Critical Approaches to Polycrisis

Discourses of Conflict, Migration, Risk, and Climate

Tamsin Parnell, Tom Van Hout, Dario Del Fante

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9783031769658
• eBook ISBN:
  9783031769665
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Critical Discursive Responses to Polycrisis
• 2. Narratives of Migration and Their Relation to the Concept of Polycrisis
• 3. Discursive Strategies in the Media Construction of Risks to Life
• 4. Dealing with Enduring Uncertainty: Brexit During COVID-19
• 5. Discourses of Force and Failure: The Construction of Crisis in the Policing of UK Climate Change Protests
• 6. ‘Homeless’ and the Cost-of-Living Crisis in The Guardian and MailOnline: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis
• 7. “Everyone Will Scream from Pain in the Same Language”: Linguistic Analyses of Anti-War Russian Letters
• 8. Climate Change as a Threat to Global Health. The Perspective of the WHO
• 9. From Climate Change to Global Crises. The Perspective of UNO
• 10. From Climate Crisis to Polycrisis: Integrating Verbal, Visual, and Cinematic Resources in Environmental Protection Videos
• 11. ‘Because Climate Change Is the Crisis That Will Stay With Us’: Crisis, Polycrisis, and Permacrisis in the EU Discursive Space
• 12. The Discursive Framing of the Climate and Health Polycrisis in English, French, and Spanish
• Back Matter