Please note that this is an academic event open to MA students, PhD students and academics working in sociolinguistics and related areas.

Following on from the last CLSS event on existential threats, in this seminar, we focus on metonymy, with particular reference to metonymic symbols that construct adversarial relations, and how such processes feed into discourses around discrimination and othering.

We are delighted to welcome Professor Ruth Wodak (University of Lancaster & University of Vienna; see full biography), who will present her work in this area. She will discuss some intricacies in the constructing Feindbilder ‘enemy images’ as metonymic symbols of evil, drawing examples from Manichean divisions in political discourse.

Professor Wodak’s talk will be followed by two short presentations by Sylvia Shaw and Birgul Yilmaz (University of Westminster), which will introduce a series of multimodal datasets including different types of texts gathered from ongoing research projects. These will be used as a basis for group work, followed by concluding remarks and discussion.

The seminar will end with an opportunity to socialise, where food and drink will be provided.

We look forward to receiving you in January.

Event coordinators (University of Westminster):

Birgul Yilmaz

Jonathan Kasstan

Petros Karatsareas

Sylvia Shaw

Ruth Wodak bio

Ruth Wodak is Emerita Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University, UK, and affiliated to the University of Vienna. Besides various other prizes, she was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize for Elite Researchers in 1996 and an Honorary Doctorate from University of Örebro in Sweden in 2010. She is past-President of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. 2011, she was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honour in Silver for Services to the Republic of Austria, and 2018, the Lebenswerk Preis for her lifetime achievements, from the Austrian Ministry for Women’s Affairs. She is member of the British Academy of Social Sciences and member of the Academia Europaea. 2008, she was awarded the Kerstin Hesselgren Chair of the Swedish Parliament (at University Örebrö).

She is member of the editorial board of a range of linguistic journals and co-editor of the journals Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies, and Language and Politics. She has held visiting professorships in University of Uppsala, Stanford University, University Minnesota, University of East Anglia, and Georgetown University. In the spring 2014, Ruth held the Davis Chair for Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC. In the spring 2016, Ruth was Distinguished Schuman Fellow at the Schuman Centre, EUI, Florence. 2017, she held the Willi Brandt Chair at the University of Malmö, Sweden. 2018/19, she was a senior visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna (IWM). Her research interests focus on discourse studies; gender studies; identity politics and the politics of the past; political communication; prejudice and discrimination; and on ethnographic methods of linguistic field work.

Ruth has published 10 monographs, 28 co-authored monographs, over 60 edited volumes and ca 400 peer reviewed journal papers and book chapters. Her work has been translated into English, Italian, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Czech, and Serbian.

Recent book publications include Europe at the Crossroads (Nordicum 2019; with P. Bevelander); The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics (Routledge 2018, with B. Forchtner); Kinder der Rückkehr (Springer 2018, with E. Berger); The Politics of Fear. What Right- wing Populist Discourses Mean (Sage, 2015; translation into the German Politik mit der Angst. Zur Wirkung rechtspopulistischer Diskurse. Konturen, 2016); The discourse of politics in action: ‘Politics as Usual’ (Palgrave, revised edition 2011); Migration, Identity and Belonging (LUP 2011, with G. Delanty, P. Jones); The Discursive Construction of History. Remembering the German Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation (Palgrave 2008; with H. Heer, W. Manoschek, A. Pollak); The Politics of Exclusion. Debating Migration in Austria (Transaction Press 2009; with M. Krzyżanowski); The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics (Sage 2010; with B. Johnstone, P. Kerswill); Analyzing Fascist Discourse. Fascism in Talk and Text (Routledge 2013; with J E Richardson), and Rightwing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse (Bloomsbury 2013; with M. KhosraviNik, B. Mral).

See http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/profiles/Ruth- Wodak for more information on on-going research projects and recent publications.