Texts and Images of Austerity. A Multimodal Multimedia Analysis

Austerity is a complex phenomenon with far reaching consequences for economic wellbeing, social justice and political systems. It is not without alternative, but connected to different political projects that can only be understood by looking at both sedimented economic and political mechanisms as well as the meaning giving efforts of human actors. As part of a broader research project on austerity, the workshop will focus on discursive constructions of austerity in the British media. The British case is of particular importance. In the United Kingdom we can see clearly the far-reaching impact of the “age of austerity”, as has been witnessed by “Brexit”.

Because the phenomenon of austerity is complex only an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods and multimodal analysis can grasp its essence and consequences. In this regard, the following questions are of particular interest:

• Multimodal Computational Social Sciences – Ontological, Epistemological and Methodological Concerns
• How Can We Combine Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies?
• Corpus Linguistic Software – Exchangeable Tools or Creators of Different Realities?
• Big Data and Corpus Composition – How Big Must a Corpus Be? How Can the Corpus Design Be Improved?
• Analysing Austerity as a Multimodal Phenomenon
• Austerity in the British News and on Twitter
• The Geographies of Austerity
• The Emotions of Austerity
• The Actors of Austerity
• The Political Economy of Austerity
• The Interdependencies of the “Age of Austerity” and “Brexit”
• Analyses of Austerity in Britain – Translatable to Other Cultural Contexts?

The Workshop Setting – Working with a Common Corpus

Perhaps you know the disappointment that often goes along with interdisciplinary projects that end up with only presenting a relatively unconnected sequence of multidisciplinary perspectives. The lack of an integrative element is regrettable both with regards to content and from a methodological perspective.
This workshop setting is rather different. To have a really transdisciplinary collaboration on austerity, every participant will work with the same corpus that is provided by us. The common corpus consists of approximately 20,000 texts from The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph that will be collected with the help of LexisNexis as well as a collection of images that are connected to these texts. We will also make available a corpus about constructions of austerity on Twitter and we very much encourage participants to use individual corpora that can be contrasted and connected with the common workshop corpus. We will for example, also provide a Twitter corpus about “Brexit” to be able to study the interdependencies of multiple crises within the British state.

During the 5 workshop days this corpus will be analysed within a mixed framework. The approximately twenty researchers will be asked to present their theoretical and methodological approaches and tools like in a normal conference setting. These presentations will be open to the public. But we also want to go beyond the normal conference setting by discussing, connecting and advancing the individual ideas by working on the same corpus within the group.

Travel and Accommodation Grant

Post-Docs and advanced PhD students from all disciplines can apply for a travel and accommodation grant for attending the workshop. If you are interested in participating in the event, please send us an abstract of no more than 500 words and a short CV to tim.griebel@fau.de until 25.08.2017. We will give a feedback by the end of August.

We very much hope that you are interested in enriching our workshop and are looking forward to your feedback.

Best wishes,

Tim and Stefan