Conference Handbook
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7th New Zealand Discourse Conference Massey University, Wellington 3-6 December, 2019 Conference Handbook Conference Committee Dr. Tony Fisher, Massey University Dr. Julia De Bres, Massey University Dr. Emily Greenback, Victoria University of Wellington Dr. Shelly Dawson, Victoria University of Wellington Dr. Jesse Pirini, Victoria University of Wellington About the NZ Discourse Conference The New Zealand Discourse Conference was initiated by Professor Allan bell and Dr Philippa Smith at the Auckland University of technology in 2007. Over the next decade the conference was hosted by AUT every two years, where it quickly grew in popularity becoming a major event in the international linguistics calendar. In 2017, it was decided that the conference would no longer be tied to a single institution, but would instead be hosted at a different NZ university every two years. Massey in Wellington has the privilege of being the first university after AUT to host the NZ discourse conference. The conference boasts an impressive array of past plenary speakers, including Margaret Wetherell, Alison Lee (2007), and Alan Bell (2007, 2013), Sigrid Norris (2007, 2017), Rick Iedema, Cynthia Hardey and David Grant (2009), Teun van Dijk and Monica Heller (2011), Cindy Gallios and Adam Jaworsky (2013), Ruth Wodak, Bob Hodge and Donal Matheson (2015), Michael Bamberg, David Barton and Theo van Leeuwen (2017). In 2019 we are delighted to host plenary talks by Paul Baker, Brian W. King and Janet Holmes – all of whom address the conference for the first time. In 2021, the New Zealand Discourse Conference continues its journey south to be hosted by Canterbury University in Christchurch. Overview Tuesday 3rd December Time Location Event 1330 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Registration 1430 See programme Workshops 1700 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Drinks Reception Wednesday 4th December Time Location Event 0830 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Registration 0900 Conference opens: welcome and introductions 0930 Room1 Plenary Talk: Paul Baker. Using corpus approaches to examine health communication 1030 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Morning tea 1100 See programme parallel conference talks 1230 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Lunch 1330 See programme Parallel conference talks 1500 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Afternoon tea 1530 see programme Parallel conference talks Thursday 5th December Time Location Event 0930 See programme Parallel conference talks 1100 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Morning tea 1130 Room 1 Plenary Talk: Brian W. King. Lacunas and Vistas: Sexuality, Sex and Gender in New Zealand Discourse Research 1230 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Lunch 1330 Trip: Te Papa and Wellington waterfront 1900 The Hop garden Conference Dinner 131 Pirie Street, Mount Victoria Friday 6th December Time Location Event 0900 See programme Parallel conference talks 1030 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Morning tea 1100 See programme Parallel conference talks 1230 Te Ara Hihiko Foyer Lunch 1330 Room 1 Plenary Talk: Janet Holmes. Contesting the culture order in New Zealand workplaces 1430 Room 1 Close Plenary Speakers Janet Holmes, Victoria University of Wellington. Keynote: Contesting the culture order in New Zealand workplaces In New Zealand, Pākehā (European) ways of doing things (the New Zealand culture order) are the norm, taken-for-granted and rarely questioned or even noted unless someone “breaks the rules”. For minority group members, however, including the indigenous Māori people, Pākehā norms are ever-present reminders of their non-dominant position. In the Māori workplace contexts that we have researched, awareness of these norms is particularly apparent and often attracts explicit comment. This paper explores the insights that such comments provide about the attitudes of some Māori employees to the hegemonic influence of Pākehā in workplace interaction, as well as some indications of seeds of change. Workshop: Unconscious Bias in Workplace Discourse This workshop will give participants the opportunity to examine a range of excerpts of workplace talk and website written material for unconscious bias. Members of the Language in the Workplace Project team will be contributing to the discussion groups. Participants are welcome to bring along an excerpt of their own for discussion if they wish. Brian W. King, University of Hong Kong Keynote: Lacunas and Vistas: Sexuality, Sex and Gender in New Zealand Discourse Research For a number of years now, I have been analysing discourse in New Zealand at the macro, meso and micro levels, querying what discourse analysis might reveal about sexuality, sex, and gender, particularly at the potential rupturing points of binaries (i.e. female/male, woman/man, masculine/feminine, straight/gay). Queer Linguistics has been the primary field informing these efforts, aligning with this field’s aim to use a discourse analytical ‘zoom lens’ while exploring the normative authority and institutional practices associated with sexuality. I have also embraced its aim of ‘picking at the knots’ of tensions between global vs. local voices that might be expressing such normative authority in everyday life. While undertaking various projects it has become obvious to me that there are several very broad lacunas in New Zealand discourse research on sexuality, sex, and gender, but these omissions reveal vistas of timely research that can now be undertaken, without delay, across the numerous analytical traditions represented at this conference. Using data collected in different field sites (i.e. formal sexuality education classrooms, informal sexuality education gatherings, and activist discussion groups), and drawing on my published analyses of conversational data, I will outline four main topics for which a great deal of further attention is overdue. These are (a) heteronormativity at the intersection of sexuality, gender and ethnicity, (b) Hip Hop Nation Language in multiple spheres of use, (c) sexual embodiment and discourse, and (d) communicating sex variation. By exploring the actions of research participants in New Zealand, and their enactment of norms across a wide range of social settings, researchers working in Discourse Studies in its broadest definition stand to make a lasting contribution through our immanent and socio-diagnostic critiques. Finally, the proposed research has the potential to produce implications that cut to the core of some of the most burning current human rights issues of our times, with potential impact from local communities to the United Nations. Workshop: Finding Ideologies in Talk about Talk This workshop will focus on analysis of data in order to explore metalanguage, or metapragmatic discourse (i.e. talk about talk) for evidence of language ideologies and more. Novices and more experienced analysts will be encouraged to work together on analysis. Excerpts from research interviews will be provided, but should participants have relevant data of their own, they are encouraged to bring it. Paul Baker, Lancaster University Keynote: Using corpus approaches to examine health communication Corpus approaches have been applied to research in such diverse fields as anthropology (Nolte et al., 2018), geography (Gregory et al., 2015), history (McEnery and Baker, 2016), literature (Biber, 2011) and translation studies (Laviosa, 2002), although have not been embraced as readily by scholars working in health communication. Cortes (2015: 51) suggests that this relates to ethical and practical concerns in building large spoken corpora, although not all forms of health communication involve speech. This talk describes work carried out at the CASS (Corpus Approaches to Social Science) research centre at Lancaster University, detailing two case studies around health communication which have gainfully employed corpus techniques like collocation and keywords to examine evaluation and argumentation. The first examines 29 million words of patient feedback posted online about the National Health Service (England) and describes how a corpus approach was able to answer questions set by members of the NHS Insight team, as well as provide answers to questions that emerged in a more organic way (Baker et al 2019). The study was able to identify what patients actually meant when they ranked their experience on a scale of 1-5, and why certain types of staff consistently received extremely good or bad feedback. The second case study involves an examination of 36 million words of British newspaper articles that refer to obesity, focussing on how obese people are represented and the different ways that the press attempt to account for rising rates of obesity. The talk also considers some of the practical issues around using corpus approaches to engage in research impact. References Baker, P., Brookes, G. and Evans, C. (2019) The Language of Patient Feedback: A corpus linguistic study of online health communication. London: Routledge. Biber, D. (2011) Corpus linguistics and the study of literature: Back to the future? Scientific Study of Literature 1(1): 15-23. Cortes, V. (2015) Using corpus-based analytical methods to study patient talk. Inn M. Anton and E. Goering (eds). Understanding Patients’ Voices. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 51-70. Gregory I., Cooper D., Hardie A., and Rayson P. (2015). “Spatializing and analysing digital texts: Corpora, GIS and places” in Bodenhamer D., Corrigan J. and Harris T. (eds.) Spatial Narratives and Deep Maps. Indiana University Press: Bloomington, pp. 150-178. Laviosa, S. (2002) Corpus-based translation studies: Theory, findings, applications. New York: Rodopi. McEnery, A. M. and Baker, H. (2016)