Papers by Massimiliano Demata
Routledge eBooks, Oct 22, 2023
Journal of Language and Politics, 2024
This paper addresses Benjamin Netanyahu’s border discourse in the context of radical right-wing p... more This paper addresses Benjamin Netanyahu’s border discourse in the context of radical right-wing populism. It discusses how, in the speeches and statements appearing in his official government website, Netanyahu construes groups located spatially outside Israel’s borders, mainly terrorists and migrants (the “wild beasts” and the “infiltrators”), as existential threats to Israel. The aim is to prove that, in legitimizing the militarization of borders through “security fences”, so that the “other” can be excluded from the nation, Netanyahu uses the same power geometries and discursive strategies, i.e. Proximization (Cap 2013) and dehumanizing metaphors (Santa Ana 1999, Musolff 2015, Taylor 2021), typically used by right-wing populist parties and leaders. By appealing to both populism and certain interpretations of Zionism, his ethnonationalist view of borders is based on the normalization of the discourse of delegitimation and exclusion of those groups considered as a threat to the nation.
Discourse approaches to politics, society and culture, Nov 15, 2022
ITA, 2020
Taking its cue from the crucial role of language in populist communication, this special section ... more Taking its cue from the crucial role of language in populist communication, this special section of Iperstoriaon \\u201cPopulism and Its Languages\\u201d aims at exploring the various discursive dimensions of populist leaders and parties, mostlytaking place in the digital environment. This special section opens with a paper by Massimiliano Demata, Michelangelo Conoscenti,and Yannis Stavrakakis on the construction of the concepts of populism and anti-populism and their metaphorical realisations in the British press in 2016, the year of the Brexit referendumand Trump\\u2019s victory, a crucial moment not only for British politics but also for the EU and populist discourseworldwide. Adopting both the methodology offered by Corpus Linguistics and the Corpus Approach to Critical Metaphor Analysis, the authors emphasise the critical role that metaphors play in orienting the public perception of populism based on shared modes of understanding social and political life. Following onfromBrexit-related discourse, in the second paper,Michael Boyd proposes a fine-grained critical analytical study of an article in a British mid-market newspaper with a pro-Brexit stance, highlighting the discursive and multimodal strategies employed to negatively represent both the Remain-supporters and the judiciary, while stressing the positive presentation of Leavers and the newspaper role as the \\u2018voice of the people.\\u2019 Maria Ivana Lorenzetti\\u2019s study compares right-wing populist discourses on migration in the national contexts of the USA and Italy,unveiling how the joint contribution of language and other semiotic modes is strategically exploited on social media by prominent right-wing populist leaders, such as Donald Trump and Italian Leagueleader Matteo Salvini inthe othering and exclusion of ethnic minorities. The study, adopting a critical multimodal analytical perspective, reveals that the two leaders employ comparable strategies. Web 2.0 affordances are crucial for both Trump and Salvini to enact the rhetorical exclusion of minorities while constructing their role as leaders and \\u201cbuild their people.\\u201d The social media domain is also the focus of the next contribution,in whichMarianna Lya Zummo investigates how politicians employ social media Demata andLorenzettiIntroduction to \\u201cPopulism and its Languages\\u201dSaggi/Essays5Issue 15\\u2013Spring/Summer 2020Iperstoriaplatforms to enhance authenticity and boost their connection with \\u2018the people.\\u2019 Within the framework of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (KhosraviNik 2017), and adopting tools from multimodal discourse analysis, Zummo highlights how politicians of different orientation, i.e. American Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Italian right-wing leader Salvini, exploit social media affordances, and in particularlive-streamed videos, creating a new politainment genre for the strategicperformance of their authenticity.