Keynote speakers

An institutional practice that has become increasingly common in the 21st century is the construction of oral history archives foregrounding an organization or profession’s key people. Selected people, typically an organization’s elite, are asked to tell the story of their individual lives, focusing particularly on their professional activities and accomplishments. This paper will analyze an archive of life story interviews of late career US federal judges told to ex-law clerks who served as interviewers. My aim is to show how the discourse of these dialogically created life stories serves multiple goals, including presenting portraits of judges on multiple dimensions including as judicial actors, as mentors of young attorneys, and as persons of a particular gender, race and social class. In addition, while the archive’s life stories foreground judges’ actions and thoughts, important work is also being accomplished for the legal and personal character of interviewers, as well as developing a portrait of the American justice system, and the particular university that created the archive. Narratives, as Linde (2009, p 3) notes, are an “important way that institutions construct their presentation of who they are and what they have done in the past.” The data are from an archive created by the Institute of Judicial Administration sponsored by New York University (Oral History of Distinguished American Judges, 2023) to help train future judges. Materials for this study are 16 interviews carried out with high visibility American judges, including five US Supreme Court justices, justices from different federal appeals courts, and two chief justices in state supreme courts. The purpose of the oral history project, as described on the Judicial Institute website is: to memorialize the thoughts and contributions of the men and women who make the US judiciary the bulwark of freedom…. the body of interviews will serve as a valuable and definitive resource on the American judiciary… provid[ing] a unique resource for the study of judges of extraordinary ability and impact on our system. A previous study on a judicial archive created by one US city (Tracy, 2023) compared how Black and white, male and female judges managed the dilemma of demographic characteristics both mattering and being irrelevant to the doing of justice. In this study I analyze this relatively new genre of discourse, unpacking how identities and institutional worlds are constructed through a host of discourse moves that my paper will describe. References Garzone, G. E. (2015). Genre analysis. In K. Tracy, C. Ilie, & T. L. Sandel (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of language and social Interaction (pp. 677-693). Wiley-Blackwell. Linde, C. (2009). Working the past: Narrative and institutional memory. Oxford University Press. Oral history of distinguished American judges. (2023). https://www.law.nyu.edu/centers/ija-oral-history/all-interviews Tracy, K. (2023). How US judges manage a dilemma in narrating their careers. Discourse & Communication, 17(2), 221-237. https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813221133016

During the past two decades online spaces have become “Lifeworlds”, or vast yet self-evident social realms. This talk sheds light on the interrelations between dialogic and narrative practices, and on how they shape these online realms or environments. It presents advances from ongoing research that examines reviewing platforms (such as Google Maps Reviews, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and others), which comprise huge digital realms that have not been well-researched compared to social media. The main inter-action reviewing platforms propel concerns sharing user-created texts, where evaluation and assessment of places and destinations visited is narrativized (attractions, restaurants, hotels, public spaces and so on). In this talk I discuss reviews shared on the Google Maps Review Platform, in relation to genocide and Holocaust museums worldwide. The analysis highlights the organic inter-relations between socio-technological environments and their participatory affordances, on the one hand, and the reviews' inter-connected narrative and dialogic dimensions, on the other hand. Reviews are conceptualized most accurately as travel-related and place-related "short stories" (Alexandra Georgakopoulou, 2017), that contribute to the constitution of these vast online realms as such. Moreover, at these reviews index a visit to a dark history museum, they serve in re-mediating the visit's experience, and in communicating and re-interpreting an overwhelming and traumatic past. Hence the study is located at the heart of the interactional semiotic construction of the present and the past (and the epistemologies of the relationship between them), as well as, indexically, between the notions of "here" and the "there" of online and offline spaces, and of practices of reading, writing, and visiting.

We live in the era of neoliberalism, a political and economic system that tends to be conceptualized as in flux, rapidly changing, unpredictable, and global. While the term neoliberalism is challenging, it is often understood as an economic and governmental logic that structures society around market rationality and that is closely linked to the knowledge (immaterial) economy, where production relies heavily on intellectual capital and advanced technology rather than on physical resources. In order for neoliberal governance to work, individuals must embody neoliberal selfhood, or at least view this subject as an aspirational and normalized. Neoliberal subjects are understood to be active subjects who construct themselves through processes of self-work (Foucault’s technologies of the self), who are enterprising, autonomous, resilient and strategic in their choice-making. To become a neoliberal subject, certain soft skills are deemed essential traits and dispositions as they support adaptability, flexibility, and optimism. One such skill is emotional intelligence, viewed as essential for adaptation, the successful response to change, novelty, and uncertainty in a situation, all common realities in the neoliberal era. Often, the value of these soft skills extends beyond economic instrumentalism to include a range of ethical, social, and personal benefits. In this talk I examine the socialization of children to becoming neoliberal subject through the development of emotional intelligence as it unfolds in everyday interactions at home when parents assist children in navigating uncomfortable and hurtful social situations. Drawing on video recordings of family dinners in the homes of 32 dual-earner, middle-class US families in the Los Angeles area, I analyze talk around the dinner table and typologize patterns of socialization to neoliberal selfhood. I conclude the talk considering the benefits of raising an emotionally competent child against the problematic socializing, monitoring, and evaluating a child’s ability for emotion regulation as a form neoliberal governance.

In this talk I focus on the importance - in the field of educational research about migrants and migrations - of analysing how situated processes of migrants’ learning are embedded in everyday webs of power relationships, with special reference to spatial construction of «intersectionality». In educational research on migrants and migrations, the concept of «intersectionality» implies the effort to describe not only how cultural or ethnic differences affect educational settings and processes, but also – and at the same time – the role played by dimensions such as social class, gender, biographical and migration backgrounds. From an educational point of view, one could say that for the majority of migrant background learners becoming a participant in the host community has to do less with formal lectures, than with on-going processes of experiential learning. These processes of experiential learning could be seen as embedded in the participation in a huge range of everyday settings and practices ranging from welfare services to workplaces to leisure places, from family to neighbourhood involvement. Drawing on some examples from previous research carried out in urban spaces such as neighbourhood schools, or leisure spaces such as public parks and playgrounds, I will suggest that these spaces are marked by a multiplicity of differences and the intersection of these territorialized differences concur to assign migrants and post-migrants to a multiplicity of subordinate positions, that educational research has to deal with in order to concur to promote more inclusive and equal learning environments.