Silvia Peterssen

Vilnius university

About the workshop presenter

Silvia Peterssen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University.

Her research explores how polarisation is linguistically realised in a wide range of contexts and discourses. She is currently leading the EU-funded project DARE, which aims to address the polarising conceptualisations of abortion and its related actors in European mainstream news media. Her work has been published in journals such as Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, as well as in edited volumes from renowned publishers, including de Gruyter and Peter Lang.

Workshop Social actors in news reports on abortion: how to analyse them and why they matter

DARE is an EU-funded postdoctoral project that intends to critically analyse how abortion and its surrounding actors have been represented in European news reports between 2020 and 2025. More specifically, DARE aims to address the polarising or socially divisive representations of abortion by focusing on the discursive inclusion, exclusion, and evaluation of social actors. These three strategies are part of the so-called social actor analysis framework and can be applied to study polarisation in a wide range of contexts and discourses. This workshop will briefly introduce and contextualise project DARE and explain not only how social actor analysis is applied in the study of abortion news, but also why it is relevant. As the workshop intends to be practical, the annotation of real examples taken from European mainstream newspapers such as BBC and The Guardian will be shown and practised.