Attitudes and related concepts

Attitudes towards confessional and sexual minorities in the discourse of the media in Latvia, Lithuania and Poland from a historical perspective

attitude	Attitude “is a relatively enduring organization of beliefs around an object or situation predisposing one to respond in some preferential manner” (Rokeach 1968: 112). In short, attitudes are our likes and dislikes and are orientated to action (response, behaviour).
as a frame of reference	An attitude, “like a theory, is a frame of reference, saves time because it provides us a basis for induction and deduction, organizes knowledge, has implications for the real world, and changes in the face of new evidence” (Rokeach 1968: 131).
rhetorical context	In a project on attitudes in discourse, it is important to emphasize the rhetorical argumentative context of attitudes: “any attitude is more than an expression in favour of a position: it is also implicitly or explicitly an argument against a counter-position” (Billig 1991: 112); “an attitude represents an evaluation of a controversial issue (…) the social context of attitudes is the context of controversy” (Billig 1987: 177). [more definitions of attitudes here]
belief	Belief is a perception of the relationship between two things or between a thing and its characteristic. Collectively, a person’s beliefs compose her/his understanding of her/himself and her/his environment (Bem 1970: 4-5) – in other words, a belief system.
belief system & change	Rokeach proposes three basic assumptions about beliefs: “First, not all beliefs are equally important to the individual; beliefs vary along a central-peripheral dimension. Second, the more central a belief, the more it will resist change. Third, the more central the belief changed, the more widespread the repercussions in the rest of the belief system” (1968: 3).
classification	Van Dijk distinguishes the following beliefs: personal/socially shared; specific/general (abstract); specific social/historical; factual/evaluative (opinions, attitudes); truth/evaluation criteria (norms, values); true factual/false factual (errors, illusions); cultural (common ground)/group beliefs (1998: 41).
knowledge as belief	What is most notable here is the classification of knowledge as belief: knowledge is simply what we as a group believe to be true; it is a belief presupposed in the group’s discourses (Fairclough 2005: 73).
Shermer’s belief-dependent realism	Shermer agrees that the knowledge we possess about the world is just a belief justified by science. Although he seems to interpret beliefs as personal, not as both personal and social phenomena, his argumentation does go well with what social psychology has to say about categorization and stereotyping. [more here] “We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, emotional, and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture, and society at large; after forming our beliefs we then defend, justify, and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and rational explanations. Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow” (2011: 5). "Belief comes quickly and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural, and most people have low tolerance for ambiguity" (p. 135).
value	Value is “a type of belief, centrally located within one’s total belief system, about how one ought to or ought not to behave, or about some end-state of existence worth or not worth attaining” (Rokeach 1968: 124). While the total set of a person’s beliefs may be very large, we usually have much fewer values. Many beliefs and attitudes are derived from them. Rokeach (1968) has the following to say about the relations between beliefs, attitudes and values: “An attitude is (…) a package of beliefs consisting of interconnected assertions to the effect that certain things about a specific object or situation are true or false, and other things about it are desirable or undesirable (p. 159)”. “Once a value is internalized it becomes, consciously or unconsciously, a standard or criterion for guiding action, for developing and maintaining attitudes towards relevant objects and situations, for justifying one’s own and others’ actions and attitudes, for morally judging self and others, and for comparing self with others. Finally, a value is a standard employed to influence the values, attitudes, and actions of at least some others… (p. 160)”
ideology	“Ideologies are the foundation of the social beliefs shared by a social group. In other words, a bit like the axioms of a formal system, ideologies consist of those general and abstract social beliefs, shared by a group, that control or organize the more specific knowledge and opinions (attitudes) of a group (van Dijk 1998:49)”. Ideologies are based on values, not knowledge. Ideologies organize attitudes which in turn control those social practices that are somehow relevant to the interests or identity of groups (van Dijk 1998).
