浙江大学当代中国话语研究中心第32次学术报告会暨话语与多元文化研究所第49次系列讲座将于2013年6月7日（周五）在紫金港校区召开。
时间：2013年6月7日（周五），16:00-17:00
地点：浙江大学紫金港校区东六402室
报告人：Bingjuan Xiong, University of Colorado
题目：Cultural Terms for Talk: Making sense of the Chinese “Citizen and Official Interaction” in Public Confrontations
提要：How much do we know about communicative practices in problematic situations involving disagreement, debate and conflict in the context of contemporary China, especially between ordinary citizens and officials? The mainstream scholarship in Chinese communication has described Chinese communicative practice as “other-oriented” (Wang & Chen,
2010) or “inter-relational” (Chen & Starosta, 1997), arguing that Chinese communication is fundamentally about maintaining harmonious interpersonal and social relations and orders in a collectivistic sense (Chen, 2008). We wonder how much this harmonious view of communication can help us to explicate communicative practices in situations of conflict, online debate or public confrontation: How do Chinese people cope with disagreement, debate and conflict in public domains and what cultural resources are available? What is the role of “communication” (or “talk”) in Chinese communicative practices in situations of disagreement, debate and conflict and how do Chinese people make sense of talk in these situations?
This paper engages with these questions through a case study to understand how Chinese people talk about (and make sense of) “talk” in those situations of disagreement, debate and conflict. By soliciting meta-discourse/ meta-talk (Craig, 2008) in focus group discussions about Chinese “citizen and official interaction” in public confrontation as evidenced in a popular online video, we focus on cultural terms for talk that are active in Chinese participants’ discussions so as to decode the meanings of talk in relation to communicative conduct in contemporary China. These cultural terms for talk are essential (at a meta-discursive level) not only for understanding the communicative practice in a given cultural context (Carbaugh, Berry and Nurmikari-Berry, 2006), but also for theoretical reflections upon conceptualizations of talk/speaking in communication theory. Grounded in this case study, findings about cultural terms for talk could potentially shed light on the prominence of “harmony” in Chinese communication in terms of the evaluation of “talk” in relation to harmony.
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中心秘书：翟玲娜
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