DISCOURSE AND ALTERITY. CONSTRUCTING SUBJECT POSITIONS BY QUALIFYING OTHERS

It is our pleasure to invite you to our workshop on "discourse and alterity", which is supported by WELS and will take place in London on Wednesday. It is open to anybody who wants to join us on Mile End campus. Please write to Elise if you want to attend.

9.30        Welcome
9.45         Johannes ANGERMULLER (Open University)
“Populism as a Practice of Subjectification. Interpellating the Other in Online Forums”
10.30         Louis STRANGE (Queen Mary University)
“Gender and Agency in the Linguistic Landscape of Ireland’s 2018 Referendum Campaign on Abortion”
11.15                     **Coffee break**
11.30         Agnieszka LYONS (Queen Mary University)
“Alignment and Role-relationships in Communication on the Move: a Post-digital Lens”
12.15         Elise SCHÜRGERS (University of Liège-FNRS)
“Labelling the Discourse of the Other. Towards the Scenography Implied by the Word 'fake news' in Francophone Press”
13.00                         **Lunch**
14.30         Christiana GREGORIOU (University of Leeds)
“Crime Fictional Mind Styles”
15.15         Rachele DE FELICE (University College London)
“Facts and Personalities in the Clinton Email Corpus”

Workshop
29 June 2022,
Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Campus, Law building, room 100

Johannes Angermuller
Elise Schürgers
Agnieszka Lyons

This workshop aims to engage the participants in a dialogue around two broad questions, that of the linguistic representation of the others and of their discourses and that of the construction of subjectivity in discourse. If these questions are rooted in long research traditions in linguistics (regarding subjectivation, one thinks for example of Benveniste’s concept of appropriation, or of Bakhtine's dialogism to describe the multiplicity of voices that underlie each utterance), we would like to be able to think about those two topics by underlining how they arise at the intersection of linguistic and social practices.
To this end, we suggest interrogating the ways in which language practices engage with collective or individual identities in the public sphere, assuming that one takes a subject position in and through discourse, that positioning oneself and others in discourse proceeds from a given distribution of social identities just as it participates in constructing this very reality. How does the representation of others, and even more specifically others who are defined by their discourse (the ways they speak, the point of view they represent, the symbolic frameworks and ideological systems on the basis of which they speak), contribute to the construction of subject positions? This would also involve observing whether the identification of a heterogeneous discourse (i.e. distinct from the enunciation in the making) produces a knock-on effect on the discourse which enunciates it – in other words, what would be the repercussions of this labelling metadiscourse on its own enunciation processes, certainly including the subjectivation dynamics, but also pathemic structures, narratives and ideological framing.
Here are a few non-restrictive themes or interrogations which can be related to this discussion:
-    Conflictuality: Does this question primarily encounter discursive genres, moments, fields, such as those of polemics or controversies, or polarizing texts engaging more identity-driven dynamics (such as discourses about Brexit, climate change or migration)? Can the enacting of conflicting discourses and positions paradoxically reflect a broad consensus around a cultural understanding of society, as shown by Durin about the European political discourses on migration (Durin 2018)?
-    Enunciative heterogeneity and metalanguage: How does one construct meaning through the representation of others? How is one’s word incorporated into the discourse being enunciated? This ranges from the fundamental level of dialogism and the different degrees of polyphony (Authier-Revuz 2020, Rabatel 2008) to explicitly nominalized identification, through a more or less fixed signifier – as would “fake news”, for instance, be a “floating signifier” (Laclau) designating an exogenus statement).
-    Socio-discursive dynamics: What are the forms through which discourse participants negotiate their subject position in relation to others? This implies reflecting on identity identification processes (whether binary or gradual; see "logics of equivalence and difference", Mouffe & Laclau 1985), on the degree of visibility of the constructed positions, on the modalities of distancing, of taking charge, of self-appropriating the others’ words.