ideology in discourse	Ideologies are meanings situated in discourses that construct a certain version of reality, e.g. present the given situation as natural, rational, or sectional interests as universal ones (Billig 1991: 101). In other words, ideologies are “propositions that generally figure as implicit assumptions in texts, which contribute to producing or reproducing unequal relations of power, relations of domination” (Fairclough 1995: 14).
public, media discourse	“By controlling the access to public discourse, only specific forms of knowledge and opinions may be expressed and widely circulated, and these may persuasively lead to mental models and social representations that are in the interest of the powerful” (van Dijk 1998: 162). “Face-to-face interaction may even play a less prominent role than textual or one-sided spoken/visual communication by newspapers and television” (van Dijk 1998: 200).
ideology in thinking	Ideology mobilizes consciousness, removing the autonomy of individual thinking: “people are socialized into communities. They learn the values and morality of their community, absorbing its common sense. The ordinary philosophers do not create their own philosophy but they have inherited the accumulated wisdom of their community. Their philosophizing is merely a reproduction (Billig 1991: 7).
important reading	Van Dijk 1998; van Dijk 2002; Billig 1991; Fowler 1991; de Saussure & Schulz (eds.) 2005; Singh & Stilwell Peccei (eds.) 2004
(social) identity	Identity is a concept just as all-inclusive and at the same time fuzzy as the concepts of culture or ideology. The following brief overview of approaches to social identity cannot be more than just a sketch.
identity as membership	Collective, group, social, etc. identity is one’s “display of, or ascription to, membership of some feature-rich category” (Antaki & Widdicombe 1998: 2). Since such categories reflect different levels of collectivity (group, community, culture), people may simultaneously display group identities, identities associated with membership in various communities (e.g. regional, national, European identity) and cultural identities (e.g. Christian). These identities form relations with each other. For example, “identities can be conceived of as being nested. According to this model, regional identities, for example, are contained in national identities, which in turn can be nested in supra-national identities, such as European. Second, identities can be “cross-cutting”, meaning some members of identity group A can also be members of identity group B. However, not all members of A are also members of B. Third, identities can be thought of as being separate, for example, when private and professional affiliations are apart from one another” (Bärenreuter 2005: 192-193). In another model, called “the marble cake”, various components of an individual’s identity “influence each other, mesh and blend into each other” (Risse 2004: 251f, cited in Bärenreuter 2005: 193). This model points out that networks of identities are not neatly organized, regular, constant; to the contrary, identities are “multiple, fragmented and fluid” (Reingarde & Zdanevičius 2007: 52). In this sense, identities are historically variable and sensitive to social change: “the expanding national and international economies, membership in the deepening European Union, economic crises, terrorism attacks (…) and the pre-existing or growing presence of minorities (…) all of these factors have naturally inter-acted with collective self-images and identity constructions in a way which has called past certainties and identities into question, leading to fears of powerlessness and hurt” (Gould 2010: 19). In an effort to resist these fears, “collective identity is increasingly conceived in terms of ethnicity, culture, heritage, tradition, memory and difference” (Stolcke 1995: 4, quoted by Gould 2010: 20).
identity as a construct	Identities may be understood as constructs, “made up of specifically constructed narratives of identity” (Wodak 2003: 678); “narratives are constitutive of the self rather than the reflective action of an already constituted individual” (Armbruster & Meinhof 2002: 18), just as attitudes are discursive constructs rather than expressions of already existing mental entities. In this approach, it is important that the construction of identity is situated and context-dependent: individuals call upon identities that are relevant to the current communicative situation.
identity as social construct	It is also important to note, especially with regard to this project, that identities are constructed not by the individual alone, but in collaboration with others; others may also attribute identities to the individual (cf. Litosseliti & Sunderland (eds.) 2002). The process of identity construction is a process of “social negotiation which individuals enter into, modify and reconstruct on the basis of discursive practices. In each case construction and perception are the products of a social consensus” (Carli, Sussi & Kaučič-Baša 2002: 35).
