Special Panel on Metaphor/Mediator

Persuasion, Power and Privilege (starting 1:20pm HKT on June 4th)

Metaphor and mediation are integral to how a community connects to, learns from, and manages to communicate. Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) contribution, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, highlighted the pervasiveness of metaphor and their use in reasoning and understanding. Metaphor as mediator in the process and practice of communication is interactive with the social and cultural environment surrounding the individual, institution, or organisation. In turn, metaphor has been shown to influence interactions, meaning making, and value systems. This symposium explores the theoretical and empirical study of metaphor in discourse across diverging domains of knowledge and practice including healthcare, education, business, politics, psychology, etc. Our focus is the examination of how metaphorical language use can manifest power in political rhetoric, persuasion in professional rhetoric, and privilege in process and practice. The symposium will showcase current research from the perspective of conceptual metaphors, linguistic metaphors, and metaphor themes or scenarios to demonstrate the merits of applied metaphor analysis to real-world problems facing academia, industry, and our communities. 

Metaphor/Mediator Panel Co-organizers

• Professor Kathleen Ahrens, Professor, Department of English and Director, Research Centre for Professional Communication in English
• Dr Allison Creed, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne