Here are the titles and abstracts for the lectures:
Michael Bamberg
Identity Research, Narrative Approaches and Small Stories
In my presentation I will give an overview of recent
moves in narrative analyses that have led to what we (see
Georgakopoulou, 2006, and
Bamberg, 2006, for further references) have termed “small story
research”. I will briefly go over recent developments in identity
research – facing the dilemma of identity formation processes in
post-modernist times – and how narrative methodologies have become prime
candidates in the field of identity analysis. Taking off from here, I
will cover the problems of traditional biographic research (using big
story-interviewing – cf.
Freeman, 2006), and show how a turn to small story research is able
to overcome some of the limitations of traditional biographic research,
and how small story research can contribute to identity research in new
and productive ways.
Michelle Lazar
Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory and Practice
Motivated by goals of social emancipation and
transformation, the critique of unequal social orders characterises much
of feminist scholarship and, in regard to discursive dimensions of
social (in)justice, research in critical discourse analysis (CDA). In
this lecture, CDA and feminist studies are brought together and, at
their nexus, a ‘feminist critical discourse analysis’ (FCDA) is
proposed. The aim of FCDA is to offer a rich and nuanced understanding
of the complex workings of power and ideology in discourse in sustaining
(hierarchically) gendered social arrangements. This is all the more
pertinent in present times where issues of gender in relation to power
and ideology have become increasingly more complex and subtle. First,
feminist theories since the late 1980s have shown that speaking of
‘women’ and ‘men’ in universal, totalising terms has become deeply
problematic for gender as a social category intersects with other
categories of social identity such as sexuality, ethnicity, age, (dis)ability,
social class and position, and geographical location. Patriarchy as an
ideological system also interacts in complex ways with say, corporatist
and consumerist ideologies. Second, the workings of gender ideology and
asymmetrical power relations in discourse are presently assuming more
subtle, ‘invisible’ forms in modern societies, albeit in varying degrees
and ways in specific communities. At the same time, in some quarters,
claims of a reverse sexism and new forms of sexist blatancy have emerged
in the wake of a postfeminist backlash. In this lecture, I will outline
five principles of FCDA, which will also form the basis for our workshop
discussion. These are analytical activism, the ideological structure of
gender, the complexity of gender and power relations, the discursive (de)construction
of gender, and a critical feminist reflexivity.
David Middleton
Making Experience Matter in the Discursive Organization of Memory:
Imaginary Futures in the Past
This lecture will present material from a recently
published book with Steven Brown on "The social psychology of
experience: Studies in remembering and forgetting" (Middleton and Brown,
2005). That book draws on work examining how psychological phenomena
(e.g., memory) can be approached as a public, action-oriented process
through discursive analysis of the interactional and rhetorical
organization of communicative action. However the interactional
organization of such psychological phenomena stands in relation to a
wider experience enduring in time.
This lecture explores that relation. How we might
approach what makes experience matter? What sort of relationships hold
between past, present and future? How do such relationships matter as
individual and collective concerns? In other words, "who am I to claim
that this matters over that in relation to you and others, and who are
you to make equivalent claims on your, my, and the behalves of others?"
Imaginary processes will be demonstrated central to all of this, but in
what ways? The present is clearly dependent on imagined futures but can
the future matter in the past? It can if we move away from treating time
in a spatial manner to an examination of time as lived experience. One
way to do this is to examine how imaginary futures are used discursively
to make experience matter as both individual and collective concerns.
Imaginary processes can be demonstrated as interactionally organized
'gap filling' and 'hesitating'. Experience will therefore be
demonstrated to matter not so much in terms of what happened in the past
but in terms of how we build the past with the future in ways that make
for the possibility of becoming different. In other words, how we
actualise alternative trajectories of living. The implications for
discourse analytic approaches to memory, imagination and time will be
discussed.
Reference
Middleton, D. & Brown, S.D. (2005) The social
psychology of experience: Studies in remembering and forgetting.
London: Sage.
Sigrid Norris
Discourse Studies: What Is the Role of Language in Interaction?
Discourse studies often are limited to the analysis of
language, spoken or written. Recently, studies sometimes add other
communicative modes such as gesture or gaze, tool use or color
presentations. However, the emphasis on language and more importantly,
in my view, the often unquestioned notion of the primacy of language in
regard to other communicative modes is visible even in multimodal
discourse studies.
In this lecture, I will question the continuous
supremacy of language over other modes, illustrating how other modes may
in fact be primary in some interactions, while language may in fact play
a subordinated role. I illustrate these notions with various video clips
from music lessons to dentist-patient interactions, starting out with a
common discourse studies approach and illustrating the differences in
conclusions when approaching the data through true multimodality without
presupposing that language plays the primary role in any interaction.
This lecture will illustrate that technological
advances and a multimodal approach bring with them a whole number of new
questions concerning language, some of which may be: What role does
language actually play in interaction? When and how does it play a
super-ordinate role? or When and how does it play a sub-ordinate role?
With questions such as these, we may want to start
looking at interaction and discourse studies in quite different ways.
Reading list
