CRISMET - Thinking pandemic societies through metaphor: Language, crisis and coronationalism in the post-Yugoslav area
Principal Investigator at ZRC SAZU
Ksenija Bogetić Pejović, PhD-
Original Title
CRISMET - Thinking pandemic societies through metaphor: Language, crisis and coronationalism in the post-Yugoslav area
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Acronym
CRISMET
Project Team
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Project ID
Grant agreement ID: 101038047
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Duration
1 October 2022–30 September 2024 -
Financial Source
Months into the Covid-19 pandemic, it became clear that global society is faced with not only a health crisis, but also a crisis in social mobilisation and communication. Emerging research suggests that the pandemic is bringing major rhetorical shifts concerning the framing of notions of collectivity and national belonging, where emerging elements of figurative, metaphorical language are paving ways to sweeping ‘coronationalisms’, across Europe.
The pervasiveness of metaphoricity in the current crisis communication is not unexpected: as a cognitive process at the core of human thought, metaphor helps us reason about abstract concepts; what we seek when faced with new situations is more simple shorthand to think and talk about the unknown, like pandemic waves and invisible enemy. But in points of change and crisis, the linguistic, the cognitive, and the deliberately political elements of metaphor are likely to come together in specific ways. It is clear today that these are not merely ‘coronationalist’, but birthing a whole repository of new metaphors with the potential to influence how we think about (post-)pandemic futures.
CRISMET aims to lay the foundations for interdisciplinary, language-driven study of crisis discourse. It locates its analysis in the post-Yugoslav area, where persisting nationalist discourses have come to mix with discourses of pandemics in ways that create complex figurative frames of current and past crises, amplifying notions of difference, but also reinvigorating the discourses of solidarity and social transformation. This geopolitical context well embodies the old discourse-cognitive position that at times of increased social reflection and crisis, metaphors become sites of entire ‘alternative imaginations’ of the present, past and future, hence allowing the project to trace developments of figurative language in the public sphere as a major site of negotiations of reality. Beyond the local context, CRISMET uncovers how metaphors of the pandemic society allow us to trace the shifting conceptualisations of control, citizen freedoms, collectivities and social relations, via dominating conceptual schemas that take hold in specific ways in times of digital media and social networks.
The project addresses these objectives on two levels:
- exploring the (re)framings of collectivity and group belonging in the post-Yugoslav political, (new) media and citizen discourses of the pandemic, and
introducing a multi-dimensional metaphorical methodological approach to public discourse analysis, bringing together metaphor study and cognitive linguistics with social science study of politics, history and cultural memory, as an adaptable interdisciplinary model suited to approaching discourses of crisis and social transformation.
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie WIDERA grant agreement: 101038047.
Corpus resources:
BOGETIĆ, K., Milinković, M., Batanović, V. (2024). Croatian Coronavirus Corpus NewsHR : version 1.0. [Ljubljana]: Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts; [Belgrade]: Regional Linguistic Data Initiative, 2024. https://zenodo.org/records/10724738, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10724738.
BOGETIĆ, Ksenija, Batanović, V., Radošević, P. (2024) Slovenian Coronavirus Corpus NewsSLO : version 1.0. [Ljubljana: Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts; Belgrade: Regional Linguistic Data Initiative], 2024. https://zenodo.org/records/12518387, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.12518386.
BOGETIĆ, K., Radošević, P., Milinković, M., & Batanović, V. (2024). Serbian Coronavirus Corpus NewsSR : version 1.0. [Ljubljana: Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts; Belgrade: Regional Linguistic Data Initiative], 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13856461.
BOGETIĆ, K., Radošević, P., Milinković, M., & Batanović, V. (2024). Serbian Coronavirus News Comments Corpus News-CommSR : version 1.0. [Ljubljana: Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts; Belgrade: Regional Linguistic Data Initiative], 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13856371.
BOGETIĆ, K., Radoševic, P., & Batanović, V. (2024). Slovenian Coronavirus News Comments Corpus News-CommSLO: version 1.0. [Ljubljana: Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts; Belgrade: Regional Linguistic Data Initiative], 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13853554.
