<TITLE: Text, Interaction and Communities Conference 2: Professionals, Clients and Interaction
ACADEMIC DOMAIN: social sciences
DISCIPLINE: social policy and social work
EVENT TYPE: conference presentation
FILE ID: CPRE06C
NOTES: continuation of and continued in CDIS06B, session also includes presentations CPRE06B/D

RECORDING DURATION: 28 min 57 sec

RECORDING DATE: 25.5.2005

NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 25

NUMBER OF SPEAKERS: 1

S15: NATIVE-SPEAKER STATUS: Italian; ACADEMIC ROLE: research student; GENDER: female; AGE: 31-50

SU: unidentified speaker

SS: several simultaneous speakers>


<S15> can you see alright <P:09> okay so first of all i'll tell you that , mhm mhm mhm i'm italian so the mistakes i will do with my english are <SS> [@@] </SS> [due to the fact that i'm italian so] if if you think like you know wow we have this incredible (case on) finn <SS> [@@] </SS> [who talks @@] you know has this very very odd english with this strange pronunciation we don't can't figure out where she comes from well that's the reason so , erm okay <COUGH> erm . so er i've been looking at how people talk about life and how it is in italy er data er have been collected er since 2000 2001 er up to now and er er come from er er an ethnographic study er on field trials erm with GMO that is genetically modified organisms so there are scientists that er after getting a certain permission can run field trials er open-air and they grow genetically modified plants and er and this study i mean i will talk about it er later on but er basically what we have been collect- er what we have been doing is collecting stories basically collecting narratives of the people involved so that there's scientist activist er laypeople citizen living nearby the fields and just seeing how they were talking about , and er here in in in particular we look at how er during interaction these people in their narrative give voices to different characters so they they create stories and they they give voices to their characters and make protagonists usually heroes and villains usually friends and foes er and how doing this and often dramatising erm er with their stories mhm putting words in the mouth of these people these characters that they have basically created er all this is well enough er in order to make the point but it's the so it's all a rhetoric how strategy in order to to prove the point , er so i will first talk about the theory that i'm following and er then i will tell you about the the trial and then i will give you a few examples i'll try and be very quick and er <P:05> so first of all the premises are that erm there are ideologies behind when people talk they conjure up a certain scenario which is (xx) people have certain qualities events have certain have certain explanations and they are not neutral they are not void of values and ideologies so here i've been using the work er by van dijk er who wrote a book on ideology in 98 and already in 95 had published an important paper and er as you can see i mean i i'm really @(xx)@ so the idea is that ideologies are so- socially shared cognitive structures so here we go er somehow behind discourse so the assumption is that when we talk discourse has expressed something which is within so discourse like behaviour expresses something so er it's not a theory which is radically constructionist even though it is radically structionist and that er and that these ideologies are produced and reproduced er within discourse so stance er within discourse emerges in several in several ways er in texts that is verbal text or or or written text of course so lexicalisation when we think about er an expression like the liberation of ir- iraq er it just tells us a lot about what we think about the situation choosing a topic er assigning choosing what to bring to the fore and what to leave in the background the way in which we refer to to people already gives us er an an impression of what our position is er with respect to the person or the or the or the or the thing modality er both er epistemic and deontic you know the level of certitude we we we assign to what we say and er something is er should be done or not and so on er semantic roles of the roles of agent pagen- patient and object i'm just here running through er a number of features that express stance in text right inferences like presupposition for example er gives an i- give an idea of what people take for granted and the the the presumptions they have and also several manners we have qualifying people and things er (maybe after my) description we will see it on the list erm and again yes i'm showing you that discourse can give access to to this complex way in which realities are produced and reproduced and erm so the idea is that language is a probe er to access these these thoughts in a (xx) standpoint again i'll go through this quickly and you can grill me about each of them @@ because they are quite strong as you can see so the first premise comes from er speech act theory and (xx) the second wittgenstein and after john austin nobody can have any more an idea of of language as something that simply represent things like er er and of course as silverstein specified representing is one of the things language does but it's just one of the many and er and then the idea that communication is not something that comes from one er em- emittent like somebody is just gives out this er this er this message but rather it's done signalling so it is er done through the fact that someone signals and the other person recognises so it is it is something which is jointly produced and then the idea that discourse practices construct us in our words so this idea of textual self er that (xx) er specify that we are just er er they're not the only