Knowledge and Power in a Polycentric World. Discourses Across Languages, Cultures and Space
The legitimacy of “Europe” and “the West” as identifiable territorial and imagined entities is in crisis. The awareness has grown of a world becoming more polycentric. At the same time, the field of Discourse Studies is growing at a dazzling rate across the globe. Discourse Studies is known for theoretical orientations and methodological tools that account for meaning production as a social practice mobilizing languages, media and technologies. It is thus uniquely placed to observe and analyse the shifting conceptions of a post-colonial, post-Eurocentric, post-west-and-the-rest world. The different understandings of the intersection of language and society, in the range of specific schools, theories and approaches within Discourse Studies promise to inspire conflicting analyses of the world today.
The focus of Discourse Studies also varies according to the specific national or regional contexts in which issues of power and language, subjectivity and inequality, language and context are being problematized. For instance, Anglophone, French-, German-, Spanish-, Portuguese-, and Russian-speaking communities of discourse analysts and theorists are marked by dynamic debates, terminologies and approaches that are not always well known outside each language community. The third DiscourseNet Congress, which is co-organized with ALED, aims to be a site of dialogue and reflection across and about different linguistic and national traditions in Discourse Studies.
DiscourseNet (www.discourseanalysis.net) is an interdisciplinarynetwork of discourse researchers who have organized more than 25 conferences in Europe over the past ten years. The Asociación LatinoAmericana de Estudios del Discurso (www.comunidadaled.org) was formed in 1995 to promote the development of Discourse Studies inLatin America. ALED has organised 12 International Congresses and about 11 national events for each country member. A joint initiative of DiscourseNet and ALED, DNC3 – ALED invites specific approaches to shifting conceptions of, for instance, “Europe”, “the global South”, “the West”… Within the overarching frame of our contemporary entangled world, we invite discourse analysts from around the world to take stock of contemporary developments in Discourse Studies.