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is also the focus of the next two contributions. Applying a methodological framework that combines the resources of qualitative approaches, such as transitivity, appraisal and multimodal critical discourse analysis, Margaret Rasulo explores the identity-populism nexus in a corpus of AOC\\u2019s tweets containing verbal and non-verbal instantiations of self-representational strategies. Based on the analysis, the communication style adopted by the politician emerges as the result of a blend of identities and life experiences, correspondingly sharpened by the presence of populist behaviour. Such a nexus allows AOC to intensify her self-presentation and build her political persona. By exploring the mechanisms that govern the presentation, interpretation, and framing of the antagonistic opponent viathe analysis of delegitimisation strategies, recontextualising principles, and (re)framingprocesses, Jacqueline Aiello\\u2019s study analyses the coverage of AOC by a political commentator with a right-wing populist ideological orientation. Her findings suggest that the delegitimisation of the antagonist occurs primarily by recontextualisation, whereby the antagonist\\u2019s viewpoints are systematically concealed, ridiculed, or the target of personal attacks, underscoring covert and overt sexism and racism.Racism and its subtle connection with right-wing populism are evident in the next paper by Philip Limerick. Focusing on the case of the Central Park Five, a criminal case involving the wrongful conviction of four African-Americans and one Latino, the paper investigates the covert and overt racist discourse by Trump. Applying a critical discourse analytical perspective to acorpus of diversified sources, the author unveils Trump\\u2019s discursive construction of African-Americans as \\u2018the others\\u2019 through fearmongering, delegitimisation, and evasion, emblematic in his \\u2018law and order\\u2019 ideology, also shedding light on resistance discourse by the Central Park Five members.Antipodean populism is…
Paolo Loffredo Editore, 2020
John Benjamins Publishing Company eBooks, Dec 15, 2022
Conspiracy Theory Discourses addresses a crucial phenomenon in the current political and communic... more Conspiracy Theory Discourses addresses a crucial phenomenon in the current political and communicative context: conspiracy theories. The social impact of conspiracy theories is wide-ranging and their influence on the political life of many nations is increasing. Conspiracy Theory Discourses bridges an important gap by bringing discourse-based insights to existing knowledge about conspiracy theories, which has so far developed in research areas other than Linguistics and Discourse Studies. The chapters in this volume call attention to conspiracist discourses as deeply ingrained ways to interpret reality and construct social identities. They are based on multiple, partly overlapping analytical frameworks, including Critical Discourse Analysis, rhetoric, metaphor studies, multimodality, and corpus-based, quali-quantitative approaches. These approaches are an entry point to further explore the environments which enable the proliferation of conspiracy theories, and the paramount role of discourse in furthering conspiracist interpretations of reality. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements | pp. ix–x Chapter 1. Conspiracy theory discourses: Critical inquiries into the language of anti-science, post-trutherism, mis/disinformation and alternative media. Massimiliano Demata, Virginia Zorzi and Angela Zottola PART I. CONSPIRACY THEORIES: EPISTEMOLOGICAL QUESTIONS Chapter 2. A corpus-driven exploration of conspiracy theorising as a discourse type: Lexical indicators of argumentative patterning. Paola Catenaccio Chapter 3. Is my mobile phone listening to me? Conspiratorial thinking, digital literacies, and everyday encounters with surveillance. Rodney H. Jones Chapter 4. “Go ahead and ‘debunk’ truth by calling it a conspiracy theory”: The discursive construction of conspiracy theoryness in online affinity spaces. Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Nuria Lorenzo-Dus Chapter 5. “You want me to be wrong”: Expert ethos, (de-)legitimation, and ethotic straw men as discursive resources for conspiracy theories. Thierry Herman and Steve Oswald Chapter 6. Fake conspiracy: Trump’s anti-Chinese ‘COVID-19-as-war’ scenario. Andreas Musolff PART II. CONSPIRACY THEORY-RELATED COMMUNICATIVE PHENOMENA Chapter 7. Exploring the echo chamber concept: A linguistic perspective. Marina Bondi and Leonardo Sanna Chapter 8. “If you can’t see the pattern here, there’s something wrong”: A cognitive account of conspiracy narratives, schemas, and the construction of the ‘expert’. Jessica Mason Chapter 9. Complementary concepts of disinformation: Conspiracy theories and ‘fake news’. Philip Seargeant Chapter 10. COVID-19 conspiracy theories as affective discourse. Carmen Lee PART III. SOCIAL MEDIA AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES Chapter 11. The ID2020 conspiracy theory in YouTube video comments during COVID-19: Bonding around religious, political, and technological discourses. Olivia Inwood and Michele Zappavigna Chapter 12. #conspiracymemes : A Framework-Based Analysis of Conspiracy Memes as Digital Multimodal Units and Ensuing User Reactions on Instagram. Derya Gür-Şeker, Ute K. Boonen and Michael Wentker Chapter 13. The New World Order on Twitter: Evaluative language in English and Spanish tweets. Natalia Mora López PART IV. STANCETAKING AND (DE-)LEGITIMATION WITHIN CONSPIRACY AND ANTI-CONSPIRACY DISCOURSES Chapter 14. Expressing stance towards COVID-19 conspiracy theories in Macedonian online forum discussions. Liljana Mitkovska and Fevzudina Saračević Chapter 15. Ideologies and the representation of identities in anti-vaccination conspiracy theories: A critical discourse analysis of the MMR vaccine-autism debate. Carlotta Fiammenghi Chapter 16. Collective identities in the online self-representation of conspiracy theorists: The cases of climate change denial, ‘Deep State’ and ‘Big Pharma’. Virginia Zorzi PART V. POLITICAL AND INTERNATIONAL DIMENSIONS OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES Chapter 17. Anti-Sorosism: Reviving the “Jewish world conspiracy”. John E. Richardson and Ruth Wodak Chapter 18. “These cameras won’t show the crowds”: Intradiscursive intertextuality in Trumpian discourse’s crowd size conspiracy theory. Kelsey Campolong Chapter 19. From strategic depiction of conspiracies to conspiracy theories: RT’s and Sputnik’s representations of coronavirus infodemic. Mari-Liis Madisson and Andreas Ventsel Chapter 20. “Gender ideology” and the discursive infrastructure of a transnational conspiracy theory. Angela Zottola and Rodrigo Borba Epilogue. Beyond discourse theory in the conspiratorial mode? The critical issue of truth in the age of post-truth. Johannes Angermuller Notes on contributors Index
Massimiliano Demata Translation and revolution: the case of Guglielmo Pepe's Relazione delle circ... more Massimiliano Demata Translation and revolution: the case of Guglielmo Pepe's Relazione delle circostanze relative agli avvenimenti politici e militari in Napoli, nel 1820 e nel 1821.
This paper addresses the construction of the concepts of populism and anti-populism and their met... more This paper addresses the construction of the concepts of populism and anti-populism and their metaphorical realisations in British news discourse, and specifically in the Daily Mail and The Guardian, in 2016, a crucial year for populist politics. The analysis of two corpora made of articles from the two newspapers is based on the methodology offered by Corpus Linguistics and Corpus Approach to Critical Metaphor Analysis. The metaphors of populism emerging from the analysis highlight a substantially standardised use of the metaphor POPULISM IS (UPWARD) MOVEMENT, both for populists and anti-populists, but with diverging evaluations. The authors argue that metaphors play a key role in orienting the public perception of populism based on shared modes of understanding social and political life.