identity as discourse construct	“Analysis of identity is analysis of language use (…) language includes the catalogue of all human interrelations, all roles, that the speaker can choose for himself and to impose on the addressee (…) We define our identities as we speak about ourselves choosing verbal formulas offered by public discourse, which helps us describe individuals in shared group terms” (Kruk 2005: 101).
identity as relational	Identities are relational – the construction of Self always involves the construction of the Other, what one is always entails what one is not (e.g. Schwartz, Luyckx & Vignoles (eds.) 2011). Identity builds upon sameness and difference: “Identity is produced from difference, it also carries multiple differences in itself. Differences and contradictions are emerging not just between identities, but also within them (Fuss 1989). Since the relation between the self and the prevailing “Other” is multiple, identity cannot be grasped and fixed either, it slips out of our hands. When we try to make it fixed and unified, we ignore a couple of further differences. Not because individual experiences are so diverse and so individual, but rather because the self-other relation, the constructedness is so multiple” (Borgos 2007: 177). The self-other relation is also what links identity to attitude: “to varying degrees, attitudes tell us what sort of people we are and what sort of people others are (…) Attitudes can be important markers of – even the defining attributes of – identity. In many, perhaps most, cases, attitudes are shared and attitudinal discontinuities among people provide the contours of social groups. In this way, attitudes can be the content of social norms – the stereotypical attributes, even the criterial attributes, of social groups” (Hogg & Terry 2000: 9). It may also be noted that our Others also differ from each other: from the “threatening significant other” (Triandafyllidou 2001) to the “positive otherness”, source of rapport rather than hostility (Szpociński 2004: 136). Others may also be “accepted and tolerated” – although not necessarily included – under certain conditions (e.g. “passing”, “acting” homosexuals).
identities “performed”	The strategies of “passing” and “acting” emphasize the basic aspects of identity mentioned above: its being a discourse construct, social construct, and its relativity. The latter especially reflects the fact that we often do identity work for others, in order to maintain desired relations with others (consider the following statement: “So after a while I thought I didn’t necessarily have to define myself. This is more important for the society than for me” (Borgos 2007: 175). Against this backdrop, “coming out” as gay may be interpreted as relational in the sense that it is always done “to someone” and it changes the relations between those involved: the perceived identity of the one coming out changes, in consequence the identity of those he/she comes out to changes as well (e.g. from “parent” to “parent of a gay child”, cf. Kuhar 2007). Gay people do not come out to everyone. They do different identity work in different situations and contexts. The concept of performativity, first applied in gender identity research (Butler 1990), seems to fit here as well. Performativity theory claims that there is no pre-discursive identity: speakers do not affirm or resist some objectively existing attributes, but “activate various identity positions within particular conversations and localized contexts” (Hall 2003: 373).
identities as “texts”	Warnke (2007) offers a very interesting approach to identity – identities as texts: identities are “interpretations of who people are, interpretations that select among the various possibilities in our culture and tradition for saying who and what people are. As ways of understanding, however, identities possess the same features as understanding in general and the same features, in particular, as understanding texts. When we ask who someone is, we are asking the same sort of question we ask when we want to know what the meaning of a particular text is; we are trying to understand the person’s “meaning””(p. 6). This understanding of identities renders them situated, purposeful, and subject to differing interpretations. We understand them because of and within historical and cultural contexts (pp. 6-7) – which are also necessary to understand and interpret texts. What is more, “our identities and identifications are not exhausted with one interpretation, just as one reading does not “exhaust” the potential of a book to be understood in different ways, in different historical and knowledge frameworks” (p. 106).
important reading	Sparks 2000, Warnke 2007, Koller 2012 Hodges 2007, Stoltz 2007 Litosseliti & Sunderland (eds.) 2002, Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2003, Holmes & Meyerhoff (eds.) 2003; Antaki & Widdicombe 1998 (eds.) Chouliaraki 1999, Kovács 2005, Krzyżanowski 2005

