News
Summer School Attracts National and International Enrolments
30 May 2005
| Byline: | Peter Kitchenman |
|---|---|
| Source: | Humanities Research Network |
The three week Discourse Theory Summer School to be held at Victoria University Wellington in late November is attracting wide interest from throughout Australasia.
Convenor Peter Kitchenman says the summer school is not only attracting enrolments from the academic communities in NZ and Australia but researchers and policy analysts in public and private organisations throughout New Zealand. He says that this is the third year the summer school has been convened and it is growing from strength to strength with renowned scholars in the field interested in coming to Victoria University to lead more courses next year.
"Discourse theory enhances our understanding of how particular discourses are joined together to form a view of the world taken to be essential and universal. "Discourse" here refers to the rich amalgam of subjectivities, analytical languages, institutions, and practices that are meaningful, not simply to the practice of using language to describe and prescribe a world external to our being," Peter says.
Such is the interest in the summer school that the University of Auckland's Centre for Cultural Inquiry has approved a scholarship scheme where they will offer six $500 scholarships to their postgraduate students to attend the summer school, which starts on 21 November.
He offers three reasons for the summer school's success. Firstly, its location outside a particular faculty or school allows it to attract enrolments from a diverse range of schools in the university and from researchers and policy analysts at Crown Research Institutes, government ministries, and private research organisations. Secondly, the trans-disciplinary nature of discourse theory, drawing on phenomenology, post-analytical philosophy, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis, takes it beyond our conventional assumptions about communication and knowledge. And thirdly, the support offered by many academics at Victoria who are interested in critical thinking.
"Critical thinking has become an important strand in Victoria University's Strategic Plan and is gaining recognition in mainstream thinking. Critical thinking and theory includes problematizing the categories of subject, language, and object that are taken for granted in rationalism and empiricism. 'Critical theory' is being used here to describe an approach that re-examines the foundations of what can be known, and that criticises the methodologies, frames, analyses and conclusions of prevailing approaches to their subject matter, including its own. In some cases, this exploration is never-ending, while in others it shows how discursive formations that become dominant are part truths masquerading as full truths. An engagement with the dynamics of power is therefore a key aspect of critical theory," Peter says.
He says that another characteristic of critical theory is its interdisciplinary stance, resulting from the recognition and acceptance by researchers that thorough analysis will require them to address a range of social issues that transgress their traditional disciplinary borders. These include politics, jurisprudence, philosophy, management, accounting, science, culture, and psychology. They therefore find themselves applying the theoretical insights developed from some disciplines to others. This presents challenges not encountered in disciplines that are keenly demarcated. It is these challenges that researchers and policy analysts who attend the summer school face.
The courses in 2003 and 2004 were evaluated and positioned as 'outstanding' using the University Teaching Development Centre's protocols.
Dr Bob Frame from Landcare Research in Christchurch, who attended the 2004 summer school, says "The summer school was one of the most stimulating, provocative and well managed events I have ever attended. The material was very stretching, and of a nature that I would not normally encounter in my main research area of sustainable development. However, the long term influence of the summer school on my overall research direction is proving profound."
Pat Hanley from the Social and Civic Policy Institute, who also attended the 2004 summer school, says "For someone working primarily with non-governmental organisations on policy and research I found the summer school to be invaluable in framing my thinking, stimulating new concepts applicable to the work of community organisations and providing enormous intellectual stimulation not available in our day to day work."
Enrolments for the 2005 summer school started six weeks ago, and already there are only a few places left on two of the courses and the third is full with a waitlist.
Course outlines and an online enrolment facility for the summer school, which is administered by the Centre for Continuing Education and Executive Development, are available on the web at http://www.vuw.ac.nz/conted/discoursetheory/.
