Critical Approaches to Polycrisis Discourses of Conflict, Migration, Risk, and Climate

This book critically examines how polycrisis is recontextualised and (ab)used in contemporary discourse from across Europe. The book brings together established and emerging researchers in the field of discourse studies from around the world to explore the accelerating interconnected challenges of climate change, conflict, risk, Brexit, democracy, COVID-19, the rising cost of living, and migration. Recognising that polycrisis is socially produced, constructed and dismantled through discourse, the authors contemplate the discursive manifestations of crisis. Falling under the banner of critical discourse studies (CDS), the methodological approaches are heterogeneous, including, but not limited to, corpus-assisted CDS and multimodal CDS. The data are equally varied, ranging from focus groups to no-war letters, media representations to environmental protection commercials. The volume provides a comprehensive consideration of how critical approaches to discourse can help to make sense of, resist, and respond to (poly)crisis, and it will be of interest to students and scholars working in the remit of discourse studies, with a particular interest in crisis communication.

Chapter 1. Critical discursive responses to polycrisis (Tamsin Parnell, Tom Van Hout, and Dario Del Fante).- Chapter 2. Narratives of migration and their relation to the concept of polycrisis - Virginia Zorzi.- Chapter 3. Discursive strategies in the media construction of risks to life (Rakan Alibri).- Chapter 4. Becoming paranoid? Dealing with Brexit, COVID-19, and other threats (Panagiota Nakou).- Chapter 5. Discourses of force and failure: the construction of crisis in the policing of UK climate change protests (Charlotte-Rose Kennedy and David Wright).- Chapter 6. “Homeless” and the cost-of-living crisis in The Guardian and MailOnline: a corpus-assisted analysis (Tamsin Parnell).- 
Chapter 7: “Everyone will scream from pain in the same language”: Linguistic analyses of anti-war Russian letters (Danil Fokin).- Chapter 8. Climate change as a threat to global health. The perspective of the WHO (Stefania Maci and Simone Abbiati).- Chapter 9. From climate change to global crises. The perspective of UNO (Stefania Maci).- Chapter 10. From climate crisis to polycrisis: Integrating verbal, visual, and cinematic resources in environmental protection videos (Tetiana Krysanova).- Chapter 11. “Because climate change is the crisis that will stay with us”: Crisis, polycrisis, permacrisis in the EU Discursive space (Cinzia Bevitori and Katherine E. Russo).- Chapter 12. The discursive framing of the climate and health polycrisis in English, French and Spanish (Niall Curry and Gavin Brookes).

Tamsin Parnell is a Research Assistant at on the EDIFY project at the University of Nottingham, UK, where she uses qualitative methods to explore how young people with eating disorders post and view content about their lived experience on social media. Her first monograph, published by Bloomsbury, is titled Constructing Brexit Britain.

Tom Van Hout is associate professor of digital culture at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He teaches courses on conflict dynamics, taste regimes and attention economies. His research has been published in journals such as Text & Talk, Social Semiotics, and Journal of Pragmatics.

Dario Del Fante is junior assistant professor at University of Ferrara, Italy. He teaches courses on discourse analysis and English language and linguistics. His research has been published in journals such as Metaphorik.de, Meta, and Umanistica Digitale. His first monograph, published by Peter Lang, is titled Migrating across times and cultures.