31 May 2022, 6:30 pm, Uni Mail

Bd du Pont-d'Arve 40
1205 Genève

Free admission, registration required

The meeting is in French but here is the English translation of the above text:

Endless queues - to be tested, to enter a store or to be vaccinated; deserted cities, empty squares and streets, convoys of military trucks requisitioned to transport the dead, tired faces of health workers, masked faces of everyone: these are the striking images that the pandemic has offered us for months. They are a kind of "visual vocabulary" of the disease that we will not easily forget.

But the pandemic also left us with a legacy of new words or words that already existed and that have undergone a shift in meaning to "give voice" to what we were experiencing: containment and decontainment, barrier, cluster, lockdown, telework, face-to-face, remote, distancing, ... The language has shown all its creativity in the face of a new situation, an unexpected situation with rapid and pervasive effects on our daily lives.

These words have spread rapidly, thanks in particular to social networks: "remote" communication has largely replaced conversations, debates, and usual exchanges, both at work and in our private lives. Millenials, Generation Z, Boomers and others: all generations and age groups have increased their use of social networks, finding themselves facing a constant flow of information on new topics.

In this open access lecture, Federica Rossi will discuss some thoughts about the use of language and communication in the age of pandemics: even in times of crisis, studying a language and its possibilities allows us to better decipher reality.