Dr. Moses Chika Christian-Achinihu, on December 20, 2023, successfully defended his PhD dissertation titled ‘Discursive Framing in Selected Online News Reports on Epidemic Diseases in Nigeria, 2014-2020.’ This marks the completion of his doctorate program in English Linguistics in the Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State.
Dr. Moses began his doctoral studies in late 2018, before joining the American University of Nigeria (AUN) as a Curriculum Literacy Advisor at the Writing Center in February 2022. His research utilized an interdisciplinary approach by intersecting critical discourse analytic theories in linguistics with a media effect theory in communication studies to investigate how epidemic diseases, disease-informed concerns, and news actors are discursively framed in different online news categories, namely: mainstream dailies, biomedicine/health websites and citizen journalism websites.
The study identified the categories of frames inherent in the epidemic disease reports, analyzed the ideologies underlying the frames, examined the discursive and linguistic resources functioning as framing devices in the reports, and related the discursive framings and the linguistic devices to the news actors’ stances.
Informed by the numerous findings, the study contends that frames and their associated ideological underpinnings are arguably positioned to have a common impact on the audience’s cognitive behavior, their decisions toward social safety as well as on the mediation of disease outbreaks.
The study concludes that there is an alignment of language and discursivity in shaping how concerns emanating from public health discourses are framed in news.
The research findings and contributions may soon be shared at the School of Arts and Sciences’ Seminar Series, this semester.
Reported by John Abah