Vilnius University Kaunas Faculty, Institute of Social Sciences and Applied Informatics, continues the series of seminars initiated by Professor Vladas K. Gronskas and dedicated to analysing sustainable state development in the context of a mixed economy.
The sixty-third seminar will take place on 1 October 2026 at 14:00 in Room 5 and online via the Microsoft Teams platform.
The topic of the seminar is “Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Gender Bias in Social Media Discourse: Science-Based and Technology-Assisted Solutions to Digital Communication Challenges”. The presentation will be delivered in English.
Speaker: Postdoctoral Researcher Līga Romāne-Kalniņa, PhD
The speaker will introduce her research on multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) as an interdisciplinary approach to studying the construction, performance, and negotiation of gender in social media discourse. The presentation will examine how gender in social media discourse functions as both socially constitutive and socially constituted, and how it is often shaped by cognitive shortcuts, including historically embedded stereotypes and biases. These, in turn, are negotiated across macro (societal), meso (platform), and micro (discursive, semiotic, and linguistic) levels of analysis.
Drawing on a corpus of social media data, the presentation will discuss how gender stereotypes and biases emerge through specific discursive strategies realised through linguistic means and other multimodal resources, such as images, emojis, and hashtags. The speaker will also reflect on preliminary research findings showing how different social media platforms and their affordances shape these dynamics in different ways.
The presentation will further address an unanticipated but significant finding emerging from the MCDA of the corpus data: the considerable presence of hate speech targeting not only marginalised groups but also individuals and institutions, particularly in comment sections. This finding points to a new and developing avenue of inquiry.
The talk will conclude by considering how science-based and AI-assisted tools can help identify and address these emerging challenges, while also reflecting on the value of interdisciplinary and industry cooperation in this field of research.
About the speaker
Postdoctoral Researcher Līga Romāne-Kalniņa, PhD
Līga Romāne-Kalniņa, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of English, Faculty of Humanities, University of Latvia, working at the intersection of Gender Studies, Critical Discourse Studies, Corpus Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, and Digital Humanities.
She holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Latvia (2022). Her doctoral research applied corpus-based critical discourse analysis to the rhetoric of the presidents of the Baltic States between 1918 and 2018, earning her the University of Latvia Annual Award (2022) and the Young Scientist Award of the Latvian Academy of Sciences (2023).
She has published several scientific articles and presented her research at numerous international conferences and symposia, including at the University of Cambridge (2025). She has also undertaken research visits at the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University (2026) and the University of Granada (2026).
Her current ERDF- and Latvian Council of Science-funded interdisciplinary and industry-oriented postdoctoral research project, titled “Gender Bias Through a Digital Lens: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus-Based Platform Development for Analysing Gender Bias in Latvian Social Media”, combines linguistics (MCDA), gender studies, and computer science to develop an AI-assisted MCDA platform for detecting and analysing gender bias and stereotypes in social media. The study has also opened a developing line of research into online hate speech and misogyny, including manipulative and covert forms of hate speech, such as so-called soft hate speech.
She is also a contact person and member of the newly established Gender Studies Research Group and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis Research Group at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Latvia.
Alongside her research, she works as a leading expert at the Ministry of Smart Administration and Regional Development and has complemented her academic career with professional training in artificial intelligence, cognitive linguistics and neurolinguistics, data science, cybersecurity, AI ethics, project management, and intellectual property.
On behalf of the organisers
Prof. (HP) Dr Remigijus Čiegis