POLITICKING LIVES AND PROXIMISING SOCIOPOLITICAL RESPONSIBILITIES IN DISASTER SITUATION

Abstract

Human life is at the centre of disaster consequences. This often leads
to immense politicking and ‘responsibilising’ of social and political
roles, which open vistas for more research, especially from the
ecolinguistic and ecocritical perspectives. This research understudies
politicking and responsibilising of social and political roles in the face
of disasters in local communities. It adopts Piotr Cap’s Proximisation
and Transitivity in the Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, as
theoretical framework. The data are six purposively selected news
reports downloaded from the YouTube videos and the websites of
Channels Television and Television Continental, two widespread
local television stations in Nigeria that cover and broadcast news of
flood disasters in local communities. The data are transcribed to texts,
and analysed qualitatively, using the top-down approach. The results
show that disasters in local communities are leveraged as political
platforms for scoring political points. However, when it comes to
actual response to disasters, there is ‘responsibilisation’ between social
and political agents. Political ‘responsibilisation’ strategies in the data
include ‘bureaucratising role relations,’ ‘defining agency response’
and ‘legitimising or delegitimizing constraints,’ while the most
dominant social ‘responsibilisation’ strategy is ‘collective response.’
The study avers that climate change discourses and disaster
management or responses are politicised; and hence, affected by
political and social ‘responsibilisation’ process.