Year: 2013
Type: book
Abstract: Mediated discourse analysis (MDA), sometimes called nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004), is an action-oriented approach to critical discourse analysis that takes sociocultural activity as its primary focus, looking closely at a physical action as the unit of analysis rather than an ethnographic event or a strip of language (e.g., utterance, turn of talk).In this way of thinking about activity, every action is simultaneously co-located within a local embodied community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and a far-reaching nexus of practice, the expected and valued ways of interacting with materials among people.The purposes of MDA are 1. to locate and make visible the nexus of practice-a mesh of commonplace practices and shared meanings that bind communities together but that can also produce exclusionary effects and reproduce inequitable power relations 2. to show how such practices are made up of multiple mediated actions that appropriate available materials, identities, and discourses 3. to reveal how changes in the smallest everyday actions can effect social change in a community's nexus of practice.To accomplish these goals, the analyst locates a rich site for ethnographic study, which eventually leads to close discourse analysis of core actions with most significance to the people participating in that site.These actions must also be situated in their pertinent histories, global trends, cultural studies, and current news and media.Mediated discourse analysis opens up the circumference around moments of human action to begin to see the lines, sometimes visible and sometimes obscured of historical and social process by which discourses come together at particular moments of human action as well as to make visible the ways in which outcomes such as transformations in those discourses, social actors, and mediational means emanate from those moments of action.(Scollon & Scollon 2002) For example, let's consider a moment of play with a popular iPad app.
Source: Routledge eBooks
Authors: Pahl, K, Rowsell, Jennifer M K
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W981217113