Monday, March 19, 2018

2018 SKAD Autumn Workshop - Open for registration



             
Autumn School 2018
›The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD)‹

University of Augsburg, October 11-13, 2018
Organizers: 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.

Following the success of last year’s inaugural international workshop in English, with 26 participants from 14 different countries spanning from Indonesia to Brazil, from Japan to the Netherlands, from Scotland to Poland and from Canada to Russia, there will once again be an introductory workshop on the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) at the University of Augsburg in 2018. The organizers invite novice as well as experienced academics from a wide range of disciplines, including but not limited to sociology, ethnology, political science, linguistics, psychology and educational science, to explore the potential of this approach to studying discourses in the context of their own projects and research.

Discourse Studies today covers 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. SKAD is perhaps the most recent major approach to emerge in this field, drawing 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 contrasting 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 Augsburg 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 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 sessions will be included, that is participants will work together on concrete data. Furthermore, participants may present and their own research project and data, which will discussed in a group setting.