Metaphor is far more than linguistic ornament: it structures how we perceive, reason and act. The call for this Congress is itself a case in point — democracy at a crossroads, eroding trust, a rising tide of migration, tectonic shifts, an AI revolution. Diagnosing democratic uncertainty is inseparable from the figures through which we state it. Speaking of "migratory submersion", of a "war against a pandemic", of "democratic backsliding" or of a "balance of powers" is never neutral: metaphor works at once as a cognitive, rhetorical and political instrument, and its persistence makes it an unavoidable object for political science. Yet the discipline still lacks a structured epistemological and methodological framework for it. This panel opens an interdisciplinary space between political scientists and specialists of language around two problems.
The first is descriptive. How do metaphors operate in the political field, and how can we establish that they do? Contributions may examine actors' discourse, party programmes, institutional and legal production, media and platform environments, or the vocabularies through which crisis, migration, security, technology and international order are made intelligible. The methodological stakes are substantial: identifying a metaphor is already an interpretive act, and questions of corpus construction, coding reliability, comparability across languages and political cultures, and the articulation of close reading with computational detection at scale all deserve sustained treatment.
The second is reflexive. What epistemological and normative role does metaphor play in the construction of political science itself? Our concepts — capital, field, weight, distance, equilibrium, network, flow, wave, erosion, consolidation — carry figurative freight that orients what we take to be measurable and explainable. Formal models and quantitative indicators are no exception: they rest on spatial and mechanical images that shape operationalization and interpretation. At issue are the conditions under which a figure becomes a concept, the traces it leaves in scientific writing, and the ethics of argumentation in a discipline whose object is itself constituted through language.
In line with RC01's plural mandate, we welcome quantitative, qualitative and formal approaches: corpus linguistics and computational text analysis, discourse analysis, conceptual history, comparative case studies, and epistemological reflection on modelling and scholarly style.
