Helsinki
Finland
Panel description:
In recent years, a large volume of critical scholarship has grappled with the media-enabled normalization of authoritarian discourses and far-right political agendas within liberal democracies. The panel contributes to this body of work by examining political actors’ communication strategies and the broad discursive mechanisms at work in different forms of contemporary media, including mainstream news media, alternative and alt-right outlets, social media, and online news platforms. It thus sheds new light on how authoritarianism and far-right politics are articulated, reproduced, and authorized, by scrutinizing authoritarian footings, emotional repertoires, and interactional practices building on exclusionary logics, antagonism, and polarisation, as they manifest in news production, and, also, in citizen engagement with news.
Invited panel contributions should focus on practices and strategies of authoritarian discourse in various sociocultural contexts, including Europe and the USA. Moreover, contributions should rely on systematic discourse analysis, employing qualitative and/or quantitative methods, and depart from or combine different theoretical-methodological traditions, such as discourse analysis, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, automated text analysis, and language-centred framing theory.
Panel contributions will address, but are not necessarily limited to, the following topics:
- Authoritarian populists’ linguistic, interactional, and multi-modal strategies seeking to control the narrative and mobilize support for their agenda in different socio-cultural and media settings, and in different media genres
- Aspects of face-work, turn-taking, speech acts, and presupposition/implicature as interactional challenges to journalism’s watchdog role in encounters with authoritarian and populist actors
- Linguistic and communication practices of mainstream media outlets and news journalists vis-à-vis the far-right
- Discursive processes and multimodal practices enabling the normalization of authoritarian values, narratives, and agendas in media discourse
- The social indexicality of authoritarian discourse and the mobilization of adversarial footings: aggravation (or mitigation) of emotions, moral evaluations, and calls for aggressive measures in online settings
- Hybrid and pseudo-journalistic communication strategies through which political actors appropriate journalistic genres to bypass or delegitimize professional media
- The construction of stance in multimodal recontextualizations of mainstream news in social media, and their role in amplifying exclusionary and authoritarian narratives
- Journalism’s labelling, classification, and framing practices, and their role in normalizing or obscuring authoritarian politics
Please submit your abstract (up to 500 words) via the conference website (https://ipra2027.exordo.com/) by 15 October 2026. In step 4 (‘Topics’) of the submission process, select the panel ‘The normalization of authoritarianism across media: Interactional strategies, emotional repertoires, and adversarial footings in mainstream news, alternative media and social media'. Further information on submitting abstracts can be found in the IPC20 Call for Papers (https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP2027).
Please note that an active IPrA membership is required in order to submit an abstract.
Contact details:
If you have further questions regarding the panel, please feel free to contact us directly:
Marianna Patrona (Hellenic Army Academy): marianna.patrona@gmail.com
Mats Ekström (University of Gothenburg): mats.ekstrom@gu.se