Reseacher
Promoter
Project duration
2018 – onwards
Keywords
Politics, political discourse, metapolitics, politicisation, discourse, critique, subjectivity
Description
This project aims to shed light on the metapolitical dimension of contemporary society-wide conflicts. The notion of metapolitics refers to struggles where competing modes and models of politics clash. Metapolitical debates potentially reshape the structure of the public realm as well as the entities, borders and processes that constitute it. Whether we talk about populist railings against Washington politics, about debates on parliamentary democracy, about the political legacy of the Enlightenment era, or about experiments with participatory democracy and alternative economies, we are dealing with projects that aim to re-imagine and/or change established modes of doing politics. A first aim of this project is to develop a notion of metapolitics that sheds light on such democratic and anti-democratic modes of politisation and depolitisation. Secondly, this project aims to contribute to the field of critical discourse studies by developing conceptual tools and heuristics suitable for the analysis of metapolitical projects, debates and conflicts. Thirdly, this project aims to analyze a selection of contemporary conflicts through the lense of metapolitics (e.g. conflicts related to the right to strike, debates on diversity and racism, etc.).
Scientific publications
Zienkowski, Jan. Propaganda and/or ideology in Critical Discourse Studies: Historical, epistemological and ontological tensions and challenges for thinking politics and the political. DiscourseNet Collaborative Working Paper Series ; 5 (2021) 7 pages. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.3/244300
Zienkowski, Jan; De Cleen, Benjamin. The polyphonic critique of trade unions: unpacking the logics of union critical discourse. In: Critical Discourse Studies: an interdisciplinary journal for the social sciences (2020). http://hdl.handle.net/2078.3/225330
Zienkowski, Jan. Propaganda and/or Ideology in Critical Discourse Studies: historical, epistemological and ontological tensions and challenges for thinking politics and the political. In: DiscourseNet Collaborative Working Paper Series (2020) (accepté/sous presse).
Zienkowski, Jan ; Breeze, Ruth. Imagining the peoples of Europe: populist discourses across the political spectrum (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture; 83), John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam, 2019. 9789027203489. 378 p. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.3/218818
Zienkowski, Jan ; Breeze, Ruth. Introduction: imagining populism and the people in Europe. In: Jan Zienkowski and Ruth Breeze, Imagining the peoples of Europe: political discourses across the political spectrum (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture; 83), John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam, 2019. 9789027203489. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.3/218819
Breeze, Ruth ; Zienkowski, Jan. Concluding remarks: appealing to the people. In: Jan Zienkowski and Ruth Breeze, Imagining the peoples of Europe: populist discourses across the political spectrum (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture; 83), John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam, 2019, p. 363-371. 9789027203489. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.3/218820(
Zienkowski, Jan. Politics and the political in critical discourse studies: state of the art and a call for an intensified focus on the metapolitical dimension of discursive practice. In: Critical Discourse Studies, Vol. 16, no. 2, p. 131-148 (2019). http://hdl.handle.net/2078.3/204103
Conference papers
Zienkowski, Jan. “Re-conceptualizing CAQDAS functions for discourse studies”, Cycle de Midis sur l’analyse de discours, Engage/CASPER (Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles), 18 février 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.3/237407(
Zienkowski, Jan. “Applying the concept of discourse as articulatory practice: a heuristic for studying discourse and subjectivity at multiple levels of abstraction(”. Cycle de Midis sur l’analyse de discours, Engage/CASPER (Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles), 22 novembre 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.3/237408.
Zienkowski, Jan. Propaganda and/or Ideology in Critical Discourse Studies: historical, epistemological and ontological tensions and challenges for thinking politics and the political.24th DiscourseNet conference – Disccourse and Communication as Propaganda (Brussels (online), du 07/09/2020 au 09/09/2020). http://hdl.handle.net/2078.3/235241
Zienkowski, Jan. Debating politics and/or the political today: on metapolitical conflicts in mediatized public debates. DNC3ALED: Knowledge and power in a polycentric world – discourse across languages, cullture and space (Paris, du 11/09/2019 au 14/09/2019). http://hdl.handle.net/2078.3/219776
Zienkowski, Jan ; De Cleen, Benjamin. The logics of anti-labor union discourse. Discourse theory: ways forward (Brussels, du 07/02/2019 au 08/02/2019). http://hdl.handle.net/2078.3/214332
Zienkowski, Jan. Politics and the Political in Discourse Studies: state of the art and a call for an intensified focus on the metapolitical dimension of communication. Paper presented at a PReCoM lunch seminar at Université Saint Louis – Bruxelles, Belgium (February 26th, 2018) http://hdl.handle.net/2078.3/198345
Zienkowski, Jan. Politics and the political in discourse studies: state of the art and a call for an intensified focus on the metapolitical dimension of communication. Paper presented at the Symposium on Metapolitics and Metapolitical Discourse at the University of Navarra (Pamplona, Spain on September 27th, 2017).
Societal valorization of Engage
Jan Zienkowski was the jury for Thomas Jacobs’ thesis entitled Winning Hegemony: a discourse-theoretical perspective on political strategy and the trade politics of the European Union. Dept. of Political Sciences (defended May 29, 2020).