Seminars
David Perlich
17 February 2012 - We are pleased to announce De Morgen's Managing Editor David Perlich will be giving a talk on his work and research for our NT&T-group on Friday 17 February 2012, at 2 pm.
Contesting Institutional Information
David Perlich has been a journalist for over 25 years. He began by writing for weekly newspapers in small Canadian towns. Later, he became a national TV and Radio producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). His work included such award winning productions as “Moral Divide”, a program analyzing ethical issues in the news.
In the early 1990s, David worked as a War Correspondent in Bosnia.
Over the years David also served as a Managing Editor at the CBC, and a Deputy Program Editor for Al Jazeera based in Washington, D.C. He has also contributed to BBC Radio. In addition to producing global daily newscasts and national specials, David concentrated on Vatican City - producing the CBC’s live coverage of the funeral of John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI.
In 2010 David got a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Columbia University in New York City, where his field of research was technological change and the journalistic contestation of institutional information in the public sphere. For the last several years David has worked with the Canadian military, teaching ‘Conflict Reporting’ courses to journalists during military exercises.
David Perlich is currently the Managing Editor of De Morgen.
Venue: Room 7, Hoveniersberg (Third Floor)
Please send us an email if you'll be attending (Geert.Jacobs@UGent.be)
Reza Kheirabadi
16 December 2011 - We are pleased to announce Reza Kheirabadi will be giving a research seminar for our NT&T-group on Friday 23 December 2011, at 10.30 am.
Towards a discursive multi-level model of news production (with an eye to studying news media in Iran)
As an interdisciplinary research topic, the news media have been studied by linguists for decades. Van Dijk (1988), Fowler (1991) and Fairclough (1995) are leading examples of critical discursive analyses of the news. Recently, there’s been a linguistic ethnographic turn with in-action attempts to describe and explain the news production process by researchers with linguistic expertise and (often) a journalistic background. The aim of this presentation is to sketch the contours of a discursive multi-level model of news production which tries to bridge the theory and practice of news media research.
In this model, the static notion of news values is criticized, the necessity of level separation (preproduction, composition, gatekeeping/selection, publication/broadcasting and feedback level) in defining news production process is reiterated and Grice’s Cooperative maxims are suggested as linguistic news criteria at the composition and gatekeeping/selection levels. Field data are presented to show how these four maxims are dealt with by journalists and editors at Iranian newspapers and news agencies.
The researcher was active as a journalist in various Iranian newspapers. He also interviewed Iranian journalists and conducted fieldwork at two major Iranian news agencies.
Venue: Decanaat Hoveniersberg (Ground floor, Room 0.12).
Please send us an e-mail if you'll be attending. ()
Felicitas Macgilchrist
On Friday 17 December 2010, 2 - 4 pm, Felicitas Macgilchrist (George Eckert Institute) will be our next guest for an NT&T research seminar:
Educational publishing as discourse production: An ethnographic perspective
This paper explores how particular knowledges are entextualised in school textbooks. The data stem from a research project drawing on media studies, curriculum theory and ethnographic discourse analysis. This larger study traces the production process of several projects at leading German educational publishing houses. In this paper, the concepts of "relevancy spaces" and "selection horizons" (Stichweh) are utilized to identify a range of somewhat contradictory aims of, and members in, the production process. Two case studies from the observations of the production process – one on postcolonial knowledge and one on gender – explore how educational publishing produces, cites and transforms discourse. The paper argues that educational publishers can be understood as organizations of discourse production, in which knowledge, forms of perception and social orders are often reproduced and stabilized but also, occasionally, contested and destabilized.
Venue: Decanaat Hoveniersberg.
Please send us an e-mail if you'll be attending.
Eva De Smedt
13 July 2010 - We're pleased to announce that Eva De Smedt (VUB) has agreed to give a research seminar on political interviews. Eva's talk is scheduled on Thursday, 16 September 2010 (2:00-4:00pm). Attendance is free but registration is required (for room & catering purposes). Please shoot us an email if you'd like to attend this seminar. Here is Eva's abstract.
Eva De Smedt
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Centre for Studies on Media and Culture (Cemeso)
Journalists and politicians in interaction: A conversation analytic study of the dynamic play of power in political television interactions.
In her PhD, Eva De Smedt focuses on the interactional dynamics and complex power relationships between journalists and politicians in political television interactions. Such interactions have been metaphorically described as a “game” being played by journalists and politicians in their sequencing questions and answers (Clayman & Heritage, 2002). Questions can be wrapped up in a number of ways going from polite, deferentially or purely information-eliciting to criticising, challenging or hostile. Likewise, politicians have a number of options available in their answering turns such as ignoring, avoiding or refuting questions. By carefully scrutinising the moment-to-moment unfolding of the interactions between journalists and politicians, Eva De Smedt aims to analyse and describe the ways both actors dynamically employ a range of interactional strategies and techniques in order to accomplish a powerful interactional position and keep up a positive image in front of the so-called “overhearing audience” (Heritage, 1985).
The presentation will focus on the relevance of the methodology of conversation analysis for the study of power in institutional interactions. Rather than seeing power as a phenomenon that somehow pre-exists in talk, a conversation analytic approach to power is much more centered on the study of how power can be ‘brought into being’ – both maintained and resisted – within the local orientations of interactants in concrete social settings. After a brief introductory account, the presentation will go through a number of extracts from Flemish political television programmes. A turn-by-turn analysis of the interactions between journalists and politicians will show the value of approaching power from a micro level, i.e. as an interactionally achieved and negotiated phenomenon.
