Language and Elitism

With its origins in my earlier Elite Mobilities project, this largely self-sustaining project has become a substantial strand of my research agenda. In May 2022, I gave a TEDx presentation in Basel which offers an indicative account of the underlying rationale for this work; the presentation was titled Embracing a Life of Mediocrtity? (external YouTube link).

Much of my foundational work on language and elitism was done with my close collaborator Adam Jaworski (University of Hong Kong). In this regard, a key collaborative publication was our special issue of the journal Social Semiotics also published by Routledge as the book Elite Discourse: The Rhetorics of Status, Privilege and Power. In this and our other collaborative work, a primary objective was to understand elite status as a banal, everyday accomplishment regardless of people's ostensible wealth and power. In this regard, we considered how “elite” functions as a quintessential floating signifier deployed all over the place and for all sorts of, sometimes quite ludicrous, rhetorical effects (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2017; see below).

Along the same lines, we are interested in language and communication that is elitist, determined loosely by its status-making appeals to excellence, superiority, or distinction. These claims to/about eliteness we term “rhetorics” insofar as they state apparent truths about the nature of privilege and power, as well as making what colleagues describe as “plausible, integral, coherent accounts of the world”. Throughout this work on Elite Discourse the focus remains on the places, moments and ways people lay claim to eliteness, how they position themselves (or are positioned by others) as elite or non-elite and for what ends. Put simply, eliteness is understood as something people do, not something they necessarily have or are. Eliteness, thus conceived, points us to the semiotic and communicative resources by which people differentiate themselves and by wh and by which they access symbolic-material resources for shoring up status, privilege and power. Ultimately, of course, I am committed to knowing how these rhetorical actions are used by people to shore up their own privilege/power and, thereby, deepen social inequalities and material injustices.

Related publications

Thurlow, C. (2020). Dissecting the language of elitism: The ‘joyful’ violence of premium. Language in Society, 1-28.

Thurlow, C. (2020). Touching taste: On the classist intersections of materiality, textuality and tactility. Multimodal Communication, 9(2).

Thurlow, C. & Jaworski, A. (2017). The discursive production and maintenance of class privilege: Permeable geographies, slippery rhetorics. Discourse & Society, 28(5), 535-558.

Jaworski, A. & Thurlow, C. (2017). Mediatizing the “super rich”, normalizing privilege. Social Semiotics, 27(3), 276-287.

Thurlow, C. (2016). Queering critical discourse studies or/and performing post-class ideologies. Critical Discourse Studies, 13(5), 485-514.

Thurlow, C. (2015). Multimodality, materiality and everyday textualities: The sensuous stuff of status. In G. Rippl (ed.), Handbook of Intermediality: Literature, Image, Sound, Music (pp. 619-636). Frankfurt am Main: DeGruyter.

Jaworski, A. & Thurlow, C. (2009). Taking an elitist stance: Ideology and the discursive production of social distinction. In A. Jaffee (ed.), Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives (pp. 195–226). New York: Oxford University Press.