PANEL @ CADAAD2020: Discourse in the Digital Age: Rigour and Context across Emerging Discourses on Digital Participatory Spaces

We invite submission of abstracts for a panel entitled Discourse in the Digital Age: Rigour and Context across Emerging Discourses on Digital Participatory Spaces, to be proposed as part of the 8th CADAAD (Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines) Conference, 7-9th July 2020, University of Huddersfield, UK.

Digital technologies have given rise to a host of new ways for people to communicate, manage social relationships and perform identities. Within a paradigmatically new discursive mode theorised as Social Media Communication (SMC), (KhosraviNik 2017, 2019), various established and emerging digital affordances and communication technologies keep impacting the content, style and characteristics discourses, by blurring the traditional boundaries across work-play, public-private, political-personal, politics-citizenship, entertainment-news, etc.

The very open and dynamic complexity of Social Media Communicated discursive life-worlds has been challenging the existing theories, methods and analytical techniques while providing unprecedented opportunities for research on bottom-up social data in enormous volume, velocity and variety. Therefore, it is high time for Critical Discourse Studies to engage with this new context meaningfully and tackle some of the theoretical and methodological challenges thorough case studies of various digital discourses.

The present panel builds on the general theme of the conference ‘Reconciling Rigour and Context in CDA’ by proposing a focus on discursive practices regimented through/via a Social Media Communication paradigm. The panel seeks to engage with questions such as: a) In what sort of adaptations can the traditions in Critical Discursive Studies contribute to an in-depth study of the new social media discourses and digital practices? b) How can Critical Discursive Approaches respond to the epistemological and technical challenges of digital discourses around its core disciplinary rigour?

The proposed panel invites theoretical, methodological and case-study contributions on various discursive events, processes and representations, including but not limited to areas of:  

·       Digital Discourse & Social, Political, Personal Identity

·       Digital Discourses of Hate and Discrimination (Misogyny, Racism, Ableism, Ageism etc.)

·       Digital Discourse & (International) Conflicts

·       Digital Politics and Political Communication

·       Digital Media & Contemporary Politics of Populism & Nationalism

·       Digital Discourse & Fake News

·       Digital Politics of Infotainment Discourses

·       Profession(alism) & Digital Discourse

·       Digital Discourse & Education

·       Discourse & Algorithms

·       Digital Multimodal Discourses

·       Digital Discourse and Meme Culture

·       Interdisciplinarity Across Discourse & Technology Research

·       Theoretical Innovations in Social Media CDS

·       Methodological Innovations in Social Media CDS

·       Small & Big Data Approaches to Digital Discourses

·       Innovations in Techniques, Tools & Software

·       Digital Discourse & Research Ethics

Proposals are invited for paper presentations of 20 minutes + 10 minutes for Q&A.

Abstracts (Max 350 words excluding references) should include the name, institutional affiliation and email address of the author(s), the paper title, and five keywords. Please send abstracts to digitaldiscourses2020@gmail.com before December 2nd, 2019.

We especially encourage submissions from early-career researchers, including postgraduate research students and postdoctoral researchers, in particular female scholars and BME communities.