27.3188, Calls: Pragmatics/UK

Fri Aug 5 17:19:31 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3188. Fri Aug 05 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.3188, Calls: Pragmatics/UK

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Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2016 13:19:13
From: Daniel Perrin [daniel.perrin at bluewin.ch]
Subject: What Really Happened: Investigating Investigative Journalism

Full Title: What Really Happened: Investigating Investigative Journalism 

Date: 16-Jul-2017 - 21-Jul-2017
Location: Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom 
Contact Person: Daniel Perrin
Meeting Email: daniel.perrin at bluewin.ch

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics 

Call Deadline: 15-Oct-2016 

Meeting Description:

Panel submitted by Daniel Perrin (Zurich University of Applied Sciences) &
Alison Sealey, (University of Lancaster)

Approaching journalism and newswriting with a dominantly constructivist
concept of reality, as often practiced by communication studies and cultural
studies, results in an epistemological gap (Perrin, 2013, 45; Wright, 2011).
Journalistic ethics are based on an ideal of separating facts from fiction and
opinions. From a professional understanding, reality can and has to be known;
finding out what really happened is the ultimate target of journalistic
investigation. 

In our panel, we focus on this epistemological gap and on theoretically sound
and practically useful ways to overcome it. We apply, discuss, and compare a
variety of research frameworks and underlying theories that allow for
elaborated approaches to explaining reality - approaches that transgress
boundaries between research paradigms as well as between academic and
professional disciplines. An example of such a research framework and theory
is Realist Social Theory (e.g., Carter & Sealey, 2009). RST clearly
distinguishes between situated activity and various types of social structures
the activity interacts with: flexible social structures, such as a newsroom’s
storytelling patterns, and robust structures, such as the prior distribution
of material resources (e.g. Archer, 1995; Layder, 1998). Whereas flexible
structures can easily be changed by activity, robust structures cannot, at
least not within manageable timeframes. In an RST view, journalists develop
their practices towards an account of this multi-layered reality that is as
adequate as possible. Besides RST, theories and research frameworks such as
transdisciplinary action research and ethnography are presented and discussed
at the panel.

In order to offer both the panelists and those attending the panel clear
starting points for the discussion, all the presentations draw on the data
from the same set of case studies in the context of investigative journalism.
These cases are analyzed throughout the panel from different theoretical
angles and within different research frameworks. Thus we aim to identify the
frameworks’ explanatory power to explain the pragmatics of investigative
journalism in general and, in particular, its strategies and practices to find
out “what really happened”.

References:

Archer, M. S. (1995). Realist social theory. The morphogenetic approach.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carter, B., & Sealey, A. (2009). Reflexivity, realism and the process of
casing. In D. Byrne & C. C. Ragin (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of case-based
methods (pp. 69–83). London: Sage.
Layder, D. (1998). The reality of social domains: Implications for theory and
method. In T. May & M. Williams (Eds.), Knowing the Social World (pp. 86–102).
Buckingham: Open University Press.
Perrin, D. (2013). The linguistics of newswriting. Amsterdam, New York et al.:
John Benjamins.
Wright, K. (2011). Reality without scare quotes. Developing the case for
critical realism in journalism research. Journalism Studies, 12(2), 156–171.
doi: 10.1080/1461670X.2010.509569

Call for Papers:

Abstracts of 500 words are welcome. If you are interested in participating
with a presentation, please submit your abstract before 15 October 2016 using
the IPrA conference website:
http://ipra.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=.CONFERENCE15&n=1510

Further guidelines for submission can be found at the following website:
http://ipra.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=.CONFERENCE15&n=1516

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