mental representation of their cause, which shapes, in turn, the audience’s perceptions and interpretation of the cause. Consequently, the study underscores the vital role of cultural identity in shaping advocacy rhetoric, effectively engaging not only the advocates’ immediate communities but also the global audiences with access to these advocates’ messages. It provides a tailored, novel framework, deduced and driven from research analysis and findings. This framework can enable analysts and researchers to systematically examine linguistic strategies, rhetorical devices, and cultural nuances in advocacy rhetoric. Additionally, it will aid educators in teaching effective communication skills and constructing persuasive arguments across different contexts.
