C3RI RESEARCH SEMINAR

in collaboration with the Multimodal Discourse Analysis Group & the Language and Literacy Research Group  

 

Speaker: David Machin

Professor of Media & Communication, Örebro University, Sweden.

How teachers and researchers lose control of their own work in marketized education:  A multimodal analysis of documents in educational institutions.

1-2.30pm  Wednesday 7 March, Cantor 9235

David has published widely in the areas of Critical Discourse Analysis and Visual Communication.  His publications include, Doing Visual Analysis (2018), How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction,(2012), The Language of Crime and Deviance (2012) and Visual Journalism (2015).  He is co-editor of the international peer reviewed journals Journal of Language and Politics and Social Semiotics.

 

There has been much international scholarly discussion about the marketization of universities and of education more broadly.   We know that academic work has become increasingly reoriented to corporate style aims where teachers and researchers are appraised on multiple levels as regards teaching, research output and pressures to work towards student recruitment and generating external funding.   This has been part of a drive towards ‘quality’, ‘excellence’, ‘value for money’ and public accountability, which can be measured through statistics and displayed in the form of a range of league tables.   Yet often such criteria are defined by managers and not by the professional expertise of professional teachers and researchers.

Yet there has been much less research on the kinds of documents, databases and meetings through which this marketized form of organization is transmitted throughout, and embedded within, institutions.   It can often appear bewildering simply due to the language which is used which is filled with abstractions and managerial terms.   But it can also appear hard to challenge as it appears somehow also to have its own logic, somehow be internally coherent, although at the same time impenetrable.     One reason for this is the way that such documents work.  Whereas formerly institutional documents would use running text to explain and manage processes, they now often use those where language is broken into chunks, were it becomes integrated into visual designs, used in tables and as part of charts and mixed with data presentation and images.   In this talk I look at some examples of a chain of such documents which implement a number of targets in an institution.  I show how the kinds of causalities, identities and complexity of processes become abstracted and completely lost, often being replaced by the symbolism of graphics and the logics created by certain forms of information presentation such as lists, tables and flowcharts. 

The seminar will form part of our Visual methodologies series.