he papers published in this issue of JAm It! respond to the urgent need for multidisciplinary app... more he papers published in this issue of JAm It! respond to the urgent need for multidisciplinary approaches to the study of the relationship between migration and the environment, especially in the North American context. This relationship has always existed and has been the main cause, or one of the main causes, of many mass migrations across or between nations or continents. However, the last three decades or so have witnessed dramatic, and often apocalyptic, changes in the environment caused
Abbreviations Notes on the Contributors Introduction: M.Demata & D.Wu Francis Jeffrey and the Sco... more Abbreviations Notes on the Contributors Introduction: M.Demata & D.Wu Francis Jeffrey and the Scottish Critical Tradition P.Flynn The Edinburgh Review and the Representation of Scotland F.Stafford A Great Theatre of Outrage and Disorder: Figuring Ireland in the Edinburgh Review , 1802-29 T.Webb Prejudiced Knowledge: Travel Literature in the Edinburgh Review M.Demata Walter Scott, Antiquarianism, and the Political Discourse of the Edinburgh Review , 1802-11 S.Manning Jeffreyism, Byron's Wordsworth, and the Nonhuman in Nature P.H.Fry Against their Better Selves: Byron, Jeffrey and the Edinburgh J.Stabler Rancour and Rabies: Hazlitt, Coleridge and Jeffrey in Dialogue D.Wu Women and the Edinburgh Review S.Curran Index
Textus, 2021
This article analyses the representation of the British National Health Service (NHS) in Governme... more This article analyses the representation of the British National Health Service (NHS) in Government communication and news media in Britain as a crucial discursive figure of British national identity both during the months preceding the Brexit referendum of June 2016 and in the early months of the diffusion of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. We focus on a number of issues regarding the ways in which the NHS has been portrayed in the public arena. Both during the Brexit campaign and at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the NHS was adopted as a powerful unifying national symbol to be protected, thanks to a populist language based on the adoption of quasi-religious tropes and mythical themes, war metaphors, and praise for heroism. This populist language was charged with rhetorical messages and slogans which turned the NHS into an image of Britishness, as emerges especially from an analysis of the leading front-page articles from the right-wing newspaper Daily Mail in the early phases of the pandemic. Keywords: NHS, Brexit, Britishness, Covid-19, nationalism, pandemic, Daily Mail.
Metaphor, Nation and Discourse
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Papers by Massimiliano Demata
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements | pp. ix–x
Chapter 1. Conspiracy theory discourses: Critical inquiries into the language of anti-science, post-trutherism, mis/disinformation and alternative media. Massimiliano Demata, Virginia Zorzi and Angela Zottola
PART I. CONSPIRACY THEORIES: EPISTEMOLOGICAL QUESTIONS
Chapter 2. A corpus-driven exploration of conspiracy theorising as a discourse type: Lexical indicators of argumentative patterning. Paola Catenaccio
Chapter 3. Is my mobile phone listening to me? Conspiratorial thinking, digital literacies, and everyday encounters with surveillance. Rodney H. Jones
Chapter 4. “Go ahead and ‘debunk’ truth by calling it a conspiracy theory”: The discursive construction of conspiracy theoryness in online affinity spaces. Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Nuria Lorenzo-Dus
Chapter 5. “You want me to be wrong”: Expert ethos, (de-)legitimation, and ethotic straw men as discursive resources for conspiracy theories. Thierry Herman and Steve Oswald
Chapter 6. Fake conspiracy: Trump’s anti-Chinese ‘COVID-19-as-war’ scenario. Andreas Musolff
PART II. CONSPIRACY THEORY-RELATED COMMUNICATIVE PHENOMENA
Chapter 7. Exploring the echo chamber concept: A linguistic perspective. Marina Bondi and Leonardo Sanna
Chapter 8. “If you can’t see the pattern here, there’s something wrong”: A cognitive account of conspiracy narratives, schemas, and the construction of the ‘expert’. Jessica Mason
