Aims and scope

The Journal of Discourse, Culture & Society (JDCS) is a peer-reviewed, diamond open-access journal publishing cutting-edge research at the intersection of language, communication, culture, and society. The journal investigates how discursive practices—across spoken, written, multimodal, and digital modalities—constitute and are constituted by broader social systems, cultural formations, institutions, and asymmetric relations of power.

JDCS is inherently interdisciplinary by design and is not committed to any single national, theoretical, or methodological tradition. The journal provides an intellectual forum for critical dialogue across the humanities and social sciences, actively welcoming contributions from discourse studies, linguistics, sociology, communication and media studies, cultural studies, anthropology, political science, and the philosophy of language, as well as inquiries that transcend conventional disciplinary boundaries.

Scope

JDCS welcomes original theoretical inquiries, robust empirical investigations, and innovative methodological contributions across a broad range of research areas concerned with discourse, language, and social life. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Discourse & Critical Approaches: Critical Discourse Studies (CDS/CDA), legitimation strategies, institutional and political discourse, hegemony, and rhetoric in public debate.
  • Sociolinguistics & Language Ideologies: Sociolinguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, language ideologies, language variation, linguistic minoritisation, and language policy/planning.
  • Media, Technology & Digital Publics: Media representations, news framing, digital culture, social media discourse, online interaction, platformed publics, and algorithmic cultures.
  • Culture, Subcultures & Everyday Practices: Cultural sociology, popular culture dynamics, subcultural practices, style, consumer culture, and the discursive construction of social identities.
  • Multimodality & Semiotics: Multimodal discourse analysis, social semiotics, visual communication, embodied interaction, and spatial/material discourse.
  • Interaction & Pragmatics: Pragmatics, intercultural communication, conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, and narrative analysis.
  • Multilingualism & Globalisation: Bi-/multilingual practices, translanguaging, linguistic landscapes, migration, and transnational communication.

Article Types & Open Access Mandate

  • Article Types: JDCS primarily publishes original empirical research articles, critical review essays, and theoretical and methodological contributions. Special-issue proposals and critical book reviews that align with the journal’s core scope are also considered following editorial consultation.
  • Open Access & Copyright: All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence, with authors retaining unrestricted copyright.
  • Fee-Free Publishing: As a committed diamond open-access journal, JDCS charges neither authors nor readers any submission, processing, or publication fees (APCs).