
Scientists publish within IDUB – prof. UWr Roman Opiłowski
The funds that can be obtained under the Excellence Initiative – Research University programme allow researchers at the University of Wrocław to obtain extensive support for their publications. We would like to show you one by one the authors who have received such support. Today, that person is prof. UWr dr hab. Roman Opiłowski.
Prof. UWr dr hab. Roman Opiłowski conducts research in the discipline of linguistics and in the fields of text linguistics, discourse and media, multimodal communication, cross-cultural contrastivity in media texts and media linguistic landscapes (media linguistic landscapes).
Prof. UWr R. Opiłowski completed his master’s degree at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin in 2000, his doctoral studies at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg in 2005 and habilitated at the University of Wrocław in 2016. He is employed in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Institute of German Studies at the University of Wrocław. Since 2012, he has headed the Media Linguistics Laboratory at this institute.
He is the originator and co-editor of the international academic series “Breslauer Studien zur Medienlinguistik / Wrocław studies in media linguistics” at Atut / Neisse Verlag and “Studien zur Medien- und Kulturlinguistik” at Peter Lang Verlag. Multiple recipients of scholarships and traineeships from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD 2000-2020), the Minister of the State of Saxony-Anhalt (2002-2004), and the Hermann-Niermann Foundation at Julius Maximilian University Würzburg (2013-2014).
He led two restructuring projects at the UWr from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education „Lingwistyka mediów, komunikacja multimodalna, międzykulturowe dyskursy medialne” (2013-2015) (“Media linguistics, multimodal communication, intercultural media discourses” (2013-2015)) and „Cyfrowa komunikacja interkulturowa” (2016-2017) (“Digital intercultural communication” (2016-2017)). He was a contractor in the international projects POWER II (2019-2023) and INTERREG „Humanistyka Cyfrowa dla Przyszłości” (2020-2021) (INTERREG “Digital Humanities for the Future” (2020-2021)). She is currently coordinating a team in three laboratories in the DARIAH-PL project “Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities” (2021-2023). Multiple grantee at IDUB UWr since 2020: internal project grant, national and international field research, research internship abroad, funding for high-scoring publications.
IDUB UWr funding of articles for 200 pts:
- Opiłowski Roman (2022): Text und Stadt in der Pandemie. Zur funktionalen Klassifikation von öffentlichen Texten in der Coronakrise. In: Oxford German Studies, 51.1, pp. 106-135, article for 200 parameter points, full Open Access https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2022.2066862
Text and city in times of pandemic. On the functional classification of public texts in the coronavirus crisis
Social life has changed in many spheres during the pandemic, one of which is social communication in urban public spaces. It responds to people’s needs and expectations through multimodal texts in public spaces. The article discusses the funcional types of pandemic texts. The qualitative analysis is based on photographed coronavirus-related texts from the LinguaSnappHamburg project (University of Hamburg). The classified text types include regulatory, discursive, altruistic, social, declarative and commercial texts, which have specific sub-types. The types of texts and analyses carried out capture an important slice of communication activities during the pandemic and public knowledge of coronavirus.
2. Czachur, Waldemar / Opiłowski, Roman / Smykała, Marta (2022): Multimodal Practices of Empathy and Fear in Polish Refugee Discourse: Analysis of Magazine Covers. In: GEMA Online. Journal of Language Studies, vol. 22/3, pp. 63-85, article for 200 parameter points, full Open Access http://doi.org/10.17576/gema-2022-2203-04
Multimodal practices of empathy and fear in Polish migration discourse. Magazine cover analysis
The article, in collaboration between researchers from the Universities of Warsaw, Wrocław and Rzeszów, is both empirical and a review. Drawing on the material studied, the authors characterised the multimodal practices of empathy and fear used in migration discourse in Poland between 2015 and 2017. In doing so, they made insights into the collective knowledge formations activated by different actors in different media in order to evoke an attitude of empathy or an attitude of fear towards refugees. The analytical corpus consists of 36 covers from the ten leading weeklies by number of copies sold in Poland. In the case of multimodal practices of empathy and fear, the process of multimodal integration should be considered important, as it acted as a keystone between the verbal and visual layers. These layers carried specific argumentative topos, which then communicated emotional empathy and fear.
3. Opiłowski, Roman / Makowska, Magdalena (2022): Functional discourses of contemporary multilingualism in urban texts. On the example of three capital cities: Warsaw, Berlin, and Luxembourg. IN: Moderna språk, vol. 117 (2), article to be published in December 2022.
Functional discourses of contemporary multilingualism in urban texts. Using three capital cities as an example: Warsaw, Berlin and Luxembourg
This article, in collaboration between linguists from the University of Wrocław and the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, attempts to describe functional discourses in multilingual texts present in the contemporary public space of Warsaw, Berlin and Luxembourg. Photographs of these texts were taken in June and July 2021. The research method applied to them is based on functional discourses and additionally on the criteria of multimodal analysis according to the language or languages used in the urban text, the genre and multimodal form of the urban text, its content and its function. The result of the analysis is the demonstration of as many as 13 multilingual functional discourses, including six discourse types specific to multilingual urban texts and already mentioned in previous studies of general urban texts (infrastructural, regulatory, commemorative, commercial, ideational and transgressive discourse). In addition, 7 new discourses were found, such as pandemic discourse, ambiguous discourse, monolingual discourse, phatic discourse, ludic discourse, individual discourse and cumulative discourse, which adds significant value to the analysis conducted.
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