Roel Coesemans
9 0ctober 2009 - NT&T is pleased to announce the third speaker in our annual research seminar series. Roel Coesemans (University of Antwerp) will give a talk on meaning transformation in international political newspaper reports. Attendance is free but registration is required. if you would like to attend the seminar on 22 January 2010. Here is Roel’s abstract.
Meaning transformations in international flows of information: A linguistic-pragmatic study of the Kenyan elections in local and global press coverage
Roel Coesemans scrutinizes the language use of newspaper reports, focusing on ideological aspects of implicit meanings. Assuming that news messages are never neutral although idealized journalism extols ‘objectivity’ and ‘factuality’, it is evident that newspaper articles are full of ideology, which is often conveyed implicitly in order to cover up, neutralize or naturalize the unavoidably ideological representation of events.
This presentation will centre around preliminary analyses of a case study in progress. By comparing newspapers reports about the Kenyan elections and the ensuing post-election crisis (December 2007-March 2008) from such different newspapers as the local Kenyan dailies The Standard and The Daily Nation, as well as the more international newspapers The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times and The Independent, it will be shown that – often implicit – meanings are transformed by an interplay of (conscious and unconscious) linguistic and journalistic choices, affecting how the readers interpret the reported events, when a local news item is picked up by global news organizations.
The texts will be analyzed from a linguistic-pragmatic perspective (Verschueren 1999, 2008), complemented by elements from other socioculturally oriented (critical) discourse analytic approaches such as those of Blommaert (2003, 2005) or Van Leeuwen (2008). Recontextualizations and ideology-related types of implicit meaning, such as presupposition, entailment and implicature, will be studied with regard to the following research questions:
(i) How are the social actors represented in the different sources under investigation and what kinds of group membership (professionally, ethnically, politically, etc.) are ascribed to the main characters of the election coverage?
(ii) How do these representations and categorizations contribute to the framing of the events? Are the elections presented as ‘free and fair’, ‘democratic’, ‘well-organized’, ‘chaotic’, ‘flawed’ or ‘rigged’? Is the crisis ‘political’, ‘electoral’, ‘humanitarian’, ‘socio-economic’? Is the violence ‘ethnic’, ‘tribal’, ‘political’, ‘electoral’, or does it involve ‘gangs’, ‘mobs’?
(iii) What is the (contextualized) meaning of these specific lexical, pragmatic and journalistic choices and how are they used in function of the discourse, taking into account the different news production contexts? Patterns will be shown to emerge that reflect clear differences in (ideological) positioning of the different media in relation to the described event.
References
Blommaert, J. (2003). Commentary: a sociolinguistics of globalisation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (4), 607-623.
Blommaert, J. (2005). Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical
Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Verschueren, J. (1999). Understanding Pragmatics. London: Arnold.
Verschueren J. (2008). Context and structure in a theory of pragmatics. Studies in pragmatics, 10: 13-23.
Stijn Joye
10 January 2009 - The second speaker in our research seminar series is Ghent University's Stijn Joye (profile page in Dutch). Stijn will give a talk about his current research on media representation of humanitarian crises. Admission is free, but registration is required. if you would like to attend. Venue: Decanaat Hoveniersberg. Date: 6 March 2009, 10:30-12:30.
Breaking news or forgotten emergency? Unravelling imbalances in news coverage of humanitarian crises through Critical Discourse Analysis.
This study explores the mediatised representation of international humanitarian crises, with a focus on three natural disasters occurring in the USA and Indonesia. Applying Critical Discourse Analysis as defined by Fairclough (1995), we have investigated the way Belgian public broadcaster VRT covered these emergencies by unravelling the underlying power relations and hierarchies. Suffering in the USA was portrayed as comprehensible, ethically acceptable and close to the spectator who could identify with the distant other. The Indonesian disaster was in contrast presented as no cause for concern or action which blocked the engagement with the distant sufferers who were portrayed as Others, with a capital 'o'. In general, the data support the claim that our Western news media reproduce a certain kind of world order, mainly a Eurocentric one. This paper argues that mediatised representations of humanitarian crises do not challenge the current global order and power hierarchies between countries and people.
Andrea Rocci
13 May 2008 - NT&T is starting up a research seminar series during which invited speakers present their views on one of our discussion topics. The first speaker to kick off this new initiative is Andrea Rocci from the University of Lugano. Andrea will give his talk on 13 June 2008 in Ghent (Decanaat Hoveniersberg). Attendance is free but registration is required. if you would like to attend. Here is Andrea’s abstract.
Three perspectives on the analysis of predictions in financial news: semantics, argumentation, and the genre system.
Financial news is as much about what could happen tomorrow than about what happened yesterday in the markets. From a pragmatic viewpoint financial news concerning public companies primarily address an audience of (potential) investors whose demand for information is largely oriented towards supporting their future investment decisions. Financial news support and influence these decision processes both directly and indirectly.
Acts of prediction in the form of economic forecasts and of other “forward looking statements” play a central role in this journalistic genre like in other genres of economic discourse. In this talk I will present the three pronged strategy of analysis of this pivotal speech act adopted in an ongoing research project. The strategy aims to bring together three research traditions that very rarely (if ever!) talk to each other: formal semantics, normative pragmatic models of argumentation, and genre studies focusing on the notion of “system of genres”. The talk will try to enucleate some of methodological implications of the approach with respect to the role of linguistic meanings and context in the practice of discourse analysis.