metapol3

MetaPol: Discourse, ideologies and sub-state nationalism Despite multiple attempts to discourage separatism and to keep the political map of the world in its present form, the fight for separate identities within modern-day nations remains a serious issue. Sub-state nationalism has led to violent conflicts in postcolonial Africa, the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union, and has been one of the main causes of political upheaval in Spain, Belgium and Britain. As Anderson (1983) indicates, nations are imagined communities whose formation involves the spread of discourses aimed at establishing a clear difference between in-groups and out-groups. While national identity has attracted a fair amount of scholarly interest in the field of political science, it is only in the early 90s that studies which emphasized the discursive manifestations of nationalism started being conducted (Wodak & Matouschek, 1993; Wodak & Reisigl, 1999; Wodak et al. 1999) These last two decades, the study of political discourse has been consolidated by metaphor analysis (Musolff, 2006; 2016; Saric & Stanojevic, 2019). Even though great strides have been made in research on the discursive construction of nationalism, sub-state nationalism has not attracted that much research. It is thus in an attempt to fill this gap in research that we are organizing this conference which will hopefully bring together researchers interested in discourse, metaphor and nationalist ideologies. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following; - Metaphor scenarios (family, vehicle, etc.) in national identity discourse - Separatist discourse - Conceptualisations of the body politic - Visual metaphor in (sub-state)nationalist discourse - Gender and metaphor in (sub-state)nationalist discourse - Etc.