SITUATED

Telling Stories: Building bridges among Language, Narrative, Identity, Interaction, Society and Culture. Narratives have been studied in many different disciplines: linguistics, literary theory, clinical psychology, cognitive and developmental psychology, folklore, anthropology, sociology and history. The primary focus of GURT 2008 is the linguistic study of narrative, especially as it has developed within discourse analysis and […]

Filosoof Richard Rorty overleden De Standaard: De Amerikaanse filosoof en cultuurwetenschapper Richard Rorty is vrijdag in Palo Alto (Californië) op 75-jarige leeftijd na een slepende ziekte overleden. Dit heeft de Universiteit van Stanford maandag op haar internetsite gemeld. Rorty gold als een van de meest invloedrijke hedendaagse denkers. Tot de belangrijkste werken van de postmoderne […]

On this blog I already mentioned Ian Hackings groundbreaking work “The Social Construction of What?” His central argument is that much of the work that has been done to ‘unmask’ certain phenomena as constructions often starts from the idea that these constructions are ‘false’ or in any case a ‘bad thing’ and according to Hacking […]

The last edition of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival was organised around the theme of interactivity. Interact or Die! focused on interactivity in general (“Interaction not as a deformation of existing forms, but rather an addition of information, an informing, a formation of forms”) and the notion of interactivity in art in particular (“Interactive art […]

“The 16th -century humanists were the founders of the modern Humanities just as surely as the 17th -century natural philosophers were founders of modern Science and Philosophy: for instance, the ways of describing human cultures implicit in Book VI of Aristotle’s Ethics, and reintroduced in our day by Clifford Geertz as “thick description”, were already […]

In his phd thesis (Intertextual turns in curriculum inquiry: fictions, diffractions and deconstructions) Patrick Gough explores a “methodology for curriculum inquiry” focussing on the “generativity of fiction in reading, writing and representing curriculum problems and issues”. In his introductory chapter he explains how he used the original version versus the director’s cut of the SF-film […]

“We are animals ‘suspended in the webs of significance’ we ourselves have spun. Culture is that web. So: the analysis of it is therefore to be not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning” (Clifford Geertz 1973: 5).

According to the psychologist Jerome Bruner, there are two ways of looking at the world: logico-scientific on the one hand and narrarive on the other hand. These two modes of thought provide “distincitve ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality”. In Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986) he explains how this idea is strongly linked to […]

Thanks to the Cultural Studies mailing list (CultStud-l), I found this televised debate between Foucault and Chomsky on the relation between justice and power, on the “situatedness” of human nature. Justice Vs. Power – Chomsky Vs. Foucault, Part 1 Justice Vs. Power – Chomsky Vs. Foucault, Part 2

Interesting quote by Edwards coming from his Rhetoric and Educational Discourse, he starts by quoting Derrida: A Standard act depends as much upon the possibility of being repeated, and thus potentially of being mimed, cited, played, simulated, or in general ‘parasited’, since all these possibilities depend upon the possibility said to be opposed to it. […]