Please choose one of the following as your preferred session for the afternoon workshop. Your preference will be used for capacity planning. You may not be allocated to the group you choose if we cannot accommodate you, in which case we will operate on a first come, first served basis.

Please note that, depending on room capacity, it may be possible for you to move to another workshop on the day if the morning session sparks a particular interest.

Qualitative interviewing

Eduardo Chavez Herrera

Interviewing is one of the most popular methods of data collection in the social sciences. Regarded as one of the most common cross-disciplinary research instruments, they serve as fundamental research methods alone, or in combination with other techniques. This session will focus on several aspects of qualitative interviewing and will introduce various perspectives on interview design, and analytic stances on interview data. This session is open to students who wish to work with interviews from a discourse analysis viewpoint.

Applications of conversation analysis in discourse analysis

Sixian Hah

In this 3-hour session on how CA can be applied in discourse analysis, participants would get the chance to discuss actual transcripts and gain hands-on experience in analysing emerging themes in an interactive mini-workshop. Participants need not have prior knowledge of CA in order to take part. The aims of this workshop are to inform participants of the general principles and theoretical assumptions of CA, and to share ideas on how CA could be used as an analytic tool in discourse analysis.

Working with coding

Marta Natalia Wróblewska

Are you struggling to get your head around emerging topics, themes and linguistic features in your data? Or looking for a way to systematically keep track of research findings? Coding can help you work systematically and ensure no observation gets lost. This procedure consists of categorizing your data in ways which make analysis easier. The hands-on workshop “Working with coding” will cover an overview of the questions you need to be aware of when doing coding, including various types of software, understanding the difference between inductive and deductive codes as well as issues related to the ethics of coding.

Understanding the Mechanics of Poststructuralist Discourse Theory and Analysis. Discourse as a Semiotic Practice.

Johannes Beetz / Veit Schwab

This session aims at providing PhD students with a hands-on experience of poststructuralist discourse analysis. Special emphasis is put on the relation between theory and analysis, and what could be called the “analytical mechanics” of discourse approaches:

How do discourse analysts approach textual and non-textual material, and the social and political realities it looks at? What makes poststructuralist discourse analysis stand out from other interpretative or hermeneutic approaches in the Social Sciences? What makes it critical? What can discourse analysis do for you? And how does a theoretically informed discourse analysis practically look like? We will start the session with a brief input on the basic ontological and epistemological assumptions of discourse theory, with a particular focus on its conception of subjectivity. The major part of the afternoon will be consecrated to a collective discourse analysis: In small groups, participants will explore the mechanics of discourse analysis by looking at how the institutional discourse in UK higher education is bound up with neoliberal forms of power, accumulation, and exploitation. The results of this analysis will be discussed and reflected collectively.

Corpus approaches to discourse

Ronny Scholz

Are you analysing textual data? Maybe you are interested in exploring your research material with text-statistical methods? The workshop introduces corpus linguistic methods for discourse researchers in the Social Sciences and Humanities. It will enable the participants to build their own corpus according to their research question and analyse it with lexicometric methods. These methods will enable you to discover new perspectives on your data by exploring them from angles that cannot be taken by simply reading texts. In this sense, quantitative methods are understood as a heuristic approach to texts representing a useful complement of qualitative methods.