Language(s) of Violence

The first TraCe Annual Conference takes place on March 1-3, 2023

A streetsign covered with paint

Photo: Picture alliance / NurPhoto | Emmanuele Contini

Lan­guage and vio­lence are closely linked. On one hand, lan­guage is a medium for dis­course about violence - be it in aca­demic ex­change, in the public sphere, or through framing. On the other hand, lan­guage can also be violence itself - be it through hate speech or pro­paganda. The first annual con­ference of the Regional Re­search Center “Trans­formations of Political Violence" (TraCe), “Lan­guage(s) of Violence," will be de­dicated to this multi-layered relation­ship between lan­guage and violence from March 1-3, 2023 in Frank­furt.

 

The registration deadline is over. Contact for inquiries: trace-coordination(at)hsfk.de

Topics:

The first panel, “The Scien­tific Lan­guage of Vio­lence,” is devoted to the seman­tic com­plexity of the sci­en­tific term “political violence” and aims to iden­tify changes in its polit­ical, normative, and analytical meanings.

The second panel, “The Public Se­mantics of Violence,” will explore the relation­ships be­tween political violence and public speech acts and discusses different dimen­sions from fake news to framing by social move­ments to mem­ory culture.

Finally, the third panel, “Lan­guage as Vio­lence,” focuses on how lan­guage itself can act as polit­ical violence and takes a look at different areas such as hate speech, pro­paganda, and justi­fication of vio­lence.

The final German-lan­guage dia­logue panel with prac­tition­ers will take place in co­operation with the cluster ini­tia­tive “ConTrust”. The focus here is on the ex­change be­tween science and practice. The aim is to shed light on various aspects at the inter­face of lan­guage and vio­lence from a practical per­spective. Beyond the sci­en­tific field, the dia­logue panel is aimed at the local public.

Program:

Wednesday, March 1:

  • Welcome and discussion

Thursday, March 2:

  • Panel 1 | The Scientific Language of Violence
  • Panel 2 | The Public Semantics of Violence
  • Panel 3 | Language as Violence
  • Roundtable

Friday, March 3:

  • Public Dialogue panel in cooperation with ConTrust and Stadtbücherei Frankfurt

Where: Normative Orders, Max-Horkheimer-Strasse 2, 60323 Frankfurt am Main, Germany (March 1 and 2)
and Stadtbücherei Frankfurt, Hasengasse 4, 60311 Frankfurt am Main (March 3)

For more information visit the event website.