book cover of "Inspecting the Interview. A Companion" by Carsten Junker

Sounds of Democracy: The Interview as an Instrument of Heuristic Attention to Discursive Voices

Article / Paper

Christian Bär, Hagen Steinhauer, Jonas Trochemowitz & Ingo H. Warnke

2024

Against the backdrop of general considerations of the interview as a genre, the paper discusses under which theoretical conditions interviews are suitable instruments for discourse analysis. With a special interest in questions of the linguistic constitution of shared knowledge in discourse, the authors outline the discourse-linguistic status of interviews in a systematic way. Based on a discourse analytical characterization of the genre of the interview, the preliminary assumptions of the present paper are tested through a pilot study which deals with the question of the contemporary state of democracy. This explorative European interview project documents and demonstrates the possibilities of a computerassisted interpretation of the discursivity of interviews. The paper thus makes a fundamental contribution to the further exploration of discourse-linguistic methods, to discussions about the current state of democracy, as well as to reflections on the interview as a complex research genre in its interdisciplinary dimensions, including digital-humanities methods.

In Carsten Junker (eds.), Inspecting the Interview: A Companion, 201–248. Berlin: De Gruyter.

print
ISBN: 9783111086231

DOI:
doi.org/10.1515/9783111086484-012

Back to overview
interstice

“The contradiction of law in Derrida lies in the interstice that separates the impossibility of deconstructing justice from the possibility of deconstructing law.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

Rozena Maart
prison of difference

“‘Contradiction is the prison of difference‘ writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Worlds of Contradiction asks: how can we explain and describe the world without making it more coherent and systematic than it is?”

Michi Knecht
Is contradiction eurocentric?

“Is contradiction a eurocentric concept, operational phenomenon, and instrument of power?”

Kerstin Knopf
hierarchy of norms

“If social contradictions are reflected in law, law cannot form a hierarchy of norms free of contradictions.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano