Dr. habil. Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Creative Communication at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (VILNIUS TECH). With a background in linguistics, she specializes in discourse analysis, communication and media studies. In this interview, we spoke with professor Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska about one of her recent works „Casual, Colloquial, Commonsensical: A News Values Stylistic Analysis of a Populist Newsfeed“, as well as her research interests, inspirations, career journey, and experiences working with VILNIUS TECH.
Let’s start from the beginning. What sparked your initial interest in science and ultimately led you to pursue a career as a scientist? Can you describe any key experiences or influences that motivated you to choose this path?
It is rather hard for me to go back to the times when my academic interests were shaped, but I guess I was mainly inspired by my professors at the Department of English of University of Wrocław in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They seemed very passionate about the research they were involved in, be that in linguistics, literary studies or communication. After the fall of communism in Poland, many things that came from the English-speaking countries seemed interesting, even exotic, to explore. When doing my MA in linguistics, I began to feel that I would not just want to be a recipient of scientific results, or a reader of scientific articles, but an author who could come up with something new, something that has not been discussed yet.
At that time I had been employed as an English teacher at some local schools, and loved working with young learners, but I felt constrained by the school curriculum and exam requirements. So I opted for the academia where I hoped I would have more freedom to teach and research language patterns that were socially relevant. I hoped I would design studies that could capture the changing nature of language (mainly English) used in the new media, in specialist conversation, or in international language contacts.
Throughout your career, what have been the most inspiring directions of your research and what scientific areas have you found most interesting to work in?
Actually I started off my research career with a doctorate at University of Opole (a city in south-western Poland), which I completed in 2006 in literary studies on American countercultural poets. In the dissertation I looked at poetic texts, but instead of taking an aesthetic point of view, I approached them as political manifestos or social philosophies. That is when I learned more about critical discourse analysis and how language as a system of expression is never transparent. What I mean is that every choice of phrase, even if seemingly neutral, may contribute to a specific representation, framing or evaluation. From there, there was a small step for me to start studying political and journalistic styles both in English and in Polish, especially if there were some highly mediatized incidents or publicized debates in the public sphere that generated a lot of data.
My international breakthrough came in early 2010s when I started systematically studying the language of online news headlines and compiled a list of the devices that make the news issue seem more attractive, interesting or relevant that is the case. I called this a pragmalinguistics of sensationalism. Sensationalism is largely a question of language use – using a question form, dropping a celebrity name, applying a story-telling formula, adding a conversational buzz word, or an attributed “think aloud” quote. Now probably AI is trained to spice up headlines for clickbait, but studying the condensed or convoluted nature of some headlines or slogans reminded me of certain types of poetry.
Also, around 2013-2014 I was invited to join a group or rhetorical scholars and start up a new journal that would reframe rhetoric as something current and very much overlapping with linguistics, media studies, literary studies, cultural studies, even sociology and political science. As I enjoy working on research problems that draw on several disciplines I agreed to co-edit this journal – Res Rhetorica – produced in Warsaw and now indexed in various databases. I have to admit that this step had an enormous influence on my career as well and allowed me to focus on linguistic tools of argumentation and persuasion in public discourses.
What is your current research focus and can you tell us more about the directions for future research? What are your long-term goals and plans?
Over the last few years I was interested in the discourses of social movements and non-governmental organizations – particularly how they use language and visuals to legitimize their causes or mobilize their supporters. Some of this research concerns environmental communication, or populist political communication, and the data I analyze are increasingly sourced from online platforms rather than print. However, as much of public communication is becoming multimodal, I also try to contribute to discussions how to expand the methodological toolkit of communication scholarship to draw on the new possibilities of corpus linguistics on the one hand and on the insights from critical, rhetorical or semiotic analytic protocols on the other.
I’m now mostly involved in projects with international partners who are part of the FORTHEM European University Alliance, piloting various innovative forms of research collaboration. Citizen Science has also been my recent inspiration and with various European partners, we are thinking how to apply its guiding principles within the Humanities and Social Sciences.
