Introduction

[Jean Widmer]

Let me first gratulate the initiators of Discours List for their initiativ.
Discours Analysis has become an important area of study where many different
theoretical perspectives cross each other. Thus, to have a kind of commun agora
may be very usefull.

To introduce my self, I am professor of media and communication sociology. I
did my PhD in philosophy about the philosophical and semiotical roots of
ethnomethology. Thereafter, I continued in sociology, with a continuous
interest for studies in pragma linguistics. My main topic is to analyse how
versions of reality are socialy constituted, and how, doing this, people
constitute themselves what they are for each other, individualy or
collectively. 

One of my research projects belongs to the area of sociology of languages: how
it is, that different tongues become used as identifyers of "cultures" and
"identities", and how it is that they may correlate with different ways of
"looking at things". This line of thought doesn't go in the direction of
semantic or syntax but to the collectiv relation to languages, how groups
constitute themselves by relating to their own language. Switzerland, where I
live and work, is a good laboratory for that, since we have standardized and
not standardized languages, a difference which expresses part of what I mean
with "collectiv relation to ones own language". Actualy, I work with my
collaborator R. Coray on the conceptions the Swiss mobilised at occasions where
they discussed about the constitutional dispositions about national languages.
By "conceptions" I mean, how they see the relation between language and
speakers, their territory, their relation to history etc., and how they see the
relations among language groups, what are the principles for conceptualizing
this life in commun and what are the principles for their politics in that
matter.
A second line of investigation, which is also part of my teaching, is to
analyse a) the way the media constitute the relation between their public, the
world they speak about and themselves. I refer mainly to the theory of
enunciation, in the french tradition, and to the membership category analysis,
from ethnomethodology. I use the same tools for a second subproject: how media
discours constitute public issues (drug, holocaust assets, etc.), and how this
discours displays a way of acting collectively about certain features of
collectiv life (the function of institutions, the nature of norms etc.).

My published work is mainly in french, some in german.

Prof. Jean Widmer
Dept. sociologie et média
Université - Miséricorde
CH - 1700  FRIBOURG

Tél. +41 26 300 83 82
Fax. +41 26 300 97 27
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