Lectures

Four introductory lectures will be offered by our guests on the first day of DeXus.

Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

Message in Virtual Bottles: Personal Web Pages and Identity Construction

The University of Birmingham has just set out to standardise personal web pages. For the institutionalised world of universities, the creativity of the personal should be in principle rejected since the corporate image has to take precedence over the individual. However, what is happening in the virtual world is that the domain of the private, even among members of institutions, is taking over and personal web pages, created by individuals from all walks of life, present to the world discourses of the self. New forms of virtual identities are therefore created daily.

In this presentation, I examine the effect of culture and gender on the discursive strategies used by web page writers to present themselves in terms of the narrativisation of their lives 

1. what kinds of life events are given prominence;
2. the multi-modal choices - what kinds of pictures, colours, spaces, scenarios help to create a particular character.

I also discuss the implications of this kind of one-sided interaction for discourse analysis - the web page addressor sends a message not to an implied audience but to anybody out there in the world who happens to open her or his page. The strategies used to address an unspecified audience are a question that we need to purse in the new virtual world of the Internet. 

My interest here is to specifically look at how participants in this new genre recontextualise in the public sphere, a fictionalised representation of themselves. Through what seems to be a light and inconsequential 'message in a bottle’ to the world, social activity is presented, evaluated and possibly new norms of behaviour are being created.

Key words: discourse, narrative, multimodality, virtual identities

Rick Iedema

Discourse and Organisational Change

This lecture outlines the tensions that arise for people who have to enact organizational change. The lecture considers the options people have for positioning themselves in relation to their changing organizational environments, and the ways in which these options are discussed in the literature. In addressing these matters, the lecture adopts a meaning-making or discourse perspective on organization and change. Here, discourse encompasses not only the multi-modal resources that people mobilize in organizational (inter)action, but also the practices and transformative dynamics afforded by the various resources that are mobilized. The organizational changes highlighted in the lecture revolve around three dimensions of work that are increasingly coming to the fore: participation, boundary-spanning and knowledging. These dimensions are explored by investigating initiatives to standardize (health care) work practices across two organizational sites.

Jay Lemke

Travels in Hypermodality

I am interested in exploring emerging new forms of textuality and their relations to changes in social organization. I would like to explore, in the lecture, and in my workshop with students and other discussions at DeXUS, including the thematic line that I join, the notion that textualities and social organizations are changing together (as perhaps they have always done) away from a dominance of institutional forms and towards a more flexible mode of linking across institutions with the very trajectories of our lives, on multiple timescales. Hypertext affords some of the semantic and technological medium resources for supporting and articulating such processes, especially, e.g. when we surf across the websites of particular (modernist) institutions, or create our own webs and traversals. Multimodality also assists by affording more resources for subverting logocentric monologic discourses, e.g. through the inevitable slippage between what is said and what is shown. As we move, both in cyberspace and in the rest of our lives, more and more quickly across and through institutions, we tend to make more and more of the meanings and actions that matter to us and to others not inside specific modernist institutions as such, but in the ways we link between and across them, mobilizing their resources for our own individual and collective purposes, rather than simply helping to maintain and reproduce their structures. Increasingly, I believe, social and cultural change is not just about the reform or re-engineering of modernist institutions, but about building new levels of social organization and possibility 'above' them.

Stef Slembrouck

Situated Discourse Analysis and Critique in Late Modernity: Categories, Resources and Practices

In my lecture I will take up a position vis-à-vis a critical programme for case-oriented studies of discourse processes in late modernity. My starting point will be a number of contradictions which are inherent in the way critical discourse analysis has appropriated and reified social theorical explanations as the best route towards the accomplishment of emancipatory goals oriented to empowerment or change. I will suggest that these contradictions invite an ethnographic turn in discourse research characterised in ways which defy reductionism and incorporation and do justice to the complexities and indeterminacies of situated practice and sense-making without losing sight of the import of and implications for social theory (cf. the extended case method, Burawoy et al. 1991). 

I will also argue that the threefold set of categories, practices (and on a secondary plane, resources) may be crucial to the development of the programme sketched above. Here I follow Bourdieu (1984: 86ff.) not only in arguing that categories are key instruments of social division and they are never value free, but also in recommending that it is at the level of categorisation practices that one can restore the epistemological and heuristic continuity between social science and the field of social action. The experience of "putting people/being put in a particular category" also has an experiental immediacy which makes it pivotal in social scientific dialogue with clients, institutional members, other experts, etc. The challenge then is to address the interrelationships between categories, practices and resources with social-theoretical and critical purchase, but to do so, without having to sacrifice on the integrity of the dialogicities between researchers and researched. 

In my lecture I will draw on examples from my own discourse research on social worker practices and parental accounts in the context of child care and protection.

References:

Buroway, M. et al, 1991, Ethnography Unbound. Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

Bourdieu P., 1984, Questions de Sociologie. Paris : Les Editions de Minuit.