Call for papers: the pragmatics of crisis

[Jacobs Geert]

CALL FOR PAPERS:
The pragmatics of crisis

(apologies for cross-posting)

We intend to propose a panel on the Pragmatics of Crisis at the 7th
International Pragmatics Conference in Budapest, Hungary (9-14
July 2000). Below you will find a brief outline of the panel theme.
If you are interested in contributing a paper, please contact Geert
Jacobs (geert.jacobs at ufsia.ac.be) or  Per-Anders Forstorp
(forstorp at nada.kth.se) or send them a one-page abstract no later than
October 27th.
Check the IPrA home page for more details about the conference at
http://ipra-www.uia.ac.be/ipra/

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PRAGMATICS OF CRISIS

Within the domain of institutional and professional discourse, as well
as in the analysis of media discourse, crisis communication has recently
received a lot of attention. The public, professional and everyday
orientation towards socio-cultural and political events being described
with the notions and rhetorics of ”risk”, ”fear”, ”crisis”, ”trust”,
”responsibility” and ”security” highlights a perennial and contemporary
concern with the sociocultural management of crisis (cf. Beck, Giddens
Luhmann).

This panel will in particular focus on the salient communicative and
discursive aspects of crisis communication in business organizations and
government agencies, such as the analysis of (the combination of) form,
content, dynamics and function of the interaction, management and
maintenance of critical events. Attempts at linking such
approaches to the socio-theoretical and political concerns connected to
the understanding of crisis, will be encouraged. Our aim is to address
the options for a broader understanding (pragmatics) of these
phenomena.

Contributions to the panel should be based on empirical analyses of
various aspects of crisis events taken from suggested contexts, for
instance: the management of internal and external emergency responses;
the rhetoric of product recall advertising; communication with and
within emergency rescue centers; media representations and coverage of
crisis events; intertextuality of discourses and contexts of crisis
management; interactions with various forms of expertise and
(secondary) victims; processes of victimization and blame allocation;
strategies for coping with demands for empathy and action, etc.

The panel proposes to bring together for the first time various
perspectives on the pragmatics of crisis, analytical approaches and
methods such as CA, rhetorics, ethnography of communication,
pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, linguistics and other areas of
discourse analysis. The scope of analytical perspectives will also enable
us to address questions concerning methods of inquiry and
investigation, as well as communicative and ethical issues connected to
the role as a researcher/vulture in crisis events.


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Geert Jacobs
Dept of Language and Communication
UFSIA -UNIVERSITY OF ANTWERP
Prinsstraat 13
B-2000 Antwerp
Belgium

tel. + 32 3 220 41 39
e-mail: geert.jacobs at ufsia.ac.be

Per-Anders Forstorp
Department of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science
Royal Institute of Technology
SE-100 44 Stockholm
SWEDEN

tel. +45 8 7906680
e-mail: forstorp at nada.kth.se