Project Team

Salomi Boukala is Assistant Professor of Critical Discourse Analysis at Panteion University of Social & Political Sciences and visiting scholar at Newcastle University, UK. She is a specialist on Greek political discourse and has published widely in the fields of argumentation and Critical Discourse Studies. She is the author of European Identity and The Representation of Islam in the Mainstream Press: Argumentation and Media Discourse (Palgrave, 2019) and co-author of the forthcoming book The Language of Politics and the Greek Paradigm (Springer, 2025). In 2020, she co-edited a volume on Critical Discourse Analysis that is the first book on the field being published in Greece by Nissos Academic Publishing. Her research interests fall within the areas of the discursive construction of political and (supra)national identities, political rhetoric, discriminatory discourse, ethnographic approaches and media discourse.

Anastasia G. Stamou is a Professor of Applied Linguistics–Sociolinguistics–Discourse Analysis at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Director of the Master Program in "Intercultural Communication." Her research focuses on how discourse (co-)shapes the world, particularly in the media, pop culture, and education. Having moved from a department of education (School of Early Childhood Education) to a department of "foreign" philology (School of German Language and Literature), her most recent research delves into critical discourse analytical approaches to multilingualism, national identities, and the discursive construction of the cultural “other”. She is the book review editor for the Journal of Language and Pop Culture.

Nikos Komianos studied Philology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (EKPA) and is a PhD candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University. The topic of his dissertation concerns the collective political identity of the middle class in Greece, as it is shaped through the discourse of politicians, the media, and its subjects during the period of the economic crisis from 2009 onwards.

Sofia Tipaldou is Assistant Professor in International Relations at Panteion University, Greece. Before joining Panteion, she he was a Fulbright Scholar with the University of California, Berkeley (2022-2023), a Wellcome Trust Fellow with the University of Manchester (2022), and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow with the University of Manchester (2017-2021). Sofia has an interdisciplinary background with a B.A. in Economics from the University of Piraeus, an M.A. in European Studies from the European University Viadrina, and an M.Phil. and PhD in International Relations from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Sofia researches nationalism, populism and far-right mobilization using ethnographic and mixed methods. Her research interests lie within the fields of international relations, with a focus on how non-state actors influence foreign-policy; comparative politics, with an area study focus on Russia and Greece; and social movement studies. Her work has been published in Communication Theory, Europe-Asia Studies, European Societies, Demokratizatsiya, Revista CIDOB d'Afers Internacionals, Historia del Presente. Sofia’s first monograph, Nationalist Opposition in Putin’s Russia, is under contract with Manchester University Press.

Panagiota Gounari has background in critical applied linguistics and critical pedagogy and investigates social issues through the lens of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and their implications for pedagogy, always aiming to produce socially committed research. Her current research focuses on far-right populist discourses and authoritarianism, the discourse of the Critical Race Theory debate and the discourses of collective memory and historical revisionism.

Christos Boukalas is a political and law theorist, expert on issues of counterterrorism law and policy. He teaches Law in Northumbria University.

Dimitrios Serafis is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen. My research has a strong interdisciplinary orientation, drawing on (multimodal) critical discourse studies, social semiotics and argumentation theory, with my particular focus being on topics such as racism and hate speech, populism and authoritarianism in contexts of 'crisis' in Europe. I have published internationally on these topics in academic journals such as Critical Discourse Studies, Journal of Language and Politics, Discourse & Communication, Social Semiotics, Journal of Argumentation in Context, Informal Logic, Topoi. I am the author of the book Authoritarianism on the Front Page: Multimodal discourse and argumentation in times of multiple crises in Greece (2023, John Benjamins). My recent publications also include ‘Soft Hate Speech: Critical Perspectives from Discourse and Argumentation Studies’ (Critical Discourse Studies, 2025; co-edited with S. Assimakopoulos) and ‘Critical Perspectives on Migration in Discourse and Communication’ (Studies in Communication Sciences, 2021; co-edited with J. Drzewiecka & S. Greco). I am the Editor of the international peer-reviewed CADAAD Journal – Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (UGP) as well as sit at the editorial board of academic journals such as Argumentation (Springer) and Journal of Argumentation in Context (John Benjamins).

Maria Samara has studied International and European Economics and holds an MBA, from the Athens University of Economics and Business. She has more than 15 years in the management of projects, including dissemination and exploitation of project results. She has participated and organized several trainings, workshops and conferences, in the field of social sciences and the humanities.

Stavros Assimakopoulos is Associate Professor at the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology of the University of Malta and the School of English of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His research lies at the interface of linguistics with philosophy, cognitive psychology and critical theory. He is the author of numerous papers in the fields of pragmatics and (critical) discourse studies and is currently serving as co Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Pragmatics and co-editor of the CADAAD Journal. Most recently, he published the CUP Element Speech Act Theory: Between Narrow and Broad Pragmatics.

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Nikolaos Saridakis is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Panteion University and a Research Fellow at both the Center for Political Research and the Center on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS). His thesis explores the underlying factors driving far-right violence in Southern Europe and is fully funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (ELIDEK). His research in comparative politics focuses on political participation, and in particular the relationship between far-right parties and movements, as well as the dynamics of online and offline hate speech and hate crime. He holds a BA in Political Science and Public Administration from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and an MA in Comparative Politics from Sciences Po, Paris. During his PhD, he conducted a visiting research period at the University of Oxford. Currently, Nikos is a research fellow on several funded projects, including DeMoLISH and CRITIC, supported by ELIDEK, as well as the Horizon-funded project CIDAPE, where he is part of the research team at Scuola Normale Superiore.

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Spyridon Karakaisis is a Ph.D. candidate at Panteion University, Department of Social Anthropology. He holds a BA degree in Political Science from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a MA in Politics from Leiden University, the Netherlands. His research examines political rhetoric, especially far-right discourse in Greece through the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis. In particular, he emphasises the normalisation of far right on social media discourses.

Christos Mantoudis is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at Panteion University, examining how state actors and progressive social movements construct competing narratives of democracy, crisis and biosecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic. His research engages with Critical Discourse Analysis, democratic theory and the study of ideological formations, focusing on argumentation strategies, political imaginaries and the dynamics of state–society contestation in contemporary Europe. He also holds postgraduate degrees in Political Science from Radboud University and Public Administration from Leiden University, and has published analytical work on democracy, neoliberalism and political mobilisation.