[Commlist] The Language of (Perma)Crisis: Discourses and Politics of the 'New Normal' (Conference)

Conference

Ljubljana, Slovenia

Date: 25/09/2024 - 26/09/2024
Registration deadline: 19/09/2024
Call for papers ending on: 29/08/2024

The notion of crisis has emerged as a defining concept of global 
reality. Its
meanings, however, are momentously shifting: from the traditional conception
of crises as temporary “turning points”, to “a state of greater or
lesser permanence” (Krzyżanowski et al. 2023), as captured by the recent
coinage of permacrisis. Yet, these dynamics of language are never just about
naming. In the third decade of the 21st century, marked by a global 
pandemic,
a longstanding climate crisis, and the eruption of devastating waves of
conflict, the rhetoric of a permanent ‘new normal’ has by now proven to
carry great potential to reinforce inequality and exclusion. Even more
worryingly, they echo the open-ended semantics of crisis historically known
to normalize politics of violence and even genocide as unavoidable (Pollack
2020). Still, the new vernaculars of crisis merit attention both for their
polarizing power, and for their potential to imagine alternatives beyond
normalizing the global systemic collapse as the only possibility for the
future.

This conference explores the aspects of language that construct the meanings
of crisis. Within a broadly sociolinguistic and critical discourse
perspective, it will examine varied forms of crisis discourse, with a
particular interest in representations of collectivity, division and
solidarity. Bringing together scholars from a range of linguistic and
geopolitical contexts, we hope to stimulate conversations about the role of
language – as well as language scholars and academia – in contexts of
global turmoil long felt to surpass a ‘critical’ point, in any of its
definitions.

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