Demokratisierung und Machtstrukturen (D&M)

Der Vortrag verknüpft die Frage nach der gesellschaftsweiten (über die Politik hinausreichenden) Bedeutung von Demokratie und Macht mit der Diagnose der funktionalen Differenzierung der Gesellschaft als der primären Differenzierungsform der Weltgesellschaft. Unter diesen Voraussetzungen ist die zentrale Frage: Welche Rolle spielen diese beiden Leitbegriffe moderner politischer Systeme in den radikal different verfassten Problemwelten der Kunst, der Wissenschaft und der Wirtschaft? Der Vortrag stellt eingangs die beiden Leitbegriffe Demokratie und Macht vor. Im zweiten Schritt skizziert er den strukturellen und semantischen Raum der vier Funktionssysteme, mit denen wir es zu tun haben. Schließlich – und das wird der Hauptteil des Vortrags sein – werden die drei Teilprojekte, auf die das Projekt sich in seiner Arbeit konzentrieren möchte, explorativ diskutiert: „Demokratie und Kapitalismus“; „Demokratie und die epistemischen Communities der Wissenschaft“; „Demokratie und die Positionen der Kunst“. In allen drei Fällen wird es um Analoga und Spielformen von Demokratie gehen, weiterhin wird es in allen drei Fällen um die Formen gehen, in denen in ausdifferenzierten, nichtpolitischen Funktionssystemen Chancen für Machtgebrauch und mit Macht ausgestattete Positionen entstehen. Die Beziehungen zwischen den Funktionssystemen, die dabei sichtbar werden, erlauben ein Bild von der Dichte der Vernetzungen in der modernen Gesellschaft.

Evelyn Moser ist seit 2014 wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin in der Abteilung Demokratieforschung des Forum Internationale Wissenschaft. 

Rudolf Stichweh ist Seniorprofessor am Forum Internationale Wissenschaft und am Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies. 

The roles that politicians play and what factors hinder or facilitate role incumbency have consequences for how well parliaments and individual parliamentarians are able to undertake their representation, oversight and policy-making functions. Work on parliamentary roles, especially in the UK case, has tended to start by interviewing MPs. We take here a different approach by using latent class analysis to analyse parliamentary activity of all backbench MPs (n=2,133) in the UK House of Commons between 2001 and 2019. We seek to identify the backbench parliamentary roles present within the chamber and to explain MPs’ incumbencies within particular roles through recourse to a series of variables concerning MPs’ backgrounds and experience, constituency information, and broader political contextual data. In this way, we wish to shed light on how and why Westminster’s World has changed and, perhaps, whether it was ever thus.

Stephen Bates is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Birmingham and is co-convenor of the Parliaments Specialist Group of the UK Political Studies Association. His work is mainly concerned with parliamentary roles and parliamentary committees. He is currently a Parliamentary Academic Fellow in the UK Parliament.

“If we want to reflect the society in which we live we need to allow other voices to be heard, other stories to be told.“ This profession on casting of formerly marginalised groups in the theatre was announced by Gregory Doran, the Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He assembled a diverse, inclusive ensemble that presented “a massive crack in the glass ceiling”, the imagined threshold of traditionally white male castings.
Professed colour-conscious and gender-conscious casting can highlight this. What about people with different health issues recognised as disabilities? The representation of the population on stage expands opportunities for contemporary actors and directors. Changes from conservative casting concepts demonstrate different facets of social, cultural, and gender issues. Of course, these are political and raise questions of agency and empowerment. This talk will dissect some opportunities given through these choices.

Dr. Imke Lichterfeld is a lecturer of English Literature at Bonn University. Her research predominantly focuses on early modern English drama, and she has published various articles on Shakespeare and a monograph on revenge tragedy.
Currently, she holds a position as Studies Coordinator at the Department of English, American and Celtic Studies at the University of Bonn.

Der Vortrag hebt die gesellschaftliche Relevanz von mentalen Modellen der Macht und ihren sprachlichen Realisierungen innerhalb einer Sprachgemeinschaft aus linguistischer Perspektive hervor. Dies soll zunächst anhand des Paritätsdiskurses – genauer betrachtet anhand des Motivs prima inter pares (dt. Erste unter Gleichen) – veranschaulicht werden. Die zentrale Fragestellung lautet, inwiefern mentale Modelle der Macht, die unsere abendländische Soziokultur prägen, dazu beitragen, das Konzept der Parität als konstitutives Element der Demokratie zu betrachten. Auch die konstruktive Wechselwirkung zwischen mentalen Modellen und ihren analogen Begriffsfeldern in einer Einzelsprache (hier v.a. dem Italienischen, Französischen und Deutschen) werden betrachtet.

