Promotions
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The staging of the apolitical. A linguistic investigation into the implicit political production of meaning and the normalization of right-wing populist patterns of interpretation in digital stagings of femininity.
Linda Leuschen
This PhD project examines how political meanings are created and normalized in digital communication spaces through seemingly apolitical lifestyle content. The focus is on German-language stagings of femininity on social media platforms, in particular so-called Tradwife videos, which aesthetically stage traditional ideas of family, gender and social order and thereby open up points of connection for right-wing populist patterns of interpretation, for example through the valorization of certain family models, the construction of social crises or the devaluation of emancipatory positions.
From a linguistic and multimodal perspective, the project analyzes how linguistic, visual and auditory resources interact to implicitly convey political positions and interpretations of the world. Of particular interest are the strategies through which such content appears as apolitical everyday life or lifestyle, while at the same time certain social concepts of order are made plausible and normalized. The aim is to make visible the mechanisms by which political meanings are produced and disseminated in digital public spheres through the staging of the apolitical.
Conspiracy theories. Linguistic patterns of their plausibilization (working title)
In the context of the still-emerging field of linguistic research on conspiracy theories, this dissertation project focuses on the plausibility of such theories as determined by their argumentative structures. Conspiracy theories—understood, in line with research in the sociology of knowledge, as specific bodies of knowledge—represent, by definition, bodies of knowledge that are not recognized in contemporary social contexts. That they nevertheless have the potential to appear plausible is demonstrated, among other things, by the electoral successes of populist to (far-right) extremist political groups, in Germany, in particular, the AfD—a party classified in some quarters as definitively far-right—whose political communication strategy regularly employs conspiracy-theory-based arguments (see, among others, Römer/Stumpf 2019, Stumpf 2020). The regularity and pattern-like nature of such topoi can be empirically demonstrated as a topological discourse formation (following Römer 2017). As part of this dissertation, various conspiracy theories defined by their content will be examined for their specific argumentative structures using a linguistic topos analysis, and overarching comparative patterns that serve to lend them plausibility will be identified. The Conspiracy Theory Reference Corpus (VerReKo), developed as part of the DFG project “Language in Conspiracy Theories,” serves as the data basis.
ArtSpeak: Linguistic Studies on the Criticism That Artistic Texts Are Incomprehensible
The dissertation project “KunstSprech” examines texts about art (particularly art criticism) with regard to their characteristics relevant to comprehensibility. To this end, a metapragmatic topos analysis of the accusations that texts about art are incomprehensible is first conducted. Based on the Text Semantic Analysis Grid (after Gardt 2012) and its multimodal extension (after Klug 2013; 2017), the supposedly incomprehensible texts are then analyzed using a qualitative-hermeneutic approach. Building on findings from comprehensibility research—which are applied to the linguistic analysis—a systematic approach is developed for analyzing features in art discourse texts that hinder comprehensibility. Furthermore, using the example of “KunstSprech,” the results shed light on the socially relevant topic of comprehensibility, which also touches on discussions regarding (communicative) participation, so-called “plain language,” and so on.