Vortrag: Perpetuating world views: The (re)production of Discourses in educational space

In the current work on my Master’s thesis I am investigating the interaction of language and power based on ethnographic research carried out through participant observation in two institutional contexts in Northern Italy. In my research, I have been focusing on (1) the powerful characteristic of institutional language that permits the transmission of knowledge and (2) the analysis of D(d)iscourses that circulate in schools, by investigating their structure and their effects.

Power in language is not always an overt top-down mechanism, but rather a subtle and often hardly perceptible one, aimed at achieving different goals (Foucault, 1971, 1972). The space in which power and language come together is big “D” Discourse. Constructing discourses (with a little “d”, i.e. language in use) (Gee, 2015) can be a matter of the social position in which we find ourselves (Bourdieu, 1982, 1993). Discourses, different visions, shapes of identities and behaviours fusion in very specific contextual circumstances, so-called chronotopes, such as oral conversations or a university lecture (Bakhtin, 1981). A particular place where these dynamics happen are educational spaces.
In my thesis, I am examining specific extracts from discourses in two Italian middle schools and one preschool. I aim to show how parts of Discourse are negotiated, reproduced, and transmitted in institutional spaces. The proposed excerpts include statements within (1) sociopolitical, (2) cultural and (3) religious themes. The aim is to unmask the selection of different discourses in Italian institutions that condition communication in the educational space, question them, and investigate how we can gain a more conscious view on the discourse-ideological machinery.

References:

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. http://archive.org/details/dialogicimaginat0000bakh_r5j1.
Bourdieu, P. (1982). Ce que parler veut dire: L’économie des échanges linguistiques. Fayard.
Bourdieu, P. (1993). Language and Symbolic Power: (J. Thompson, Ed.). Harvard University Press.
Foucault, M. (1971). Orders of discourse. Social Science Information, 10(2), 7-30. https://doi.org/10.1177/053901847101000201.
Foucault, M. (1972). The archeology of knowledge. London: Tavistock.
Gee, J. P. (2015). Discourse, Small d, Big D. In The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction (pp. 1– 5). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118611463.wbielsi016.

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Tag: 26.10.2023
Anfangszeit: 15:00
Dauer: 00:25
Raum: Hofburg Raum 2
Track: Applied Linguistics
Sprache: en

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