Discourses in/of Disruption, Dresden

Diskurs – interdisziplinär 12

Discourses in/of disruption

TU Dresden, 16–17 November 2023

in cooperation with U Bremen, IDS Mannheim, U Warsaw and ÅAU

Discursive orders become visible where they get irritated or disrupted. The unquestioned yet effective foundations of what can be said in certain social and historical constellations become particularly clear when they are questioned, attacked or subverted (Butler 1997: 19; Tavory/Fine 2020). Discursive orders, from this perspective, prove to be fragile and vulnerable, while at the same time they provide powerful mechanisms and procedures of averting the dangers of disruption (Foucault 1971: 8).

From a methodological point of view, then, disruptivity is at the heart of discourse analysis. While focusing on transtextual patterns and regularities of discursive formations, the analytical interest of discourse analysis should also be directed at discontinuities, at the unpredictability and contradictoriness of discursive events. Discourse analysis has not yet devoted itself enough to tracing the mutual constitution of social and epistemic orders on the one hand and disruption on the other.

Disruption and disruptivity are not only latent aspects of discursive orders and methodological foci. Rather, they can themselves become a topic of discourse when they are collectively articulated, e.g. in crisis and catastrophe discourses (Vollmer 2013: 6–12) or in technopolitical discourses on disruptive innovations (Antos 2017).

The twelfth annual meeting 2023 of Diskurs – interdisziplinär is dedicated to these multifaceted entanglements of discourse and disruption. We focus both on discourses in disruption, addressing disruptive subversions of discursive orders and constellations, and discourses of disruption, addressing discursive negotiations of disruptive events. We invite researchers from various disciplines, including but not limited to linguistics, literature, sociology, history, political science and philosophy, to discuss theoretical issues and empirical analyses of discourse in/of disruption.

Key questions can be:

• How do we conceptualize discursive disruption and disruptivity?
• Which discursive orders in politics and society are disrupted in which way and how are these disruptions handled, mitigated, adapted or suppressed, e.g., by securitization policies (Koch, Nanz & Pause 2016)?
• Which social actors, agendas, knowledge systems and objects are involved in disrupting discourse and which socially constitutive effects can disruptions have, e.g. in protest movements and cultures?
• Which technological frameworks and media constellations of discourse are shaping and shaped by disruptions in various social domains, e.g. in the science and educational sector facing artificial intelligence and datafication?
• Which discourse-analytical methods are suitable for the analysis of disruption and how can the methodological needs for disambiguity, reproducibility and clarity be reconciled with the very discontinuity and contradictoriness of disruptions?
• How can discourse analysis itself be disruptive in its performative accomplishment? 

A keynote will be held by Lars Koch (Media Studies and Modern German Literature, Dresden).

Talks can be given in English and German. Please send an abstract (300 words max.) by 30.04.2023 to ulrike_marie.pfeifer1@tu-dresden.de. Please send your submission as a PDF with your name(s) and contact details on a cover sheet and the abstract without mentioning personal data. 

The conference proceedings (short papers of 10 pages max.) will be published Open Access as part of the series “Diskurs¬ – interdisziplinär” at IDSopen (https://idsopen.de/). Manuscripts should be submitted by 31.01.2024.

Organisation committee of Diskurs – interdisziplinär:
Hanna Acke (Åbo Akademi University)
Silvia Bonacchi (Universität Warschau)
Mark Dang-Anh (IDS Mannheim)
Simon Meier-Vieracker (TU Dresden)
Ingo H. Warnke (Universität Bremen)

References

• Antos, Gerd. 2017. Wenn Roboter „mitreden“...: Brauchen wir eine Disruptions-Forschung in der Linguistik? Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 45(3). 392–418. https://doi.org/10.1515/zgl-2017-0021. 
• Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.
• Foucault, Michel. 1971. Orders of discourse. Social Science Information 10(2). 7–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/053901847101000201.
• Koch, Lars, Tobias Nanz & Johannes Pause. 2016. Imaginationen der Störung. Ein Konzept. BEHEMOTH - A Journal on Civilisation 9(1). 6–23. https://doi.org/10.6094/behemoth.2016.9.1.885. 
• Vollmer, Hendrik. 2013. The Sociology of Disruption, Disaster and Social Change: Punctuated Cooperation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139424622.  
• Tavory, Iddo & Gary Alan Fine. 2020. Disruption and the theory of the interaction order. Theory and Society 49(3). 365–385. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09384-3.