Chapter 9. Complementary concepts of disinformation: Conspiracy theories and ‘fake news’. Philip Seargeant
Chapter 10. COVID-19 conspiracy theories as affective discourse. Carmen Lee
PART III. SOCIAL MEDIA AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES
Chapter 11. The ID2020 conspiracy theory in YouTube video comments during COVID-19: Bonding around religious, political, and technological discourses. Olivia Inwood and Michele Zappavigna
Chapter 12. #conspiracymemes : A Framework-Based Analysis of Conspiracy Memes as Digital Multimodal Units and Ensuing User Reactions on Instagram. Derya Gür-Şeker, Ute K. Boonen and Michael Wentker
Chapter 13. The New World Order on Twitter: Evaluative language in English and Spanish tweets. Natalia Mora López
PART IV. STANCETAKING AND (DE-)LEGITIMATION WITHIN CONSPIRACY AND ANTI-CONSPIRACY DISCOURSES
Chapter 14. Expressing stance towards COVID-19 conspiracy theories in Macedonian online forum discussions. Liljana Mitkovska and Fevzudina Saračević
Chapter 15. Ideologies and the representation of identities in anti-vaccination conspiracy theories: A critical discourse analysis of the MMR vaccine-autism debate. Carlotta Fiammenghi
Chapter 16. Collective identities in the online self-representation of conspiracy theorists: The cases of climate change denial, ‘Deep State’ and ‘Big Pharma’. Virginia Zorzi
PART V. POLITICAL AND INTERNATIONAL DIMENSIONS OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES
Chapter 17. Anti-Sorosism: Reviving the “Jewish world conspiracy”. John E. Richardson and Ruth Wodak
Chapter 18. “These cameras won’t show the crowds”: Intradiscursive intertextuality in Trumpian discourse’s crowd size conspiracy theory. Kelsey Campolong
Chapter 19. From strategic depiction of conspiracies to conspiracy theories: RT’s and Sputnik’s representations of coronavirus infodemic. Mari-Liis Madisson and Andreas Ventsel
Chapter 20. “Gender ideology” and the discursive infrastructure of a transnational conspiracy theory. Angela Zottola and Rodrigo Borba
Epilogue. Beyond discourse theory in the conspiratorial mode? The critical issue of truth in the age of post-truth. Johannes Angermuller
Notes on contributors
Index
REVIEWS
"This is a thought-provoking book on the notion of border. By relying on Anderson's notion of 'imagined community', Demata successfully explain how the border is an ideological construct. To do so, he explores Donald Trump's aesthetic conceptualisation of "The Wall" as a commodity and of Democrats' appeal to security and moral values. While different constructions can be found, Demata convincingly shows how the notion of 'border' is exploited in political discourse for legitimising the existence of a (differently-constructed) nation".
Laura Filardo-Llamas, Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics, Universidad de Valladolid
"This book contains an extensive case study about ‘Trump’s beautiful wall’, promoted and branded as unique, as protecting the US from so-called illegal immigration. Borders are contested in this case; on the one hand, ‘closed borders’ are promoted, on the other, ‘open borders’, with a range of different arguments, some of which are necessarily fallacious. However, both sides promise security and border management. Theoretically and methodologically, this book is an outstanding example of context-dependent qualitative discourse-historical analysis which allows tracing Trump’s propaganda step-by -step, both visually and textually. Such differentiated and detailed case studies allow understanding and explaining the success of far-right ethno-nationalist populist body- and border politics, integrated into a populist politics of fear. A must-read for scholars and graduate students alike".
Ruth Wodak, Distinguished Professor and Chair in Discourse Studies, Lancaster University/University Vienna
Special Section Theme: Populism and its Languages
Editors: Massimiliano Demata (University of Turin) Maria Ivana Lorenzetti (University of Verona)
Call for Papers
Today the term Populism is a trendy delegitimising term used by politicians to criticise the modus operandi of their opponents, portrayed as demagogues or manipulators. In political science, however, it is an ambiguous and complex phenomenon that ultimately entails putting into question the institutional order by constructing a dualistic view of society.
