35.2314, Calls: Panel - "Keeping it civil online: in pursuit of civility in social media interaction"

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-2314. Thu Aug 22 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.2314, Calls: Panel - "Keeping it civil online: in pursuit of civility in social media interaction"

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Date: 20-Aug-2024
From: Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen [sanna-kaisa.tanskanen at helsinki.fi]
Subject: Panel - "Keeping it civil online: in pursuit of civility in social media interaction"


Full Title: 19th International Pragmatics Conference - Panel; "Keeping
it civil online: in pursuit of civility in social media interaction"
Short Title: IPrA2025

Date: 22-Jun-2025 - 27-Jun-2025
Location: Brisbane, Australia
Contact Person: Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen
Meeting Email: sanna-kaisa.tanskanen at helsinki.fi
Web Site: https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP2025

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Computational Linguistics;
Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics

Call Deadline: 01-Nov-2024

Meeting Description:

Panel - "Keeping it civil online: in pursuit of civility in social
media interaction"

Call for Papers:

This panel is dedicated to examining the intricacies of civil
interaction on social media. Building on previous work on
pragmalinguistic or interactional features which may help bring
uncivil interaction back on track (see e.g. Tanskanen 2021; Vásquez
2021; Zhang et al. 2018), the panel aims to shed light on how civility
is enacted and negotiated by participants in various digital
communities. For the purposes of the panel, civil interaction involves
exhibiting a respectful orientation towards open discussion, aiming
not necessarily for agreement but striving for an understanding of
diverse viewpoints. As Vásquez (2021) notes, pragmatic research is
needed for an understanding of how participants can conduct civil
interaction online even when the topic is controversial.

Questions of civility may emerge especially in situations where
interaction is (close to) breaking down, i.e., when interaction seems
to be spiralling towards antagonism or conflict. In such situations,
or to avoid such situations, participants may use pragmalinguistic or
interactional strategies to make the interaction more civil.
Strategies uncovered by previous research include impersonalisation
strategies (e.g., use of passive voice) and metapragmatic signals of
communicative intent (Vásquez 2021) as well as explicit interventions
used to steer the interaction in a more civil direction or help
prevent a conflict (Tanskanen 2021).

Participants’ emic perspective as well as the role of community norms
are especially interesting in the negotiation and emic definition of
civility. Questions to be addressed can include: How do participants
signal acceptance or disapproval of features of discourse when it
comes to civility? How are the norms pertaining to civility negotiated
within these digital communities? By examining participants' reflexive
or metapragmatic awareness of civility, as proposed by Verschueren
(2000), insights into the contextual meanings of civility across
various platforms will be gained.

The negotiation of civility is intertwined with the affordances of the
platform on which the interaction takes place. We welcome research
across different social media platforms and languages to enable
comparisons and dialogue. This crosslinguistic and cross-platform
dialogue will help illuminate whether certain digital environments
facilitate or hinder the maintenance of civility, providing a broader
and more nuanced understanding of civility online.

Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa. 2021. “Stop arguing”: Interventions as
metapragmatic acts in discussion forum interaction. In Marjut
Johansson, Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen & Jan Chovanec (eds.), Analyzing
digital discourses: Between convergence and controversy, 219–244.
Palgrave Macmillan.
Vásquez, Camilla. 2021. “I appreciate u not being a total prick …”:
Oppositional stancetaking, impoliteness and relational work in
adversarial Twitter interactions. Journal of Pragmatics 185. 40–53.
Verschueren, Jef. 2000. Notes on the role of metapragmatic awareness
in language use. Pragmatics 10. 439–456.
Zhang, Justine et al. 2018. Conversations gone awry: Detecting early
signs of conversational failure. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual
Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1350–1361.
ACL.

Submit your abstract by 1 November 2024 via the conference website.



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