Introduction [to Special Issue: (Critical Discourse Studies and the (new?) normal. Proceedings of the 9th Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines conference, Bergamo, 2022]

With the 2020 outbreak of COVID-19, lockdown measures disrupted – or at least coloured – norms and practices across all areas of social life. It was therefore unsurprising that work in (Critical) Discourse Studies began to respond to these changes by examining emergent discourses in the context of new norms and reconfigured social practices. Alongside a usual focus for (C)DS on institutional and political discourse during the pandemic (e.g. Vásquez & Jaworska, 2022; Williams & Wright, 2024), work also began to consider how some of the most basic and banal aspects of social life like touching one another as part of physical greetings (Katila et al., 2020), handling physical money (Mondada et al., 2020), and buying bread (Weatherall et al., 2022) were discursively reconfigured and “[became] interactionally relevant in a pandemic world” (ibid., p. 90). The CADAAD22 conference, held at the University of Bergamo, sought to respond to this COVID-19 zeitgeist and reflect on several years of turbulence, including for (C)DS as a field. Would everything – conferences, teaching, ways of being in academia – simply go back to ‘normal’? Or would there be a ‘new normal’? What would this look like? But we also sought to provide – through the return to a somewhat ‘normal’ conference format – a space for considering how (C)DS can respond to myriad social issues as it always has. This special issue is arranged around two parts, each of which reflects just a few of the themes emerging from the conference.