Empowerment through metaphor

Metaphor is everywhere. It’s in the most moving poems and heartfelt songs, sure. But it’s also in our news articles, our viral memes, and our casual conversation. It’s even in our scientific research. Metaphor is also powerful. It shapes how we reason and talk about pretty much everything, from something as seemingly simple as time or quantity, to something as complex and abstract as climate change or democracy. In its power and omnipresence, metaphor can help or harm. So we better know how it works.

We take metaphor to be a cognitive process in which we use one concept to reason about another. This cognitive process is then expressed through language and imagery. This means that we don’t really care about the differences between “metaphors”, “similes”, and “analogies”. They are just different strategies for expressing the same underlying process (which is all to say, don’t bug us for using an example with “like”).

We also understand metaphor as a cultural process in which a particular cognitive metaphor is reinforced or challenged via our interactions with each other and institutions. In our tumultuous and crisis-ridden times, we think that being alert to the power of metaphor is more important than ever.

Join the Metaphor Society

After a long hiatus, we are back and we have an agenda: expose the metaphors that prevent us from conceiving of and enacting transformative change. We're breaking the strictures of academic writing here. We're academically trained, but we're not interested in feigning "neutrality" anymore. That "neutrality" is part of the problem.

We still want you to be critical. We want you to argue with us. We want a dialogue, not a dogma. But this newsletter has a stance, and that stance is if we are to survive this mess, we must dismantle all forms of domination. And we want our work to actively contribute to that dismantling.

We want you to be a part of this too! Join our community by practicing metaphor analysis yourself. Become a member, for free, and participate in our discussions through the comments. Or contact us with a proposal for a guest post!

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Always free, always human-made, always turning toward justice.