[Linganth] IPrA 2023 panel Call for Papers

[Dominika Baran, Ph.D.]

Dear Colleagues,

We are organizing a panel for the 18th International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA 2023), to be held in Brussels, Belgium, on July 9-14, 2023. The panel is titled “On pragmatics and ‘peach tree dishes’: Discourses of far-right extremism, conspiracy, and solidarity.” We would like to invite you to submit a paper to present in our panel. The panel abstract, including a CFP statement, is included below at the end of this email.

The IPrA deadline for submitting abstracts is November 1, 2022. All abstracts must be submitted via the official IPrA portal, as submissions to our specific panel. The instructions for how to submit abstracts may be found at: https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP (see the bullet point “Panel contributions”). For the official IPrA submission, you must be an IPrA member. However, please feel free to contact us first directly via email with your ideas, or any questions regarding the panel.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Best regards,
Dominika & Cat


Panel Title: On pragmatics and ‘peach tree dishes’: Discourses of far-right extremism, conspiracy, and solidarity

Panel Organizers: Cat Tebaldi (cat.tebaldi at gmail.com<mailto:cat.tebaldi at gmail.com>) and Dominika Baran (dominika.baran at duke.edu<mailto:dominika.baran at duke.edu>)

Panel Abstract:

Although often dismissed by both academics and progressive voters as nonsensical and irrelevant fringe ideas, far-right conspiracy narratives in fact present complex, multimodal, and affective discourses that contest, co-opt, and connect to mainstream and official knowledges, and as such become increasingly normalized, accepted, and influential. Responding to the 2023 IPrA conference theme of exceptionality and ordinariness, this panel explores the conflicting (meta)pragmatic regimentation and unruliness of digital discourses of far-right politics, of our complicity in them (Verschueren 2021) or contestation of them. Digital, multimodal discourses can co-opt the language of the ordinary to promote exceptional conspiracy narratives as, for example, meat eating in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent evocation of the supposedly outrageous notion of growing meat in a “peach tree dish” (sic!) which aligned the replacement of meat with the replacement of white men. Alternatively, they banalize the language of progressive values: COVID anti-vaccine advocates have co-opted the slogan of reproductive rights activists, “my body, my choice,” in protest signs in Ireland, UK, US, and elsewhere (Strange 2021), while in Poland, anti-genderist politicians and media have sought to resignify the LGBTQ+ symbol of the rainbow as an index of sinful, immoral, and unpatriotic ideologies (Baran 2022). Perhaps most perplexingly, the reactionary right sometimes takes up the language of critique (Tebaldi 2021) and creates a popular, pseudo-linguistic analysis around the ordinariness of words, claiming that it is the progressives who twist and denaturalize the “true” meaning of words and concepts such as, for example, “marriage,” “freedom,” or “patriotism.” Given the global influence of rightwing languages of hate, this panel aims to examine and demystify their discursive operation in various national, regional, and local contexts, but also to engage with existing counter-discourses that seek to disrupt rightwing attempts at co-opting and perverting progressive terms and ideas. This latter focus is crucial because, as Borba (2018) convincingly argues, “hatred is past oriented” (177) whereas “acts of hope” (174) look to the future and to the potential for checking and pushing against acts of hate. Consequently, we invite contributions to the panel that include but are not limited to: theoretical exploration of contestations and different uptakes of discourses, exploration of rightwing protest discourses (e.g. anti-vaccine, anti-reproductive rights, conspirituality, and others), the new solidarities produced between but also, crucially, against these, and attempts at disrupting these rightwing uptakes through oppositional discourses of hope. We welcome methodological and theoretical approaches including, but not limited to: Critical Discourse Analysis, Discourse Historical Analysis, semiotic analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, media discourse, Conversation Analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, narrative analysis, computational sociolinguistics, corpus analysis, critical sociolinguistics, and other discourse analysis and/or digital analysis approaches.



Dominika M. Baran
Associate Professor
English Department
Duke University
Allen Building 303
Durham, NC 27708

Pronouns: she/her/hers

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