Illusory authenticity: negotiating compassion in animal experimentation discourse
Society’s compassion towards nonhuman animals used in experimentation has grown exponentially. This paper adopts critical discourse analysis to examine how the animal experimentation industry negotiates this societal moral response. To this end, the discourse of the largest animal experimentation in...
| Autores: | , , |
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| Formato: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión aceptada para publicación |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2024 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Varias* (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitáries de Catalunya, Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya) |
| Repositorio: | Recercat. Dipósit de la Recerca de Catalunya |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:recercat.cat:10230/59611 |
| Acesso em linha: | http://hdl.handle.net/10230/59611 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/14614456231219633 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | Animal experimentation animal research animal testing critical discourse analysis interest groups public relations speciesism strategic communication |
| Resumo: | Society’s compassion towards nonhuman animals used in experimentation has grown exponentially. This paper adopts critical discourse analysis to examine how the animal experimentation industry negotiates this societal moral response. To this end, the discourse of the largest animal experimentation interest group in Spain has been studied. Our findings show that the industry, as represented by this interest group, does not negotiate compassion with authenticity but rather creates an illusion of it through opportunistic lexical choices and suppressions, including contradictions and incongruities. We conclude by defining such a discourse as illusory authenticity, a discourse with which the industry conveniently frames itself as altruistic and concerned about animal suffering while at the same time discouraging the public’s cultivation of compassion towards nonhuman animal suffering. This is done by means of perpetuating a logic that frames nonhuman animals as inferior beings whose existence is at the service of humanity. |
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