CFP Themed issue

[E. Hidalgo Tenorio]

Dear colleagues,

Could you please post this CFP? Thanks a lot in advance!

Encarna

---------------------------------------------------
Dr E. Hidalgo Tenorio
Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics
Depto. Filologias Inglesa y Alemana
Fac. Filosofia y Letras
Edificio Anexo, Planta 3º, Despacho F28
Campus de Cartuja s/n
18071, Granada
España
+34 958241000 (Ext. 20251)

---------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------

Topic: The construction of Otherness in Ireland

Draft title: “Irish history is not a closed shop”: A multidisciplinary 
approach to post-Mary Robinson Ireland

Executive summary:
In line with the general consensus that interdisciplinarity contributes 
towards understanding the complexities of phenomena, this project is 
designed to examine, from various perspectives, the old and new 
discourses generated in a changing society such as Ireland, which has 
recently witnessed spectacular transformations. In the last decade or 
so, the condition of some minorities has markedly improved; that is the 
case, for instance, of women, who have started holding down power 
positions, and homosexuals, who, after persecution, are beginning to 
enjoy equal legal status like the rest of Irish citizens. Similarly, the 
economic boom and the subsequent social turmoil have encouraged 
alternate notions of Irishness based on Ireland’s contemporary 
heterogeneity, which would have been unthinkable half a century ago. 
This is mainly derived from the present growing migrant intake, leading 
to the coexistence of white Catholic Irish descendants with other 
ethnicities and religious backgrounds in a now multicultural society. 
Furthermore, the impact of technology on education or business has 
shaped the Republic to such an extent that there remains less of the 
traditional rural nation the country has been renowned for. Lastly, in 
an almost rigid political landscape, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gale and Labour 
have given space to other parties with new agendas and persuasions 
demanding renovated ways of selling their ideas to the electorate. In 
this context, images of less privileged groups are continually 
generated; in some cases, these are moulded as a result of prejudice 
towards them and for fear of those who are different. Their 
demonisation, as represented, for example, through discourse in the 
media, is one of the consequences of the new social panorama in Ireland. 
With things the way they are, there is considerable interest in 
scrutinising the (discriminatory) viewpoints held by a number of 
individuals regarding Muslims, homosexuals, immigrants, prostitutes, the 
poor, and the Travellers, to mention but a few. The latter justifies a 
joint effort by a multidisciplinary team, which must face the challenge 
posed by the texts under analysis. The corpus will mainly consist of 
films, documentaries, news articles, political speeches and debates 
produced over the last fourteen years, as well as posters, videos, 
tweets and other multimodal materials used in the most recent election 
campaigns. These may reveal underlying ideologies present in both verbal 
and non-verbal communication. For our purposes, we will rely on 
corpus-based CDA (Baker, Gabrielatos and McEnery 2013), social actors 
analysis (van Leeuwen 2008), multimedia content analysis (Divakaran 
2009), or appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005). Other approaches 
will be welcome, though. One of the aims will be to detect how 
evaluative language can reflect the mentality ingrained in this 
particular society. Attention will also be paid to the construal of 
candidates’ public personae as well as that of the subjects of their 
discursive practices (Fairclough 2003). Finally, by focusing on 
different modes of filmic theory (Branigan 1984; Marks 2000; Naficy 
2001; Nichols 2001), and studying metaphorical, modality or transitivity 
patterns (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Forceville 1996; Halliday & Matthiessen 
2004), certain strategies of domination and subordination may be 
uncovered that are a manifestation of the Irish reality at this moment 
in time.

Areas of analysis:
Sociolinguistics, anthropology, multimodality, sociology, musicology, 
cultural studies, discourse analysis, political communication.

Date of abstract submission:
1 July 2014

Year of publication:
2015
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Contributors_data_IGALA.doc
Type: application/msword
Size: 32256 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gala-l/attachments/20140601/2b7a8118/attachment.doc>