This term our group is hosting (together with the Centre for Language and Linguistics) two international invited talks:

CLL / DPS Group Lunchtime Talk

Invited Speaker: Dr Stavros Assimakopoulos, University of Malta

Time and Venue: *Friday* November 1st, 12-1:30pm, COLT3

Title: Ιndirectness, implicature and discrimination

Abstract:

While an often useful indicator, explicitness is not the only determining criterion in the identification of discriminatory discourse. As Leets (2003: 146) observes, discussing racism, “[m]ost contemporary societies do disapprove of racially offensive language, and it is now less common to hear public, verbal invocations of racism”, which has led several scholars to argue that, in recent years, “overt prejudicial bias has been transformed into subtle and increasingly covert expressions”. Critical analyses have long recognised the central role that indirect tactics play in the communication of a negative attitude towards a target minority group, but have traditionally been based on monologue-type texts. Recognising the changing landscape with the emergence of Web 2.0, the research carried out for the purposes of the EU-funded C.O.N.T.A.C.T. project (cf. Assimakopoulos et al. 2017) focused on the investigation of discriminatory discourse in online comments made in reaction to news reports pertaining to migrant and LGBTIQ issues. In this talk, I will present some of the results of this research, focusing on the ways in which discriminatory attitudes are – often inadvertently – perpetuated in everyday discourse practices. To this end, I will implement the notion of implicature with a view to showing how the communication of an array of weak implicatures that ‘sneak’ into the collective perception of the general public can lead to an appropriation of discriminatory stances.

CLL / DPS Group Invited Talk

Invited Speaker: Dr Dimitris Serafis, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI, Switzerland)

Time and Venue: Wednesday November 13th, 4:30-6pm, CCLT1

Title: Portrayals of refugees and immigrants in Greek newspapers: Integrating multimodal critical discourse analysis and argumentation.

Abstract:

Drawing on Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), and integrating it with argumentation studies, in the present paper we propose a methodological synergy that enables scrutiny of racist conceptualizations cultivated by the representation of migrants and refugees in headlines and photographs in newspaper articles along with the argumentative potential that is implicitly sustained in these multimodal representations.