Ruth Wodak, Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University and visiting Professor for the PhD program in Applied Linguistics at Hellenic American University will give a public lecture on "The Politics of Fear: What right-wing populist discourses mean." The lecture will take place on October 15th 2015 at 19:00, in the 2nd floor Auditorium, at 22 Massalias Street in Athens.
In her abstract Professor Wodak writes:
Inclusion and exclusion of migrants and refugees are renegotiated in the European Union (and beyond) on almost a daily scale: ever new policies defining and restricting immigration are proposed by European member states. A return to more local policies and ideologies can be observed, on many levels: traditions, rules, languages, visions, and imaginaries are affected. I claim that we are currently experiencing a re/nationalisation in spite of (or perhaps because of) multiple globalising tendencies. Moreover, recent heated political debates across Europe, about citizenship, language tests related to citizenship and immigration, and the construction of the immigrant as 'the post-modern stranger', coincide with the global financial crisis and the crisis of the welfare state. We are dealing with global and glocal developments (Wodak 2010, 2011). Post-nationalism (Heller 2011) and cosmopolitanism (Bauman 1999) have become utopian concepts. Such tendencies are reinforced and reproduced by right-wing populist parties such as the Austrian Freedom Party, the French Front National, the Hungarian Jobbik, and the British UKIP in election campaigns and in everyday politics (Wodak 2015; Wodak et al. 2013); the success of these parties seem to influence mainstream parties in a shift to the 'right': a normalisation of ever more exclusionary rhetoric (and related policies) can be observed.
In my lecture, I will analyse these recent developments in respect to immigration policies across Europe from a discourse-historical perspective, and will try answering the question why such right-wing populist parties and their slogans seem to be so successful: I focus on the discursive construction of national and transnational identities, and on the analysis the 'politics with a new face'. The data - analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively - consist of a range of genres (party programmes, TV documentaries, citizenship tests and language tests, and election campaign materials) and are part of my new book The Politics of Fear (2015)".
Bio-Blurb
Ruth Wodak is em. Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University, UK, while she has remained affiliated to the University of Vienna (as full professor of Applied Linguistics). Besides many other prizes, she was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize for Elite Researchers in 1996. In 2008, she was awarded the Kerstin Hesselgren Chair of the Swedish Parliament and an Honorary Doctorate from University of Örebro in Sweden in 2010. In 2011, she was awarded the Grand Decoration in Silver for Services for the Austrian Republic. She is Past-President of the Societas Linguistica Europea, and member of the British Academy of Social Sciences and the Academia Europea. Recent book publications include The Politics of Fear. What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean (Sage 2015); The discourse of politics in action: 'Politics as Usual' (Palgrave 2011); Migration, Identity and Belonging (with G. Delanty, P. Jones, LUP 2011), The Discursive Construction of History. Remembering the Wehrmacht's War of Annihilation (with H. Heer, W. Manoschek, A. Pollak, Palgrave 2008), Gedenken im Gedankenjahr (with R. de Cillia, Studienverlag 2009); The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics (with B. Johnstone and P. Kerswill; Sage 2010); Critical Discourse Analysis (2013; 4 Volumes; Sage Major Works), Analysing Fascism: Fascism in Talk and Text (with J. Richardson, Routledge 2013).
See http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/people-profiles/Ruth-Wodak for more information on on-going research projects and recent publications.
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Admission is free of charge.
