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Analysing Political Language

Course Dates and Times

Monday 29 February to Friday 4 March 2016
Generally classes are either 09:00-12:30 or 14:00-17:30
15 hours over 5 days

Dvora Yanow

Dvora.Yanow.prof@gmail.com

Wageningen University and Research Center

This course will provide an overview of several methods or approaches that have been developed to analyse political language. Each day will be devoted to one method: metaphor analysis, category analysis, narrative and storytelling analysis, framing analysis, and visual analysis. Afternoon or evening group meetings will enable participants working together to ‘workshop’ these various analytic approaches with respect to their own field data, whether these derive from documentary, conversational/ interviewing or (participatory-) observational sources, or to delve further into specific readings. The course is not intended as a seminar for discussing individual readings in depth, however, but rather to introduce a variety of methods in a way that renders them immediately usable for analysing data.


Instructor Bio

Dvora Yanow is a political/policy/organisational ethnographer and interpretive methodologist. Her research and teaching are shaped by an overall interest in the generation and communication of knowing and meaning in organisational and policy settings.

Current research engages state-created categories for immigrant groups, citizen-making, and race-ethnic identity; research regulation (ethics board) policies; practice studies; science/technology museums and the idea of science; and built space/place analysis. 

Her most recent book, Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes (Routledge 2012), written with Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, is the first volume in their co-edited Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods. A second edition of their co-edited Interpretation and Method was published by ME Sharpe/Routledge in 2014.

As part of a new podcast series, New Books in Interpretive Social Science, hosted by Nick Cheesman (Australian National University), Dvora and Peri talk about their book and discuss what interpretive methods are and why they matter. Listen to the podcast here

The ‘interpretive turn’ in mid-late 20th century social sciences brought with it renewed attention to the role of language in social and political life. The ‘linguistic turn’ built on the established idea that in (re)presenting lived experience, language is not, and should not be seen as, an exact ‘mirror of [human] nature’ (to invoke Richard Rorty’s title) or transparent referent of those experiences, but needs to be understood as an interpretation of them.  As researchers, we ‘translate’ others’ and our own experiences into language—what Charles Taylor (1971) called ‘text analogues’ (see also Ricoeur 1971)—for purposes of analysis. Consider, for example, field notes that render persons, events, interactions, and the material world of research settings and artifacts in it as written texts. Additionally, the notion of language these days needs to be taken not only in a literal sense–referencing research-relevant documents, whether contemporary or archival, or field conversations, including interviews–but also with respect to repertoires of visual and nonverbal ‘languages.’

This course will explore several methods or approaches that have been developed to analyse political language: metaphor analysis, category analysis, narrative and storytelling analysis, framing analysis, and visual analysis.  Each day’s session is intended to introduce one of these ways of looking at the topic, theoretically, and a set of empirical articles or papers that use that method. We will touch briefly on language and the politics of science (e.g., 1976 articles by R.H. Brown and by J. Gusfield), but the course will not cover rhetoric, discourse analysis or some other topics that might well fit under this broad umbrella. 

This course presumes some knowledge of interpretive methodological presuppositions, including the so-called ‘linguistic turn,’ part of the interpretive turn, described in the long course outline below. We are not likely to have sufficient time to go into this background in depth.  If you have missed out on these ideas, you can find them in the following key readings:

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The interpretation of cultures. NY: Basic Books, esp. ch. 1.

Hawkesworth, M.E. 1988. Theoretical issues in policy analysis. Albany: SUNY Press, chs. 1-4.

Hiley, David R., Bohman, James F., and Shusterman, Richard, eds. 1991. The interpretive turn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark.  1980.  Metaphors we live by.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. [although focused on metaphor, this book includes arguments in re. the character of language underlying this course]

Polkinghorne, Donald E. 1983. Methodology for the human sciences. Albany: SUNY Press. [esp. the opening chapter]

Rabinow, Paul and Sullivan, William M., eds. 1979, 1985. Interpretive social science, 1st and 2nd eds. Berkeley: University of California Press. [selected chapters]

Ricoeur, Paul. 1971. The model of the text. Social Research 38: 529–62.

