Events

Český překlad výběru z knihy Prospéro. Une technologie littéraire pour les sciences humaines (F. Chateauraynaud)

23/02/2019

Dovolujeme si s vámi sdílet český překlad výběru z knihy Francise Chateauraynauda Prospéro. Une technologie littéraire pour les sciences humaines, která je souhrným dílem o softwaru Prospéro. Francis Chateauraynaud vede výzkumnou skupinu pragmatické a reflexivní sociologie na pařížské Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

Prospéro představuje nástroj pro textovou a diskurzivní analýzu, který naše skupina v čele se Simonem Smithem převedla do českého jazyka a umožňuje tak badatelům analyzovat texty prostřednictvím tohoto softwaru. 

Česká verze knihy je ke stažení v pdf zde.

Pro české zájemce o práci s programem Prospéro připravil náš tým příručku, kterou naleznete zde.  Příručku sdílíme jako Google document, aby byla otevřena komentářům zájemců.

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Seminář Změna organizace a krizový diskurz

18/11/2018

Místo konání: CESES FSV UK, Celetná 20, Praha 1, místnost č. 216

Čas: Čtvrtek 6. prosince, 9:00 - 15:00

Členové grantu v rámci semináře představí výsledky svého tříletého bádání, společný článek, který integruje teoretickou a empirickou část grantu, a v neposlední řadě bude uveden také praktický manuál pro české uživatele softwaru Prospéro.

Program: 

Dopoledne (9:00 - 12:30): 

Jiří Kabele, Simon Smith, Karel Čada, Tomáš Dvořák: Politická stabilita/mobilita světů a krizový diskurz

Simon Smith: “Scénářů vývoje je víc”. Orientace vůči skriptům v mediální serializaci krizí a kauz

Tomáš Dvořák: Argumentativní analýza populistického diskurzu

Odpoledne (13:00 - 15:00): 

Karel Čada, Petra Honová: Čím více ověřujeme, tím více je to pravda: Jak se vykazuje fakticita v krizových debatách

Tereza Klabíková Rábová, Pavel Kotlík, Simon Smith: Představení příručky pro české uživatele Prospéra

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Seminar with François Cooren: Acting in the name of matters of concern

15/05/2018

The seminar will take place in the Hollar building, H014, on Monday 28 May from 11.30 to 13.00.

The seminar will be run in the spirit of a reading group, so participants should read Cooren's text in advance. We've chosen a text he co-wrote with three colleagues from Montreal, The communicative constitution of strategy-making: Exploring fleeting moments of strategy. It deals with "matters of concern" (a concept also employed by Bruno Latour). Cooren et al apply it to situations in which strategy is created in an organisational context. They show how it's possible to study strategy-making by following the things in whose name strategic decisions get justified or in whose name people mobilise support for strategic orientations.

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Lecture in Prague: Francis Chateauraynaud: Sociological pragmatism at the crossroads. Dealing with complexity and uncertainty in an era of multi-scale controversies.

05/03/2018

The lecture of Francis Chateauraynaud will be delivered on Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 5pm, Prague, FSV Hollar building, room H014. 

Biography:
Francis Chateauraynaud is a French sociologist, director of research at EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences), in Paris, founder and director of the Pragmatic and Reflexive Sociology Group. Originator of the concept “Lanceur d’alerte” (close to the american concept of “whistleblower”), his work focuses on environmental controversies, political conflicts and the making of future scenarios. His approach is connected to the pragmatist movement, into which he introduces specific concepts concerning argumentative activities in controversies or polemics, and models the trajectories of public issues. Paying attention to the long, non-linear and complex processes of transformation of protests, claims, alarms or counter-expertises in public arenas, his sociology tries to articulate a sociology of power or domination with a pragmatic style of investigation, based on the experiences and the tests of reality produced by the actors themselves. In order to fulfill this integration, Chateauraynaud analyzes the techniques of catch and grip used by influential actors agile in escaping accountability, at least for a certain period of time, long enough to create an asymmetry. Chateauraynaud is also a co-author of socio-informatics tools, including Prospero, Tiresias and Marlowe, providing a “digital sociological device” for work on large scale corpuses. The digital tools are skilled enough to compose reports and chronicles during conversational sessions with researchers and for automatic publishing on the Web. 

Author of:
Argumenter dans un champ de forces. Essai de balistique sociologique – Arguing in a field of forces. Towards a sociological ballistics (Paris: Petra, 2011)
(with Josquin Debaz) Aux bords de l’irréversible. Sociologie pragmatique des transformations – On the brink of Irreversibility. Pragmatic sociology of transformations (Paris, Petra, 2017).

This lecture is funded by the Czech Science Foundation (16-20553S) and is part of the Jean Monnet lecture series at the Institute of Sociological Studies.

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Narratives and arguments at Leicester IPA conference

21/11/2017|

On July 7th 2017 a panel “Narrativizing institutional crises” took place at the Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) conference in Leicester, UK. The panel was organized with a specific goal. It was to focus on narratives of crisis, accounts and descriptions of disorder, failures and dysfunctions of public policies, organizations and even institutions.  Our hunch was that narrative accounts of crisis can, and often actually do, influence and shape the development of organizational fields and institutions. By viewing narratives of crisis as discursive/rhetorical tools for defining and disputing the legitimacy of institutional arrangements we aimed to tackle the issue of interrelations between narrativization and institutional change.

The panel was chaired by Simon Smith with Francis Chateauraynaud participating as discussant. The presentations of Kateřina Merklová & Tomáš Dvořák, Anna Durnová and James Beresford sparked an intriguing discussion, which we have extended at subsequent reunions of our research team in Prague, Narrativisation of crisis and institutions in party politics and public policy (Simon Smith, Jiří Kabele, Karel Čada, Tomáš Dvořák a Kateřina Merklová).