To consider:

The struggle for the liberation of identities might be followed by a struggle for the liberation from identities. (Borgos 2007: 181)

Discursive psychology and social psychology

Attitudes towards confessional and sexual minorities in the discourse of the media in Latvia, Lithuania and Poland from a historical perspective

Out of the three fields of discursive psychology, social psychology and discourse analysis, the last one will carry most weight. The reason for this is that discourse is not only the research object, but also the medium through which other (mental, social) phenomena are communicated and may be studied. Thus, the concepts and methods of discourse analysis will be discussed in length separately. Here, I would like to introduce the concepts contributed by the two other disciplines that are relevant to this project. 

Social psychology
 In this project, I am interested in the influence of various aspects of social life on an individual’s attitudes. 
An individual, “self”, is always both a “unique human being” (van Dijk 1998: 119) and a member of various groups and communities. An individual is the recipient, contributor to, but also a product of, culture. 

cultural common ground	The concept of culture will not be defined here for obvious reasons (I refer the curious to Geertz 1973). It must suffice to say that people within a culture share cultural beliefs that are relatively stable at a given point in time (although historically subject to variation and change), that comprise cultural “common ground” which is taken for granted. This common ground provides a “shared reality and order for people” (Brown 1996: 27). Cultural norms and values are internalized by individuals via socialization and become obvious, “unmarked”; but they are not universal, and outsiders coming from other cultures may fail to recognize and abide by them. Cultures are abstract, generalized entities, and thus “cultural identities (e.g. Afro-Caribbean) have to be actively created and constructed; this construction involves a struggle over representation and narrative (…) and power” (Wetherell 1996: 225).
group	A group, on the other hand, is an aggregate of people who think of themselves as being group members, experience a sense of belonging and common identity, and who have psychological effects on each other (Brown 1996: 44). Next to their unique personal identities, individuals have numerous group memberships and identities; identification with a group involves self-categorization, even self-stereotyping (i.e., adopting stereotypical group attributes in relation to oneself). Properties of group membership ascription include “impact on self-esteem, adoption of stereotyped ways of thinking, and the influence of group membership on one’s judgements and decisions” (McKinlay & Dunnett 1998: 48). Each group has its own norms, values, attitudes, etc. Group members are affected by group norms through social interaction, by observing the behaviour of other members, by being confronted with their beliefs, attitudes and opinions (van Knippenberg 2000: 161). According to van Dijk (1998), ideologies – understood as shared sets of beliefs of groups, general, abstract beliefs that underlie other social representations – operate at the group level. [more on ideologies here] If we think in terms of group memberships, we naturally distinguish groups we belong to (in-groups) and groups we do not belong to (out-groups). This accounts for the framework of intra- and inter-group dynamics, including intra-group loyalty, obedience, conformity, cohesion, (avoidance of) conflict; inter-group cooperation (e.g. against a “common enemy”), competition, conflict, etc. It also accounts for certain biases in perception and thinking, e.g. internal diversification of an out-group may be underestimated or ignored, while differences between the in-group and the out-group (intergroup differences) may be exaggerated (McCauley 1995). [more on this issue here]
reference groups	Social psychology also talks about reference groups, “which we take as a reference point for our views or behaviour whether or not we are present in them or have any realistic expectations of joining them at any time” (Brown 1996: 26). Reference groups are thus important sources of social influence. An individual may even adopt certain attitudes in order to attain membership in a desired group (Fleming & Petty 2000: 197).
imagined communities	Imagined community is a term coined by Anderson in relation to the concept of nation: nation is an imagined community because it is impossible for members of a nation to know all other members, but still they share a common identity – national identity (Anderson 1991) – that in some cases may even constitute one of the most important and central values of an individual. The definition of a group given above may thus be applied to imagined communities with one exception – the second defining feature of a group, that of members’ psychological effect son each other, is not obligatory, although it is possible. Sexual minorities and, to a lesser extent, religious minorities may be thought of in terms of imagined communities.
individual	All the entities listed above contribute to an individual’s set of beliefs and attitudes. Social psychology recognizes the following foundations of beliefs and attitudes: persuasion, interpersonal influence, social norms, influence of reference groups. We may assume that social norms come from all levels (culture, communities, groups), persuasion – from imagined communities and reference groups (understood e.g. in terms of intellectual elites) and interpersonal influence – from groups. Of course, “each member may have a personal version of the shared belief or ideology, a version that is obviously a function of individual socialization or ideological development” (van Dijk 1998: 30). This way, beliefs are both personal and social, and they tell us something about both the individual and the society he/she is a part of (Billig 1991).

