Workshops
Four workshops will be offered by our guests. These will
take place on Days 2 and 3 of DeXus. On each day two workshops will be offered in the
morning, followed by contiguous group work in the afternoon.
Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard
Cross-Cultural Representation, the Body and Gender in the
Discourse of Tourism
This workshop will examine cross-cultural conventions
and semiotic constructions in the discourse of Tourism. Gender
representation is a key factor in this persuasive discourse and the use
of the human body is an essential part in the representation of
identities.
Different national identities are construed in texts
for tourists and that they are not purely reflections of personal
identities. They are recontextualisations, convenient hybrids of
processes of representation whose realisations and forms are conditioned
by the social practices of the advertisers and by their stereotypical
views of the countries being advertised.
Using examples from Brazilian, British and possibly
Danish tourism texts and ads, my main aim in this workshop is to
discuss:
Tourism texts are here considered as multi-modal since
not only the written language but also the visual input contribute to
the overall message.
Note: It would be interesting if participants could
bring to the workshop their own examples - tourism brochures, flyers,
Internet addresses, photos, guidebooks, etc.
Rick Iedema
The Professionalisation and Personalisation of Public Discourse
I wish to encourage people/students to gather materials relating to organizational change from sites they are familiar
with and process these materials such that they become accessible to me in English (and send me their 'digests' sometime before the workshop).
Materials can include records of discussions, documents, ethnographic descriptions, video data, sartorial evidence, architectural or interior
design data, and so on, and so on. The point of the workshop would be to get
some purchase on the ways in which 'doing being a worker' is changing in 21st century organizations. Part of this focus is also thinking about the
changing role of management in (public) organizations, and the consequences of workplace change for managerial identity and practice.
Jay Lemke
Emergent Textualities: Critical Hypermedia Analysis
What kinds of meanings are created across a "click" from hyperlink source
to target? What new resources for critical meaning-making emerge when source/target media include text, images, and dynamic-interactive forms?
How can we analyze meanings that are made by users and designers across both smaller and larger numbers of hypertext jumps within and across
websites? How can we design hypermedia that subvert monologic meanings and afford more divergent resources to users? What are the tensions between the
institutional purposes of multimedia and hypermedia texts and the more post-institutional agendas of global citizens?
Participants are welcome to propose sites on the web for analysis or examples and to bring their own
multimedia for discussion.
Stef Slembrouck
Discourse Analysis and the Ethnography of
Institutions: Interpretation, Critique, Intervention and What
Else?
In this workshop I suggest participants explore some
of the promises and difficulties posed by a commitment to ethnographic
epistemologies in critical forms of discourse analysis of practices in
institutional sites. What are the implications for specific
projects?
It is fairly easy to draw up a list of merits and
advantages that come with ethnographic epistemologies, for
instance:
 | a refusal to theorise studied populations out of
sight (knowledge is seen as invariably rooted in contact and
communication). |
| a recognition that doing research involves a range
of situated role identities which shift with different stages in the
research project and entail progressively transformed
'one-up'/'one-down'-dyads (anyone who is serious about
interventionist research will see the advantages of being explicit
about this layeredness and making it visible). |
| an explicit sensitivity to issues to do with social
scientific authority and power, in short, the terrain of the poetics
and politics of representation. |
| an insistence on the mutual in site shaping
of research questions, participant understandings and methodological
instruments. |
| a reluctance to dismiss the relevance of any
methodology prematurely; instead there is a recognition that
different stages in the research may warrant different themes and
methodologies (as primary instruments or for purposes of
triangulation); for language research this entails a cautious note
on the isolation and reification of the textual moment
(audio/video-recorded or not). |
These merits are undoubtedly enabling in all sorts of
ways, but there are also strings attached, interpretative paradoxes that
can be detected, heuristic tensions which may be hard to resolve,
ethical dilemmas of allegiance, implications which relate to research
funding and institutional legitimation, etc.
Although I will bring along a range of examples and
cases from my own research experience, participants are most of all
encouraged to bring their own projects to the workshop. A key question
may therefore be 'how does it all work out in detail for my/a particular
research project?'