Narratives of crisis involve scenarios about a restoration of order. In other words they involve or proclaim a sequence of deinstitutionalisation followed by reinstitutionalisation – either as a way of making sense of crisis situations or as a rhetorical device to persuade actors to commit themselves to a narrative schema of institutional/organizational change. This implies that narratives can have argumentative functions (or that arguments can be formulated narratively), but at the same time we believe it’s important to recognise certain analytical and methodological distinctions between narrativization and argumentation.

Indeed, following Chateauraynaud’s main remark, arguments and narratives are sometimes thought of as opposites. Studies based on semantic tools (like Prospéro) have shown that argumentative logics and narrative structures rest on contrasting uses of linguistic markers. Nevertheless, these two major modes of expression are often intertwined. Narratives involve a sequence of events (a plot) that usually include problem (world disruption), problem definition, resolution and sanction (reward). On the other hand, the aim of an argument is not to tell a story but rather provide reasons to support a certain claim that can be the subject of rational discussion and deliberation – the claim is equipped for its own potential refutation.

Generic conventions and audience expectations – institutional conditions of production – to some extent dictate the balance of arguing and narrating that goes on in any given text. Yet many texts, and certainly most larger corpuses, will contain both argumentatively strong moments and narratively strong moments. The questions are about synergy versus exclusivity, the articulations and the contrasts or incompatibilities between the two discursive practices as speech-based sense-making instruments or as rhetorical forms. When there is strong narrative, does that mean there is not much argumentation and vice versa? And if there are ways in which argumentation and narrativization combine in processes of institutional change, at what level or stage of analysis does this become apparent to the observer?

We took away from the panel, and from our subsequent deliberations, six ways in which argumentation and narrativization interact and overlap.

Secondly, Simon Smith has been working with a perspective advocated by François Cooren in his rendition of the Greimasian approach to narrativization. According to this view argumentation includes persuasion strategies with respect to the recipient’s system of belief. Rhetorical techniques involve argumentative schemas that present new ideas (as minor premises) and associate or dissociate them with established principles or systems of beliefs (as major premises). Argumentation is essentially a transformation that creates commitments to or dissension from ideas/knowledge, just as narrativization creates commitments to or dissension from projects/programmes of action. But while both discursive practices make normative links between past, present and future (what Cooren calls ideal pathways), commitment is perhaps more binding when it amounts to self-insertion in a narrative schema. This may explain why the presence of strong narratives makes actors relatively immune to counter-arguments.

Anna Durnová, thirdly, is interested in images of science ‘under siege’, a discursive figure or script mobilised repeatedly in the debates around the preparation of the ‘March for Science’ in April 2017. Although she does not work directly with the concept of narrativization, the positioning struggles she documents (the positioning of science with respect to politics which was the central issue for the demonstrators, but also the positioning of different potential groups of science supporters with respect to one another or the positioning of science defenders with respect to other civil rights movements) show how intertextuality, among other factors, defines a script’s performativity. In other words it’s often the intersections or incompatibilities between different groups’ ‘narrative programmes’ that determines their capacity to act in a plural social action space. And according to her analysis those struggles are played out as emotional orchestrations of identity that work with binary oppositions, an idea that bridges to the associating-dissociating moves we find in argumentation.

Fourthly, claiming and storytelling are often linked to actors’ attempts to memorialise a recent occurrence – to try to incorporate it into the future historical memory. James Beresford has been using interviews with legal practitioners and policy-makers to explore the intertextuality of memory work, a practice that resists clear categorisation as either argumentative or narrative, but which clearly involves discursive contestation. For him, the construction of collective memory is as much about a politics of reception as a politics of enunciation. What makes some events/accounts more amenable than others to recording, citing, retrieving, recollecting? What makes an event nameable and what, vice versa, lends a name a ‘memory’? Beresford argues that it’s not just a matter of certain things being or not being said, but of certain things being or not being listened to – being or not being accorded the authority to fit into the (official/dominant) historical record of events.

Fifthly, developing an idea from Tomáš Dvořák and Kateřina Merklová’s paper on the of argumentation strategies of populist Czech political parties, arguments are not ahistorical and independent structures but rest on (master) narratives which are, however, most often implicit or accessible only as narrative fragments. With reference to the Toulmin argumentation scheme, arguments rest on legitimations – backings – which are often in fact narratives or narrative fragments. The strength of arguments stems from the underlying narrative that provides the legitimation of inferences made in the arguments. The persuasiveness does not only stem from the ‘logical’ clarity of particular arguments, but rather from the link to the underlying narrative.

Finally, Jiří Kabele argues that narrativization, from a pragmatic perspective, can be analogically mapped on to the Toulmin model of argumentation. Plots of narratives, just like arguments, make leaps from series of events to claims (empathy, qualia) with the use of storyarcs and genres that rely on and are authorized by other narratives or ‘master-stories’ that provide relevant backing. In his current work, he treats argumentation as a complement to the plot-composition of narrativization that, by giving good authority and legitimating claims about world stability/mobility, transforms story-telling into world-making agency.

Taking stock of the relation between argumentation and narrativization the main challenge we face is to achieve simultaneously two goals: to hold argumentation and narrativization as two analytically distinct categories but at the same time analyze the interconnection between the two and use these insights in our empirical research dealing with discourse in the fields of politics and public policy.

This article was published on Socio-informatique et argumentation. Read the original article.