Ruth Wodak: "Driving on the Right" - Analyzing Far-right Rhetoric

Much research illustrates that formerly taboo subjects and expressions in mainstream discourse are being accepted increasingly ('normalization') and have become part and parcel of mainstream politics (Bevelander & Wodak 2019; Wodak 2021, 2022; Wodak & Rheindorf 2022, 2026). Such normalization goes hand in hand with a certain ‘shamelessness’: the limits of the sayable are shifting regarding both the frequency of lies (Block 2019) and the violating of discourse and politeness conventions – as well as regarding repeated attacks on salient democratic institutions.

Discursive strategies of provocation, blame avoidance, denial, Manichean division, victim-perpetrator reversal as well as eristic argumentation and conspiracy theories dominate official communication, accompanied by ever more nativist nationalism and the racialization of space. For example, normalizing the assessment of migrants and refugees (all labeled as “illegal migrants”) as a threat to inner security, a burden on the welfare state and education system must be perceived as an international development – generally instrumentalizing a “politics of fear” and reinforcing a “coarse civility” [rohe Bürgerlichkeit] (@Heitmeyer 2018). In my lecture, I will deal inter alia with the imaginary of a “new normal” (Krżyanowski, Wodak, Bradby et al. 2023, Wodak 2024), as a consequence of the COVID-pandemic and multiple crises.

Dr. DDr. h.c. Ruth Wodak is a linguist, language sociologist and discourse researcher, retired full professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Vienna (Austria) and emeritus Distinguished Progessor of Discourse Studies der Lancaster University (UK). She holds multiple awards, among them the Wittgentstein Award 1996, honorary doctorates from Örebro University in 2010 and Warwick University in 2020. She is a member of the British Academy of Social Sciences and of the Acadamia Europaea. Since March 2020, she is a
Honoary Senator of the University of Vienna. Her research interests include identity politics, populism and right-wing extremism, media communication, discrimination and rhetoric of exclusion.

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