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Plenary Speaker:
Professor Sari Pietikäinen, University of Jyväskylä,
Finland
Title: Discourse in Transition
Abstract: The heteroglossic nature of many
contemporary spaces and practices of language use creates profound
complexities in discursive action. The circulation of discursive
resources - discourses, genres, styles, languages - across time and
space stirs existing relations, categories and hierarchies. Such
processes of transition highlight the uneasy tensions between paradigms
and dichotomies, such as linguistic and social, micro-level and
macro-level. At the same time, discursive innovations and creative use
of a variety of meaning making resources result in new types of
crossings, mixtures and norms. These transitions stress, first of all,
the need for dialogue across schools of thought, sites of research and
types of data and researchers. To me, they also underscore the need for
examining various historical, political, social and discursive
processes: how "things" come about, under what conditions and with what
consequences.
With this backdrop, in this paper I focus on multilingual and
transnational Sámiland as a site of discursive complexities. This area
is characterized by mixed ways of living and traditions and changing
ideologies regarding what is considered good, bad or desirable, together
with new opportunities for identity and commerce. It is also a
discursive space, constructed situationally in interaction and hence
emerging differently in different contexts and by different language
users. As an application of the work by Scollon and Scollon (2004)
Sámiland is here seen as a nexus point at which historical trajectories
of people, discourses, practices, experiences and objects come together
to enable some action which in turn alters those historical trajectories
(Pietikäinen 2010). This dynamic, I argue, provides us with means for
discovering the theoretical and analytical challenges in understanding
discourse in transition.
References:
Pietikäinen, S. (2010). Sámi language mobility:
Scales and discourses of multilingualism in polycentric environment.
International Journal of Sociology of Language 202 (2010), 79-101.
Scollon, R. & Scollon, S. (2004). Nexus
analysis: Discourse and the emerging internet. London and New York:
Routledge.
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