Genre as Ideological Mediation

This paper draws on data from intercultural development discourse, ESL teaching and hate media in pre-genocide Rwanda to characterise genres as mediators of ideology, instantiating and interweaving culturally significant representations, authority systems and textual traditions through dispersed patterns of discourse as much as structural regularity. Applications of the approach for development and educational discourse are discussed in terms of the generic potential of discourse contexts and the registerial competence of participants, and the potential of the approach for propagating counter-discourses to hate media is considered in light of the data from Rwanda.