Ljubljana
Slovenia
The notion of crisis has emerged as a defining concept of global reality. Its meanings, however, are momentously shifting: from the traditional conception of crises as temporary “turning points”, to “a state of greater or lesser permanence” (Krzyżanowski et al. 2023), as captured by the recent coinage of permacrisis. Yet, these dynamics of language are never just about naming. In the third decade of the 21st century, marked by a global pandemic, a longstanding climate crisis, and the eruption of devastating waves of conflict, the rhetoric of a permanent ‘new normal’ has by now proven to carry great potential to reinforce inequality and exclusion. Even more worryingly, they echo the open-ended semantics of crisis historically known to normalize politics of violence and even genocide as unavoidable (Pollack 2020). Still, the new vernaculars of crisis merit attention both for their polarizing power, and for their potential to imagine alternatives beyond normalizing the global systemic collapse as the only possibility for the future.
This conference explores the aspects of language that construct the meanings of crisis. Within a broadly sociolinguistic and critical discourse perspective, it will examine varied forms of crisis discourse, with a particular interest in representations of collectivity, division and solidarity. Bringing together scholars from a range of linguistic and geopolitical contexts, we hope to stimulate conversations about the role of language – as well as language scholars and academia – in contexts of global turmoil long felt to surpass a ‘critical’ point, in any of its definitions.