Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD) is an ongoing project which aims to foster and promote cross-disciplinary communication in critical discourse research. Following the success of the project’s first international conference hosted at the University of East Anglia in 2006, we are pleased to announce the second international conference CADAAD’08, to be hosted at the University of Hertfordshire, 10-11 July 2008.

In line with the general aims of the project, we welcome papers both from CDA and neighbouring disciplines such as communication studies, media studies, narrative studies, sociology, philosophy and political science. Abstracts are invited which assess the state of the art and offer new directions for critical discourse research. By new directions we mean i) theoretical/methodological development and/or ii) analysis of contemporary discourses.

Theoretical/methodological frameworks sourced from all areas of the social and cognitive sciences are welcome. Papers exploring the following frameworks in linguistics are particularly welcome:

• Cognitive Linguistics (Blending, Construction Grammars, Framing, Metaphor)
• Corpus Linguistics (Corpus Construction, Data Extraction, Semantic Prosody)
• Pragmatics (Presupposition, Relevance Theory, Speech Acts)
• Systemic Functional Linguistics (Cohesion and Coherence, Grammatical Metaphor)
Analyses of all contemporary discourses are welcome, including those within applied and professional areas such as education, environmental policy, health, and law. Papers applying critical analysis to discourses used in the construction of ‚minority‘ vs. ’normality‘ and other dichotomies are especially welcome. Areas of particular interest include:
• Discourse on gender
• Discourse of International Law
• Discourse on immigration
• Discourse of the war on terror
• European Union discourse
• United Nations and foreign aid discourse
Reflecting our commitment to multiplicity in critical approaches to discourse analysis, the following plenary speakers have confirmed their participation:
• Professor Piotr Cap (University of Łódź, Poland)
• Professor Jonathan Charteris-Black (University of West England, UK)
• Professor Teun van Dijk (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)
• Professor Ruth Wodak (Lancaster University, UK)
Abstracts of no longer than 400 words should be submitted as MS Word attachment to discourse@cadaad.org by 30 November 2007. Authors should include their name, affiliation and email address. Successful authors will be notified via email by 15 February 2008. Papers will be allocated twenty minutes plus ten minutes for questions. Selected proceedings will be published. Selected papers from CADAAD’06 were published in the inaugural issue of the journal Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines (http://www.cadaad.org/ejournal) and additional papers from the Cognitive Linguistics theme session were published by Cambridge Scholars Press as “Cognitive Linguistics in Critical Discourse Analysis: Application and Theory” (Hart & Lukes, eds., 2007).

We also invite proposals for theme sessions and satellite events. A theme session should consist of four or five thematically related papers. Satellite events, such as workshops and tutorials, may take place on 9 July 2008. Please send proposals to discourse@cadaad.org by 1 October 2007.

Please visit http://cadaad.org/cadaad08 for further details.