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Aspects of political language in the age of "post-democracy" and beyond Editors: Luke Blaxill (University of Cambridge), Emilia Di Martino (Università Suor Orsola Benincasa) Copy-editor: Jacqueline Aiello (New York University/Università... more

Aspects of political language in the age of "post-democracy" and beyond
Editors: Luke Blaxill (University of Cambridge), Emilia Di Martino (Università Suor Orsola Benincasa)
Copy-editor: Jacqueline Aiello (New York University/Università di Napoli L'Orientale)
Foreword: John E. Joseph (University of Edinburgh)

First coined by Colin Crouch at the turn of the millennium, the term "post-democracy" was used to describe a coming age in which democratic institutions seemed strong, but their energy and effective power were in fact gradually being transferred to an oligarchic politico-economic elite. Opinion is divided on whether recent political events, not least the rise of anti-establishment 'populism' in the Western World, point to a further realization of a post-democratic order, or instead indicate that we have moved beyond it, in ways Crouch did not foresee.

Although long recognized as inescapable, the interplay between language and politics has emerged at the fore of academic research only fairly recently. This has brought with it an attempt to forge a dedicated sub-discipline ("political linguistics"), encouraged a political approach to discourse, and promoted a new emphasis on interdisciplinarity, particularly between political science and linguistics. Recent political events, not least in 2016, have also seen renewed public interest in political language across the world.

It is exactly this emphasis on interdisciplinarity that we place at the heart of this issue of Textus, which welcomes Dr. Luke Blaxill, a British political historian working with political language corpora, to the editorial team, with a view to mutual enrichment and cross-pollination. He is especially eager to explore the intersection between language, history and political science, and to receive contributions which stretch disciplinary boundaries.

The volume sets out to focus on political discourse as used by politicians, representatives from political media, and political analysts, rather than the broader and more abstract political dimension of language use at large. It aims to offer Italian anglicists a shared locus for discussing a topic that is an object of inquiry for many of them and has already produced research studies of outstanding quality at an international level. We are especially interested in contributions that seek to explore the ways in which particularly controversial issues in recent years (for example immigration, the EU, unemployment, women and minority rights) have been articulated through language by politicians. We are also interested in the linguistic choices made to build consensuses, and those which seek to shift or redefine ideological positions (for example, a political rebranding designed to move a party or issue from extreme to mainstream).

The time frame we have selected for analysis is the last two decades of the twentieth century to the present day. The 1980s are often seen as marking the start of the slide towards "post-democracy" - i.e. the gradual move away from the centrality of welfare, and the emergence of a marketing citizenship model. Although "post-democracy" may be, both conceptually and in terms of chronology, a debatable issue, the label is used here as a linguistic shortcut to refer to the contemporary evolutions of political systems in the Western world.

We welcome contributions that address the following themes, which may be tackled with the (possibly combined) methods of sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, genre analysis and critical discourse analysis:

- The effects of the digital revolution on political language;
- The language of political analysts;
- The style of public political rhetoric, both popular and parliamentary;
- Contemporary migrations of political terms and concepts from one language to another;
- The linguistic presentation of key (and especially controversial) political issues;
- The building of consensus;
- Language and political ideology.

Abstract submission deadline: 28th February 2017
Notification of acceptance: 15th March 2017
Preliminary papers to the editors: 30th June 2017
Revised peer-reviewed papers to the editors: 30th October 2017
Final versions from the editors to the publisher: 20th December 2017