The Covid-19 pandemic fast showed that the global health crisis brought an emergency of not only health, but also of social mobilisation and communication. Marking a period of multiple tensions by now dubbed as permacrisis, the onset of the pandemic seemed to fit the analysts’ predictions for a (post)pandemic society: an emergent ‘coronationalism’, nationalist authoritarianism and politics of fear, accompanied by a growing mistrust of science and reconceptualizations of ‘truth’, where language – and in particular the creative, figurative and metaphorical language – plays a distinct role in social (re)conceptualization.
CRISMET has foregrounded the pervasive and fast-changing metaphoricity in crisis discourse as a core of crisis language and crisis conceptualization. From perspectives of cognition, this is not surprising: what people seek when faced with new situations is more simple shorthand to think and talk about the unknown, like 'pandemic waves' and the 'invisible enemy'. This project emphasizes that in points of change and crisis, the elements of metaphorical thought and language come together in specific ways, which birth a whole repository of new metaphors with the potential to influence how we think about collective futures. In this light, metaphor for social transformation emerges as a multi-dimensional process that may play a central role in rooting effective, or potentially problematic talking-and-thinking likely to persist long after the crisis is over. By locating the analysis in the post-Yugoslav, post-socialist area, where persisting nationalist tensions mix with pandemic discourses in complex ways, the project has laid the foundations for interdisciplinary, language-driven study of crisis discourse grounded in the role of metaphor.
The objectives of this Action followed a dual focus. On one level, the project has aimed (a) to produce empirical investigation drawing on metaphor as a vehicle of analysis, exploring the (re)framings of collectivity, belonging and nationalism in the pandemic, specifically in locales with earlier crisis and conflict experience. On another level, the project’s overarching aim has been (b) to expand the metaphorical methodological approach to public discourse analysis in a multi-dimensional perspective, bringing together cognitive-linguistic metaphor study and social science study of politics, history and cultural memory.
Above all, in engagements directed to scholarship and the wider public, the project has emphasized that the ways we come to talk about a new global crisis will have wider resonance with other looming crises of our day, from the challenges of climate change to new waves of war and conflict. With a view to broader importance for society, CRISMET has foregrounded how the new metaphors that take hold may lead to crisis-induced polarization, but also to fresh critiques, new solidarities, and different ways to cope. Opening the debate on how we talk about social problems, from a deeply informed linguistic perspective, the project results can directly or indirectly steer public discourse, policy, educational and health communication in more productive directions in the future.
