[Commlist] Discourses of War and Peace: Reflections on and around the Aggression against Ukraine - DiscourseNet ad-hoc workshop (Workshop)

Workshop


Date: 13/04/2022 - 13/04/2022
Registration deadline: 6/04/2022
Call for papers ending on: 6/04/2022

Welcome to Discourses of War and Peace, a virtual conference in response to
the ongoing war in Ukraine. Our first ad-hoc workshop will take place on 14
April 2022 on Zoom.

Two steps for joining this event:


	
	Register by email.

	
		To receive the Zoom invitation link, please send an email to JaspalSingh
at: (jaspal.singh /at/ open.ac.uk), until 13 April 2022 midnight at the very
latest.
	
	
	
	Make a user profile and pay your annual DiscourseNet fees.

	
		To be eligible to participate at DiscourseNet events, you have to either
have or create a user profile on our website (see the tab on the top-right
corner) and become a fee-paying member of DiscourseNet. The annual feeis
€30. Instructions on how to pay your fees can be found
here: https://discourseanalysis.net/DN [1] - Please understandthat we
cannot send you a Zoom link (and let you into the meeting), if you are not a
fee-paying member of DiscourseNet.


Workshop Synopsis
In the light of the ongoing campaign of the Russian government against the
Ukrainian people, DiscourseNet, the international association of discourse
researchers, expresses its deep solidarity with all the people who suffer
(directly and indirectly) from the military conflict — especiallyour
friends and colleagues from Ukraine directly affected by it. We are fully
aware of the fact that the current situation will dramatically worsen the
life and work conditions of our Russian colleagues, too.

Facilitating the academic exchange of different communities, beyond language
boundaries, discriminatory categories and social hierarchies as well as 
using
our research to foster democratic decision making, civic rights, various
forms of informed activism, academic freedom, and peace are constituent 
parts
of our network’s mission.

We observe the war in Ukraine with great concern. DiscourseNet encourages
critical research to monitor the invasion and its effects on Ukraine, Russia
and all the countries involved. In this mission, we expressly want to
strengthen our relationship with Ukrainian as well as Russian scholars.

In the next few weeks, DiscourseNet will promote further discussions and 
host
events about what discourse researchers can do in order to provide
non-violent and democratic spaces for conflict prevention and resolution. We
will discuss especially the power of words in armed conflicts as well as the
power of discourses for peaceful dialogue.

The first ad-hoc workshop will take place as an online event on 14 April
2022, between 9.45am and 5.00pm CEST (Central European Summer Time).



Workshop Programme
All times are displayed in Eastern European Summer Time (EEST) (UTC+3).



10:45am

Welcome



11:00am

The War Concept Patchwork:  Conceptualization, Contradictions, Conflict,
Communication

Lyubov Gurevich

The ongoing war’s conceptualization, contradictions and conflict
communication create an impression of a mixture of incompatible components
reminding a patchwork, where every piece of fabric is unique by its form and
colour. They are supposed to tell us the whole story in its logic order, 
but,
basically, represent a mixture of discrete sheds.



11:20am

The Russian World imaginary: transmitting supremacy through language and
culture

Tatiana Romashko

I am going to address the “Russian world” imaginary and its role in the
justification of the war in Ukraine. How does Russian state cultural policy
contribute to the "Russian world" imaginary? What is the ‘missionof
culture’ in constructing and maintaining the Russian world and its
subjects?



11:40am

Laughter through Tears: Role of Humor in Ukrainian Resistance
Against Russian Aggression

Mozolevska Alina and  Petro Mohyla

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that started on February 24 2022 leads
not only to the shift of real and mental borders in Europe but also
drives profound changes of not only geopolitical visions of the contemporary
world but also of Ukrainian mentality and national identity. The paper seeks
to define the role of humour in shaping the image of the enemy, Ukrainian
army and Ukrainian nation. The data set is composed of more than
1000 caricatures and memes produced between February 24 and March 29.