Populism has taken on many forms and connotations through time, also shifting from right-wing to left-wing orientation. Nowadays populist movements on both sides of the political spectrum exploit a feeling of disillusion, widely felt in the public sphere of many countries, in the traditional workings of representative democracy and in the establishment (or the “elite”) by claiming to represent the true will of the “people” and are founded on a divisive rhetoric (us vs. them) .
Populism has been the subject of a vast literature and the source of intense scholarly debate. Many definitions of populism have been proposed, as it has been considered an ideology, or “thin-centred ideology” (Mudde), a discourse (Laclau), a style (Moffitt), a discursive style (Hofstadter) or a form of political strategy (Weyland). However, very little attention has been devoted to how populism is structured in discourse: while both media observers and scholars debate on who or what is truly “populist”, there are still gaps in the literature about the language – and most crucially the discursive strategies – used by populist actors as well as their electorate.This special section of Iperstoria on “Populism and Its
Languages” will focus on the discursive strategies used by those political leaders, movements and segments of the electorate who are ritually branded as “populist” within political and media discourses. The ultimate aim of this collection is to explore the possibility that there are certain common features in discourse that can be characterised as quintessentially populist.
We welcome contributions in English from scholars working within a wide range of theoretical approaches, both from a quantitative or qualitative perspective, addressing discourses (by leaders, parties, media as well as the public) in the Anglo-American public spheres that may be characterised as “populist”, that discuss populist performances, rhetoric and practices, or focus on different textual typologies (e.g. speeches, newspapers articles, social media posts). Papers may also include contrastive studies, but a focus on the Anglo-American perspective is required.
Abstracts, of no more than 300 words plus references and a short bio sketch of the author(s), should include a clear indication of the methodology used and should be submitted to both editors Massimiliano Demata (massimiliano.demata@unito.it) and Maria Ivana Lorenzetti (mariaivana.lorenzetti@univr.it) by 30 September 2019.
Papers will be subjected to a double-blind peer review process.
Submission Schedule:
30 September 2019: abstracts submission to the editors 15 October 2019: notification of acceptance 31 January 2020: first draft sent to the editors 30 March 2020: reviewers’ comments sent to authors 30 April 2020: submission of final manuscript
All inquiries regarding the issue should be sent to massimiliano.demata@unito.it and mariaivana.lorenzetti@univr.it
EURO-AMERICAN RELATIONS IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION: RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES
A special issue of DE EUROPA, edited by Massimiliano Demata (University of Turin) and Marco Mariano (University of Turin)
http://www.deeuropa.unito.it/ ISSN 2611-853X
De Europa is a double-blind peer-reviewed open access journal published by the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society at the University of Turin. De Europa is a multidisciplinary journal which publishes contributions from different disciplines in order to embrace the complexity and richness of Europe. The focus is on Europe and the value of its unification, the goal is to identify and highlight European identity, shared values, the need to find common solutions to meet the challenges posed by globalisation.
Following the very successful conference on “Euro-American Relations in the Age of Globalization” held in Turin on 6 May 2019, the editors are looking for abstracts on any aspect of the current Euro-American relations, with a focus on the new scenario created by the Trump administration, but also looking at the crises and transformations in transatlantic relations during the three decades between 1989 and 2019.
Papers may address one or more key issues which are relevant to Euro-American relations today, including:
-Discourses of nationalisms, populisms and globalization;
-The role of multilateral institutions (e.g. the EU, NATO, the UN) and the perceived loss of their importance;
-The role played by mass media and social media in the construction of the public sphere and the circulation of ideas and languages between Europe and the US;
-Discourses of immigration, fear, security;
-Market, protectionism and fair trade.
IMPORTANT DATES
30 June 2019: submission of abstracts (300 words excluding references, plus five keywords)
10 July 2019: notification of acceptance of abstracts communicated to authors
30 November 2019: submission of papers for review (5000-8000 words)
1 March 2020: reviews sent to authors
31 May 2020: submission of final paper
1 July 2020: publication of special issue
Abstracts and enquiries should be sent to both massimiliano.demata@unito.it and marco.mariano@unito.it.
on migration which have become central in media and politics both in Europe and the USA. The five papers presented here look at the representation of migrants in public discourse from a variety of perspectives and provide the current debate on migration within and
beyond Linguistics with some original insights into the discourses of migration.
