The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays

When Things Get Real: (Re)Considering the Challenges to Cultural Industries Research

“…And it is here that critical research practice can intersect performativity (i.e., the consideration of communicative micropractices and the scholars influence within its structuring moments) by examining “the acts of language and the effects related to their repetition and the construction of the felicity conditions that make them performative” in relation to organizational dispositives (Aggeri, 2017, p. 34) as sites for potential interventions. Performativity is always conditional, opening spaces for diversions of thought and consideration (what Bakhtin refers to as “heteroglossia”; Thompson et al, 1981). The research question, in turn, invites discursive parley, and how one answers invites critique and in turn, self-reflexivity and consideration, if not a troubling of the discursive waters that produce the organization and its dispositives.…”

Shenzhen’s Urban Villages. Dialogic cultural landscapes and resilient rituals

“…Critical to note is that not only are ideas open to change, but concurrently any one person can him/herself be open to change, even defining a sense of self in dialogue within overarching narratives (Bakhtin 1981).…”

Writing(s) at the Crossroads

“…I argued that sociocultural approaches to writing must grapple with the fact that texts and acts of inscription "are no more autonomous than the spray thrown up by white water in a river, and like that spray, literate acts today are far downstream from their sociohistoric origins" (ibidem, 138). Drawing on Bakhtin's (1981) notion of utterance as chronotopic (as a phenomenon always situated in and indexing times-spaces), I argued that writing must be understood "as situated, mediated, and dispersed, " as an aspect of literate activity that is "not located in acts of reading and writing, but as cultural forms of life saturated with textuality, that is strongly motivated and mediated by texts" (ibid., 138).…”

“…For example, going out with her husband to a Mexican restaurant in a Mexican neighborhood played into her papers on Cinco de Mayo and her reflections on the way local celebrations had come to be more about tacos than the battle of Puebla. Prior (1998) and Prior and Shipka (2003) articulate the blend of Bakhtin's (1981) account of chronotopes (represented and embodied) with Goffman's (1981) account of the lamination of discourse. Once we take on board this understanding of activity as situated, mediated, and dispersed, fundamentally dialogic and heterochronic, then it follows that any cultural act or object is layered with multiple histories -with a fuzzy, emergent set of affordances for meaning and action -that any activity can only be a laminated assemblage (Prior & Schaffner 2011).…”