Information regarding the International Research Group Language, History, Politics and Communication (LHPC)

The research group LHPC, which was founded in October 2016, aims at an interdisciplinary and/or transdisciplinary investigation of political communication in both its linguistic form as well as its historical context.

For this purpose, the research group intends to promote the scholarly exchange between a variety of academic disciplines including, on the one hand, different language sciences as well as, on the other hand, political science, history and communication studies. This way, the development of contrastive, cross-cultural and transdisciplinary projects, which particularly focus on the investigation of language, shall be enabled. It is a chief prerequisite of such projects to establish contact between researchers from different academic fields such as linguistics, history, political science, communication and media studies and to thereby enable the identification and designation of shared interdisciplinary and/or transdisciplinary research interests as well as lay the foundation for successful and promising collaborations between the different researchers.

In addition to the investigation of topics and phenomena from the post-WWI period, the initiators seek to focus on political communication prior to 1914, which has so far received relatively little academic attention. Thematically, research focuses primarily on language – both diachronic as well as synchronic – and politics in the context of historical, media and communication studies. Moreover, contributions from different linguistic programmes focusing on individual languages are more than welcome. Those contributions shall furthermore preferably exhibit interdisciplinary traits within said linguistic programmes, combining grammar, pragmatics, historical and variational linguistics.

A further explicit goal of the research group is the international collaboration with researchers from countries outside German-speaking regions. Hence, in order to include non-German-speaking researchers, both German and English will function as working languages in individual projects and conference sections. German shall receive the status of academic language for the cooperation between German-speaking scientists.

The initiative for founding the research group was originally launched in the context of the „International Conference on the Study of Political Language at the Intersection of Pragmatics, Grammar and Culture“ (original German title: „Internationale Konferenz zur politischen Sprache im Schnittfeld von Pragmatik, Grammatik und Kultur“), which took place at the University of Passau from 22-23 October 2015 and was organised by Annamária Fábián, M.A. (University of Passau/Regensburg), Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Harnisch (University of Passau) and PD Dr. Igor Trost (University of Passau).

The conference mainly focused on the interdisciplinary investigation of linguistic phenomena in the context of political, historical and communication studies. Following the conference, the idea was then developed further. In addition to the original focus on German political linguistics, other programmes and disciplines shall be included so that research can be extended to address issues from the fields of English, Romance and Slavic linguistics as well as history, political science and communication studies.

Structure of the Research Group:
In order to ensure the quality of the interdisciplinary cooperation, work should be conducted within and between sections, which orientate themselves towards the individual disciplines involved as well as their intersecting research areas. The research group should follow a loose, but nevertheless regular organisation without club structure by scientists who are interested in inter- and/or transdisciplinary or cross-cultural work and research on issues regarding language, history, politics and communication. Furthermore, linguists who prefer to combine several different linguistic subfields in their research, including, for instance, lexicology, pragmatics, grammar, historical linguistics, variational or cultural linguistics, are very much welcome.

Activities:
A conference on selected issues will be hosted every three years. Furthermore, we wish to establish a publication series for the conferences as well as a scientific journal. The first conference took place in Paris (Sorbonne Nouvelle) in 2018 . The next (digital) conference will be held in Jena in 2021.