Centre for Discourse Studies Local Workshop 14th May 2007

Location: Aalborg University, Kroghstræde 3

Workshop leader:

Workshop Description

Srikant Sarangi is Professor and Director of the Health Communication Research Centre at Cardiff University. His research interests are in discourse analysis and applied linguistics; language and identity in public life and institutional/professional discourse studies (e.g., healthcare, social welfare, bureaucracy, education etc.) His recent book-length publications include Language, Bureaucracy and Social Control (1996, with S. Slembrouck); Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings  (1999, with C. Roberts); Discourse and Social Life (2000, with M. Coulthard); and Sociolinguistics and Social Theory (2001, with N. Coupland and C. N. Candlin); Language Practice in Social Work: Categorisation and Accountability in Child Welfare (forthcoming, with C. Hall and S. Slembrouck). In addition, he has guest-edited five journal special issues and has published over one hundred journal articles and book chapters. He is the editor of Text & Talk: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse and Communication Studies as well as the founding editor of Communication & Medicine and with (C. N. Candlin) of Journal of Applied Linguistics. He is also general editor (with C. N. Candlin) of two book series[es]: Studies in Applied Linguistics and Studies in Language and Communication.

Professor Sarangi’s background forms an excellent basis for interdisciplinary research, which is the topic he is going to talk about in a seminar at Centre for Discourse Studies on 14 May 2007.

The seminar will be a full-day event from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. with a selection of presentations on interdisciplinary research, interweaving different fields and faculties. The seminar will close with a planning meeting, in which the possibility of organizing an interdisciplinary research school for week 33 (August) will be discussed.

Registration

Further details or registration by mail to Inger Lassen, E-mail: inglas@hum.aau.dk

Deadline for registration: 10th May 2007

Ph.D studerende optjener ECTS-point ved at deltage i workshoppen. Det præcise antal points fastsættes gennem aftale mellem den studerende og  dennes vejleder.

Registration fee

There is no registration fee, but participants who do not give a presentation, will have to buy their own lunches. Free coffee and tea is provided in the breaks.

Provisional schedule

Keynote speaker

09.00-10.30 Srikant Sarangi: The analyst’s paradox in professional discourse studies

10.30-10.45 Break

Presentations

10.45-11.15 Birthe Dinesen, Department of Health Science and Technology: Implementation of telehomecare technology across sectors - Emerging Sticking Points

11.15-11.45 Paul McIlvenny, Centre for Discourse Studies, Aalborg University: PlaceMe: Interdisciplinarity in a Nordic Research Network on Place, Mediated Discourse and Embodied Interaction

11.45-12.15 Annette Kanstrup, Research Centre for Development and International Relations: Methodological, conceptual and theoretical reflections when doing research among/ with ethnic minority groups

12.15-13.15 Lunch

Presentations   

13.15-13.45 Kåre Lehman, Department of Life Sciences, AAU: Interdisciplinarity – from the perspective of a biotechnologist

13.45-14.15 Anders Horsbøl, Centre for Discourse Studies: Discourse and Interdisciplinarity

14.15-14.45 Lise-Lotte Holmgreen, Centre for Discourse Studies: How experts communicate

14.45-15.15 Inger Lassen, Centre for Discourse Studies: Who are the experts? Knowledge and attitudes in public opinion research.

The analyst’s paradox in professional discourse studies

Srikant Sarangi, Cardiff University

Beginning with an overview of the communicative turn in the study of professions, in this presentation I draw attention to the interpretive  challenges facing discourse/interaction analysts. My assumption is that as discourse/interaction analysts we are more geared towards interpreting manifest performance (mainly language, but also to include visual, non-verbal and paralinguistic features), although professional knowledge and experience may not always be explicitly visible, even when undertaking ethnographic fieldwork. Additionally, given the complex inter-relationship between language and context, what may be visible is not easily interpretable. The position that member’s method (ethnomethod) allows one to categorise and interpret events unproblematically becomes untenable, especially when the knowledge gap between analysts and participants increases, as is the case in new sites of healthcare delivery. Against this backdrop of tacit and layered embeddings of professional conduct, I introduce the notion of ‘analyst’s paradox’ – the activity of obtaining members’ insights to inform analytic practice – in order to explore how categorisation and interpretation are central to all professional activity, to the extent that within discourse studies, these are both the object of study and the process through which we study the professional habitus. I make an appeal for communication ethnography as a way of collaboratively interpreting ad hoc categories of professional practice, while striving towards ‘discriminatory expertise’ if our research were to attain practical relevance.