Professor Panayota Gounari presented at the DNC5ALED Conference Discourses and their Impacts on a World of Multiple Crises at the University of Valencia, Spain in July 2023. Her presentation on “Rethinking Marcuse: One-Dimensional discourse, authoritarianism and social media” was part of a panel on Discourse and Critical Theory. Her talk focused on the relevance of the work of the Frankfurt School, and particularly of Marcuse’s 1964 seminal book One-Dimensional Man as a theoretical framework to understand authoritarian populist far-right discourses and their contemporary iteration in social media. This framework aspires to address current theoretical and conceptual needs for those scholars who work on authoritarian far-right populist discourses in social media, especially given the well-established connection in the Critical Discourse Studies literature between the rise of right-wing populist parties, authoritarianism, Alt-right groups and mediatization.
Dr. Gounari also co-presented at the same conference with Minh Nghia Nguyen, a doctoral student of the Department of Applied Linguistics, on their joint research project Collective memory, “Necropolitics, and Discourse: the Vietnam War Remembered” in a panel on War and Peace. Their research presents a critical multimodal discourse analysis (CMDA) of historical photographs from the Vietnam War published in the New York Times. In this project, collective memory and commemoration are perceived as a political practice, embodied discursively and used historically to coerce the “necropolitics of death” (Mbembe, 2003) on the racialized Other (Vietnamese). The project makes a novel contribution to the burgeoning body of research on the discourse of necropolitics in war remembrance that has focused, so far, mainly on textual data.
In Lyon, France, there was the 20th International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) World Congress, Professor Gounari presented presented at a panel on Ethics and Politics of Language Teacher Education in an Uneven World. She proposed a Critical Language Education agenda and a pedagogy that names, interrupts, challenges, critiques, and has a proposal for a different kind of language classrooms, curricula, schools, and communities that, in turn, affect societies and human life as a whole. How are academics, researchers, and language educators, engaging with social and political reality? Or are they? How do we educate and raise educators’ and students’ critical consciousness, so that they will find themselves on the right side of history? If educators want to invest in engaged scholarship that truly aims at improving the lives of students, their families, their communities, and our society, they must be ready to talk about the workings of power and power asymmetries, the unequal distribution of wealth and power, racism, discrimination, and the role of schooling in all this.
