Cameron Mozafari Recent Presentations

Mozafari's recent talk and workshop at UCLA Discourse Lab.

On October 28, Cameron Mozafari, lecturer in the Department of English, gave a talk and ran a workshop for the UCLA Discourse Lab, titled "Cognitive Corpus Approaches to Political COVID Discourse." The talk analyzed features of political discourse emerging from the Trump presidency during the early stages of the COVID pandemic (February 28 - June 15, 2020), paying close attention to figurative language used to conceptualize the pandemic with a specific focus on war and violence metaphors and their effects on xenophobic national security policies. The workshop presented participants with hands-on activities for analyzing words, keywords, collocations, grammatical constructions, and figurative language across politicians, military personnel, and public health specialists as they are represented in Mozafari's (2020) Trump Covid Corpus.

Cameron Mozafari will be presenting at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in Baltimore, MD, on November 19, 2021. His talk, "The Cognitive Construction of Racist Messaging in Race-baiting Discourse," is part of a panel titled "Cognitive Linguistics and Social Meaning: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Situated Meaning-Making," which demonstrates how cognitive theories of meaning-making can aid critical social theories and ethnographic approach to examine the interplay between convention and dynamic meaning-making in local contexts of use. The panel focuses specifically on the act of "reading" drag queens, the use of "cuck" by white nationists on the website 8chan, the use of "racist" by tweeters ideologically aligned with 'blacklivesmatter; and 'maga', and the dynamic construction of race-baiting in Donald Trump's 2018 'caravan' tweets.