The Academic Dispositif: Towards a Context-Centred Discourse Analysis

Hamann, Julian; Maesse, Jens; Scholz, Ronny and Angermuller, Johannes (2018). The Academic Dispositif: Towards a Context-Centred Discourse Analysis. In: Scholz, Ronny ed. Quantifying Approaches to Discourse for Social Scientists. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 51–87.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97370-8_3

Abstract

This contribution outlines the dispositif approach, which combines a linguistic discourse analysis of texts with a sociological study of the social context (i.e. the dispositif understood as an institutional arrangement of practices and structures). The authors use the discourse of academic researchers to exemplify this approach. By articulating correspondence analysis of self-representations on researchers’ homepages with institutional data of sociology professors in the United Kingdom, they outline a research design that consists of three components: a linguistic analysis of texts, a sociological analysis of institutional contexts, and a theoretical account of how the two are related in the academic dispositif. The dispositif perspective on discourse aims to respond to a demand for systematic discourse research on the social and institutional contexts of discursive practices.