Past Event

Re/Inventing Nationalism and National Identities: Recontextualising Traditional Themes in Global Politics – A discourse-historical perspective.

Professor Ruth Wodak
Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies, Lancaster University 
* 2012 FASS Distinguished Visitor  

Our world is constantly changing, due to processes of globalization and migration, changes in political systems, the era of web 2.0, and other, broader socio-cultural trends. On the one hand, global media, linguae francae, standardized ‘benchmarks’ and global economies are determining our lives; on the other hand, a return to ever more local policies and ideologies can be observed, on many levels: traditions, rules, languages, visions, and imaginaries. The role of language and communication is, of course, essential in these processes of change, since it is through language that change is talked or written into being, that genres gradually change or drastically alter, that evolving, general societal discourses are voiced. 

These developments are not new: Already in 1996, Gerard Delanty stated that [‘T]he crisis of national identity in Western Europe is related to the rise of a new nationalism which operates at many different levels, ranging from extreme xenophobic forms to the more moderate forms of cultural nationalism (p.2). Hence, I claim that recent heated political debates across Europe, about citizenship, language tests related to citizenship and immigration, and the construction of the immigrant per se coincide with the huge crisis of the welfare state. We are dealing with global and glocal developments (Wodak 2010, 2011). Post-nationalism (Heller 2011) and cosmopolitanism (Bauman 1999) seem to have become utopian concepts. 

In this lecture, I will analyse recent European developments from a discourse-analytical perspective: I focus on the discursive construction of national and transnational identities, on the analysis of citizenship- and language tests, and on the continuous reconstruction of national histories by frequently‘re/inventing new narratives’. The data – analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively – consist of a range of genres (focus group discussion, political speeches, comic books, TV documentaries, and election campaign materials). 

About the Presenter

Ruth Wodak has held the position of Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University, UK, since 2004 while remaining 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 in 2010 she received an Honorary Doctorate from University of Örebro in Sweden. 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. Recent book publications include Migration, Identity and Belonging (with G. Delanty, P. Jones, 2008), The Discursive Construction of History. Remembering the Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation (with H. Heer, W. Manoschek, A. Pollak, 2008), The Politics of Exclusion (with M. Krzyżanowski, 2009), Gedenken im Gedankenjahr (with R. de Cillia, 2009); The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics (with B. Johnstone and P. Kerswill) and The discourse of politics in action: ‘Politics as Usual’ (Palgrave), 2nd revised edition (2011).