Darauffolgend wird der Vortrag auch ausblickhaft auf ein weiteres Teilprojekt eingehen, das sich mit einem stark von mentalen Modellen der Macht geprägten Diskurs beschäftigt: dem Sicherheitsdiskurs. Hierbei wird eine erste exemplarische Vergleichsstudie vorgestellt. Diese widmet sich vor allem folgenden Fragen: Werden Sicherheit und Freiheit innerhalb eines mentalen Machtmodells als gegensätzliche oder zusammengehörige Begriffe wahrgenommen? Wie werden sie konzeptualisiert und welche Akteur:innen werden ihnen zugesprochen? Wie verhält sich der Sicherheitsdiskurs in Bezug zu anderen Diskursen wie dem der Parität, der Migration und innerhalb weiterer relevanter Diskursüberschneidungen?

Daniela Pirrazzini, Karolina Küsters & Silvia Sommella (Unversity of Bonn, Università degli Studi di Firenze)

The presentation focuses on two spatial dichotomies to illustrate recurrent forms of political arrangements. The first dichotomy is visible in horizontal and vertical organizations: a horizontal and circular disposition of bodies is associated to equality of value and power dispersion among participants; on the contrary, the choreographic vertical elevation of leaders expresses inequality and power concentration. The second dichotomy, characteristic of vertical organizations, distinguishes those who stand above from those below. A visual and cross-cultural approach is used to illustrate the nuances that the organizational models present throughout human history (the visual material is available at Le figure del potere (eleuthera.it) ). The anthropological analysis raises crucial questions on current forms of political organizations: What are the assumptions behind different spatial arrangements? Can horizontal and vertical forms co-exist? What happens when those who stand above are brought down? The subversion of verticality consists in its elimination or in turning the order upside-down?

Stefano Boni is professore associato at the University of Modena e Reggio Emilia (Italy) where he teaches political anthropology. He conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana, Italy and Venezuela on political institutions and rituals; power dynamics within assemblies; grass-root mobilizations and social movements.

Democratization has been described as the “reduction of overt markers of power asymmetry” (Fairclough 1992: 98). Reber (2021) has studied how practices of quoting serve to (de)construct power at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), a parliamentary session with the Prime Minister at the British House of Commons, and how these practices have changed between 1978-2013. The aims of this paper are twofold: 1) I show how changing practices of quoting at PMQs can be related to democratization and argue that democratization may be linked to personalization. 2) Looking at another type of institutional discourse, I present first steps into a new project on United States Supreme Court Opinions, which explores how power asymmetries are created from the early 20th century to today through linguistic and discursive practices.

References
Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity.
Reber, Elisabeth. 2021. Quoting in Parliamentary Question Time. Exploring recent change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PD Elisabeth Reber is a replacement Professor for Applied English Linguistics, University of Bonn and a Senior Lecturer, University of Würzburg (on leave). Her current research interests include Institutional Discourse, Diachronic Interactional Sociolinguistics, and Historical Linguistics. With Cornelia Gerhardt, she was the director of the scientific network “Multimodality and Embodied Interaction” (DFG, 2012-2019).

crucial institutions: “critical race theory.” Progressive activists, Rufo claimed, were trying to “indoctrinate” and “re-educate” Americans by instilling in them the belief that they lived in a white supremacist society. Critical Race Theory originally emerged as an academic concept within critical legal studies in the 1990s; recently, the political right has seized the term as a buzzword that only bears scant relation to that academic framework. Yet, the discourse around “critical race theory” not only allows conservative political actors to rhetorically position the white nation as marginalized and threatened; Rufo’s activism also sparked an immediate executive order by the Trump administration that prohibited federal contractors to conduct antibias trainings (reversed by Biden) and has found its way into bills introduced in state legislatures across the country. School boards in red states have begun to ban books from curricula, including Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus.
This talk will trace the “career” of the term “critical race theory” and the discourse it has generated to shed light on how the power of language is deployed within the culture wars around identity politics in the United States. It highlights “critical race theory” as a paradigmatic example of a larger conservative strategy to appropriate and reframe concepts of the political left in order to secure power. Situating the debate on “critical race theory” within the contemporary discourse on racism in the US, the presentation seeks to raise the question of why this strategy is successful and whether it exposes flaws in progressive ideas about race and (anti-)racism.

