An Alternative, International Summer School on Discourse and Social Justice
Dates: 17th - 22nd August, 2009
Location: Centre for Discourse Studies. Aalborg University, Aalborg,
Denmark
- Anabela Carvalho, University of Minho, Portugal
- Lawrence Frey, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA
- Shi-xu, Zhejiang University, China
- Thomas Tufte, Roskilde University, Denmark
...
Deadline for fee payment: 15th June 2009 ...
DeXusChange 2009 draws upon the innovative pedagogical tradition at
Aalborg University to experiment with a problem-based, project-centred research
summer school for doctoral students and scholars. The core concept is the free
play of ideas within the thematic context of group-derived problems and
reflexive project work developed during the six fruitful days of DeXusChange.
What are the themes of the summer school?
The thematics of this summer school
is prompted by the recent emergence of a set of interlocking global crises – including climate, energy, food, water,
finance – which demands a renewed interdisciplinary effort to understand how to
mediate the future, the past and the present in ways that attend to equity,
justice and rights. The aim is to bring together people investigating and
promoting social change and transformation with an explicit focus on the role of
discourse in shaping a just future (and the past). Discourse is understood as
encompassing an interdisciplinary perspective on text, talk, discourse, genre,
narrative, archive, document, image and rhetoric in all their modal, social and
cultural forms, not only in terms of representation but also action and
practice.
Themes within the interdisciplinary focus of this summer school will include
the following clusters:
- Discourse/Style/Genre/Semiotics/Rhetorics
- Mediation/Modality/Action/Practice
- History/Narrative/Memory/Experience
- Change/Intervention/Critique/Social Justice
- Rights/Ethics/Care/Hope
- Suffering/Risk
- Identity/Gender/'Race'/Ethnicity/Kinship
- Belonging/Citizenship/Linking/Relationality
- Nature/Environment/Habitus/Context
- Interaction/Technology/Artefact
- Structure/Ordering/Organisation/Governance
- Space/Movement/Mobility/Flow/Scale
What are the goals of the summer school?
The goal of DeXusChange is to create a space in which attendees --
invited guests, doctoral students and established scholars -- can discuss
contemporary theoretical and methodological issues in relation to social change
and justice, apply interdisciplinary approaches to 'real world' problems, learn
hands-on in a positive environment and find new relays between academic work and
social change.
Who will participate?
DeXusChange will interest students and scholars who work in
the diverse fields of discourse studies, communication studies, development
studies, globalisation studies, media studies, political science, sociology,
history, anthropology, international studies, social movement studies, communication activism, participatory communication, critical journalism studies, action research, and human-centred
communication and informatics.
The summer school is international and open to all
scholars, researchers and
PhD students. Apply here. Student
helpers from our own programmes will be taking part to assist
participants.
 Shaping discourse to come?
The idea behind the summer school's thematic subtitle
"shaping discourse to come" is a promise of
a discourse 'to come', a
promise that is both an injunction and yet unfulfillable. It derives from
Derrida's discussion of "democracy-to-come", which he proposes in the The Politics of
Friendship (1997). Derrida discusses his conceptual critique of democracy in
an
interview with Geoffrey Bennington.
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