DNC5ALED Theme

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DNC5ALED: Discourses and their impacts on a world of multiple crises

25-28 July, 2023

University of Valencia, Spain

Congress theme

Discourse, language, and communication are central to our understanding of the world today. Researchers from many disciplines have become interested in how discourses shape social, political, and economic realities and they study discourses in many areas of social life: as a meaning-making practice of groups, as an aspect of cultural and aesthetic tendencies, as a tool for political mobilization and as a way to imagine hopeful futures and organize social justice. As a transdisciplinary field, Discourse Studies responds not only to the theoretical and methodological questions important for academia but also to real-life and practical challenges of a changing social world.

Co-organized by DiscourseNet, the International Association of Discourse Studies, and ALED, the Latin American Discourse Studies Association, this congress explores how discourses and Discourse Studies have impacts on the contemporary world. We invite participants to reflect on the impact that discourses can make on our lives in a globalising world facing multiple crises: What is the role of language in contemporary political struggles and how does it promote values such as democracy, social justice, and tolerance? What is the place of discourse in our current economic model of global neoliberalism and how can we imagine alternative visions that are culturally and environmentally more sustainable? How does the looming climate catastrophe or the coronavirus pandemic intersect with discursive developments? The uses of language are often associated with the idea of conveying a particular idea and pursuing a given ideological agenda. Yet, discourses not only represent our world but they also shape it in crucial ways. In their own work, discourse researchers may be committed to bring about positive social change. However, in many cases, the effects of discourses on the social fabric need to be accounted for more systematically and in detail, allowing for more complexity, than is currently the case.

DNC5ALED invites contributions that explore the impact of discourse in a world facing multiple crises. We invite discourse analysts from around the world, and other people interested in Discourse Analysis, to take stock of contemporary developments in Discourse Studies. Possible paper proposals for the conference include but are not limited to the following:

• public debates around social issues and political concerns;
• the social, economic, political, legal, cognitive, institutional, historical, cultural, or linguistic dimensions of discourse in communities;
• discursive practices that bring about social, technological, political change;
• discursive strategies and tactics of valuing and devaluing people, things, ideas;
• strategies and tactics of disseminating research findings to a non-academic public;
• the symbolic and material relations between orders of discourse;
• the impact of emancipatory and authoritarian discourses;
• political and environmental crises in contemporary democracies;
• colonising and decolonising practices in the field of Discourse Analysis;
• discourses of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability

The focus of Discourse Studies varies according to the specific national or regional contexts in which issues of power and language, subjectivity and inequality, language and context are being problematized. For instance, Spanish-, Portuguese-, French- and English-speaking communities of discourse analysts and theorists follow different dynamic debates, terminologies and approaches that are not always well known outside of each language community. 

DiscourseNet is the International Association of Discourse Studies, founded in 2019 in Paris during our first joint congress with ALED. The Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios del Discurso was formed in 1995 to promote Discourse Studies in Latin America. ALED has organised 14 International Congresses and more than 30 national events in the member countries. 

DNC5ALED is the second DiscourseNet-ALED joint congress, and aims to be a site of dialogue and reflection across and about different traditions in Discourse Studies. 

DNC5ALED:

• is open to discourse researchers from all disciplines,
• welcomes presentations in the many languages in which discourse research is conducted,
• aims to create and develop multilingual non-hierarchical and open spaces for interepistemic dialogue,
• welcome social movements and policy practitioners interested in discourse as well as academics.

We encourage contributions that seek to develop novel approaches to, for instance: subjectivity in contemporary societies; epistemologies; ontologies; cosmologies; indexicality; ideology; knowledge and hegemony; (de)coloniality; governmentality in the knowledge economy; protest and activism; critique and reflexivity; bi-, multi- and translingual communication; language policy; discourse and gender, sexuality; class; race; ability; indigenity; migration; populism; (neo-)fascism; discrimination; argumentation and rhetorics; social cognition; institutional discourse; workplace communication; psychoanalysis; practices and identities in workplace; multimodality; media and digital culture; materialism and discourse; digital humanities; cross-cultural interaction; corpus and computer-aided analysis; conversation and interaction; poststructuralism ...

DNC5ALED welcomes papers which re-examine existing discourse theoretical frameworks, articulate new approaches from different fields and schools, study social processes empirically, and reflect on the critical potentials of Discourse Studies. We also invite contributions that deal with theoretical and/or methodological challenges in Discourse Studies, preferably with a focus on the impact of discourses in a world in crisis. Abstracts of no more than 250 words can be submitted in Spanish, Portuguese, English, French as well as in other languages. They will be considered as long as there are sufficient submissions in one language to fill a panel or stream. By bringing discourse researchers together from many backgrounds, we aim at creating productive encounters across and between discourse researchers working in different languages.