Guest workshops
Below you will find the titles and abstracts of the
guest workshops at the summer school. See the
Bibliography for reading lists for each guest.
Anabela Carvalho
Analysing Texts: Developing Tools and Skills to
Deconstruct Social Problems
The workshop will be geared towards the development of
analytical and critical skills in the study of media(ted) texts,
political discourses, activist discourses and other forms of
communication that shape our social world. Starting out with the basic
tenets of Critical Discourse Analysis, we will discuss the communicative
challenges posed by problems such as the environmental crisis,
terrorism, war and poverty, and the roles of various discourses in their
social construction. How can Critical Discourse Analysis contribute to
understanding the meanings of these issues and the processes by which
they are produced and contested? Can it help motivate social change?
During the workshop we will work with a sample of texts covering
different themes, genres and supports, from television news to
advertising, from images of distant suffering to news texts on Islam.
Various analytical approaches will be suggested, including contributions
from Social Semiotics and narrative analysis.
Lawrence Frey
Intervening into Discourse: Communication Activism
Scholarship at Work
Abstract: This workshop follows up on issues
introduced in Frey’s keynote lecture on “Communication Activism for
Social Justice Scholarship” to examine how scholars can engage in
communication activism, bringing their resources to bear to make a
difference, especially for underresourced and marginalized individuals,
groups, organizations, and communities in search of social justice. The
workshop first explores differences between observational,
translational, and intervention-oriented scholarship, followed by a
focus on how scholars intervene into discourse, including types of
interventions, examples of communication activism research studies that
have been conducted, ethical issues pervading such scholarship, and
institutional and disciplinary resources and challenges involved in
communication activism scholarship. Participants are strongly encouraged
to share (or propose) communication activism research projects and
teaching practices and resources, as one important goal of this workshop
is to provide participants with useful concepts and practices for the
group project work they will engage in this alternative, international
summer school on discourse and social justice.
Shi-xu
The Changing Discourses of Human Rights in China: A
Historical-Cultural and Globally-Minded Approach
Abstract: After briefly introducing on-going projects
of ‘discourse and urban development’ and ‘China-EU trade disputes and
discourse’, She-xu examines with the group the historical change of
China’s discourses of human rights and accounts for it in terms of
Chinese traditional culture on the one hand and the relevant discourses
of the US and other Western countries on the other.
Thomas Tufte
Edutainment – Deconstructing a Communication
Strategy for Change Abstract: Narratives,
stories, told in entertaining ways and with some inherent educational
dimension and intention has been seen always. Nevertheless, quite a
particular form of ‘entertainment cum education’ narratives emerged in
the context of communication for development, coming to be known in the
1990ies as entertainment-education communication strategies, or simply
edutainment (Singhal and Rogers 1999, Tufte 2005). It had become a
widespread communication strategy used massively in health
communication, increasingly in relation to issues such as sustainable
development, post-conflict situations, refugees and climate change. It
aims often times on engaging marginalized and disadvantaged populations
in processes of development and social change. The key focus has often
been on conveying particular messages, although the limitations of the
dominant practice are increasingly being contested.
Based on a case-based introduction to edutainment, this
workshop wishes to identify and analyse the different underlying
discourses and understandings of communication within which edutainment
strategies are embedded. The objective is to provide the summer school
participants with key concepts, as well as providing them practice-based
insights into the application of edutainment as a communication strategy
for change. |
