Tag: Mariaelena Bartesaghi

Hughes & Bartesaghi Guest Post: Disability as Intercultural Dialogue

Guest Posts
Disability as Intercultural Dialogue. Guest post by Jessica M. F. Hughes & Mariaelena Bartesaghi.

Ethnomethodologist Carolyn Baker argues that culture is not a pre-made context for action to unfold, but rather an ongoing moral order of categories and categorization, where locally produced categories become “locked into place” (2000, p. 99). This is how we understand—and are able to talk about—disability in terms of culture, as an assemblage of voices, bodies and actions within a contingent and shifting social order(ing). Just as Bakhtin (1986) tells us that there is no first speaker, but rather language as coordination over time and amidst utterances in relation, disability can only mean in terms of what we are able to (co)produce it as meaning. In our book, Disability in dialogue (Hughes & Bartesaghi) contributors set out on empirical projects designed to trouble the categories of disability within several cultural frames: geographical settings, diagnostic accounts, political action, crisis events, and everyday occurrences.

Inasmuch as disability is a culture, an ordering of relations and identity projects, of what is and might be possible, of what is historically entrenched and institutionally regulated, then disability is also an intercultural doing. This is the case not merely in the exchanges between a culture of able bodiedness to which disability owes its constitution, but between the multiple and diverse identity positions of those who are incumbent within the culture of disability. These exchanges are dialogic through and through, for they always mirror, borrow, and often oppose each other. In Shotter’s words (2015), these dialogues are occasions for attunement (p. 8) and intercultural betweenness.

Analyzing disability discourses means appreciating dialogic tensions, the centripetal and centrifugal forces at work, the constant interplay between dialogue and monologue. And it means listening to the diverse voices that, as Bakhtin remarked, are everywhere and always in relation.

Download the entire guest post as a PDF.

Mariaelena Bartesaghi Profile

Profiles

Dr. Mariaelena Bartesaghi is Associate Professor of Communication at the  University of South Florida, where she studies language and social interaction, as well as dialogue.

She was born and raised in Milan, Italy, and is an expat to the United States since her 20s, so intercultural dialogue is an everyday accomplishment for her. She is an associate professor of communication at the University of South Florida. She is a discourse analyst, who studies institutional discourse in social settings, such as psychotherapy, psychiatry, medicine, academia and crisis. She was the Editor in Chief of Qualitative Research in Medicine and Healthcare from 2016 to 2021 and has published in Discourse Studies, Applied Linguistics in Professional Practice, The Review of Communication and Language Under Discussion. She has recently co-edited the anthology Disability in Dialogue for John Benjamin’s Dialogue Series (with Jessica Hughes) and is working on a book on crisis discourse. She is delighted to have introduced many graduate students to discourse studies, and the empirical study of dialogue. Many of her once doctoral advisees now study dialogue in their own work.

Work for CID:

Mariaelena Bartesaghi is the co-author of a guest post on Disability as Intercultural Dialogue.

CFP Risk, Crisis, Emergency & Disaster: On Discourse, Materiality & Consequentiality of Communication

Call for submissions:
ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, SPECIAL ISSUE:
Risk, Crisis, Emergency, and Disaster: On discourse, materiality, and consequentiality of communication
Edited by Mariaelena Bartesaghi
University of South Florida

Risk, crisis, emergency, and disaster are phenomena increasingly at the forefront of contemporary life. As communication scholars, we appreciate how these terms underscore and complicate the nexus of the material — as threats to life, habitat, and social system– and the interpretive, as terms that constitute, assess, and in turn convey messages about actionable information in moments of uncertainty. Yet these terms are used somewhat synonymously and index processes of decision and sense making that are often referred to transparently as well as from post facto standpoints.

Research addressing risk and crisis is often dependent on analyses of post facto accounts, when the outcome of the episode is already known. Systematic studies of communication during emergency, crisis, and disasters are relatively few, thus obscuring the “in the moment” negotiations of those making sense of emergent situations, under conditions when timeliness may have life or death implications. Terms like “risk” or “disaster” in risk and crisis communication appear as if transparent, with seemingly agreed upon ontologies of what constitutes these constructs. This appearance is misleading, for risk and disaster are already evaluations, that is, they are post facto accounts, justifications of outcomes, or prescriptions for future planning. They are semantically tied endpoints rather than processes or dynamics and thus implicate the question “What went wrong?”

In this special issue, we focus instead on risk, emergency, crisis, and disaster as emergent, contingent, and shifting in the very communication intended to define, address, and manage them. In so doing, we invite authors to consider the way, in the words of Karl Weick, “small events can have disproportionately large effects” as those who are responsible for responding, managing, negotiating, and communicating under conditions of ambiguity orient to and arrive at definitions of the situation as they attempt to act within it.

Possible topics for manuscripts include:
• studies of spoken and written discourse related to risk assessment, management, and decision making
• analyses of the dynamics of policy making
• negotiation of meaning among experts, stakeholders, and/or decision makers in knowledge production about crises, disasters, risks, and/or emergencies
• discourse analysis of documents, frameworks, and policies related to risk, crisis, emergency, and/or disaster
• organizational sensemaking studies
• case studies of crisis/risk/emergency/disaster discourse or interaction in the moment

Send completed manuscripts (8,000 words max, plus references) to the issue editor Mariaelena Bartesaghi by January 10, 2016. Send queries to the same email address.
Manuscripts should be prepared according to the guidelines set forth in the APA, 6th Edition.