Doctoral workshop
 January 28th - 30th, 2008

Global Media and Local Perception: Calibrating Mediated Discourses and (Direct) Action

Location: Kroghstræde 3, Aalborg University, Denmark

The workshop is arranged by the National Doctoral School for Media, Communication and Journalism (FMKJ) and is supported by the Centre for Discourse Studies (AAU)

Organised by: Pirkko Raudaskoski ((Department of Communication & Psychology), Paul McIlvenny (Department of Language and Culture) and Tove Arendt Rasmussen (Department of Communication & Psychology)

Because of ill health, Ron Scollon has had to cancel his trip to Aalborg. The workshop will still take palce with extended lecture presentations by the local scholars. See the new programme below.

Context

It would be an exaggeration to say that ‘global media’ give us news for which we don't have any direct sensory experience, and ‘local perception’ is sensory experience for which we have no published story. A more moderated form of this idea would be to say that ‘global media’ give us news about actions, activities, things which have happened, or things which we are worried about that are distant from our moment-by-moment real-time activities. ‘The local’ is the stuff of our daily lives for which we certainly have stories but not ones which are couched in general terms and so are not easily exportable as news.

There are two components to the concept of media: First, there is the medium itself - a technological apparatus that intervenes between one person and another as a mediator of that experience of communication; second, there is the content – the ‘story’ which is carried by that medium. The term ‘media’ refers broadly to all of the communication technologies from microphones and loudspeakers used in an auditorium for a lecture, to literacy and printing, and telephone, video and sound recording, and internet or web-based disseminations. And this definition also covers the contents of messages from intimate interpersonal exchanges to literature to international stories of world events. In most cases the institutionalized broadcast media (TV, newspapers, web news sites, and blogs) serve as a convenient sub-set of the media for my analysis. The crucial theoretical point is that mediating technologies of communication plus story production is a phenomenon which must be treated separately from face-to-face communication. The media open crucial gap between primary social interaction and secondary (mediated) interaction. This gap is the gap between ‘global’ and ‘local’, not geographical placement or distance as is often presupposed.

The problem for the media, for businesses, and for international humanitarian and development agencies is finding a way to calibrate between the global layers of discourse which frame so many of our ideas of the world and the local, sense-perceptual level of ordinary people acting in their daily lives. The organizing goal of this course is to invert the trope ‘Think globally; act locally’, and to see how we can learn to think locally so that we can comprehend how to act globally. In my work I am taking the position that ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ are not matters of ‘here’ and ‘over there’ or ‘elsewhere’. On the contrary, global and local are two different logical types of place overlaid on the same spaces on earth. Wherever one might be or wherever one's interest might be, for any action in any place there will be both local ways of comprehending that action and global ways of comprehending it. Our purpose is to learn how to calibrate or mediate across these two different logical types for specific places and specific issues.

The ‘geographies of discourse’ framework maps out the places that are inscribed through discourses, but also the discourses which arise from place. It takes the position that all places are local in that they consist of material, concrete objects, and spatio-temporal arrays of these as people use them to act face-to-face. But they are also mediated. For any space we can define there will be multiple overlays of discourse-geographies. Mediated actions are what people do; a nexus analysis is how you find out about those actions (and the mediational means); and a specific geography of discourse is one of many overlays on any place. Our goal is to learn how to map routes and itineraries across and through those geographies.

Course content

The course will consist of a combination of content lectures, student presentations of their own work, and group work toward a theme of common interest. Lectures and workshop activities will show participants:

The contents of the course are based on the following books (and a variety of papers):

There will be lectures over the three days by local scholars who have used Ron Scollon's framework (for example, Ole B. Jensen, Peter Allingham, Anders Horsbøl, Inger Lassen, Paul McIlvenny & Pirkko Raudaskoski).

Provisional schedule

All lectures and workshop activities will take place in room 3.115.

The workshop will be restricted to a small group of 20 doctoral students with priority given to doctoral students from the National Doctoral School for Media, Communication and Journalism (FMKJ), and thereafter on a first-come, first-served basis. Once the workshop is full, a waiting list will be kept. Please inform us as soon as possible if you have registered but cannot attend. Participation in the workshop will earn a student 2 ECTS points. Participation which includes giving a presentation will earn them 3 ECTS points 

The workshop is free and includes participation and tea/coffee/fruit. If the participant is a member of the FMKJ, then they can claim travel and accommodation costs (inclusive meals) direct from the graduate school. For all other participants, travel and
accommodation costs and meals are their own responsibility. Location, travel and accommodation information is available from this web site.

The deadline for registration is closed. Please register with Pirkko Raudaskoski Give your full affiliation and contact details, indicating whether or not you are a member of the FMKJ. In addition all participants must send with their application a title of their doctoral project and a short abstract of their research interests. Applicants will be informed before Christmas if they have been accepted as a workshop participant.

For more information, contact Pirkko Raudaskoski or Paul McIlvenny.

Further information

Ron Scollon has recently retired from the Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University, Washington, USA. He is now a Consultant in geosemiotics. He maintains a website full of interesting snippets and discourse projects.

His recent publications include:

Books

Articles

See also