Date: 06-Jul-2010
From: Antoon De Rycker <teundrum.edu.my>
Subject: Call for Papers for a Book: 'Language and Crisis'
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Call for papers for edited volume: Language and Crisis
Editorial Team:Zuraidah Mohd Don and Antoon De RyckerUniversity of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Call for Papers:Objectives, Relevance and Content:
We are proposing to publish, with an international publisher, a book on therelationship between language and crisis. The book will explore the manyand varied roles that language plays in defining, constructing, coveringand managing crises, both at a personal and a societal level. The mainobjective of this edited volume is to describe, explain and explorelanguage and language use in crisis situations, and to do this from a largerange of theoretical and methodological angles. What will unify the variouscontributions is that all studies will look at some kind of crisis —economic, social, political, cultural, personal, psychological, etc. —through a predominantly linguistic lens.
How to define what constitutes a crisis in these and other areas (afterall, it is a social construct, and not every ‘perceived’ crisis is a ‘real’crisis) and how to categorize crises has been — since the 1970s — thesubject of an enormous amount of research in disciplines such as medicine,psychology, economics, management, media studies, political sciences,history, etc. At this stage in the project it is sufficient to set out froma loosely defined notion of ‘crisis’ (adapted from Wikipedia and thesources quoted there) as a specific, unexpected event (or series of events)that creates a high level of uncertainty and a real or perceived threat tothe important goals of an organization. So, it has at least the followingdefining characteristics: specific (as opposed to vague, general),unexpected (as opposed to predictable or routine) and serious in the senseof threatening (as opposed to insignificant and safe). This kind ofunstable condition brought on by some turning point (a process oftransformation) will usually require immediate and often coordinatedaction, or more generally, a need for change. Depending on which aspect onechooses to zoom in, synonyms can be disaster, emergency, catastrophe, etc.It is important to add here that the volume will also take ‘organization’in its most general sense. For example, talking at cross purposes can bereferred to as a ‘crisis’, too, as it threatens the smooth flow andorganization of discourse, and will usually require repair.
Within these broad content parameters, however, contributors are encouragedto pursue their own research interests in terms of data (text types),language or languages (including multimodal communication), time period(both synchronic and historical studies are possible) and methods. Though9/11, the tsunami of 2004, the subprime mortgage crisis and H1N1 come tomind, there are many more crises — whether small or big, personal orsocietal — that are worth investigating. In fact, the topic area is wideenough to warrant micro-linguistic analyses (descriptions of lexical,syntactic and discoursal features, the selection and organization ofcontent, the expression of identity, dimensions like clarity anddirectness, etc.) but also to investigate macro-linguistic issues (culturalaspects of the language used, code switching, the creation of controlledlanguages, etc.).
The data can be described and/or explained, using any relevant linguistictheory (e.g. SFL, CDA, Contrastive Rhetoric, genre analysis) while theanalyses themselves can be quantitative or qualitative, one language onlyor comparative, etc. Options abound.
Contributions: Length and Format:
The edited volume will have about 300 pages. It will consist of anintroductory chapter plus 12 papers. Further division into two or threeparts will be decided later on the basis of the papers themselves.Contributions have to be written in English. They will be from 6,000 to anabsolute maximum of 8,000 words (roughly 15 to 20 pages) altogether,including references, notes and appendices.
Contributions should follow the typical structure of an academic researchpaper, i.e. 150-word Abstract plus Key Words, Introduction, LiteratureReview, Research Questions (or Research Objectives or Hypotheses), Method,Results, Discussion, Conclusions, Acknowledgements (if any), End Notes,References, Appendices. Please do not use footnotes, but you may useendnotes, at the end of your chapter, listed together immediately beforethe References section. Variations on this template are, of course, possible.
Given the limited number of words per contribution, it is clear that paperswill ideally set out from a rather specific and narrow research objective.Less is more in terms of relevance, contextualization of your research,cogency of argumentation and interpretation of findings.
Over to You, Now:
If you are interested in contributing to this volume, then submit a150-word abstract in English, identifying the research gap, the relevanceof your research question and the methodology. Also clearly state thelanguage(s) you will be examining and the overall theme (politics,economics, religion, health, education, the arts, etc.). The latter willallow us to structure the book at an early stage and look for a balancedcollection of articles. E-mail your abstract as an MS Word attachment toAntoon De Rycker at teundrum.edu.my.
Note:
A likely publication outlet for the book is the prestigious John BenjaminSeries ‘Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture.’ It will bethis series, edited by Ruth Wodak, that we will first pitch our book to.
Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis
Page Updated: 08-Jul-2010
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