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Discourses on Risk
Discourses on Risk
Thursday, 14 July 2016: 10:45-12:15
Location: Hörsaal 23 (Main Building)
RC25 Language and Society (host committee) Language: English
Critical Discourse Analysis is an interdisciplinary field between social and linguistics studies, once it theorizes discourse as a moment of social practices and proposes textual analysis to subsidize social critical researches. This theoretical and methodological approach, looking at discourse in a critical way, promotes discursive analyses sociologically oriented, also pointing possibilities to sociological analysis discursively oriented (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999; Fairclough, 2003). In this perspective, key themes to understand the inner relation between discourse and society are representation, discursive action, reflexivity and disembedded process.
In this session, this theoretical perspective of social functioning on language will be exploited to discuss themes related to discourses on risk, considering risk situations due to technological, social and environmental processes, as well as to discourses about risk itself (Giddens, 1992; Giddens, 1999).
This notion of risk, often repeated in many texts materializing several genres, may produce powerless and fear feelings, characteristics of the current phase of modernity that, for Beck (1992), is characterized as “risk society”. The repetition of these discourses seems to intensify conservative perspectives and prejudices, to reify powerless feelings facing social and environmental challenges and, in a last instance, to weaken human rights, being, thus, a relevant theme to critical social research.
This session is interested in discourse analysis researches dealing with risk situation and how discourses involved act and constitute the society, considering analysis of unequal power relations linked to discourses about environment, extreme poverty, terrorism, rights violation, gender and sexualities, etc.
Session Organizers: