Monday, June 19, 2017

SKAD Autumn Workshop registration open





'Autumn School': The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD)

University of Augsburg, September 14.-16., 2017
Organisers: Prof. Dr. Reiner Keller, Dr. Saša Bosančić, MA Matthias Roche

Please visit www.diskurswissenschaft.de for up-to-date information and details concerning registration, venues, etc.

Discourse Studies today cover a large field of approaches across the social sciences, ranging from work inspired by Foucault to Critical Discourse Analysis and through to hegemonic stability theory, corpus linguistics, and on to more interpretive approaches. The present workshop will introduce participants to the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD). SKAD draws from Berger & Luckmann's sociology of knowledge, the interpretative paradigm in pragmatist sociology, and core Foucaultian concepts in the analysis of regimes of power/knowledge. In doing so, SKAD re-directs discourse research towards Foucaultian research interests about questions of social relationships of knowledge & knowing and politics of knowledge & knowing. Concerning itself with ‘ways of doing’, it uses elements of qualitative research design (like theoretical sampling, sequential analysis, analysis by contrast cases, category building, discourse ethnography) and interpretative analytics.

Since it first appeared in the late 1990s, the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) has experienced considerable popularity in discourse research in Germany and several other countries. Today, it informs a large amount of discourse research and publications in the field of discourse studies. Workshops introducing theory, methodology and methods of SKAD research have been established in Germany for more than a decade now. Workshops in French and English have followed suit in the last few years (e.g., in the United States, Switzerland, Austria, France, Denmark, Belgium, United Kingdom, Romania).

The present workshop builds on the emerging interest in SKAD in international contexts and will be the starting event for an annually recurring series of SKAD workshops in English at the University of Augsburg. SKAD workshops address core issues of the concrete doing and practice of discourse research. It addresses colleagues from the Social Sciences and the Humanities who are interested in learning about SKAD and its particular profile within the field of discourse studies as well as in doing SKAD research/using SKAD methodologies in their own concrete work in the context of discourse research.


The two-day workshop will discuss the following topics:

  •  SKAD: what is at stake when using SKAD in discourse research?
  •  SKAD theory: discourses - and how to conceptualize them
  • Research questions and conceptual tools in SKAD
  • The methodology of interpretative analytics
  •    Getting into the field: methods of data collection and analyzing data
  •   Getting out of the field: from data analysis to comprehensive diagnostics

During the workshop, small data work sessions will be included, that is participants will work together on concrete data. Furthermore, participants might present and have discussed their own research project and data.