Discourse as Social Practice

The Second International Scientific Conference
“Discourse as Social Practice: Priorities and Prospects”
16 -17.10. 2014
Moscow
Organizer: Centre for Socio-Cognitive Discourse Studies for Moscow State linguistic University (SCoDis - MSLU).

Discourse is one of the most popular, intriguing and disputed notions of present day linguistics. Discourse is described as communication in general, as text “in context”, as a dialogue, as any kind of speech event, etc.

While research of discourse covers many domains (linguistic, social, psychological, cultural, etc.), scholars often work within separate disciplines and with little contact. At the same time all researchers in the field of discourse studies share the same idea, i.e. discourse is a communicative tool used to sustain or modify social practices in various cultural contexts.

To bridge the gaps within and outside linguistics the second international conference “Discourse as Social Practice: Priorities and Prospects” is to be held at Moscow State Linguistic University.

The following issues will be highlighted at the conference:

• discourse of social institutions (science, education, politics, business, religion, etc.);
• methodologies and methods of discourse studies (cognitive research, multimodal studies of discourse, Critical Discourse Analysis; gender studies, stylistics, etc.);
• social and cultural identities of speakers and its influence on discourse activities;
• communicative strategies in professional and other contexts;
• mass media technologies in modern communication;
• changes in language and discourse practices produced by social changes.