Exploring Metaphors and Shaping Social Transformation

We congratulate Marie Teich on successfully completing her PhD in Digital Humanities. Marie has recently started teaching at the American University in Kyiv. She is also actively involved in a research group initiative that helps shape social and cultural transformations. We wish Marie all the very best!

In her PhD project, Marie focuses on data analysis in the field of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). CMT sees metaphor not as a rhetorical embellishment but as a cognitive mechanism that allows abstract topics to be structured in terms of concrete, experientially acquired structures. “We used data from the Mapping Metaphor project to represent the English language as a network of metaphors between different topics. By studying this network, we systematically tested basic CMT assumptions, investigated the semantic structure resulting from the metaphorical conceptualization of the topics, and were able to systematically explore the metaphorically induced word meaning flexibility”, Marie explains her research.

“A strong metaphor theory considers metaphor as a point of meaning-creation in language. Formulating parts of these thoughts in the framework of Cognitive Linguistics, Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) views metaphor as a thought mechanism through which abstract topics are structured by means of concrete domains. This thesis presents a systematical study of the metaphoric network underlying the English language through the analysis of the dataset of the Mapping Metaphor project. Network analysis techniques are used to empirically examine different fundamental propositions of CMT. Building on this, CMT is brought together with continental approaches to metaphor and schematically extended.”

Since mid-October, Marie Teich has been teaching at the American University in Kyiv. She is also active in the research group initiative "Transformative Research - The Third Floor" and the adult education platform CowoGuru. The "Transformative Research - The Third Floor" group aims not only to understand social and cultural transformations but also to engage with and constructively shape them. This summer, their first major public project was a summer school in Lutsk: https://www.summerschool-lutsk.com/.

Since the Maidan, an active and innovative civil society has been emerging in Ukraine, moving further away from the post-Soviet system. At the heart of many civil society initiatives are currently private adult education platforms, which serve both as networking hubs and think tanks for social projects. The platform CowoGuru (https://www.youtube.com/@cowoguru) is one such educational platform. Marie will be teaching model thinking there, and probably also other playful and applied introductions to analytical thinking, and if possible, contributing to the networking of these projects with those in other European countries.