BOGETIĆ, K., Vuk, B., & Milinković, M. (2024). Croatian Coronavirus News Comments Corpus News-CommHR (1.0) [Data set]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13766992.
BOGETIĆ, K. Bosnia and Herzegovina Coronavirus Corpus NewsBiH : version 1.0. [Ljubljana]: Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts 2024.https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14216940
Publications and other:
BOGETIĆ, Ksenija. (2022) Approaching crisis discourse via metaphor: Some observations from the post-Yugoslav public discourses of the COVID-19 pandemic. Language. Text. Society 9(2): 14-21.
BOGETIĆ, Ksenija (2023). A metaphorical approach to investigating crisis discourse : historization, ‘coronationalism’ and fuzzy metaphors in covid-19 discourses of the post-Yugoslav area. 25th Warwick International Conference in Applied Linguistic (WICAL), University of Warwick, 27-29 June, 2023.
BOGETIĆ, K. (2024). Military metaphors in the discourses of the pandemic in two post-Yugoslav states: Literal associations and historization of crisis. Metaphor and the Social World, 14(1), 64-84.
BOGETIĆ, Ksenija (2023). Language of the pandemic in a post-conflict area: military metaphors, nationhood and collectivity in the discourses of covid-19 in four post-Yugoslav states. Lancaster University, DisTex talks, June 2023.
BOGETIĆ, Ksenija (2023). Metaphors of covid-19 : negotiating crises responses, collectivity and memory in the post-Yugoslav area. LESoL seminar series "Language, society and ethnography", University of the Aegean, Department of Social Anthropology and History, Mytilene, Lesbos, Greece.
BOGETIĆ, K. (2024), Approaching metaphor and nationhood in post-pandemic Europe. Workshop (Re)imagining nationhood and collectivity in the ‘new normal’ Europe at the international conference The Language of (Perma)Crisis: Discourses and Politics of the 'New Normal', Ljubljana, 2024.
BOGETIĆ, K., GORJANC, V., SKUBIC, J., KAVČIČ, A. Gender ideology : a corpus-linguistic look at emergent ‘anti-gender’ vocabulary in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. In Proceedings of the 12th Language Technologies and Digital Humanities Conference (Ed. by Š. Arhar-Holdt and T. Erjavec), September 2024, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
BOGETIĆ, K. (Ed.; forthcoming 2024/2025) Language, gender and politics in central and eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan: Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality.
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2024/2025): "This book is also the first collection of work on gender and language in the area of central and eastern Europe. Focused on a space increasingly described as a hub of ‘anti-gender’ hostility sparked by other social crises – as currently witnessed in the curtailing of abortion rights, removal of gender from curricula and institutionalisation of anti-LBGTQ rhetoric – the chapters shed light on the intense debates that connect language use, gender equality, sexuality, perceptions of crisis, history and conflict in this region today, while advancing novel perspectives on conceptual resignification that complicate some western-dominated frameworks in the discipline."
BOGETIĆ, K. (forthcoming 2024/2025) Introduction: Linguistic approaches to gender and politics in eastern and central Europe. In Language, Gender and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan: Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality.
BOGETIĆ, K. (2024). Not for those of us who know war well: crisis, metaphor negotiation and collective memory in an era of war. Critical Discourse Studies, Online First, 1-19.
BOGETIĆ, K. (2024) Mnemonic remappings: Metaphor, nationhood and collective memory in crisis discourse. At the workshop Crisis, public discourse and metaphor: (Re)onceptualizing nationhood and collectivity in the 'new normal' , University of Zagreb.
Workshop organized under CRISMET Project Crisis, public discourse and metaphor: (Re)conceptualizing nationhood and collectivity in the 'new normal', University of Zagreb, 2024.
BOGETIĆ, Ksenija, Del Fante, Dario. The meanings of crisis: a corpus-based analysis of parliamentary discourses across space. 7th Corpora & Discourse International Conference: CADS 2024. Innsbruck: Universität Innsbruck, 2024.
K. BOGETIĆ The Language of (Perma)Crisis: Discourses and politics of the ‘new normal’, DOI/10.5281/zenodo.14211515.svg. International conference Book of Abstracts is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14211515.