ones talking about this of course but er i can read you this quote from them that's saying you know that <READING ALOUD> in individu- an individual emerges through the through the practices of social interaction not as a relatively fixed an end-product but as one who is constituted and reconstituted through the various discursive practices in which they participate </READING ALOUD> so the idea is that one of the products of discourse is the self alright and er and then the idea that even reference for example always presents at least one aspect of stance so erm so that discourse er always is is er presents some instance of s- stance and that language is used to do things in interaction and then of course er as goffman as goffman told that communication is always contextualised and when we talk about context of course we talk first of all about sequential context so an utterance comes in a chain there are utterances coming before it and then so in in order to interpret it and to understand what it is we need to look at the chain of utterances but then of course the concept is is much wider and er so er of course the social context the environment the situation participants are positioned they have roles they have power roles they don't have the same level of logic knowledge and blah blah blah with the three the three parties @@ and , and the idea that also other discoursers- other discourses constitute the context of a dis- of a certain interaction so the discourses that occurred before and of which er the participants are aware of constitute the context of it so for example talking about biotechnology there are discourses like biotechnologies are bad for the third world or they are good for the third world because they can solve the problem of world hung- world hunger or i don't know a certain idea of science as positive or negative all these are things that are within our environment we've heard them and we can pull them out and and have them at at our disposal , and of course this idea that bakhtin er of bakhtin that there is this intertextuality so that an utterance again context what i was trying to say and (xx) is a link in the chain of speech communication so the preceding links here i don't think bakhtin is really thinking about simply sequential context he's talking about er a discourse which is much er wider than what happens within one social encounter , and this is why the kind of received view of communication is actually not good so there are several problems with it one is that er this idea that there is a message like er a goal that is beyond language and it's just wrapped up basically in language so that we could unwrap it and have the content which is simply passed between speaker and hearer so there is first the problem with the idea that there is a message beyond language then erm that er the communication is simply er passing information from one to the other but then another problem is actually the notions of speaker and hearer because those are problematic too and here er of course er goffman's paper on on footing erm is quite useful so goffman looks at erm at pa- er the notion of participant roles in conversation and of course he breaks it down (and) problematise (it) so of course he says that when we talk about hearing in fact we talk about this social slot so it's not about you know physically receiving the sound on our ear but being the ratified one or being the addressee or being someone who's hearing but is not supposed to hear and so on and so forth and even more interesting er the notion of speaker should be er breaked into different parts because er in fact er when we talk about speaker we don't really distinguish who's got the responsibility for what's said and so goffman instead says that speaker should be broken to at least the animator that is the talking machine er the person who simply utters the sounds the words erm the author who's the person who's responsible for writing the words and the principal who's the person whose ideas and whose views are expressed so the the ultimately responsible for the the , er for the message er so if you think about the pope for example er usually the pope is the animator when he talks er and is also the principal right so he expresses his his view is authoritar- authoritative view ho- however it's hard to imagine that he er would be writing his own speeches so somebody writing for them so somebody else is the author right and of course you can think about many examples actors and er people who read the mag- the newspaper er sorry the news on TV and so on , so this is important for for for what i'm i'm trying to to talk about now because erm , or what i'm trying to talk about is people making voices so people erm erm , dramatising their s- their story and making up voices and the point of goffman of course is that , these roles are not stable we keep shifting all the time we keep changing footing all the time so there is a continuum between being fully responsible for what we say and attributing what we say to somebody else and being completely against it so quoting in order to contradict , so er bakhtin again wrote some wonderful stuff on on on speaking person in the novel er and , of course he says that er er this was was written in a context of talking about novels but in fact he said that this er phenomenon of the talking person is extremely relevant in everyday conversation as er we use other people all the all the time , so he says most of all what we say is is transmitting recalling and weighing and pass judgement of other people words opinion and assertion . and again he says that the speaking person and his discourse in everyday speech serves as a subject for the engaged practical transmission of information not as a means of the