Monday, June 16, 2014

Call for Submissions - Augsburg Conference on Discourse Research, March 2015

The Discursive Construction of Reality II

Interdisciplinary perspectives on a sociology of knowledge approach to discourse research


Location: University of Augsburg, Germany
Date: March 26, 2015 (begins 2:00 p.m) – March 27, 2015 (ends 5:00 p.m.)
Conference organizers: Reiner Keller, Sasa Bosancic


Concept

Over the last decade, the research programme outlined by the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD) has spread to many disciplines in social science. A common interest in discourse research has resulted in a widely distributed community that prevalently, but not exclusively, uses qualitative research designs to examine forms of 'discursive construction of reality'. Corresponding studies may be found in sociology, but also in neighbouring disciplines such as political science, historical science, educational science, theology, linguistics, and criminology, among many others. This approach to discourse research combines social constructionist and interpretive-pragmatic schools of thought with the theoretical concepts and lines of investigation of discourse in the tradition of Michel Foucault, with the intention of analysing knowledge relations and policies in society. Bearing these core tenets in mind, the original approach has nonetheless been successfully amended, expanded, and occasionally modified to meet the demands of different fields of study and forms of data.
Following the first Augsburg conference on interpretive / sociology of knowledge (SK) discourse research with over 150 participants and 40 contributions from different disciplines in March of 2013, the upcoming conference would like to continue in the spirit of an interdisciplinary discussion about the foundations and applications of SKAD and SK-inspired discourse research, as well as related perspectives.

Areas of focus for contributions may include:

  • theoretical-methodological explication of the research programme and methodology of SKAD, including the question of how SKAD fits into the current landscape of discourse research or into the specific discussions within the scope of individual disciplines
  • concrete methods and ‘modus operandi’ in empirical research contexts, focusing less on the respective object of research but instead on analytical procedures involved in these studies. Especially when going beyond the ‘classic’ text-based or qualitative approaches (including audiovisual, ethnographic, or interview material // quantitative applications), how do we proceed, in practice, when researching discourse?
  • the ‘power effects’ of discourses, specifically the relationship between discourses and practices or between discourses and subjects/biographies/identities
  • presentation of active or completed empirical discourse and dispositive studies that include a substantial reference to SKAD. A number of different disciplinary perspectives are possible and welcomed. These contributions should show what role SKAD plays in these studies, and how their results are relevant for the ongoing discussion on SKAD.

Please send your submissions to Sasa Bosancic (sasa.bosancic@phil.uni-augsburg.de) in the form of an abstract (max. 2,500 characters).

Deadline for submissions: September 15, 2014