Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 4-5 July 2022
Keynote Speakers:
Marianna Fotaki (Warwick Business School, UK)
David Grant (Griffith University, Queensland, Australia)
Workshop on Discourse Analysis for PhD-students and early career scholars, run by:
Cliff Oswick (Cass Business School, City University of London, UK)
Ida Sabelis and Sierk Ybema (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)
We are happy to re-announce the 14th International Conference on Discourse and Organization. “The Discourse Conference” has a long tradition of gatherings that inspire and deepen the discursive branch of organization studies, creating a platform for lively exchange between senior and junior scholars, and establishing relationships of enduring academic cooperation.
The 2022 conference theme is “Interstices, Intervals and Interrogations” be it that some of us may view the theme from different angles than before (the Covid-19 pandemic). Either way, the theme invites us to focus on the in-betweens, enclaves and intersections – the times and spaces where we may find terse storytelling or extensive story-swapping, discursive struggles or silent scheming, serious joking or hilarious debate, affectionate shouting or underplayed mumbling, strategic bullshitting, fake news or hard-boiled facts. All these contexts may be even more valid than in 2020. Furthermore, the concern with ‘inter’ in our title questions how linkages and liaisons are constructed across social, cultural, organizational, institutional or disciplinary, and empirical or academic divides.
To spark your interest in joining us:
Interstices calls for us to read between the lines of organizational life, by which we may explore the work and world in-between the formal and informal, the said and unsaid, the troubled and the troubling at the intersection of power and resistance. Following this, we can investigate how discourse “speaks” or comes to matter through the noises or silences, the done or undone of the in-between.
Intervals asks us to unpack competing, contradicting and interconnected discourses and the disciplining, struggling and dis/organizing practices of work and subjectivity. Further, we may attend to how discourse un/settles or re/invents the present, the past and the future – or the gaps between these.
Interrogations challenges us to explore mysteries and allows for criticality that creates new insights into organizational phenomena and their changing meanings and matters. Such investigations may develop concepts, methods or analyses that denote or interrupt the political forces that spread notions such as objectivity and Truth, or that unravel the multi-dimensional works, effects and complexities of such notions.
The conference theme offers a broad canvas of questions, debates and possibilities.. Will the interstices give rise to new spaces of activism, work practices and scientific insight? Will the combination with interrogations produce heated discussion, intervals of doubt and reflection?
It is up to you, as prospective conference participants, to frame your work in ways that may inspire others and garner novel insights to further the bright tradition of ‘discourse and organization’. We invite contributions that will renew and rethink how to reflect, critique, destabilize or queer (our studies of) dominant organizational assumptions, orders, doings, as well as the mainstream organizational theorizing thereof.
Beyond this, and in keeping with past conferences, we also welcome contributions outside of the confines of the specified 2022 theme. Currently, in addition to contributions exploring our central themes, we can imagine paper presentations that organize themselves within and around the following topics:
- Institutions, Entrepreneurship and Networks
- Futures, Foresight and Fiction
- Time, Space and Materiality
- Inclusion, Exclusion and Intersecting Concepts
- Sense-making, Stories and Narrative
- Crisis, Change and Transformation
- Knowledge, Affect, Power and Politics
- Diversity, Difference and Distinction-drawing
- Auto/Ethnography and Organizational Life
- The Unsettled and Restless, the Between and Betwixt
We envisage that the conference will again provide an inspirational forum in which academics with various perspectives on organization and discourse, and from all walks and stages of academic life, engage in lively debate and constructive dialogue.
A joint publication of the best papers presented is planned.
Conference Organizers
Ida Sabelis, Sierk Ybema, Cliff Oswick, Galit Ailon, Mie Plotnikof, and Patrizia Hoyer.
Conference Advisory Board
Nic Beech, David Grant, and Cynthia Hardy
Conference Administrator
Elles Bandringa
Guidelines for Submission
Prospective contributors interested in presenting a paper should submit an abstract of approximately 1,000 words by Feb 18, 2022.
The abstract should be emailed to orgdiscourse2022@vu.nl as an attachment (saved as a pdf or MSWord document).
Abstracts should include the title of the paper and contact details for all authors (i.e. names, affiliations, and email addresses).
Notification of acceptance will be given by the End of February 2022.
In order to receive collegial feedback on your work, please send a full paper version no later than 10th of June to orgdiscourse2022@vu.nl
Travel information
If you are planning to attend the conference in person, you can find relevant travel information here.
Registration
You can register for the conference by clicking on the “register here” button below.
Further details of the conference will be posted on this website at a later stage.