Circulation and dissemination of populist ideas of law and justice across languages, communities and genres (CIRCLE)

Our investigation is conducted in four overlapping steps, each representing a work package:

Work package 1: The Rhetoric of Populist Ideas. In a first step, the PI and PhD - supported by a student assistant and in collaboration with national expert Katrine Meldgaard Kjær - will collect and code Danish media and political texts on human rights. Denmark is selected as the country of primary investigation due to the widespread populist sentiment across the political spectrum.

Work package 2: The Circulation of Populist Ideas. In a second step, not part of the PhD thesis, the PI with international collaborators will compare populist phrases across languages and trace their circulation and dissemination. The selected countries represent nation states in which European law is criticized publicly to varying degrees reflecting their different geo-political situation (Poland, the UK, Italy, Spain, and Germany).

Work package 3: The Impact of Populist Ideas. In a third step, the PhD will turn to legislative and judicial discourse to ascertain whether and how legal texts of the human rights system at national and European levels have been affected by populist ideas.

Work package 4: The Response to Populist Ideas. In a final conclusive step, the PI, in cooperation with international collaborators, will draft a grammar of a non-populist, plain and simple language of human rights that may be used in defense of the international legal order based on liberal democracy and the rule of law.

Roundtable discussion on Populist ideas of law and justice in media representations, at the International Language and Law Association, General Conference, University of Krakow, 21 September 2023.

5 April 2024: Roundtable. Pernille Kloster’s presentation of her PhD project “Populist Rhetoric of Law and Justice and its Impact on Legislative and Judicial discourse”.

September 2024 (exact dates to be announced): Workshop on “The Rhetoric of Populist Ideas”, University of Copenhagen.

Ruth Breeze

Ruth Breeze is Full Professor in the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra, Spain, specialising in computational linguistics and discourse analysis.

She is Principal Investigator of the research group ‘Public discourse’, which focuses on the applications of linguistics and discourse analysis to the social problems of our time. Its researchers apply their knowledge of different languages and their theoretical mastery of sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, multimodality and narrative analysis to deconstruct current social discourses in politics, business, media and social media. This approach has allowed members of the research group to shed light on social issues as diverse as Arab migration in Navarra, media literacy, digital misogyny and hate speech. 

Stanislaw Gozdz-Roszkowski

Stanisław Gozdz-Roszkowski is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Specialised Languages and Intercultural Communication, University of Lodz (Poland). His research focuses on the relationship between language, argumentation and rhetoric.

He is now finalizing a project on the role of evaluative language and stance-taking in judicial discourse (funded by Poland’s National Research Centre (NCN)).  He has published widely in the area of legal argumentation, legal phraseology, corpus linguistics and communicating evaluative meanings in judicial opinions.

His most recent book publications include Language and Legal Judgments Evaluation and Argument in Judicial Discourse (2024), Law, Language and the Courtroom. Legal Linguistics and the Discourse of Judges (2022) and Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings. A corpus-based interdisciplinary perspective (2019), all published with Routledge.

Gianluca Pontrandolfo

Gianluca Pontrandolfo is Associate Professor at the University of Trieste at IUSLIT, Department of Legal Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies, where he is also Director of the Master programme in Legal Translation. He is currently PI of the  research project “Rights and Prejudice: Legal Implications of Gendered Discourses in International and European Courts” (GenDJus) (funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) and the EU (Next Generation EU)). The aim of this interdisciplinary project is to investigate subtle forms of discrimination, which can derive from prejudices, stereotypical views and biased attitudes in judicial discourse. More specifically, it explores the way judges argue about gender and sexual minorities’ issues and how their discourses might impact on the enjoyment, restriction or denial of specific human rights. His research activity mainly focuses on legal linguistics and translation, textual analysis of specialised discursive genres applied to translation, corpus-assisted (critical) discourse analysis from a sociolinguistic perspective, and more recently, from a gender studies perspective. Many of his works adopt corpus linguistics as a privileged research methodology for empirical contrastive (Spanish, Italian, English) analyses.

Dr. Friedemann Vogel

Friedemann Vogel is Full Professor of sociolinguistics and discourse studies at the University of Siegen, Germany.

As a linguist and a specialist in media and cultural studies, he is interested in the relationship between language, knowledge and power. Since his university studies, he has been dealing with research questions that can be clarified only by applying an interdisciplinary methodology, such as: How does our linguistically founded legal system work? How is collective knowledge shaped and manipulated by the media? In which communicative practices are social groups and their access to power constituted? What role does the computer play as a medium of interaction or as a methodical tool to support linguistic and cultural studies research?

Katrine Meldgaard Kjær is Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. She is interested in interdisciplinary and creative approaches to developing digital methods for social research. Her work draws primarily on Science and Technology studies, critical data studies and feminist studies. She is a member of the ETHOS Lab, a research lab dedicated to methods development in the intersection of digital methods and ethnographic inquiry, and the Technologies in Practice research

Data Specialists. Both affiliated with iCourts, Centre of Excellence for International Courts, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen