ABSTRACT
In his chapter, Scollon traces the ‘itineraries’ associated with a rather ‘mundane’ piece of discourse, the word ‘organic’ on a bag of rice, showing how it is linked both to the histories and habits of those who buy and consume the rice and the practices and policies of those who produce it and the government bodies that regulate its production. Choose an everyday piece of discourse such as a product label, an advertisement, a memo or an email and, using Scollon’s theoretical framework for resemiotization, trace how the text is linked to multiple social actions, practices and material objects and people, and consider how understanding these linkages can help us to better understand the discourse. One of the central problems of mediated discourse analysis is dealing with what Blommaert (2005) calls the ‘layered simultaneity’ of human action – the fact that actions are always performed on different levels and in different timescales and that the way we interpret them depends upon which of these levels and timescales we choose to focus on. Consider how our understanding of a particular action and the discourse associated with it might change as we widen or narrow the circumference through which this action is viewed. Collect a series of accounts by various people surrounding a particular social practice and, using the theoretical framework introduced by Jones, examine how the retrospective and anticipatory discourse in the accounts reveals something about the relationship among discourse, action and the ‘historical body’ of the individual. One of the central concerns of mediated discourse analysis is the issue of agency. Rather than a simple matter of individual ‘will’ or societal ‘conditioning’, Jones argues that agency is typically distributed among the multiple chains of social actions that converge in a given moment of time. Consider the different chains of actions that go into a particular event and the various agentive positions social actors might take in these chains.
