[en:]This call invites contributions to the special issue of the CADAAD journal and the authors’ workshop ‘Discourses of Covid-19 and the Reconfiguration of the Political’. It has been initiated by the speakers of the DVPW discourse research group, Christiane Barnickel, Elena Dück and Amelie Kutter.This call invites contributions to the special issue of the CADAAD journal and the authors’ workshop ‘Discourses of Covid-19 and the Reconfiguration of the Political’. It has been initiated by the speakers of the DVPW discourse research group, Christiane Barnickel, Elena Dück and Amelie Kutter. The ..read more

The COVID-19 pandemic created a heated debate about freedom and responsibility, care and control. On the one side, we see critics who warn that the special measures introduced herald the end of individual freedoms and democracy. On the other side, there are equally vocal groups who demand even more stringent surveillance to maintain public health and safety. The emotional tenor of the debate has led to shouting matches, mutual accusations and a general crisis of faith in public institutions. Now, in the third year of the pandemic, we have the luxury of looking back at the discussion to ask whe ..read more

Introduction In my first travel after more than a year since the beginning of the pandemic, I had a mask respirator, a PCR test and mandatory quarantine at my arrival. In my imagination, a severe police checkpoint awaited me at the airport. I felt like a veteran of the Italian total lockdown who never passed any borders without ‘proved and justified reasons’ as the strict mobility restriction protocols had so far imposed. At my arrival, no one checked the PCR test result. Since then, I kept sending test results to the hygiene station (the health department of the city) for each journey I made ..read more

Deadline: 17 October, 2021 When the Covid-19 virus started spreading globally, heralding a pandemic, we faced a crisis in its initial medical meaning: a moment deciding about the lives and deaths of a growing group of people, while adequate intervention was unknown and highly uncertain. Debates focussed on epidemiology, measures of containment and the facts and figures, on which they could be based. In the meantime, efforts at understanding the medical crisis have transformed into struggles over the management of social, economic, ecological and political-representational crisis surfacing wi ..read more

On 20 July, 1-2pm, you will have the occasion to discuss with CriDis editors, including Dr Amelie Kutter, Dr Christiane Barnickel and Dr Elena Dück, the just-launched Crisis Discourse Blog and its Covid-19 special edition. Authors of the Covid-19 special edition will also be present. They will present their work at the Viadrina Institute of European Studies (IFES), the home of the workshop where contributions to the special edition originated. Dr Anja Hennig will facilitate the discussion. The event will be held online on Zoom and can be accessed via the following link: Presentation of CriDis ..read more

The Covid-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is only one among many recent ‘transboundary’ crises that painfully bring to light how connected and precarious our lives are. Like the preceding financial and Eurozone crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic reveals the unequal distribution of vulnerability and burden that is characteristic of most societies in the early 21st century. Being presumably a zoonotic disease that emerges from the destruction of natural habitats by humans and spreads via global production chains, Covid-19 also points to the transformation that the globe is undergoing, in ..read more

6 July, 2022, 2:30 pm CriDis and its special edition on Covid-19 and the political will go online at the 9th conference of the Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD), hosted by the University of Bergamo, Italy. on July 6, 2022, 2:30pm. During this event, editors of the Crisis Discourse Blog (CriDis) will launch the platform and present the Blog’s first special edition, a collection of discourse-analytical blog posts on Covid-19 and the political. CriDis will then be accessible, via the link https://www.crisis-discourse.net. Feel invited to explore CriDis and the ..read more

It is a windy but sunny day in early May 2021. Fatuma approaches an elderly woman who sits on a bench with a crutch in her hands. We are in one of the so-called socially vulnerable areas of Stockholm with low economic status and a high proportion of people with a migration background. The women speak a non-European language, and we see Fatuma handing out a piece of paper. In the voiceover, Fatuma explains that she works as a hälsoinformatör, a health informer, and reaches out to people in the area who don’t watch Swedish news. She talks to them about the vaccination programme that is being rol ..read more

Solidarity has become a key concept in the discourses surrounding the Covid-19 crisis. In this blog post, I will analyze the utilization of the concept within the pandemic context in Germany I argue that the utilization of this concept is central in epitomizing the securitized dividing-line between the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses and the ways in which they construct the current crisis. The concept solidarity expresses different understandings of the very nature of the crisis. The hegemonic discourse focuses on the dangers associated with Covid-19, while the counter-hegemonic dis ..read more

2-3 December, 2021, @ Zoom An initiative of the DVPW Discourse Research Group and Crisis Discourse Blog, hosted by the Viadrina Institute of European Studies Conveners: Speakers of the Discourse Research Group at DVPW Amelie Kutter (Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)), Christiane Barnickel (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Hannah Broecker (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) and Elena Dück (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel) Contact: kutter@europa-uni.de The workshop aims at collecting insights and discuss specificities of discourses (and discourse research) related to ..read more