representation so when we represent something we do it for our own purposes we completely deform and change what it was so there is no such a thing as the perfect verbatim reproduction of something because even when we do it verbatim it serves our own discourse at that point serves our own aim , so er now going to the going to the matter of it er i've been working for this er european union funded project er that was running in seven countries and we study field trials so what we wanted to do was see what people thought about it and er so we talked with all the stake-holders that we could get hold of and with laypeople living nearby , and it was concerned er with basically with citizenship so with seeing if and how people were feeling that they had been excluded by the decision-making process er that would er give licence to run field trials and of course we found out that (xx) nobody knew nothing that er everything all the decisions were made up above and that locals were not notified even though it was in the legislation and blah blah blah so , erm that's but going to the matter so here we have the the following situation a field trial was running and er , er this this scientist was er the university was erm doing experiments with strawberries and olive trees er he wanted to make them resistant and make them better using biotechnology so he did his experiments and then at certain point instead of doing it in er green gardens he got the permission to do it outside in the fields and so he did but people found out and there were several episodes of vandalism and also several epiro- episodes of er protest so people occupied the university and and this kind of <COUGH> dialogue er very controversial started off between the university and these protesters and erm and so now er we're gonna look at er how this scientist describes what happened during one public encounter in which he was talking and trying to explain what he was doing with the his experiments and there were people local people and also kind of professional protesters from greenpeace er jose bove also went there and so on and er so how people reacted because i asked him so but what about local people did they come were they interested in in this field trial what did they ask and so on and this is what he says so he's he's telling a story , erm so he says <READING ALOUD> yes i mean local people you know they came so there were those who live in here and they came to understand but they did not want to understand so in in that in fact a lady she went out at a point during my exposition and then she came back and started to squeak so then one of the students </READING ALOUD> and so on so here er please notice how this person is using the word understanding it's interesting because i hadn't pulled it out i hadn't asked so er did people understand he uses precisely the word understand and my point er i don't know if i will be able to convince you but is that it is within a frame of a a world-view in which understanding basically means that they should agree with him so understanding means that they would not be afraid of it , erm here we have a what silverstein calls a metapragmatic description so it's not exactly when when he says that this lady started to squeak so it's not that really he's providing er er a specific illocutionary force of what this lady did but in fact erm this characterise her er very strongly so it's not protesting or making an argument or or er you know providing er information against the field trial it is squeaking so only certain people squeak er people who basically are not competent or not polite at least to say the least okay so this is how er in in a metapragmatic way this guy characterised one of the persons that were in the audience so that's that story he was talking he was talking about the field trial the lady left and then she came back and she was squeaking , so here we see that there are different layers in within the conversation so in one i am with the scientist that is telling me this story and he conjures up this other setting this other situation in which there is a student that we will see is gonna talk to the squeaking lady and there is the scientist who's now silent so he's just talking about that now of course to this now we could add this er third level in which i am talking to you talking about this interaction that occurred to me in which the scientist says blah blah blah okay so just to make clear that there are all these different layers of action going on , erm so and he he goes on so this lady started to squeak <READING ALOUD> so then one of our student told her but you what have you understood you've understood nothing because you went out to smoke and you've understood nothing she says you are afraid of transgenic plants and then you're smoking she says a student from your university she's from your region a student who studies here </READING ALOUD> so here again we have all this er switching of er of footing in which er er here he really frames it a little this student told her and there is this virtual opening commas in which he says what the student said , erm and again so so i i put it in black so so again she she introduces it again with a pronoun she says blah blah blah erm so this seems a a case in which he is really reporting the real words that the student said gives this illusion . and then he goes on so er <READING ALOUD> then you were smoking said the student from your region huh here so she said so what i'm against GMOs full stop so why do you come here to bother us then but the majority had then in fact (condemned) </READING ALOUD> so here he makes the voices er , not so clearly so it's not that really he dramatises it then produces different voices for the student and from for for the for the lady but