Index terms: Brexit, Britain, Corbyn, Labour, nation, nationalism, people, populism
will look at Corbyn’s speeches, newspapers articles written by him and official Labour statements from 2016–2017. It will specifically analyse the evolution of Corbyn’s discourse during the period between the referendum and the General Election, looking at how certain choices within his discourse may be related to populism. The key argument developed in the chapter is that in his discourse Corbyn responded to the wave of populist politics that caused the Leave victory in the EU referendum by using the key concept of populism and of rhetoric about
the ‘people’ in a politically progressive manner.
Rome, Italy
University of “Tor Vergata”
20 – 22 June 2019
a-mode.eumade4ll.eu
_________________________________________________
Keynote speakers:
Marina Bondi
Carey Jewitt
Rodney Jones
Gunther Kress and Jeff Bezemer
David Machin
Theo van Leeuwen
_________________________________________________
A-MODE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
Elisabetta Adami – University of Leeds, UK
Cristina Arizzi – University of Messina, Italy
Styliani Karatza – National and Kapodistrian University of Athens,
Greece, and University of Leeds, UK
Ivana Marenzi – L3S Research Center, Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany
Ilaria Moschini – University of Florence, Italy
Sandra Petroni – University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, Italy
Marc Rocca – Rocca Creative Thinking Limited, UK
Maria Grazia Sindoni – University of Messina, Italy
Discourses of and about Conspiracy Theories
Ed. by Ruth Breeze, Massimiliano Demata, Virginia Zorzi and Angela Zottola
Conspiracy theories (CTs) seem to be having a growing influence on public opinion in many countries. A CT is “an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who attempt to conceal their role” (Sunstein & Vermeule 2009). In other words, conspiracy theorists lay out a distorted representation of the world in which we are constantly being exploited and oppressed for the benefit of powerful groups. CTs are fed by misinformation and fake news and find a very favourable terrain in the Internet and especially in social media, where Facebook and Twitter have had a major role in spreading CTs and misinformation. While CTs are not new, the current age of “post-truth” or “the death of truth” has given new impetus to a set of increasingly powerful and popular counter-discourses opposing the hegemonic mass media, political institutions, the “elites” and official science.
CTs construct a counter-reality and a set of alternative explanations of complex problems, ranging from health issues (e.g. 5G, anti-vaxxers), weather control and climate (chemtrails, climate change deniers), economy and the state infrastructure (the New World Order, the “deep state”). Those who believe in CTs oppose the validity of mainstream science, the discourse of “official” media and state institutions, and employ discursive strategies based on highly emotional language and the construction of conflictual social identities.
CTs are also used as political tools, and are routinely used by some political parties as part of their agenda based on finding scapegoats for social or economic problems (Richardson 2013; Ter Wal 2017; Wodak 2020). Populist parties and leaders use CTs as a means to mobilize people against the elite or an outside enemy and explain the elite’s oppression of the people (Bergmann 2018; Bergmann and Butter 2020).
The recent outbreak of COVID-19 has witnessed the rise of numerous CTs which supported accounts and explanations about the pandemic outside (and against) official science and mass media, even though most of them lack any hard evidence and often consist in totally exaggerated or implausible claims, which have been used with political motivations, for example to attack China.
Discourses of and about Conspiracy Theories aims to fill an important gap in the literature: CTs have attracted considerable attention from political scientists (e.g. Uscinski 2019), but there has been little extensive research done on the actual discourses and language of CTs, or those opposing them, by using the approaches developed by Discourse Analysis or Critical Discourse Analysis. We are looking for chapters focusing on the discourse of the currently most popular CTs (including those about the COVID-19 pandemic) as elaborated by three groups of social actors:
1) the “manufacturers” of CTs;
2) the “supporters” of CTs;
3) the “opponents” of CTs.
