Professor Hailong Tian from the Tianjin Foreign Studies University will give an open lecture “Discourse, Politics and Media in Contemporary China”. It will be held on 14th October.

Great changes have taken place in all aspects of life in China in the last three decades, and these changes are mediated significantly through the power of discourse. Discourse, as a way in which the complex kinds of verbal exchange are institutionalized around specific macro-topics, is so obviously involved in the social practice of contemporary China that it becomes the replica of reality, and this is all the more salient in the post-modern society where new technologies of communication work together with power over and control of the ways and sources of communication. Starting with this understanding of the Chinese society, Professor will first explain in this talk how discourse is mingled in the social life in contemporary China, with examples in the field of politics and law. Then he’ll go ahead with the rationales of doing critical discourse analysis (CDA) in China, that is, he’ll account for the importance of such an academic endeavor in terms of its advantage for seeing the nature of socio-political transformation. Thirdly, he’ll discuss the agendas of doing CDA in China, that is, what we do in researching the dialectical relation of discourse and society. And finally, he’ll discuss the implications of CDA for intercultural communications, by answering possible questions from the audience.

The lecture will take place at the Auditorium 1.008 (1st building of the Institute of Applied Linguistics, Dobra 55 street, on Tuesday, 14 October 2014, 13:15-14:15.