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This interdisciplinary collection brings together leading and emerging scholars of discourse, conceptualizing how discursive practices shape social, political, and even material realities today. Discourses in Action presents a wide range of essays that explore fundamental concerns for the social consequences of text, talk, and discursively informed actions and possibilities of discursive engagement. It opens new perspectives on what language does and the differences that scholarly and practical contributions can make. Chapters cover diverse topics, ranging from political struggles, climate change, social revolutions, ethnicity, violence and other often unexpected patterns of discursive consequences. Its essays also explore the cultural contingencies that underlie discourse practices which are usually ignored when analysed from within a taken-for-granted culture. Providing a useful examination of current discourse studies, this interdisciplinary volume is ideal for students and researchers within media, communication, discourse analysis, linguistics, cultural studies, and the sociology of knowledge.
This book charts a clear and accessible path through some of the key debates in contemporary psychology. Drawing upon the wider critical and discursive turn in the human sciences, Social Constructionism, Discourse and Realism explores comprehensively the many claims about what we can know of `reality' in social constructionist and discursive research in psychology. Relativist versus realist tensions go to the heart of current theoretical and methodological issues, not only within psychology but across the social and human sciences. By mapping the connections between theory, method and politics in social research and placing these within the context of the broader social constructionist and discursive debates, the int
This edited volume brings together scholars from psychology, linguistics, sociology and communication science to investigate how performative notions of gender and sexuality can be fruitfully explored with the rich set of tools that have been developed by conversation analysis and discursive psychology for analyzing everyday practical language use, agency and identity in talk.Contributors re-examine the foundations of earlier research on gender in spoken interaction, critically appraise this research to see if and how it 'translates' successfully into the study of sexuality in talk, and promote innovative alternatives that integrate the insights of recent feminist and queer theory with qualitative studies of talk and conversation. Detailed empirical analyses of naturally occurring talk are used to uncover how gender and sexual identities, agencies and desires are contingently accomplished in conversational practices. Collectively, they pose the important question of what a critical theory of talk, gender and sexuality ought to look like if it is to be sensitive to a politics of conversation analysis.
Essays in the The Prettier Doll focus on the same local controversy: in 2001,a third-grade girl in Colorado submitted an experiment to the school science fair. She asked 30 adults and 30 fifth-graders which of two Barbie dolls was prettier. One doll was black, the other white, and each wore a different colored dress. All of the adults picked the Barbie in the purple dress, while nearly all of the fifth graders picked the white Barbie. When the student’s experiment was banned an uproar resulted that spread to the national media. School board meetings and other public exchanges highlighted the potent intersection of local and national social concerns: education, censorship, science, racism, and tensions in foundation values such as liberty, democracy, and free speech. For the authors of these essays, the exchanges that arose from “Barbiegate” illustrate vividly the role of rhetoric at the grassroots level, fundamental to civic judgment in a democratic state and at the core of “ordinary democracy.”
Grief-stricken over a friend's drowning, Potter is visited by a bird who flies with him on a life-changing journey that helps him come to terms with sorrow and death.