The focus of single chapters may be national, transnational or comparative. Issues may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Discursive strategies of Self-Legitimization and Delegitimization (i.e. CTs attacking official media, institutions or science, or viceversa)
- Online discourses
- Emotions and violence in language
- Argumentation
- Humour in or against CTs
- Multimodal strategies in discourses of and against CTs
Abstracts for chapters (200 words plus references) should be received by 30 June 2020. An international publisher has expressed strong interest in this volume, and we will submit the full proposal to them after selection of abstracts. Confirmation of acceptance will be by 15 July 2020, and chapters will be due by 31 December 2020. We plan to have the book published by early 2022.
Please send abstracts to:
rbreeze@unav.es
massimiliano.demata@unito.it
virginia.zorzi@unito.it
angela.zottola@unito.it
References
Bergmann, Eirikur (2018) Conspiracy and Populism. The Politics of Misinformation. London: Palgrave.
Bergmann and Butter (2020) “Conspiracy Theory and Populism”, in M. Butter, P. Knight (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories. London: Routledge.
Jessika ter Wal (2017) “Anti-Foreigner Campaigns in the Austrian Freedom Party and Italian Northern League: The Discursive Construction of Identity * in R. Wodak and A. Pelinka, The Haider Phenomenon. London: Routledge, pp. 213-230.
Richardson, J. (2013) “Ploughing the same Furrow? Continuity and Change on Britain’s Extreme-Right Fringe.” In R. Wodak, M. KhosraviNik, B. Mral, B. (eds.) Right-Wing Populism in Europe. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 105-119.
Sunstein, Cass R., & Vermeule, Adrian (2009). Conspiracy theories: Causes and cures. Journal of Political Philosophy 17, 202–227.
Uscinski, J. E., ed. (2019) Conspiracy Theories & the People Who Believe Them. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wodak, R. (2020) “Ruth Wodak on How to Become a Far-Right Populist”, Social Science Space, March 2, 2020. https://www.socialsciencespace.com/2020/03/ruth-wodak-on-how-to-become-a-far-right-populist/
The journal publishes high-quality, original research and ensures its academic rigour by utilising double-blind expert review process. It strives to make the review and publication process as transparent, smooth, and user-friendly as possible while maintaining the high standard of published content.
The themes of future general and special issues might include: language and ageism; language and disability; gender and language; same sex marriage and civil partnership; racist language; religious language discrimination; legal perspectives on language and discrimination; language and sexual orientation; trolling; offence; political correctness; drug/alcohol users and language; fat shaming; language and social justice; islamophobia; anti-Semitism; the language of terrorism; standardisation, education and 2nd language learners; migration policies and language analysis; hate speech; animal rights/primate campaigns and language; dialect, accent and discrimination; minority languages; metaphors and discrimination; challenging linguistic stereotypes; language and class; freedom of speech.
Editors
Massimiliano Demata, University of Turin, Italy
Natalia Knoblock, Saginaw Valley State University, United States
Service (NHS) in Government communication and news media in Britain
as a crucial discursive figure of British national identity both during the
months preceding the Brexit referendum of June 2016 and in the early
months of the diffusion of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. We focus
on a number of issues regarding the ways in which the NHS has been
portrayed in the public arena. Both during the Brexit campaign and at the
onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the NHS was adopted as a powerful
unifying national symbol to be protected, thanks to a populist language
based on the adoption of quasi-religious tropes and mythical themes, war
metaphors, and praise for heroism. This populist language was charged
with rhetorical messages and slogans which turned the NHS into an image
of Britishness, as emerges especially from an analysis of the leading frontpage articles from the right-wing newspaper Daily Mail in the early phases of the pandemic.