This website presents the EU-funded project DARE (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101244447), which explores how abortion and its related actors are represented in European mainstream news media.
- The site aims to share the project key information, including its objectives, research areas, work packages and findings with a broader audience.
- It also introduces the project team, highlights upcoming and past communication events such as conferences, seminars and workshops, and provides contact details for collaboration and inquiries.
- The website is designed especially for students, researchers and professionals interested in media, discourse, identity and polarisation and social issues in Europe.
Project objectives and work packages
DARE aims to contribute to the normalisation of abortion in Europe by empirically and critically examining the way abortion is talked about in contemporary news media discourse.
The project will focus on the polarising discourse strategies used to represent abortion and its related social actors in five European mainstream newspapers to examine the complexity of the abortion debate during the pandemic and post-pandemic period.
The specific project objectives, each corresponding to a work package, can be summarised as follows:
- Compilation of Abortion-Eur, a corpus of news articles on abortion published in the following European mainstream news websites between 2020 and 2025: BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, Euronews and Politico Europe.
- Annotation of Abortion-Eur, focusing on the polarising discursive representations of abortion and its surrounding social actors.
- Descriptive and comparative analysis of Abortion-Eur based on quantitative discourse-driven text mining and corpus methods as well as qualitative context-based critical readings.
- Open dissemination of project information, activities, and results to the public.
Team
Silvia Peterssen
Silvia Peterssen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University.
Her research explores how polarisation is linguistically realised in a wide range of contexts and discourses. She is currently leading the EU-funded project DARE, which aims to address the polarising conceptualisations of abortion and its related actors in European mainstream news media.
Her work has been published in journals such as Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, as well as in edited volumes from renowned publishers, including de Gruyter and Peter Lang.
Liudmila Arcimavičienė
Liudmila Arcimavičienė is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University.
She has published over twenty papers and book chapters on media and political discourse, exploring themes such as education, migration, gender, leadership and populism. Her work appears in journals including Discourse, Context & Media (Elsevier), Open Linguistics and Lodz Papers in Pragmatics (De Gruyter), and SAGE Open. She has also contributed chapters to volumes by John Benjamins, Springer, Cambridge Scholars, and Bloomsbury Academic. In 2019, she revised the C1-level English curriculum across Vilnius University faculties, introducing academic debates, an initiative that evolved into the annual Vilnius University Academic Debate Tournament, which she leads and moderates.
She is currently supervising the EU-funded project DARE, which examines the polarising representations of abortion and related actors in European mainstream news media.