Taylor, Charles.  1971/1979. 'Interpretation and the sciences of man'. In Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive social science: A reader, 25–71 [also in the 2nd ed.]. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schwartz-Shea, Peregrine and Yanow, Dvora. 2012.  Interpretive research design: Concepts and processes.  NY: Routledge.

Yanow, Dvora and Schwartz-Shea, Peregrine. 2006/2014. Interpretation and method: Empirical research methods and the interpretive turn, 2nd ed. Armonk, NY: M E Sharpe, especially book introduction, part introductions, chs. 1-7, 24-25.

Those students who have already conducted field research and have their own ‘word data’ to analyse are likely to benefit the most, in a practical sense, from this course, although it is not a prerequisite for the course. Those who have not yet generated their own research data will also gain knowledge of this range of ways of looking at linguistic materials.

Day Topic Details
1 Metaphor analysis Class: 09.00-12.30 each day. Lab: afternoon or evening.
2 Category analysis Class: 09.00-12.30 each day. Lab: afternoon or evening.
3 Narrative and storytelling analysis Class: 09.00-12.30 each day. Lab: afternoon or evening.
4 Framing analysis Class: 09.00-12.30 each day. Lab: afternoon or evening.
5 Visual analysis Class: 09.00-12.30 each day. Lab: afternoon or evening.
Day Readings
Detailed reading assignments will be provided to registered participants. The following are intended as suggestive; actual readings will be drawn from these and others
1: metaphor Donald Schon, Donald Miller, chapters in two edited collections (Terrell Carver and Jernej Pikalo, Political language and metaphor; Alan Cienki and Dvora Yanow, ‘Politics and language’, Journal of International Relations and Development special issue)
2: categories Ian Hacking, George Lakoff, Ralph Hummel, Patrick Simon, Dvora Yanow
3: narrative-stories Shaul Shenhav, Joseph Gusfield, Deborah Stone, Merlijn van Hulst, and others
4: framing Donald Schön, Martin Rein, Carol Bacchi, and other scholars writing in the public policy tradition (as distinct from social movement frame analysis)
5: visual Mary Bellhouse (on paintings), Ilan Danjoux (on cartoons), Dvora Yanow (on built spaces)

Literature

These are some suggested additional readings; more will be provided to registered students:

Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. Sorting things out. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Gamson, William A. 1992. Talking politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (esp. chapter on cartoons).

Gusfield, Joseph R. 1981. The culture of public problems: Drinking-driving and the symbolic order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, esp. ch. 1.

McCloskey, Donald N.  1994.  How to do a rhetorical analysis of economics, and why.  In Roger Backhouse, ed., Economic methodology, 319-42.  London: Routledge.

Polkinghorne, Donald E. 1988. Narrative knowing and the human sciences. Albany: SUNY Press.

Schmidt, Ronald, Sr. 2000. Language policy and identity politics in the United States. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Schwartz-Shea, Peregrine and Yanow, Dvora. 2002. >Reading= >methods= >texts=:  How research methods texts construct political science. Political Research Quarterly 55: 457-86.

Shenhav, Shaul. 2015. Analyzing political narratives.  NY: Routledge.

 

Recommended Courses to Cover Before this One

Summer School: Introduction to Interpretive Research Designs; Expert Interviews for Qualitative Data Generation; Issues in political, policy, and organizational ethnography; Analysing Discourse I and II– Analysing Politics: Theories, Methods and Applications

Winter School: Introduction to Qualitative Interpretive Methods; Knowing and the Known: The Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Sciences; Interpretative interviewing

Recommended Courses to Cover After this One

Summer School: Analysing Discourse I and II– Analysing Politics: Theories, Methods and Applications

Winter School: Writing ethnographic and other qualitative-interpretive research: Learning inductively