he makes clear that they were talking so here the the lady responded that she doesn't care so that <READING ALOUD> so what i'm against GMOs full stop </READING ALOUD> and if this se- if you look at this what comes next this <READING ALOUD> so why do you come here to bother us then </READING ALOUD> this is a bit er hard to attribute so it is not really that it belongs to the student we don't know if the student told her <READING ALOUD> so why do you come here to bother us then </READING ALOUD> we don't know if if is that what happened and we don't know if it's what the professor told her it remains like guess suspended it remains like a a kind of discourse that is like , it's there but it is not fully attributed to someone it is not fully attributed responsibility to someone for what was said , er and then this it continues so he said <READING ALOUD> in fact there was also a professor among other things in fact a (nut) professor that was totally against GMOs he had come here to demonstrate two years ago three years ago and then recently i met him and i say so now what do you think and he says listen he says i i i've not changed my mind radically but now i've understood more and i must say that in the end earlier on i'd understood nothing i was just following what others were telling me but now i've understood with my own hand and i'm not afraid anymore of GMOs this said by this guy who's older than 60 in fact it (xx) me in fact </READING ALOUD> right so here we have a parable basically things like straight from the gospel right so we have the process of someone from darkness to enlightenment so from not understanding to understanding and understanding means that he's not afraid of GMOs it's things like thi- that's the only way in which you can conceive of it so the the kind of polarisation this this professor seems to display is from not understanding and understanding there are @no other@ things either you understand or you don't understand or you are a third person that doesn't want to understand like the squeaking lady right so it's , do you understand what what i mean i don't know if i'm . i i don't know if you can see the colours maybe you cannot in fact <SU> [just about] <SU> [yes] mhm-hm </SU> </SU> can you see the [colours] <SU> [yeah] mhm-hm </SU> . so in fact i don't really know if this professor really told him you know what now i understand if if i don't think that's the point of course the point is that all this has been used in order to give grounds to the claims that he very implicitly this professor is doing , er and then if you look at the other side i've been talking with the greenpeace representative about the same field trial of course he comes up with completely different stories , so well this is a another maybe not so interesting this is a a kind of a quotation which is not direct like indirect quotation so it doesn't change the pronouns and so on and so forth not so interesting er but this now he's talking about that professor , and he says that <READING ALOUD> i've known that professor for many years </READING ALOUD> and actually this er guy the greenpeace representative had studied at that university so he knows this scientist very well he was one of his professors so and <READING ALOUD> apart from this operation that in my opinion is to be totally condemned but he is a person with whom it's possible to talk he's an agreeable person no doubt but he says it is necessary to augment our wealth of knowledge we do it in order to understand certain phenomena fine after all this is the essence of research or science but in the end if one does not manage to consider </READING ALOUD> and then he goes on so this is another case in which the words of the other person are quoted in order to argue against erm . a same thing this er this greenpeace representative talked about the (xx) and so on but there is one last example that i want to i'm almost done er my last example er which is very erm , so in in this case there is no really clear attribution w- you don't know who is talking to who so <P:07> sorry i'm all , this is the one so this er greenpeace representative says <READING ALOUD> this is the reason that i don't know if it is a bit er i don't know it i don't know it is a bit what one often perceives in the research world independently from the faculties GMO research or not that one goes on one's own road without maintaining a more complex perspective in respect to the macro-system within which you should one day insert your research i mean are you working for the agricultural development in the direction agriculture has taken today or are you worried in chasing a kind of scientific chimera which is what fulfils mostly your greed for knowledge </READING ALOUD> so here the first you <READING ALOUD> which you should one day insert your research </READING ALOUD> is kind of impersonal but if you look at the following one what seems to be happening is that the erm the greenpeace representative is now talking to someone who's there who's not me so he used the second pronoun he says you and he's talking to the scienti- the scientist in general because here he's not even talking about that single professor or research about the GMOs he's really talking about science so he really is expressing in this way his personal view of science as something that looks for a scientific chimera and a scientist as someone who basically er has the greed for knowledge now greed is a is quite a bad word it's not thirst for knowledge it's not desire for knowledge it's something quite negative , okay so these are my concluding remarks erm . that basically using er looking at how people er use other people's talk erm can provide insights to their er basically to their erm not explicitly provided erm ideology and that's it </S15>
