presentation

In today's world, marked by the effects of globalisation, the economic crisis and corruption in public office, there has been a growing distrust of conventional politics, as well as a distancing between citizens and their representatives. This has led to the emergence in Europe of new political formations of a more or less radical nature. These groups are very diverse: although their characteristics sometimes allow them to be associated with classic left-wing, right-wing and/or nationalist parties, they also offer new proposals and discourses that are difficult to classify in traditional terms.

The proposals of these new political actors, who claim to embody the will of the demos ("the will of the people"), seem to be a reaction to some aspects core topic of neoliberal governments in areas such as Economics, European integration, migration or social security. Their discourses try to legitimize the claims of the right and/or left, appealing to the will of the citizenry, and are characterized by the protagonism they grant, as opposed to the supposedly hegemonic groups, to aspects of identity, which are also intensified with a high Degree of emotionality. However, perhaps because it is a very recent phenomenon and the changing political situation calls for quick and flexible responses, the discourses of these formations have received little critical attention from linguists.

In each country or region the concept of demos is articulated differently and gives rise to a "map" of terms whose meaning conditions the interpretation of these discourses that question neoliberal policies; therefore, based on various corpus of materials related to these new political groups in different countries, the goal of this project can be summarized along two main lines:

• identify the different ways of understanding and (re)articulating the concept of demos;

• mapping of the terms related to this concept and their respective articulations with other concepts in a selection of European countries.

Are you interested in DEMOS, would you like to work with us, would you like to collaborate with us to obtain external funding? Write an email to Ruth Breeze or Carmen Llamas