Explorations in Ethnography, Language and Communication

Activity: Attending an eventConference organisation or participation

Description

This workshop discusses various takes on relationality. Instead of treating the possible impact of the researcher on the researched as a problem, we want to explore further how the necessary close relationship between those who want to say something about the (social) world and the world itself should be theorized and approached analytically. In nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon 2004), getting to know the people, places and practices of interest is an essential part of the ethnographic approach to analyzing mediated actions. Thus we can challenge the traditional idea of objectivity with Clarke (2005) for whom it means closeness and constructing, instead of finding, facts, and the researcher doing this together with the researched. How can Potter’s (1996) ideas about facts and reality as constructed be developed with this ethnographic interest? The topic can be also approached as one of representationalism. Barad writes “The idea that beings exist as individuals with inherent attributes, anterior to their representation, is a metaphysical presupposition that underlies the belief in political, linguistic, and epistemological forms of representationalism. Or, to put the point the other way around, representationalism is the belief in the ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent; in particular, that which is represented is held to be independent of all practices of representing” (Barad 2003: 804). Individuals emerge, they do not pre-exist. Barad, Karen (2003) Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3): 801-831. Clarke, Adele (2005) Situational Analysis. Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn. Sage. Potter, Jonathan (1996) Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction. Sage. Scollon, Ron & Scollon Suzie Wong (2004) Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. Routledge.
Period13 Sept 2012
Event typeConference
LocationCopenhagen, DenmarkShow on map