160158 PS Additional course in this subject area (2017S)

Over the last years, "crisis" has become a recurring topic. We have witnessed several "economic crises", "banking crises", a "Greek crisis", and, finally, the so called "refugee crisis" (to name but a few; the German reference corpus lists no less than 8264 word forms occurring in mass media, ranging from "Adler-Krise" to "Zyper-Krise"). A veritable "permanence of crisis" (Popper) seems to have come to pass: Crises are no longer exceptions to the "norm", they have become, as it were, "normal" themselves.

But: what does "crisis" even mean? How is this concept (originating from medicine) determined in media discourse? What turns a certain situation or development into a "crisis"? What is the discursive function of a "crisis"? What are, in fact, "crisis discourses"? How do "crises" relate to self-determination and positioning of actors? How are crises evaluated in media discourses: exclusively negatively or, as Karl Popper would argue, as a precondition for necessary transformation? In this course, we will intensively discuss such questions. For this, we will focus on the concept of crises from a theoretical perspective as well as on the related concepts of liminality and precarity/precariousness, which recently have been discussed again increasingly in applied linguistics. Moreover, we will discuss studies of linguistic research on crisis (discourse) and analyse ourselves a recent "crisis discourse" in the media with discourse linguistic tools. Over the course of the semester, the students will develop their own research questions, which they will elaborate on in a final paper.