Framing the Marginalised: An Analysis of Themes in History and Sociology Book Reviews

Adopting a quantitative and corpus-based methodology, the present research examines the framing of the minority-related themes in academic book reviews in History and Sociology. Two corpora of book reviews (1,000 reviews in total, 500 for each discipline) from 2000 to 2024 were compiled and utilised for data analysis purposes. A theory- and data-driven keyword taxonomy, consisting of seven main themes and 27 keywords, emerged from the literature review, concordance analysis and expert validation. Keyword frequencies were generated, normalised, and transformed into a comparison using AntConc software. Inferential statistics such as Chi-square, Z-test, and hierarchical clustering methods were used to find out significant differences and thematic clusters of keywords in disciplines. Findings show strong disciplinary leanings: reviews in history are much more likely to discuss themes such as “native” and “indigenous”, which is consistent with historical understandings of ethnicity and marginalisation. In contrast, Sociology reviews foreground contemporary and intersecting concerns, frequently employing keywords such as “queer”, “gender” and “racialised”. This lexical pattern reflects a critically engaged stance, highlighting the discipline’s active negotiation of identity, diversity, and social justice in current scholarly debates. These findings demonstrate how book reviews both reproduce and produce disciplinarity, providing important indications toward knowledge dissemination and minority discourse. The methodology exemplifies that thematic patterns can be recognised using corpus-based and statistical analyses. It has significant implications for diversity efforts, disciplinary pedagogy and corpus-based research beyond and including academic discourse analysis, providing insight into the more general disciplinary involvement in marginalisation. Keywords : minority-related themes; corpus-based; quantitative; book reviews; History and Sociology