Dr Aleksandra Salamurović (seeFField Academic Coordinator, University of Regensburg) and Prof. Dr Tanja Gradečak (University of Osijek, seeFField project partner) presented their joint research at the international conference Languaging Crises at the University of Helsinki from 4-5 March 2026.

The LanCris conference explores how language is used, and sometimes abused, in times of crisis, and how different societies represent and respond to crises across a range of texts and communicative contexts.

At the conference, Aleksandra Salamurović and Tanja Gradečak presented their joint research on the use of novel and creative metonymies in protest communication, focusing on protest slogans from the student protests in Serbia that began in December 2024. Their analysis of 100 slogans collected from the website https://protestografija.cloud/  shows that creative metonymies play an important role in constructing protest identities and legitimising collective action, particularly in contexts where traditional forms of political participation are perceived as ineffective. The study also demonstrates that these linguistic strategies help create new cognitive links that enable alternative value systems to emerge. While the “lifespan” of such metonymies is partly shaped by extralinguistic factors, such as shared generational knowledge (for example, the slogan “Selo moje lepše od Parizera”), they are not limited to local contexts. Some metonymies originating in the Serbian protests have already crossed borders, appearing in recent protests in Sarajevo, including the multimodal metonymy “bloody hands.”