SPECIAL ISSUE OF DISCOURSE & SOCIETY ON "DISCOURSE AND POVERTY"

DISCOURSE & SOCIETY has in the past paid attention to many important social issues, especially those related to power abuse and inequality in the fields of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, politics and ideology.

There is, however, one primary field of social inequality and daily exploitation, suffering and misery that has received much less attention from critical discourse scholars, both in DISCOURSE & SOCIETY as well as in other journals or books: poverty.

True, poverty is first of all a question of a fundamental lack of basic resources and human rights (food, housing, work, health care, safety, education, and so on) due to social and economic domination and less an issue of discursive discrimination. Yet, as is the case for all forms of social inequality, also poverty may be discursively ignored (e.g., in media or political discourse), mitigated or explained away (e.g., in bureaucratic or academic discourse), or directly or indirectly legitimated (e.g., in political, corporate or legal discourse). To understand poverty, one needs to understand the mechanisms of power abuse. Power abuse is engaged in by various dominant groups/classes and their elites. Elites exercise their power mainly through text and talk. Analyzing such talk, or the dissident discourses that oppose it, may contribute to our critical understanding of poverty.

Poverty -- anywhere in the world, also in the rich countries -- should be placed more prominently on the world agenda -- also of discourse analysts. With the vast media and political attention for terrorism, the daily terror of poverty affecting many hundreds of millions of people is usually forgotten.

Critical discourse analysts should not tolerate this, and actively contribute to the study of the discursive foundations of the reproduction of poverty. DISCOURSE & SOCIETY stimulates and publishes such critical studies.

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ABSTRACTS/PROPOSALS (max 200 words, including Title of paper, Names of Authors, Institutional Address and e-mail as header of the abstract) should be sent before October 1, 2005 to the Editor, Teun A. van Dijk: vandijk@discourse-in-society.org.

First versions of papers whose proposals are accepted are probably due on May 1, 2006.

PAPERS are preferred that systematically and explicitly analyze both the discursive and the social dimensions of a sizable corpus of text and/or talk related to the topic of poverty. For details about what we understand by 'discourse analysis' see the Criteria for Preferred Papers for DISCOURSE & SOCIETY: http://www.discourse-in-society.org/pref-das.htm.

Teun A. van Dijk
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Dept. de Traducció i Filologia
Rambla 30
08002 Barcelona
España/Spain

E-mail: teun@discourse-in-society.org
Internet: www.discourse-in-society.org