Crispin Thurlow
Thurlow is interested differences between the rich and the very rich - in the context of the large amount of poverty in the world. But what we're buying is semiotic. We're paying for an intensely-semoticized experience. He's interested in the ways language, discourse, and visual communication are used to represent the world in unequal ways.
This happens in two areas:
In talking to young individuals' use of language
Global mobility and the super-elite and how the world has been reorganized around them
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) rises out of sociolinguistics, but is also interested in the Foucauldian discourses. It's fundamentally empirical, and interested in how microtexts links to macro discourses. CDA scholars are interested into looking at the production of texts. Thurlow suggests his work as discourse ethnography.
Kate Dunsmore
Who gets to say what and in what circumstances? What are the political and economic consequences of this? Dunsmore is currently looking at national discourse between Canada and the US. She's interested in the ways our official speech and media coverage tell us what countries can and can't do? Edelman (draws on Foucault, Burke, and Derrida) is one scholar she finds particularly useful. She's done interviews, participant observation, mostly qualitative work.
She suggested working in multiple stages including deep immersion reading, and then using Atlas.ti for word occurance and KWIC (keyword in context).
Jamie Moshin
There are two major camps: rhetorical critics (doing more interpretative work) and those who would call themselves critical rhetorians (doing more critical work). A rhetorican can find themselves doing either of things, however. He in interested in the intertwining of method and theory. Moshin argues that text and people are sometimes indivisible. He's working currently on Matisyahu, and is very interested in the creation/representation of Jewish identity. His work is deeply reflexive. He worked on the represenation of Jewish identity in humourous films about the Holocaust - he generally studies popular culture.
Moshin tends to avoid the standard rhetorical tropes of ethos and metaphor, in favor of modern theoretical frameworks: naming, passing, etc.
Giorgia Aiello
Her dissertation is the visual construction of European identity (the integrated EU). Aiello's work is rooted in Barthes' semiotic work - the ideas that images are really powerful, and her dissertation draws on social semiotics. It sees texts as doing semiotic work; they are dynamic and create fields of meaning potentials. What social conventions stand behind the texts?
Text/context - but all semiotic work needs to be rooted in the political economy/production issues. In doing a social semiotic analysis, she takes three main steps:
- Descriptive - syntax of the text, and the form and the semiotic resources
- Interpretive - exploring the context (interviewing curators, image makers, etc.)
- Critical - critique of/question these texts
Q&A
There's a lot of talk of theory (good, bad, other?) - what is the role of theory? Crispin suggests that this almost sounds like a sort of anti-intellectual move of the right. As Kate pointed out, Foucault discusses the nature of disciplines as restricting certain ways of talking/thinking - this means that we might be somewhat suspicious of "theory" as a mode of separating our work artificially.
Crispin mentioned that we need to consider the specific claims that producers of texts make. What about situations in which the author of the text is a marginalized voice?
Other questions: How do we engage the communities with which we study? What about questions of class?
Where we've been:
- power (what/when/where it is?)
- economy
- politics
- inequality
- social justice
- public scholarship
- action research/resistance/change
- data (what, when is it?)
- issue (what constitutes it?)
- reflexivity (when is enough?)
- context (when is enough?)
- situated history
- production/reception
Maybe it's a degree thing - perhaps, we look for more of this in the critical arena.