Other important concepts: 
Social representations – are “mental schemata or images which people use to make sense of the world and to communicate with each other” (Potter & Wetherell 1987: 138). An example may be a representation of a political party: “First, there is the political party; second, there is the person’s social representation of that party; third, there is the person’s opinion, which is derived from the representation” (Potter & Wetherell 1987: 139). So, when people are asked for their opinion about the Party X, they respond by giving their opinion of their social representation of Party X. A member of another group may have a completely different social representation of the same party. 

Attitude inconsistency, dissonance, cognitive dissonance, and similar – all refer to the lack of consistency between someone’s attitudes, attitudes and beliefs, or attitudes and behaviour. The theory of cognitive dissonance accounts for attitude change, which takes place when a person’s behaviour does not match their attitudes, creating a feeling of discomfort. This person may find it easier to change an attitude to match the behaviour than to look for justifications and explanations of this behaviour (Bem 1970). 

Discursive psychology’s focus is “the action orientation of talk and writing (…) how events are described and explained, how factual reports are constructed, how cognitive states are attributed” (Edwards & Potter 1992: 2). For example, “remembering is understood as the situated production of versions of past events, while attributions are the inferences that these versions make available, and that participants treat as implied” (Edwards & Potter 1992: 3). 
Discursive psychology rejects cognitivism and looks to discourse for patterns of “everyday procedures” that people use to do things, to act with their words. Such patterns are employed in descriptions, accounts, narratives, etc., in order to construct facts, factual versions that “appear credible and difficult to undermine” (Edwards & Potter 1992: 3). For example, discursive psychology identifies and investigates discursive strategies people use to attribute blame, justify, make excuses, etc. Scott & Lyman (1968) came up with a typology of excuses that includes appeal to: accident (‘I tripped up’), mental elements (‘I forgot’), natural drives (‘I couldn’t help myself’), scapegoating (‘he made me do it’); denial of injury (‘it’s only a scratch’), victim (‘she deserved it’), and appeal to loyalties (‘I owed it to him’). 
Attitudes in discursive psychology are not reflections of underlying cognitive entities – they are not something we have “inside”. Just as factual versions or memories, they are constructed in specific situations, specific contexts. Different people construct very different accounts of the same event; one person constructs very different accounts of the same event under different contextual conditions. This way, discursive psychology deals with the problem of cognitive dissonance – it is seen as a contextual effect of attitude talk: “people modify their behaviour, including their talk, in accordance with different social contexts. (…) Discourse analysts see variation in accounts as a consequence of people performing a whole range of different acts in their talk. Some variations may be due to considerations of face saving and creating a good impression” (Potter & Wetherell 1987: 37). Note that face management and politeness research (initiated by Goffman (1967) and Brown & Levinson (1987), respectively) are very important parts of discourse analysis too. 

Other important concepts: 
Disclaimers – are “pre-accounts which attempt to ward off anticipated negative attributions in advance of an act or statement” (Potter & Wetherell 1987: 77), e.g. I am no racist, but… (also van Dijk 1984, Billig 1991, among others). 
Interpretative repertoires – “are recurrently used systems of terms used for characterizing and evaluating actions, events and other phenomena. A repertoire, like the empiricist and contingent repertoires, is constituted through a limited range of terms used in particular stylistic and grammatical constructions. Often a repertoire will be organized around specific metaphors and figures of speech (tropes)” (Potter & Wetherell 1987: 149). Also Billig 1991, Wetherell, Taylor & Yates (eds.) 2001, Goodman 2007.