How did your journey with VILNIUS TECH begin and what have been some of the most memorable experiences you have had during this time?
I was recruited to join the Department of Creative Communication at the Faculty of Creative Industries by prof. Vytis Valatka in 2020. He noticed the parallels between my research studies and the work done in the department. However, because of the pandemic, I have yet to join my colleagues in person, because all of my work has been enabled to be provided remotely. I remember contributing to the application for the opening of the Doctoral Programme at the Faculty, and all the initiatives designed to first recruit and then mentor and evaluate the students according to the required procedures. Other highlights include when I was informed that VILNIUS TECH has been ranked so high among the Lithuanian universities and when one of my articles won an award for an outstanding contribution. It is always nice to be recognized and appreciated.
You have published a study “Casual, Colloquial, Commonsensical: A News Values Stylistic Analysis of a Populist Newsfeed”. Could you tell us more about the research process and what were your key findings?
There has been a lot of work done on populism recently because of the increase in the number of populist parties and leaders, be they right- or left-wing. Actually, there are two ways to study populism. One comes from political science and concentrates on how some of those politicians and parties manage to collect voter support. They often do that by positioning themselves as the only force acting in the interest of the citizens (populus in Latin). To build the following, such politicians do not avoid, for example, vilifying the elites and demonizing the immigrants. The other way comes from rhetoric and looks at the language devices that are used by populists to appeal to the crowd, to stir up emotions and that are effective for political support. As linguists, myself and a colleague – Dr. Przemysław Wilk from University of Opole, took the second path.
In the study “Casual, Colloquial, Commonsensical: A News Values Stylistic Analysis of a Populist Newsfeed” we develop a systematic framework for the study of what is called populist newsfeeds. A newsfeed is an online genre often used by a populist party when releasing news that look like reports, but are in fact political propagandas. Some populist parties use web and social media platforms to broadcast their propagandas in order to bypass established media outlets.
We found this was the case with the website of an American grassroots populist party The Tea Party, whose “news” we sampled in 2019. The Tea Party is decidedly conservative has a relatively narrow sense of American patriotism. In recent years it has embraced the attitudes that are now known as Trumpism.
To identify what makes populist news popular with voters, we drew on journalistic notions of news value and on linguists’ work on styles. In this way we could see how populist news items made use of certain keywords and formulations in headlines. We discovered that much attention was paid to elite individuals and covering what they did or said, as if politics was mainly done by prominent leaders only. Secondly, there was a lot of focus on negative news related to corruption, illegality and crime. Thirdly, we noticed many words that imply impact and influence of politics on everyday life of citizens.
As the title of the study suggests, the newsfeed was characterized by casual style of expression that avoided political jargon. It was also marked by colloquialisms sourced from American, and by repetitive and stereotypical representations of “us” versus “them” or “right” vs. “wrong.” Needless to say, all these stylistic devices were recruited to praise Donald Trump and conservative values, and to discredit Democratic politicians and progressive actions in various states.
As you can see, we offer a small scale, but a detailed study the language of populism. The styles of populism vary, but we believe that if voters were paying more attention to devices of language and expression, rhetorical maneuvering or purposeful stylization, there would be less possibility to manipulate them into voting for parties that, in the end, do not serve them well. Researchers also have to monitor closely the technological developments in the media and how the open virtual public sphere is hijacked by propagandas disseminated in very clever and insidious ways.
Thank you for the interview. As we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts you would like to share?
Thank you very much for your interest in my research and for the questions about my inspirations. I hope to have shown that there is still a lot of fascinating scholarship waiting to be done in communication, especially now with many language patterns changing due to technological advances and societal challenges. If there are any young people out there thinking of pursuing a doctorate or a career in this area, the Faculty of Creative Industries at VILNIUS TECH will definitely accommodate them, as they accommodated me.
