Session Information
17 SES 07, Creativity and Democracy
Paper Session
Contribution
The paper presents the main results from the research project “Dialogue as idea and as practice”, financed by the Swedish Research Council and involving five researchers.
The background of the project is the wide impact of the notion of dialogue from the 1980’s onward. This is the case especially in Sweden, but certainly within a European dimension as well. The notion of dialogue has empirical concretisations in many social fields, among them education and health, in the form of institutionalised dialogues or conversations. This, in turn, means that "dialogue" has become an important site where influence is exerted and learning takes place. The impact is seen also in the academic field. Ontological-epistemological frameworks of an interactional kind often conceptualised as dialogical theories have become increasingly popular.
The concept of dialogue seems to have taken on a special emotional, political and perhaps even existential loading. Against this background, it becomes important to examine the phenomenon critically, and to try to understand it. In the project we have examined it in the perspective of meaning-making. The human urge to ascribe meaning to the world in which we live and, at the same time, the tendency to see, think and act in more or less the same way, differently in different epochs, has been conceptualised in many ways. It is found in the foucauldian concept of discourse, in Kuhn’s paradigms, in concepts within the narrative tradition, in the concept of root metaphors and so on. In the project, we have chosen Swedish sociologist Johan Asplund’s concept “figure of thought” as an important tool to think by.
A figure of thought according to Asplund is a concept or thought acting as a kind of screen (in the typographical sense) for meaning-making. It is a concept that appeals to us, “calls” us, producing discourses that are discourses “on” the figure. Ultimately a figure of thought reflects a base in social conditions of one kind or another, and it is in its turn shaping social conditions (Asplund 1979; 1987, 1991).
Substudies within the project have had different foci – contemporary or historical, with specific questions - but the global research questions have been the following: What does the notion of dialogue stand for in different contexts? What are the supporting, basic ideas and what is variable? - How could the concrete forms that "dialogues" take at school and in health care be described? What meanings does "dialogue" take on when integrated and used in different practices? - How could we understand the wide impact within many social domains that the notion of dialogue has had during the last part of the 20th century?
Substudies have concerned dialogue and conversation in a philosophical discourse, in Swedish educational policy documents 1969-2008, in policy documents concerning medical service and in empirical dialogues in upper secondary school and at health centers. In the paper, emphasis is on education and philosophy.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Asplund, Johan (1979). Teorier om framtiden. Stockholm, Liber. Asplund, Johan (1987). Det sociala livets elementära former. Göteborg, Korpen. Asplund, Johan (1991). Essä om Gemeinschaft och Gesellschaft. Göteborg, Bokförlaget Korpen. Bauman, Zygmunt (2010). 44 letters from the liquid modern world. Cambridge, Polity Press. Drew, Paul & Heritage, John (1992). Analyzing talk at work. I: Paul Drew & John Heritage (red.) Talk at work: interaction in institutional settings. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Englund, Boel & Sandström, Birgitta (red.) (2012). Dialogen som idé och praktik. Stockholm, Carlssons. Foucault, Michel (1993). Diskursens ordning. Stockholm, Symposion. Linell, Per (2009). Rethinking language, mind, and world dialogically. Interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making. Charlotte, NC, Information Age Publishing. Nikulin, Dmitri (2006). On dialogue. Lanham, MD, Lexington Books. Nikulin, Dmitri (2010). Dialectic and dialogue. Stanford, Stanford University Press. Rose, Nikolas (1996).Govern advanced liberal democracies. I: Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne & Nikolas Rose (red.) Foucault and political reason: liberalism, neo-liberalism and rationalities of government. London, ULC Press. Tannen, Deborah (2007). Talking voices. Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse (2:a uppl.). Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). The concept of ‘dialogue’ in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. Discourse Studies, Vol. 8, No. 5, 675-703.
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