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.





References:
Keller, R.: The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD), in: Human Studies 2011, 34 (1) S.43-65
Keller, R.: Entering Discourses: A New Agenda for Qualitative Research and Sociology of Knowledge. In: Qualitative Sociology Review 2012, Vol. VIII Issue 2, S.46-55
Keller, R.: Doing Discourse Research. An Introduction for the Social Sciences. London: Sage 2013]
Keller, R.: Comparing Discourse Between Cultures. A Discursive Approach to Movement Knowledge. In: Baumgarten, B., Daphi, P., Ulrich, P. (Hrsg.) (2014) Conceptualizing Culture in Social Movement Research. Hampshire: Palgrave, p. 113-139 (with P. Ullrich).
Keller, R./Hornidge, A./Schünemann, W. (Ed.): Doing SKAD research. London: Routledge 2018 (in prep.)
Keller, R.: The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse. A Research Agenda. New York: Springer 2018 (translated from the German, in prep).

 The venue: University of Augsburg
The University of Augsburg is located in the city of Augsburg in southern Germany, which is 60 km/40 miles from the Bavarian capital of Munich and can be easily reached by train or by flight (via Munich (MUC) airport). Hotel rooms are available from 30-80 Euro per day. The workshop organizers will provide more information after registration.

The workshop: two full days of discourse analysis
·         The workshop starts on September 14/2017 at 2:30 p.m. and ends on September 16/2017 at 1:00 p.m.
·         The number of participants is limited to 25 people max. Depending on the number of participants who wish to present their own projects, the organizers may need to select which individual cases will be discussed in the analysis sessions.
·         Additional programme: open space time slots for questions and discussion, dinner
·         Venue: University of Augsburg Campus; for more information see  www.diskurswissenschaft.de , Travel and Hotel Information.

Workshop fee
The workshop fee is 50.00 Euro per person (includes refreshments during the workshop). This fee does not cover travel, accommodation, or meals, which are the responsibility of each individual participant.

Registration
Please register by e-mail with Saša Bosančić (sasa.bosancic@phil.uni-augsburg.de). This should include the following elements:
  • Last name, first name, e-mail
  • Address at your institution (or private address)
  • Current position
  • If applicable: your current research project in discourse analysis and whether or not you are interested in presenting and discussing your own research/data at the workshop.
You will receive a preliminary e-mail confirmation including bank account details for payment of the workshop fee (bank-to-bank transfer only; no credit cards, cheques, or cash can be accepted). Registration is approved only if payment is received within four weeks after the initial confirmation. You will receive final confirmation upon receipt of the fee. Withdrawing from the workshop is possible until eight weeks before the event; cancellations after this time will not be refunded. There will be a waiting list in case the event is fully booked.

Preliminary Workshop Program

September 14/2017
2.30 pm                Welcome from the organizers
                             The ‘why?’ of SKAD
     SKAD theory and methodology
7.30 pm                Dinner
September 15/2017
9 am                      Research questions & designs
10.30 am              Break
11 am                    Research methods and data analysis

1 pm                      Lunch
2.30 pm                Data analysis session
5.30 pm                Break
6 pm                      Open discussion session
7.30 pm                Dinner

September 16/2017
9 am      Discussion of participants’ projects

11.30 am              Open discussion session
1 pm                      End of workshop

Additional activities (optional): tour of the city, dinner, Augsburg pub crawl.

The Organizers
Prof. Dr. Reiner Keller is Professor of Sociology at the University of Augsburg; co-director of the Centre for Transnational Studies and member of the executive board of the German Sociological Association (DGS). From 2011 to 2016 he headed the sociology of knowledge division of the DGS. He started working on and with SKAD in the 1990s. He has longstanding experiences in discourse workshops as well as a long list of publications in discourse research. His work & research interests include social science discourse research, sociology of knowledge and culture, qualitative methods, and analysis of contemporary societies. He has a longstanding experience in conducting and directing collaborative research projects. Keller was a member of the Munich Centre for Reflexive Modernization from 1999 to 2010 and has just finished co-directing a comparative research on French and German history of sociological knowledge production since the 1960s, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Another recent DFG-funded three-year project on politics of knowledge in the field of hydraulic fracturing is set to begin in July of 2017.

Dr. Saša Bosančić is Assistant Professor at the University of Augsburg and an editor of the Journal for Discourse Studies. Besides his work in the field of discourse studies with numerous workshops and lectures on SKAD, his research interests include the theory, methodology and methods of subjectivation analysis.  

Matthias Roche, M.A. is a research assistant in sociology at the University of Augsburg. His primary research interests are centered around qualitative research methodology, discourse studies, and transnationalization. In addition to considerable experience in teaching discourse theory and especially SKAD, he has also translated several German-language texts on SKAD into English.


General conditions

1.      Participants who have received preliminary confirmation must pay all fees associated with workshop participation within four weeks after initial confirmation. Should payment not be received at this time, their right to participate is forfeit.
2.      Paying the appropriate fee within the allocated timeframe grants participants access to a workshop. Participants can transfer their right to participate to another person with the organizers’ permission.
3.      Participants may withdraw from workshops up to 8 weeks before the event. Participants will receive a refund in this case. Fees cannot be refunded if a participant withdraws after this time.
4.      In case that the workshop must be cancelled by the organizers due to force majeure, all fees will be refunded.
5.      The organizers take no responsibility for damage to or loss of electronic and other equipment.

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