ABSTRACT
Mediated discourse analysis (MDA) takes the mediated action as its unit of analysis. As a theoretical position this close focus on a moment of action within a site of engagement (R. Scollon 2001) might easily mistakenly fall into what Blommaert (2005) has called synchronization, that is, taking the moment of action to be all that is of interest to be studied. As this theoreticalmethodological framework has developed, however, it has become clear that much discourse which is of relevance to a moment of action is, in fact, displaced from that action, often at quite a distance and across a wide variety of times, places, people, media, and objects. As we have expanded the
circumference (Burke 1969 [1945]) of our view of the moment of action we have come to consider these complex displacements to work across multiple moments in which the discourse is transformed semiotically. We call the historical path of these resemiotized displacements discourse itineraries. As a way of capturing the kind of analysis that we need in order to trace these discursive displacements from a crucial moment of action we have used the term ‘nexus analysis’.
