37.847, Calls: Journal of Language and Discrimination - "Special Issue 11.2" (Jrnl)

Tue Mar 3 13:05:02 UTC 2026

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-847. Tue Mar 03 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.847, Calls: Journal of Language and Discrimination - "Special Issue 11.2" (Jrnl)

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Date: 26-Feb-2026
From: Bronwen Hughes, Margaret Rasulo [bronwen.hughes at uniparthenope.it]
Subject: Journal of Language and Discrimination - "Special Issue 11.2" (Jrnl)

Journal: Journal of Language and Discrimination
Issue: Special Issue 11.2
Call Deadline: 15-Apr-2026

Call for Papers – Special Issue 11.2 (2027)
Journal of Language and Discrimination | University of Toronto Press
https://utppublishing.com/journal/jld
Guest Editors: Bronwen Hughes and Margaret Rasulo
Title: Truth Value, Visual Evidence, and the Politics of
Discrimination in Platformed Discourse
This special issue invites contributions on how truth value is
attributed, contested, and put to strategic use through images in
contemporary communication across platformed public spheres. Whenever
a contrasting or diametrically opposed multimodal artefacts circulate
as “evidence”, they become focal points for polarised and
discriminatory conflict (Fairclough, 2001; Farkas & Schou, 2020). Of
particular interest are cases where the same event yields divergent
visual “proof”, and where competing communities, be they political,
institutional, journalistic, or activist, fight over how visible cues
are turned into evidence, and evidence into truth claims. Such
dynamics have emerge in the circulation of contrasting images and
interpretive frames following the recent deaths of Alex Pretti and
Renée Good, with the same visual material repeatedly recontextualised
to support incompatible accounts of what had effectively occurred.
The theoretical underpinning of this special issue draws on Social
Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS; KhosraviNik, 2017)
operationalised mainly through Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis
(MCDA; Machin & Mayr, 2023; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). Submissions of
research drawing on robust, self-standing methodologies, such as
multimodal (inter)action analysis, multimodal conversation analysis,
visual rhetoric, social semiotic analysis, and multimodal corpus
methods, where these are applied critically to discrimination in
platformed environments, are welcome. Within this analytical
repertoire, these approaches enable a fine-grained examination of
linguistic, visual, and interactional resources shaped by platformed
affordances and constraints (Demata et al., 2018).
This is particularly pertinent given that contemporary truth-value
disputes rest on evidentiality claims that treat images as
self-evident proof, invoking a commonsense “what you see is what you
get” epistemology. At the same time, such claims operate within a
broader post-truth communicative environment, widely discussed since
the mid-2010s, in which factual authority is unstable, trust in
institutions is eroded, and visual material is mobilised both to
assert truth and to undermine it. In this context, multimodal
artefacts function paradoxically as anchors of certainty and as sites
of contestation, making their circulation, recontextualisation, and
uptake central to contemporary struggles over credibility.
It is precisely at the interface between the semiotics of visual
evidence and recontextualised platformed trajectories that this
special issue introduces the conceptual lens of the tumbleweed effect
(Hughes, Rasulo, & Wodak 2025), whereby a news image travels across
platforms and communities, leading to the accumulation of semiotic
debris and the progressive reassignment of truth value, often with
discriminatory intents.
In parallel, this special issue also encourages dialogue with the
concept of bounded rationality (Simon, 1972) to account for how users,
under conditions of limited attention and time, rely on heuristic
readings of “visible evidence” and on socially circulated cues, often
referred to as ‘cheap signals’ (captions, comment consensus, reposts).
This is precisely why a tumbleweed-style accretion of these signals
can so powerfully steer what gets accepted as true.
We therefore invite submissions addressing, among others, the
following research areas, provided they are explicitly connected to
processes of discrimination in digital environments:
 - Platformed recontextualisation and circulation dynamics
 - Image enhancement and AI-mediated evidentiality
 - Discriminatory meaning-making through visual evidence
 - Polarisation and framing of truth value through affective response
(moral outrage, fear, empathy etc.)
 - Ethnographic perspectives on affect in techno-discursive practices
 - Counter-discourse, factchecking, and credibility repair in the
circulation of polarised narratives
 - Platform governance, moderation discourse and digital power
relations
 - Memes, GIFs, Emojis and discriminatory visual rhetoric in
ideological positioning
 - Image-based harassment and symbolic violence
Abstract Submission:
 - Length: up to 500 words (references excluded)
 - Language: English
 - Send to: bronwen.hughes at uniparthenope.it and
margherita.rasulo at unicampania.it
Important Dates:
 - Abstract deadline: [04/15/2026
 - Notification / invitation to submit full paper: [04/30/2026]
 - Full paper due: [02/28/2027]
 - Final submission: [07/30/2027]
 - Estimated publication: November 2027
References:
Demata, M., Heaney, D., & Herring, S. C. (Eds.). (2018). Language and
discourse in social media: New challenges, new approaches (Special
issue). Altre Modernità.
Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and power (2nd ed.). Pearson
Education.
Farkas, J., & Schou, J. (2020). Post-truth, fake news and democracy:
Mapping the politics of falsehood. Routledge.
Hughes, B., Rasulo, M., & Wodak, R. (2025). The expanding nexus of
conflict: Multidimensional struggles across discourses and domains.
TEXTUS, 1, 7–24.
KhosraviNik, M. (2017). Social media critical discourse studies
(SM-CDS). In J. Flowerdew & J. E. Richardson (Eds.), The Routledge
handbook of critical discourse studies (pp. 582–596). Routledge.
Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: The grammar of
visual design (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Machin, D., & Mayr, A. (2023). How to do critical discourse analysis:
A multimodal introduction (2nd ed.). SAGE.
Simon, H. A. (1972). Theories of bounded rationality. In C. B. McGuire
& R. Radner (Eds.), Decision and organization: A volume in honor of
Jacob Marschak (pp. 161–176). North-Holland.
Issue 11.2 (2027)

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis
                     Pragmatics
                     Sociolinguistics
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)

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