Suchergebnisse

It has become commonplace to employ dialogue-based approaches in producing and communicating knowledge in diverse fields. Here, "dialogue" has become a buzzword that promises democratic, participatory processes of mutual learning and knowledge co-production. But what does "dialogue" actually entail in the fields in which it is practised and how can we analyse those practices in ways that take account of their complexities? The Promise of Dialogue presents a novel theoretical framework for analysing the dialogic turn in the production and communication of knowledge that builds bridges across three research traditions - dialogic communication theory, action research, and science and technology studies.It also provides an empirically rich account of the dialogic turn through case studies of how dialogue is enacted in the fields of planned communication, public engagement with science and collaborative research. A critical, reflexive approach is taken that interrogates the complexities, tensions and dilemmas inherent in the enactment of "dialogue" and is oriented towards further developing dialogic practices from a position normatively supportive of the dialogic turn.

This article presents an account of an empirical study of discourse on the environment, the media and political action in Denmark. The study applies an interdisciplinary framework for discourse analysis which draws on the fields of social psychology, communication studies and linguistics. It analyses the discourse of six couples in the light of key social developments involving a `democratization of responsibility' whereby individuals feel personal responsibility for solving public problems, including global and local ecological risks. The role of the mass media in producing and disseminating knowledge of the problems in stressed. Discourse analysis shows that people draw on discourses which provide them with ways of coping with the proliferation of ecological risks and the burden of responsibility for those risks. People's sense of responsibility is limited in its strength by being constituted within a discourse which constructs political action beyond a limited amount of political consumption as belonging to a separate realm to which they have access only via the mass media.

Der Beitrag fasst erste Ergebnisse einer empirischen Untersuchung zum Diskurs von Umwelt, Medien und politischem Handeln in Dänemark zusammen. Die Diskursanalyse wurde mittels eines interdisziplinären Methodengerüsts aus den Bereichen Sozialpsychologie, Kommunikationswissenschaft und Linguistik durchgeführt. Sie untersucht das Verhalten von sechs Paaren im Lichte wichtiger gesellschaftlicher Entwicklungen unter Einbeziehung des Modells einer "Demokratisierung von Verantwortung". Damit ist gemeint, daß Individuen eine persönliche Verantwortung für die Lösung öffentlicher Probleme wie globale oder lokale ökologische Risiken fühlen. Besonderer Nachdruck wird dabei auf die Rolle der Massenmedien bei der Herstellung und Verbreitung von Problemwissen gelegt. Ergebnisse zeigen, daß die Menschen Diskurse vorziehen, die sie mit Informationen darüber versorgen, wie sie mit der Ausbreitung ökologischer Risiken und der Last der Verantwortung für solche Risiken fertig werden können. Das Verantwortungsgefühl der Menschen ist begrenzt, weil es das Resultat eines Diskurses ist, der politisches Handeln über einen begrenzten politischen Aufwand hinaus nur in einem Bereich ermöglicht, zu dem sie nur über die Massenmedien Zugang haben. (UNübers.)

This article investigates the role of the mass media as the dominant form of publicness in contemporary western societies, through a theoretical analysis of the impact of mediated publicness on relations between the state and the people, and an empirical study of a particular media event: the media representation of the wedding of the younger son of the Queen of Denmark, Prince Joachim, to Alexandra Manley on 18 November 1995. I analyse the wedding as a media construction based on a particular type of royalist discourse. This discourse is fundamentally modern in its incorporation of elements of egalitarian discourse and high modern or postmodern in its use of irony. Within the terms of the discourse, it is possible to express mild critique from a position of ironic distance, but open resistance lies outside its bounds. The media construction of the wedding within this discourse, therefore, provides part of the answer to the anomaly of the continued popularity of the monarchy in Denmark, a country with a strongly egalitarian political culture.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discuss how being led by a young child to unknown destinations without shared language offers an experience of indeterminacy that opens up (re)thinking of political co-existence.


Design/methodology/approach
The relational arts project The Walking Neighbourhood hosted by children challenges the social practice of adults chaperoning children through public streets by inviting children to curate and lead unknown adults on walks of local neighbourhoods. This paper focusses on sensory ethnographic research of one encounter of a child-curated walk when this project took place in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The experience is relayed through multilayered sensorial storytelling inter-woven with diffractive analysis informed from a post-humanist agential realist position (Barad, 2007, 2012).


Findings
Perceptions, knowings, imaginings, memories and connections are read as explanations of intra-actions in the child-led walk to produce new meaning in the phenomena of political co-existence. Emergent, embodied, sensorial listening produces new awareness and understandings of intra-acting beings in an urban space regardless of age or form.


Social implications
Application of ethical ontological epistemological practice through emergent, embodied, sensorial listening to others opens affectual ethical ways of being and knowing for justice-to-come in political co-existence.


Originality/value
The concept of child-led walks is innovative as a political act by shifting from vertical adult-child relations to horizontal relations. Post-humanist agential realism is a new and emerging theory that offers possibilities to reconceptualise co-existence with others in public spaces.

In March 2012, Contact Inc., a community cultural development organization based in Brisbane, Australia, launched the project 'Walking Neighbourhood: hosted by children'. This project sought to engage young people in the negotiation of a large urban space, as well as provoke an awareness of child actualization by challenging existing understandings of the role young people play as active citizens. By asking a group of children, aged between eight and twelve, to navigate their way through a large urban space and subsequently lead a curated tour of this space for groups of participant adults, Walking Neighbourhood unsettled existing notions of child safety, the place of children within the city and assumptions surrounding young people as cognizant, active citizens. This article will explore the implications of the Walking Neighbourhood project and how renewed understandings of young people's capacities to navigate urban spaces as active citizens might form.