Language and Dialogue - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2021

It has been two decades since the social-material turn in social interaction studies proved the heuristic limits of a logocentric analytical geography. In this paper, we focus on the performative function of objects in an underexplored learning activity: parent-assisted homework. Adopting a Conversation Analysis informed approach complemented by the ventriloquial perspective on communication, we illustrate how parent-assisted homework is accomplished through the multiple resources in the semiotic field. Particularly, we show how participants orient to and exploit the agency of materiality in interaction. In the conclusion we raise a socio-pedagogical issue concerning the cultural capital embedded in the learning environment as well as the parents’ competence in recognizing and exploiting it in ways that are aligned with the school culture.

Complaints about the use of new communication technologies are frequent in public discourse and work within a broader assemblage of discourses that promote selective ideologies. What is it that people are doing when they produce these complaints, and how might acts of complaining promote equity in our daily lives? We analyse complaints taken from 16 hours of video recorded dialogues and argue that the complaint discourse about the relationship of new communication technologies to people’s expected embodied functioning and idealized social participation reconstitutes and perpetuates broader ableist discourses about preferred engagement in the “real world.” By identifying intertextuality between two different topical discourses, we expand understanding about the reification of cross-cutting ableist discourses and promote more inclusive language use.

This paper examines the contribution of multimodal strategies in challenging aspects of public discourse about people with disabilities. It looks into media texts that were created by people with disabilities, in which the topic of disability is not a metaphor or a narrative prosthesis, but a demand for recognition and a call for a sincere dialogue, using three complementary strategies: disabling the viewers, challenging dominant aesthetic norms, and ironic echoing. The paper focuses on two autobiographical videos, a promotional video, a small corpus of paintings and a photograph, in which ironic echoing is the dominant strategy.

This paper sets out the results of an analysis of a corpus of interviews with certified accountants who work or have worked for a major international audit group (one of the Big 4). It uses a dialogical and enunciative approach to show how highly controlled discourses are employed to criticize the “affective temporality” in these large firms. The interviewees all mention the difficulty of living with certain emotions within these Big 4 firms (in particular with the following “temporal emotions”: boredom with repetitive tasks, cold relationships, stress and pressure). We use the pedagogical context of data collection and the professional context of the interviewees to interpret these controlled discourses, while strongly mobilizing the responsive dimension of dialogism.

This piece explores dialogue analysis inside a particular ongoing collective work, a regional adaptation to climate change research-action project in the southern part of Québec province, the Memphrémagog MRC. First, some precision is given to better understand what it means to work in interdisciplinary contexts such as this one, continuing the development of a terminology to be able to better identify collaboration between and with different professionals. These problems are then expressed in two case studies of dialogues as they have been documented in the research project.

This article presents an analysis of dialogue as an alternative to debate and argument for engaging contested community issues. Treating dialogue as a communication practice, I draw on ethnography of communication, cultural communication theory, and cultural discourse analysis to describe and interpret how participants practiced community dialogue as a communication event comprised of sequences of listening and verbally responding. When topics and identities were elaborated upon and socially negotiated through personal communication in the form of narratives and emotional responses, participants reported effective dialogue. These sequences were dialogic moments partially due to the dialectical tension between Americans’ once predictable civic routine of public expression of individual’s beliefs and the process of dialogue featured in our War and Peace dialogue workshop.

Paradigmatic changes in education arise as a result of the emergence of a fundamentally new reality in society. Society has predicted this new reality through the concepts of post-industrial society, information society, knowledge society. The basis of this new reality is the development of information technologies (IT). These transformations of reality are taking place so rapidly that the institute of education has not had the time to realign itself in this new space and has been late in its development of new breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence. The purpose of the study is to show the fundamental paradigmatic differences between classical education and smart education, and to build a bridge of dialogue between these two paradigms.