The Discursive Construction of Knowledge

Course focus and approach:
The course seeks to instruct participants the basics of
discourse analysis by taking a broadly social constructionist perspective, investigating
how discourse serves to construct knowledge and what we take for granted as everyday
common sense.

Course description:
The course aims to investigate the discursive construction of
knowledge through an interdisciplinary approach based on text analysis and readings
from diverse fields such as philosophy of language, linguistics, sociology and social
psychology. While discourse analysis is often presented as a linguistic tool to discover
hidden ideologies, this course seeks to broaden the focus of the concept of discourse to
teach participants an interdisciplinary and critical perspective that questions what is
presented as knowledge and common sense. Special attention is paid to social aspects
such as class and gender, as well as resources of linguistic analysis such as metaphors
or subjectivity.

Learning objectives:
At the end of this course the students should
1. have developed a critical view of knowledge as a social construction
2. understand the role of language in the (re)production of ideology
3. be able to analyse texts and discourses as perspectives on social interaction
Course workload: Apart from the classes, there are two weekly readings that serve
as preparation and reinforcement to be read before and after the class, respectively.
Every week, one group of students will have to prepare a presentation while others
prepare critical or comprehension questions to engage in a debate in class about the set
reading.