Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CRISMET (Thinking pandemic societies through metaphor: Language, crisis and coronationalism in the post-Yugoslav area)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2022-10-01 al 2024-09-30
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.
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.
The empirical work spanned metaphor-led analyses of crisis discourse in differing top-down and bottom-up modalities (from politicians' public announcements, through news articles, to citizen uptake in digital space), across four post-Yugoslav states (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina). Several corpus resources were compiled in the process, as a lasting repository of Covid-time language for future study, while expanding the resources in South Slavic as lower-resource languages. A methodological reconsideration of the processes of metaphor identification, classification, quantification and analysis – addressing some long-standing methodological issues in the field – allowed the development of a multi-dimensional approach to studying metaphor in crisis discourse. The applications of the approach in the post-Yugoslav context addressed several foci that emerged as important in the data, including the topics of: crisis, nationhood and nationalism; crisis and collective memory; negotiation of ‘truth’ and political reality; gender and crisis. Throughout the work, the fellow has been advancing closer connections of linguistic metaphor study, corpus linguistics and broader crisis scholarship in the humanities, as well as their practical implications for crisis communication.
The published and forthcoming results have exceeded the goals planned in the project proposal, and comprise, among others, 7 open-access corpus resources, 6 scientific articles including major international journals (e.g. Critical Discourse Studies, Metaphor and the Social World), 2 edited books with major international publishers, 2 book chapters and 1 online guidebook. The fellow delivered and organized dozens of academic and public appearances, including an international interdisciplinary conference at the host institution in Ljubljana. She provided leadership in publishing and research at the national and international levels. She was appointed Editorial Board member of two leading scholarly journals (Language in Society, Cambridge University Press and Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Springer Nature), and has become the programme committee member for large international conferences in the field. Her linguistic research has brought the insights from the post-Yugoslav area more prominently on the map of today’s corpus and discourse studies, pointing to sociolinguistic complexities that problematize some Western-dominated frameworks in the discipline. All this has opened the door to new collaborations, especially during the secondment period at Lancaster University in the UK, with several new European project proposals underway (Leverhulme Trust UK, FWF Austria, with preparations for the Fellow’s ERC application).
The published and forthcoming results have exceeded the goals planned in the project proposal, and comprise, among others, 7 open-access corpus resources, 6 scientific articles including major international journals (e.g. Critical Discourse Studies, Metaphor and the Social World), 2 edited books with major international publishers, 2 book chapters and 1 online guidebook. The fellow delivered and organized dozens of academic and public appearances, including an international interdisciplinary conference at the host institution in Ljubljana. She provided leadership in publishing and research at the national and international levels. She was appointed Editorial Board member of two leading scholarly journals (Language in Society, Cambridge University Press and Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Springer Nature), and has become the programme committee member for large international conferences in the field. Her linguistic research has brought the insights from the post-Yugoslav area more prominently on the map of today’s corpus and discourse studies, pointing to sociolinguistic complexities that problematize some Western-dominated frameworks in the discipline. All this has opened the door to new collaborations, especially during the secondment period at Lancaster University in the UK, with several new European project proposals underway (Leverhulme Trust UK, FWF Austria, with preparations for the Fellow’s ERC application).
This Action has pushed the frontiers of crisis discourse research in several ways. The methodological and theoretical considerations – pertaining to the role of metaphor in crisis communication, but also to language and crisis more broadly – are already being applied and tested in other forms of research. The most recent article in Metaphor and the Social World has been among the journal’s five Most Read Articles since its first appearance. One ancillary book collection on aspects of gender is being promoted with invitations to international events even before publication, as the first book-length collection from the central and eastern European region in the gender-linguistics field. The second edited book underway is bringing together the main international metaphor experts in a new line of research on metaphor, crisis and nationalism as initiated by the project. Outreach to wider audiences, in particular in the education sector and with the Guidebook of crisis metaphors, opens some important conversations in the public pertaining to the role of language – as well as language scholars and academia – in responding to the concerning social realities of our day. Beyond the results produced and published during the fellowship itself, the datasets and findings from the Action will inform dozens of now in-progress publications and collaborations in the coming years, including the Fellow’s secured follow-up project within the The Recovery and Resilience Programme by the European Commission.