CTSJ 215 Language and Power

This methods seminar introduces students to discourse analysis as the ontological and epistemological deconstruction of everyday language and symbols and their relationship to power. Throughout the course, students develop techniques for gathering and analyzing multimodal transcripts of naturally occurring conversations, interviews, discourses in institutional settings, media discourses, and texts of historical materials. The course draws from systemic functional linguistics, genre/text studies, multi-modal semiotics, interactional sociolinguistics, and critical social theory to understand how linguistic features of texts constitute, and are constituted by, the social, cultural, and local relations, processes, and contexts in which they are embedded. Using a seminar format, students will engage the readings and apply discourse analysis strategies in order to develop their own independent qualitative research projects.