Political catchwords and catchphrases are used pervasively, continuously, and in all major languages, and form the crux of exchanges in news media, social networks, policy documents, bureaucratic notices, academic and creative texts, everyday conversations/messages, etc. Examples of the moment in global English circuits include ‘austerity’, ‘disinformation’, ‘rightwing populism’, ‘political polarization’, ‘neoliberalism’, ‘culture war’, ‘climate crisis’, ‘climate denial’, ‘greenwashing’, ‘filter bubbles’, ‘big data’, ‘social media’, ‘smart city’… to name a few.

Some of these appear to be produced, so to speak, from above (as campaign slogans, names for alignments, etc.) and some from below (to signify complex concerns succinctly, as collective nom de guerre, etc.). They are relevant to understanding some of the principal concerns of our time.

This two-day workshop is part of an international collaborative project, Analysing Contemporary Political Catchwords, with partners in Jordan, Cyprus, Bulgaria, and the UK. It is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK.

Workshop Themes

This workshop focuses on the contemporary usage of political catchwords in relation to two areas:

1. News production and circulations through print, broadcast, and online media. Questions such as the following may be addressed:

• To what extent are political catchwords generated by news media (as framing devices in reportage, as covert publicity mechanisms, through editorial prerogative, etc.) and how do news media enhance their purchase (enable them to catch on)?
• Why and when do catchwords originating in news media find growing usage through reception (by audiences/consumers) and dissemination into wider discourses and registers?
• How do political catchwords work in terms of distinctions in the mediascape such as the following?
  • Local/regional and international news provision and reception
  • Print, broadcast, and digital modes of news provision and reception
  • Mainstream and alternative/specialist news provision and reception (including from activists, charities, academic or professional bodies, etc.) 
  • Received categories of news, such as politics, culture, finance, sports, etc.
  • Professional journalism and do-it-yourself journalism
  • The claimed or implicit ideological agendas of news providers
  • Access to news in curated form (e.g., newspapers or broadcast news) or via social media (by user/platform selection, customization, targeting)
  • Investigative and on-the-ground reporting, sourcing from trusted institutions (e.g., corporate or governmental briefings), sourcing from social media platforms
• What resources and methodologies can be employed for the analysis of political catchwords in news media along the above lines? What general conceptual principles of the news media space are relevant, how are these regionally or culturally differentiated, and what sorts of digital repositories and tools can be called upon?  

2.  Crossovers between languages, through translation, adaptation, transliteration, or as international terms, both at interlingual and intralingual (e.g., between varieties of English) levels. This theme is not focused particularly on news media and discourses, and could extend to legal, governmental, academic, activist, commercial, technical, everyday and other registers of communication. Questions such as the following may be addressed:

• To what extent do catchwords have global purchase across languages and to what extent are they confined within specific language domains?
• Do catchwords which catch on across languages depend upon translation, transliteration, adaptation?
• In the circulation and reception of international catchwords, how distinctive are their associations and nuances in specific language domains and why?
• What role does human and machine translation play in the movement of catchwords across languages?
• What roles do cross-border ideological and political, business, and other alliances and networks play in the movement of catchwords across languages? 
• What resources and methods could be employed to study this dimension of political catchwords?

For both these themes, presentations could discuss either general conceptual and methodological perspectives or be anchored to specific political catchwords and case studies.

The workshop will consist of short presentations (20 mins) with generous space for discussion.

Note on Political Catchwords

For the purposes of this workshop, political catchwords/phrases have the following features:

1. These are words/phrases which have acquired distinctive connotations or are neologisms;
2. Their origin as such can be traced from a specific social juncture;
3. From the juncture of origin, they are increasingly used extensively (across contexts) and intensively (frequently);
4. Such usage may involve adaption across various contexts by shifting or enriching connotations or by meaningful modifications;
5. These are not produced for the purpose of marketing commercial products;
6. Such words/phrases are likely to be associated with other words/phrases which are regarded as political;
7. These may eventually lose their distinctiveness and growing purchase to enter ordinary language usage or to have diminished purchase as clichés.

For further relevant elaborations on the concept of catchwords, you might wish to consult the following brief essays:

Frequency Matters (Suman Gupta)
A Taxonomy of Political Catchphrases (Philip Seargeant)