Masterclass

Our Post-ALAPP Masterclass 'Engaging Qualitatively with Institutional and Professional Discourse' will be delivered by Prof. Srikant Sarangi of Danish Institute of Humanities and Medicine and take place on 20 September, 2018.

The aim of the ALAPP Masterclass is to offer research-based conceptual, methodological and analytical insights into discourse analysis in institutional and professional settings such as health and social care, law, education, media, business and industry.

Language/communication-based studies – concerned with talk, text and other modalities (discourse, more generally) – have been carried out in the domains of professions and institutions/organisations over the past four decades, both within quantitative and qualitative research paradigms.

Within the qualitative tradition, researchers adopt different methodological and analytical perspectives when engaging with talk data (e.g. workplace encounters, research interviews) and text data (e.g., websites, media representations, illness narratives).

Within what can be broadly captured as ‘theme-oriented discourse analysis’, this Masterclass will be primarily devoted to ‘activity analysis’ and ‘account analysis’ which are distinctive in at least three ways:

• mapping of structural, interactional and thematic trajectories;
• relationality concerning focal themes and analytic themes;
• and role performance vis-à-vis participant structure and rhetorical devices.

There are four parts to the Masterclass:

1. an overview of mainstream traditions of professional and institutional/organisational studies;
2. a summary of methodological and interpretive challenges facing the qualitative researcher, with a focus on key analytical tools;
3. an exercise in sample data analysis;
4. a discussion of concerns arising from participants’ own research experiences.

The Masterclass is targeted at both early career and experienced researchers across disciplinary boundaries with an interest in qualitative inquiry.