Social representations vs. interpretative repertoires:

social representations	interpretative repertoires
concepts and images of objects originate in the course of social interaction provide an agreed code of communication their sharing makes a group a group we have one social representation of an object	terms and metaphors used to talk about objects a limited range of terms used in particular stylistic and grammatical constructions we may activate different repertoires according to context

 

Zukunftskolleg - project introduction

Project summary
Embedded in the frameworks of critical and historical discourse analysis, this project examines the construction of attitudes to confessional and sexual minorities in the post-socialist, transitional societies of Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, and the role played in this process by the media. The project regards the construction of religious and sexual minorities against the backdrop of national identities, showing that in the post-socialist societies, identification with a religious or sexual minority may put into question an individual's loyalty towards the nation and state, making it a political issue. This project examines the role of the media discourse in sustaining such harmful and prejudicial notions.
The project examines a corpus of samples in the three languages excerpted from printed periodicals, radio and television programs, digital versions and websites of mainstream newspapers, radio and television channels, and blogs, all published after 1991. Following the historical development of discursive strategies marked with textual means over this period of time, it shall reveal the developments of explicit and implicit attitudes under the influence of important political, economic and cultural events, thus reflecting on the larger context of globalization and Westernization and the transitional societies' response to these processes. The critical part of the analysis is based upon the hypothesis that the media discourse serves power groups in legitimizing their ideologies and thus shaping and affecting public opinion. Exposing ideological content that is often subtly concealed and imposed on the public opinion may help to educate a more critical and informed media audience. 

Interdisciplinarity

The approach applied in this project may be called transdisciplinary (in Fairclough’s (2003, 2005) terms) or pluralist interdisciplinary (in van Leeuwen’s (2005) terms). Interdisciplinary research of this kind is problem-oriented rather than method-oriented, and recognizes that the problem “may rightfully belong to a number of different disciplines” (van Leeuwen 2005: 6). This approach is believed to be required for the study of the phenomenon of attitudes.

An attitude is one of the basic concepts in social psychology, which makes it interdisciplinary in its essence, if social psychology is understood as the discipline serving as “interface between the study of cognition and the study of society” (van Dijk 2009: 23). Attitude may be defined in purely “individualistic”/psychological terms, as “a relatively enduring organization of beliefs around an object or situation” (Rokeach 1968: 112); however, most modern approaches define it in one of the two prevalent interdisciplinary ways: 

1. emphasizing its social nature: “attitudes are the apotheosis of social cognition, because they are unobservable cognitive constructs that are socially learnt, socially changed, and socially expressed” (Hogg & Terry 2000: 1); 

2. emphasizing its discursive nature: attitudes are “the subjective evaluation experiences that are communicated through various channels but particularly through language” (Eiser 1987: 5).

So, attitudes are subjective entities that are socially determined and discursively expressed. We have thus three objects of study: the individual, the society, and the discourse. We have three processes associated with attitudes: construction (by the individual), internalization (of attitudes prevalent in the society) and reproduction (in discourse). This network is illustrated in Fig. 1.