12:10pm

The discursive political economy of the Russian rentier economy

Jens Maesse

The presentation analyses the discursive, economic and political elementsof
the Russian political economy that is – in contrast to almost allother
rentier states – developing from a trade oriented economy to a rentier
state. Through this “back-ward” orientation, specific expansionary
dynamics emerge that Arrighi described as a switch from C-T-C´ to
T-C-T’.



12:30pm

Roundtable discussion



1:00pm

Lunch break



2:30pm

War of Visuals, Emotions, and the Use of Cyber Tools

Sybille Reinke de Buitrago

The contribution will explore the nexus of visuals, emotions and new
cyber tools in the Russian war against Ukraine.Visuals of conflict and
suffering evoke emotions. The contribution considers how such visuals are
used for mobilization, and how various people – from ordinaryones to
hackers – have turned to various cyber tools to support either side in the
war.



2:50pm

Collective paranoia in Russia

Johannes Angermuller

For centuries, Russian domestic policies have swung between “Western” and
“Slavophile” phases. In my contribution, I propose to retrace some
developments in Russian public discourse since perestroika, which has seen a
progressive turn against the “West”. Starting from my discourse analysis
of Putin in the early 2010s, I will discuss the discursive construction of
collective paranoia in Russia (e.g. against the “NATO threat”) since the
2000s and some parallels with the recent rise of extreme right-wing
discourses in liberal democracies.
Angermüller, J. (2012) ‘Fixing meaning. The many voices of the
post-liberal hegemony in Russia’, Journal of Language and Politics,11(2),
pp. 115–134.



3:10pm

Political Languages of Current War

Bela Lebedeva

The aim of the research is to collect and compare how new challenges and
differences of political language have reflected in national and global
media. Research methods are discursive and narrative analysis of media
mainstreams during the war between Ukraine and Russia in Slavic languages,
English and French.



3:40pm

Imperialism, language, and not-so-soft power: Analyzing discourses of the
'Russian World'

Juldyz Smagulova and Kara Fleming

We critically examine discourses of the 'Russian world’ /‘русский
мир’, the idea that Russia ends where the Russian language ends,
tracing concepts of the ‘civilizational mission’ of Russian from the
imperial era to the present to show how these discourses move from the realm
of soft power to military invasion.



4:00pm

The discursive power of memes: Memetic discourse around the Ukrainian war

Liisi Laineste, Anastasiya Fiadotava, Guillem Castañar, Sergey Troitskiy

Memes offer responsive acute commentary on societal matters by using,
reinforcing and recontextualising established stereotypes. They provide
non-violent and democratic spaces of discussion for conflicts. Their
inevitable discursive situatedness makes them an attractive tool for
political online engagement, but at the same time, their ambiguity and
commonplaceness undermines that function in many ways. The presentation
focuses on memes on the Ukrainian war that spread in Eastern (Russia,
Estonia, Belarus) and Western Europe (Spain). We analyse the discursive
contexts of four small meme samples referring to the personalisation or
“face” of the war: Putin, and the motives that relate to that: liar,
enemy, coward etc. We pinpoint the use of local references to show the
connections between the degree of a country’s engagement in the conflict
and the content of memes in that country.



4:20pm

The good refugee is welcome” – the role of gender when fleeing from war

Katharina Gallant

Media reports on Ukrainian refugees differ from the coverage on Syrian
refugees. Beyond potential racism expressed in this discourse, historic and
political differences, the potential identification with refugees, and 
gender
discrimination are at stake. Is there a stereotype of a “good refugee”
who is welcome to the EU?



4:40pm

Beyond the war: Russophobia as a discursive weapon

Júlio Antonio Bonatti Santos

This paper proposal aims to understand some discursive constructions around
Russophobia expressed in movements of cancellation of Russian art in Europe.
We will seek to understand, through news from digital newspapers, which
arguments are used to legitimize these actions, which could be materialized
or not in an example of cultural persecution.



5:00pm

Roundtable discussion



5:45pm

Closing

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