Speaker
Description
This presentation investigates the conceptualisation of medical staff in conspiracy theories surrounding childhood vaccination and organ cancer treatment in mature/old age, situating the analysis within the theme of language across the lifespan. Conspiracy narratives (in the sense of Introne et al. 2020) in English-speaking contexts—particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom—have gained momentum in the last decade, with childhood immunisation and cancer treatment emerging as recurrent focal points. These narratives not only dispute medical knowledge but also rely on the conceptualisations aimed at reframing doctors, nurses, and scientists as agents of harm.
My aim is to use the lens of Cognitive Linguistics in order to demonstrate how construal operations, such as metaphor, metonymy and framing (Croft and Cruse 2004, Langacker 2008) structure these representations and how they intersect with age-specific framings of health and vulnerability.
The study draws on the random sample of texts extracted from the LOCO corpus available at: OSF | LOCO: the 88-million word language of conspiracy corpus, marked by the authors as belonging to the topical category of health, and containing two key words: vaccine and cancer. For the sake of comparison, the relevant samples have been extracted both from the conspiracy and mainstream corpus, with the latter treated as the control group (in the sense of Miani 2022).
The analysis conducted within the cognitive linguistic framework reveals systematic contrasts in the conceptualisation of medical staff depending on the age group under discussion. The analysis of LOCO conspiracy subcorpus on childhood vaccination shows that doctors are frequently construed as predators or agents of control, while children are presented as innocent victims whose bodily integrity is threatened. Parents are construed as protective but powerless, caught in opposition to the “white coats” who enforce state and corporate agendas. In texts about adult decision-making (particularly parental consent), medical professionals are construed as manipulative counsellors, exploiting uncertainty and fear. As regards texts on cancer in conspiracy discourse, doctors are conceptualized through negatively charged frames that position them as agents of a profit-driven, morally compromised medical system rather than as caregivers. These narratives activate frames of deception, control, and harm, which reconfigure the doctor figure from a trusted expert to a threatening antagonist, thereby reshaping how audiences construe medical authority.
In contrast, in LOCO mainstream subcorpus medical professionals are conceptualised through metaphors of guardianship and protection, tailored to specific life stages (e.g. safeguarding children, supporting families, prolonging life in old age).
By uncovering conceptualisations behind these antagonistic portrayals, the paper contributes to understanding how language construes authority (as well as vulnerability) across the lifespan. In addition to this, it discusses the way in which metaphor, metonymy and framing shape age-specific discourses in conspiracy theories.
References:
Croft, W. and D. A. Cruse (2004). Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Introne, J., Korsunska, A., Krsova, L., & Zhang, Z. (2020). Mapping the Narrative Ecosystem of Conspiracy Theories in Online Anti-vaccination Discussions. International Conference on Social Media and Society, 184–192. https://doi.org/10.1145/3400806.3400828
Langacker, R. W. (2008). Cognitive grammar: A basic introduction. Oxford University Press.
Miani, A., Hills, T., & Bangerter, A. (2022). LOCO: The 88-million-word language of conspiracy corpus. Behavior Research Methods, 54(4), 1794–1817. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-021-01698-z
| Principal domain of study | English linguistics and applied linguistics |
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