Discourses in Action: What Language Enables Us to Do (Shaping Inquiry in Culture, Communication and Media Studies)

This interdisciplinary collection brings together leading and emerging scholars of discourse, conceptualizing how discursive practices shape social, political, and even material realities today.

Discourses in Action presents a wide range of essays that explore fundamental concerns for the social consequences of text, talk, and discursively informed actions and possibilities of discursive engagement. It opens new perspectives on what language does and the differences that scholarly and practical contributions can make. Chapters cover diverse topics, ranging from political struggles, climate change, social revolutions, ethnicity, violence and other often unexpected patterns of discursive consequences. Its essays also explore the cultural contingencies that underlie discourse practices which are usually ignored when analysed from within a taken-for-granted culture.

Providing a useful examination of current discourse studies, this interdisciplinary volume is ideal for students and researchers within media, communication, discourse analysis, linguistics, cultural studies, and the sociology of knowledge.

Klaus Krippendorff (Ph.D., Ph.D.h.c) is the Gregory Bateson Professor for Language, Cybernetics, and Culture at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. He pioneered work on communication theory, content analysis, and methods of design semantics. As a critical scholar he examines discursive constructions of realities and paths of liberation from oppression.

Nour Halabi (Ph.D.) is a Lecturer of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds and the Vice-Chair of the MeCCSA Race Network. Her interdisciplinary research examines the interactions between mobility, social movements and global media. She received her doctorate from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and her Masters from The London School of Economics.