Simone Knewitz is Senior Lecturer in the North American Studies Program at the University of Bonn and one of the initiators of the project “Democratization and Power Structures.” She is the author of The Politics of Private Property: Contested Claims to Ownership in US Cultural Discourse (Lexington Books, 2021). Her current research focuses on discourses and representations of whiteness in 21st century culture.

The ability of cinema to shape individual and public imagery has long been discussed across disciplines (Fluck 2003; Gallese & Guerra 2020), and it is especially complex when power relations among different ethnolinguistic groups are at stake. On the one hand, when a majority group represents a minority, it is common to have representations that can be defined as ethnotypes, a fictional rationalization of difference (van Doorslaer et al. 2016). On the other hand, when the members of a minority reclaim representativity and become involved in the creative process of filmmaking, their challenge would be to cater to both majority and minority expectations (Morrison 1992). In both cases, films are cultural representations where characters are diegetic devices functional to reinforce or subvert the existing social hierarchies (Ramos Pinto & Mubaraki 2020).
With such premises, this lecture explores, quantitatively and qualitatively, the linguistic and multimodal dimensions of the cinematic representation of the Chinese American diaspora in the United States. More specifically, we will use a discursive and linguistic approach (Wodak & Meyer 2001; Wodak & Chilton 2005; Antelmi 2012; Maingueneau 2014) to investigate diachronically the figure of the male hero from the Chinese diaspora through examples taken from films distant in time. This may suggest how cinematic discourse practices reflect and shape power relations in society (Bateman 2017; Feng 2002).

References
Antelmi, D. (2012). Comunicazione e analisi del discorso. Torino: UTET.
Bateman, J. (2017). Critical Discourse Analysis and Film. In J. Flowerdew, & J. Richardson, The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies (p. 41). London: Routledge.
Feng, P. X. (2002). Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Fluck, W. (2003). Film and Memory. In U. J. Hebel, Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures (pp. 213-229). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter.
Gallese, V., & Guerra, M. (2020). The Empathic Screen. Cinema and Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Maingueneau, D. (2014). Discours et analyse du discours. Une introduction. Paris: Armand Colin.
Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Ramos Pinto, S., & Mubaraki, A. (2020). Multimodal Corpus Analysis of Subtitling: The Case of Non-standard Varieties. Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 32 (3), 389-419.
van Doorslaer, L., Flynn, P., & Leersen, J. (2016). Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Wodak, R., & Chilton, P. (2005). A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. (2001). Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage.

Francesca Santulli is a Full Professor of Linguistics at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. Her research has focused on various aspects of language and linguistics. She has published books and numerous papers on language change, translation, interlinguistics, pragmatics, rhetoric and discourse analysis.

Dora Renna is a postdoctoral researcher at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her main research interests are English language and linguistics, corpus linguistics, multimodality, language variation, discourse analysis, audiovisual translation, ESP and pragmatics.

This paper examines the discursive construction of ordinariness in the context of British political discourse. The analysis focuses on politicians assigning ordinary-life experience the status of an object of discourse, and on their ‘doing ordinariness’ in the mediated political arena. To bring ordinary-life experience into discourse, politicians may use quotations, sometimes embedded in small stories, and to ‘do ordinariness’ they may use colloquial language. The paper shows that the discursive construction of moments of ordinary-life experience in a non-ordinary-life context is done strategically to align with the audience as a whole or with particular sub-groups. ‘Doing ordinariness’ in a non-ordinary context is done with the use of ordinary-life anchored concepts, such as ‘people’, not talking about ‘government’ any longer but rather of ‘the people’s government’.

Anita Fetzer is a professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Augsburg, Germany. Her research interests focus on pragmatics, discourse analysis, and functional grammar. She has had a series of articles published on context, political discourse, discourse relations, and the communicative act of rejection. Anita is the editor of the book series Pragmatics & Beyond: New Series (John Benjamins). She is a member of several editorial boards, including Functions of Language and Journal of Pragmatics.