Rabelais and his world

Transcending enclosures by bus: Public transit protests, frame mobility, and the many facets of colonial occupation

“…In what follows, I offer an analysis based on journalistic and participant accounts of the Rides (which took place before I began my field research in the West Bank but which motivated my research into the politics of Palestinian public transit). The rider-activists set out to cause a spectacle in the Bakhtinian sense (Bakhtin, 1968), an event in which rules are temporarily suspended and the powerful are subject to critique and exposure which would otherwise be risky in a context of wildly asymmetrical power relations. The Freedom Rides exposed Israeli segregation of mobility for an international civil society audience, and they used the bus as both motif and physical vehicle to transport the activists’ message.…”

Chronotopes

“…All these double-edged concepts are filled with controversies and tension; they form integral elements of dialogical thinking in novels, and in life: ‘Such motifs as meeting/parting (separation), loss/acquisition, search/discovery, recognition/nonrecognition and so forth enter as constituent elements into plots’ in literature and by their very nature they are chronotopic (Bakhtin, 1981b, p. 97). These double-edged concepts strongly feature in Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin, 1984a) and perhaps even more in Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin, 1984b). In the latter, the contradictions between official and unofficial languages are shown, on the one hand, in their extreme separation from one another, and on the other hand, with the boundaries between them being removed; such movements between polarities are ridden with tension and clashes expressing different points of view and enabling diverse interpretations.…”

Studying Discourse as Social Interaction: The Potential of Social Network Analysis for Discourse Studies

“…Social theories of discourse describe how language and speech are embedded in interactions between people (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984; Gee, 2012; Street, 1984). Participants in talk jointly construct and enforce social norms that tacitly define the expectations of the interaction, including what content and knowledge merits transmission, who is entitled to transmit it, and the modes through which transmissions may occur (Bourdieu, 1991; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Goffman, 1959).…”

“…Participants in talk jointly construct and enforce social norms that tacitly define the expectations of the interaction, including what content and knowledge merits transmission, who is entitled to transmit it, and the modes through which transmissions may occur (Bourdieu, 1991; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Goffman, 1959). This joint construction of the context and meaning of talk situates discourse as a distinctly dialogic process defined by the relationships and interactions between participants (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984; Cazden, 2001; Gee, 2012). By foregrounding these social interactions, social theories of discourse draw attention to the centrality of human interaction for talk and learning.…”

“…Although such measures of talk can represent important dimensions of discourse, these measures treat discourse as an attribute of a single person. This view does not align with conceptual understandings of discourse as a social phenomenon in which talk is interactionally constructed and negotiated for particular purposes (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984; Gee, 2012; Goffman, 1981). This raises issues of validity in discourse research relying on attribute-based measures.…”