Localising, Translating and Stretching Conduct: Video as a Technology for Media Therapeutics

Rather than debate the relations between the already constituted dichotomies of local/global, micro/macro, institutional/everyday or space/place, this paper takes a relativistic approach that topicalises how such distinctions of scale, association and abstraction are practised, worked up and translated in and across nexus of practice. In order to do this, conversation analysis (CA) and mediated discourse analysis (MDA) are drawn upon in combination with actor-network theory (ANT) and contemporary theories of space, governmentality and agential realism. I will assume a knowledge of conversation analysis, but I will briefly introduce the theoretical background and the most relevant (and provocative) concepts of MDA, ANT, agential realism and governmentality. My goal is to suggest that some of what we might call the building blocks of ‘context’ – namely, individual, space, materiality and experience - are deeply problematic. If they are, then simply invoking ‘a context’ in analysis is troubling. Instead, I suggest that we need to examine more closely how participants translate and circulate conduct at the non-scalar interface between technologies of power and technologies of the self. I illustrate an attempt to do this using an example from a reality TV programme.