CfP: Special Issue – Language and Communicative Aspects of Disinformation

We are preparing a special issue on the Language and Communicative Aspects of Disinformation. Rather than treating disinformation as a straightforward cause of social problems, we approach it as a symptom of deeper shifts in social relationships and public communication.

The special issue will open space for research into the linguistic and communicative strategies through which media, political actors, and influencers deliberately create conditions for distorted interpretation and misunderstanding. It will equally attend to the possibilities of effective communicative response — from strategic state-citizen communication to everyday communicative practices within communities and between individuals.

Our aim is to offer readers a deeper understanding of how disinformation operates in language and communication, why it is socially effective, and how its impact can be mitigated through responsible and thoughtful communication. We welcome contributions from a wide range of disciplines.

Planned publication: Vol. 3, 2027

Language of contributions: English

Submission deadline: 31 March 2027

Topics of Interest

We welcome contributions from all relevant areas of inquiry, including but not limited to:

• Theoretical and methodological foundations for disinformation research (from the perspectives of linguistics, semiotics, philosophy, logic, sociology, political science, law, history, social psychology, and related disciplines)
• Linguistic analysis of disinformation texts (lexical, stylistic, textual, and genre-based aspects)
• Communicative and pragmatic aspects of disinformation (speech acts, communicative principles and norms, relational and interactional dimensions, interpretive competence, mechanisms of (mis)understanding)
• Discourse-analytical and critical approaches to disinformation (language ideologies, power relations, meaning construction, legitimation and delegitimation in discourse)
• Corpus-based research on disinformation texts (methods, tools, and empirical approaches to the analysis of large text collections)
• Research on unwarranted beliefs and conspiracy theories (from historical and contemporary perspectives, including information operations and their linguistic manifestations)
• Strategic communication and communicative responses to disinformation (institutional, media, community, and interpersonal communication; prevention, mitigation, and building communicative resilience)

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should be submitted through the journal's editorial system. When submitting, authors are asked to select the following section in the system:

Special Issue: Disinformation as a Communicative Phenomenon