Article published In:
Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict: Online-First ArticlesAttacking epistemic personhood on Twitter/X
A Spanish corpus-based examination
This paper reports on an examination of the actions that Spanish epistemic agents perform in order to question, challenge, undermine and/or destroy the epistemic personhood of an informer on Twitter, recently been renamed ‘X’. Relying on a corpus of reactions to information about sanitary measures released during the COVID-19 pandemic by an allegedly reliable and trustworthy information source, namely the Spanish Ministry of Health, the analysis looks into the said actions and how these are arranged in larger digital discourse sequences. While contributing to extant research on conflict talk in Spanish on social networks, the paper also aims to raise vulnerable epistemic agents’ awareness of the varied forms and dynamics of threats to epistemic personhood as a way of empowering them to identify and counteract such threats.
Keywords: conflict talk, digital discourse, epistemic personhood, epistemic trustworthiness, dismissive incomprehension, epistemic denigration
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background
- 2.1Epistemic personhood
- 2.2Attacking epistemic personhood
- 2.3Conflict on Twitter/X
- 3.Methodology
- 3.1The corpus
- 3.2Data analysis
- 4.Results and discussion
- 4.1Actions attacking epistemic personhood
- 4.2Number of moves in attacks to epistemic personhood
- 4.3Move patterns
- 5.Concluding remarks
- Notes
-
References
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