Invited speakers' abstracts
Dr. Andreas Musolff University of East Anglia, UK A.Musolff@uea.ac.uk Metaphor, Conspiracy Theory and Crisis Metaphors have been known at least since Aristotle to be extremely useful in social and political crises for one purpose ( inter alia ): to highlight, exacerbate, exaggerate or, in modern parlance, ‘weaponize’ the crisis in question. Strictly speaking, metaphors do not achieve this feat on their own: they are aided and abetted by hyperbole, metonymy, analogy and, if needed, by the whole gang of rhetorical tricks known since Antiquity as figures or tropes. Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) has tried to exonerate metaphors from the association with demagoguery; however, in the form of Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA), metaphor’s power of shaping social and political processes in detrimental ways has become a central research object across several domains of study, e.g. Psychology, Media Studies and Discourse Studies. Taking one of the many recently erupted crises, i.e. the Covid-