Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD)

Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD) is an ongoing project which aims to foster and promote cross-disciplinary communication in critical discourse research. This site is intended as a resource for both students and scholars critically involved with discourse.

Rhetoric in Society III

 

Call for papers

Rhetoric in Society III, January 26 - 28   2011

Department of Applied Language Studies
Lessius University College
Antwerpen - Belgium

Keynote Speakers:

Gunther Kress
Christopher W. Tindale
Jef Verschueren

 

Rethinking rhetoric

Since Aristotle, the study of rhetoric has focused on the persuasive aspect of discourse in the political, forensic, and ceremonial domains. Rhetoric deals with doxa, the shared opinions and reasons people consider plausible and acceptable in a specific situation. It involves decisions taken by participants in public discourse on the basis of common deliberation and free choice in domains in which there can be no absolute truth, e.g. as in social and political life. Nowadays, we have come to realize the importance of rhetoric in all forms of discourse. There is no communication without some form of rhetoric.

Rhetoricians examine how people use arguments and language in order to convince or persuade an audience. But there is a lot more to rhetoric than that. It comprises more than sets of advice; in fact it is an art. It is the art of discovering what is persuasive in a given situation. This inventiveness points to how rhetoric has a heuristic function as well. It appeals to our creativity in our search for relevant questions and answers to specific matters. And as our discourse and arguments develop in interaction with other discourses (Voloshinov / Bakhtin), the hermeneutic aspect of rhetoric should not be overlooked. There is no rhetoric without analysis, interpretation and theoretical reflection. The art of speaking and writing "well" can be considered a cornerstone of our cultures and our educational systems.

Interdisciplinary research

The conference Rhetoric in Society aims to present and discuss different approaches to rhetoric. It will address this basic question: in what ways can the study of rhetoric function and provide an insight into our postmodern world?  Consequently, what can it claim about discourse in the public domain, how is it related to empirical sciences, what can it say about the ever increasing amount of information and opinion that pervades our lives? Conversely, it can also be asked in what way actual language and communication theories and disciplines draw on ancient rhetoric.

Contributions to the conference will cover a wide range of both themes and theories. They will cover a broad spectrum of academic fields and thus favour interdisciplinary research not only within the fields of rhetoric, rhetorical criticism, rhetorical citizenship, argumentation studies, pragmatics, critical discourse studies, text linguistics, art and literature, but also the fields of communication studies, journalism studies, political, social and educational studies, history and philosophy.

We welcome papers or panel proposals on the role of rhetoric and argumentation in written and oral discourse and genres, on topics such as: public deliberation, controversies, legal decision-making, spin, hyphenated writing, social change, political campaigning, social movements, public relations, publicity, advertising, management, corporate internal communication, art and literature, visual rhetoric and public media discourse.

The core themes of the conference are:

Rhetoric in journalism and new media
Rhetoric in political discourse
Rhetoric in organizational discourse
Rhetoric in legal discourse
Rhetoric in education
Rhetoric in visual communication
Theoretical, historical and (inter)cultural perspectives on rhetoric

Abstracts

  • Please send your abstract of max. 300 words edited in MS Word to .
  • The abstract should include a title, a research question, an indication of the theoretical framework, at least three bibliographical references, methodology, results and conclusion. The academic committee will review the abstracts (blind reviewing).
  • Deadline for abstracts is June 30thth 2010, 12 a.m. Central European time.
  • All contributions should be presented in English only.
  • Please mention in your abstract the conference theme(s) within which you wish to present your paper.
  • Please put your name in the subject of your mail, and your further references in the mail message (affiliation, university or institution, e-mail, phone number, most important publications on the topic if possible, and the title of your paper).
  • Notification of acceptance will be sent before September 15th 2010.

Proceedings

Proceedings will be published digitally after the conference on the conference website. A selection of the proceedings will be published in book form. Your paper should be submitted by April 1st, 2011 at the latest.

 

Published 07/03/2010

University of Malaya Conference on Discourse and Society

University of Malaya Conference on Discourse and Society (UMDS2010)

Theme: Interdisplinary Approaches to Discourse

June 16-18, 2010

Hilton Hotel, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia

Call for papers

UMDS2010 Website: http://umconference.um.edu.my/UMDS2010

The Faculty of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Malaya is pleased to announce the University of Malaya Conference on Discourse and Society (UMDS2010) which will be held at Hilton Hotel, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. The conference aims to bring together scholars from various disciplines to exchange ideas as well as offer new perspectives and directions in research on discourse and society. We welcome papers from any topic in the field of discourse and especially those that focus on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives of discourse. Areas of interest include:

  • Discourse and Education
  • Discourse and Gender
  • Discourse and Multimodality
  • Discourse and Workplace
  • Discourse and Religion
  • Discourse and Globalisation
  • Discourse and the Environment
  • Discourse and Technology
  • Discourse and Politics
  • Intercultural Discourses
  • Minority Discourses
  • Other related areas of research in discourse and society

Keynote Speakers

  • Professor Emeritus dato' Dr. Asmah Haji Omar (University of Malaya)
  • Professor Ruth Wodak (University of Lancaster)
  • Professor Theo van Leeuwen (University of Sydney)

Submissions are invited for abstracts for oral presentations. All abstracts should be limited to 300 words in either English or Bahasa Malaysia and must be sent to by 14 February 2010.

Paper presentations will be 20 minutes in duration with an additional 10 minutes for discussion. Papers accepted for presentation will be notified by April 16, 2010.

For more information please contact:  

 

Published 05/02/2010

Text-mining in the Digital Humanities

  Call for Papers

Text-mining in the Digital Humanities: The Interface between Conceptual History, Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics.