The diagram also shows – very roughly and approximately – the disciplines involved in the project:
1. discursive psychology – “studies texts and talk for how they are constructed and what they do”; “emphasizes the way versions of actions and events are constructed in discourse” (Potter 1996: 168); see also Potter & Wetherell 1987, Edwards & Potter 1992;
2. social psychology – interested in such intra- and inter-personal phenomena as attitudes, self-concepts, identities, group dynamics, social influence and persuasion, among others. See Wetherell (ed.) 1996;
3. discourse analysis – a loose interdisciplinary framework of methodologies to study text and talk that (should) have the following in common:
· an interest in natural language use,
· a focus on units larger than words or sentences,
· a study of action and interaction beyond sentence grammar,
· the extension to non-verbal (semiotic, multimodal, visual) aspects of communication,
· a focus on dynamic (socio-)cognitive moves and strategies,
· the study of contexts of language use (Wodak & Meyer 2009: 2).
Different strands of DA attend to “a vast number of phenomena of text grammar and language use”, such as coherence, anaphora, speech acts, turn-taking, politeness, argumentation, and others, to different extents. Critical discourse analysis, in contrast, is interested in studying social issues – here, the analysis of the phenomena listed above is a means rather than an end. More information on:
· approaches to discourse – Schiffrin 1994, Schiffrin, Tannen & Hamilton (eds.) 2008;
· methods of textual analysis – Stubbs 1983, 1996, Wetherell, Taylor & Yates (eds.) 2001, Fairclough 2003, Richardson 2007, Wodak & Meyer (eds.) 2009;
· more on CDA in Wodak & Ludwig 1999, Wodak & Chilton (eds.) 2005;
· (socio-) cognitive approach to CDA – van Dijk 2008b, 2009.
For case studies and examples of applying the CDA framework in social research, see Gelber 2002 (on hate speech), Blackledge 2005 (on power in a multilingual society), Fairclough 2006 (globalization discourse), Hodges & Nilep (eds.) 2007 (war and terrorism in discourse), and many others.

 State of the art
This project rests upon two extensive sets of scientific literature. The first set provides the background of historical, political and cultural events, conditions and consequences of transition in Latvia, Lithuania and Poland (e.g. Pollack, Jacobs, Muller & Pickel (eds.) 2003, Savicka 2004, Juknevičius (ed.) 2005, Myant & Cox (eds.) 2008, Berg & Ehin (eds.) 2009, Mole 2012, Wangler 2012), against which the results of the empirical study will be presented. The second set provides the methods and measures of carrying out this empirical analysis (this post). 
When it comes to the literature on minorities in the countries in question after the fall of communism, the discussion so far has mostly focused on ethnic minorities – especially Russians in Latvia, Russians and Poles in Lithuania, Ukrainians (e.g. Wangler 2012) and Germans in Poland. These texts often focus on the process of nation-(re)building carried out by the “titular nations” and the role played in it by the minorities – “historical” or more “recent” immigrants (e.g. Jubulis 2001, Galbreath 2005, Mole 2012). There are also many sources that look at the identity of the Russian Diaspora in the post-Soviet countries in general (e.g. Kolstoe 1995, Laitin 1998, Commercio 2010) and in the Baltics in particular (e.g. Agarin 2010). Due to the fact that the breakup of the Soviet Union left millions of people uprooted and displaced (cf. Polian 2004), leading to conflicts and tensions in many places, the issues of ethnic identity and ethnic minorities in the post-socialist world has been topicalized, neglecting the questions of other, e.g. sexual or religious, minorities. The former have been mentioned in passing by Mole as he writes that homosexualism is now being constructed as a new “threat to national survival” in Latvia and Lithuania, and that the problem requires further attention (2012: 167). The latter is brought up by Juknevičius (2005, see above). 
The method of discourse analysis adopted in this project has been slowly claiming its place in the research on ethnic and other minorities and related issues in Latvia, Lithuania and Poland over the past few years. Worth mentioning are Golubeva & Gould (eds.) 2010 and Muižnieks (ed.) 2008; while the former deals with the political and media discourse on non-citizens in Latvia, the latter focuses on the portrayal of Latvia by the media discourse in Russia. When it comes to Lithuania, the method has been used to study the “positive” construction of nationalism against the backdrop of the imperial past (the Grand Duchy of Lithuania), national minorities (Dudzińska 2011) and the emerging European identity (Savukynas 2005). With regard to Poland, the method has been applied to the study of official patriotic discourses that construct “foreign influences, cosmopolitan values and cultural diversity” as challenges to the Polish “way of life” (Cox & Myant 2008: 5, also Sidorenko 2008). 
Overview of the literature regarding the situation of sexual minorities in Latvia, Lithuania and Poland may be found here and here.