The First Research Forum of the Corvinus Metaphor Workshop

The Corvinus Metaphor Workshop (CMW) held its first research forum on 29 March at Corvinus University of Budapest. Four students of communication and media science presented their ongoing inquiries into metaphor in the fields of health communication, political communication, and social media research.  

First-year BA student Balázs Horváth talked about his paper prepared for the Conference of Scientific Students’ Associations (TDK) on the personalization of political communication in Hungary. His results show if the communication of the Hungarian Prime Minister has become more person-centered in the course of his tenure.  

Our second-year MA students, Petra Bialkó and Sára Cornides addressed two fields of health communication. Petra presented her findings about the metaphors of post-natal depression (PND) on online forums. Her work aims to de-stigmatize and move forward the discourse around PND by highlighting its conceptualization. Sára shed light on another key issue of health communication: the metaphors and metonymies found in social advertisements surrounding breast cancer. Her research helps us understand the way society thinks about breast cancer and the potential implications of the figurative language surrounding it. 

Finally, Utku Bozdag, our first-year PhD student showed how to collect data from social media by using various online tools. His practical introduction to scraping data gave an insight into the possibilities of quantitative analyses by assembling a large body of texts and images from new media platforms.  

We would like to thank our presenters their work and the exciting talks they gave and wish them success in their research. We are also thankful to our audience for their thought-provoking questions and comments.