Lancaster University     Thu 13 - Fri 14 May 2010

The aim of this interdisciplinary workshop is to explore the potential for collaboration between researchers in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Corpus Linguistics (CL) and Conceptual History (CH), the study of key socio-political concepts in their historical context (see http://www.concepta-net.org/conceptual_history).

Recent studies by mainly Lancaster-based researchers have suggested the methodological synergy that can result from combining CDA and corpus-linguistic approaches. Meanwhile, the discourse-historical approach in CDA developed by Ruth Wodak (Lancaster) overlaps with CH in its study of the discursive construction of collective identities that can themselves be seen as concepts, each with their own history. Finally, the development of increasingly sophisticated software programs, such as Lancaster's UCREL Semantic Analysis System, opens up exciting new research possibilities for mining the ever-increasing number of historical texts available in digital form. The workshop will provide a unique opportunity for researchers in CH, CDA and CL to discover how they might benefit from mutual collaboration. It should also be of interest to anyone in the Humanities and Social Sciences who works with texts and/or deals with basic socio-political concepts, including collective identities.

Guest speakers will include Jan Ifversen (Head of Institute for History and Area Studies, Aarhus University), Hans-Erich Boedeker (Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin), both from the History of Political and Social Concepts Group, and Gerlinde Mautner (Vienna University of Economics and Business), who pioneered the use of corpus-linguistic techniques in CDA. The workshop will also include demonstrations of various software programs.

Abstracts (200-300 words)

We invite the submission of proposals for 20-minute papers from scholars working in:

  • Conceptual History (including historical semantics and metaphor history)
  • Critical Discourse Analysis (including critical metaphor analysis and cognitive approaches)
  • Corpus Linguistics (including historical text-mining and keyword extraction)

Possible topic areas for papers include, but are not limited to:

  • Case studies in using historical corpora
  • Concepts, texts and discourses
  • Conceptual history vs historical semantics
  • Conceptual contestation / conceptual innovation
  • Critical metaphor analysis and cognitive approaches
  • Different national approaches
  • Identities as concepts
  • The importance of context(s)
  • Reconstructing semantic fields
  • The role of concepts in the discourse-historical approach
  • What corpus linguistics can and cannot do
  • What makes a key word key?

Deadline for abstracts, to be sent to Prof. Anne Wichmann ().is 26 March 2010.

Further information (accommodation, travel etc) will soon be available at http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/events/chcdacl2010/  

Published 05/02/2010

CFP: From Text to Political Positions 2010

AMSTERDAM WORKSHOP - Political Text Analysis

9-10 April 2010, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

http://www2.let.vu.nl/oz/cltl/t2pp/index.html

 

Plenary speakers:

Kenneth Benoit (Trinity College, Dublin, Dept of Political Science)

Jan Kleinnijenhuis (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Dept of Communication Studies and The Network Institute)

Veronika Koller (Lancaster University, Dept of Linguistics and English Language) and Paul Davidson (University of Bradford, Department of Peace Studies)

Janyce Wiebe (University of Pittsburgh, Dept of Computer Science).

The workshop ‘From Text to Political Positions´ (T2PP) is intended to provide a meeting place for individual researchers and research groups focussing on the development of methods and techniques for the analysis of political texts. It will allow for dialogue between scholars working on complementary multidisciplinary projects, and so may lead to further collaboration. During these two days, plenty of time will be reserved for social and intellectual exchanges and the event will close with a round-table discussion.

The meeting will focus on comprehensive and precise methods for manual and automated analysis of subjectivity and the presentation of opinions in political texts.  Examples of relevant text-types include, but are not limited to: television news broadcasts, interviews, newspapers, opinion papers, parliamentary debates, manifestos, party websites, blogs, public-opinion polls on the internet and voting polls and election results.  Topic suggestions include:

  • Modelling positions of actors in political texts on issues and dimensions
  • Sociological and linguistic models for deep-structure analysis of political texts
  • Linguistic evidence of popularisation of language in politics
  • Politics in the media: methods of analysis in media discourse on politics
  • Securing quality in quantitative research methods
  • Analysing political discourse from a regional (e.g., European, Asian, African, British, USA) or global perspective
  • Acquisition and representation of subjectivity and modality (emotion, deontic and epistemic modality, urgency) as expressed lexically (e.g. ‘good/bad', ‘for/against', ‘can/will/should/must/shall', ‘say/state/assume/demand', pos./neg. ‘possible/likely') or on a higher discourse level.
  • The automatic annotation of subjective, deontic and modal layers of implications in texts to model complex opinions and positions of actors
  • Applications for political opinion mining and positioning tools
  • ... other suggestions are welcome

We invite word abstracts in English. They should be sent to

-- Deadline for abstracts: 29 January 2010

-- Notification of acceptance will be made by February 15th.

-- Participation will be based upon acceptance of refereed abstracts.

-- Only a limited number of papers (12-16) can be accepted to allow for 20 minutes per paper plus discussion time.

-- Deadline for papers from accepted participants: 10 March 2010

-- Accepted papers will be posted on the T2PP web site two weeks in advance as 'working papers' to enhance discussion and debate.

-- We plan to compile a selection of the papers and submit them to a peer-reviewed international journal for publication as a special issue.

Workshop cost: FREE - There will be no registration fee!

Published 13/01/2010

English and German Nationalist and Anti-Semitic Discourse (1871-1945)

The Historical Discourse Working Group and the Leo Baeck Institute, London , with the support of the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations would like to announce their first international conference "English and German Nationalist and Anti-Semitic Discourse (1871-1945)" to be held at Queen Mary, University of London on 10-11 November 2010.  

The project website and detailed call for papers can be found at the following link:

http://www.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/research/nationalismproject/november_2010_conference.shtml

Stefan Baumgarten  

Published 04/01/2010