Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

   PDF

2. Grammar and Social Worlds

   • Jodie Clark

   Pages 1-11

3. Structures, Centres and Transformation

   • Jodie Clark

   Pages 13-29

4. The Empirical Project of Imagining Social Change

   • Jodie Clark

   Pages 31-47

5. Selves, Bodies, Centres

   • Jodie Clark

   Pages 49-68

6. The Embodying Community

   • Jodie Clark

   Pages 69-78

7. The Social Body

   • Jodie Clark

   Pages 79-92

8. Disruptive Bodies

   • Jodie Clark

   Pages 93-121

9. Openings

   • Jodie Clark

   Pages 123-135

10. Back Matter

    Pages 137-142

    PDF

This book is an invitation to researchers who are committed to social change to look for ideas about transformation in an unexpected place – that is, in the data generated from empirical research. Informed by Critical Discourse Analysis and postmodern theory, it proposes a method of locating, through close grammatical analysis of everyday descriptions of the social world, the desire for alternative transformative structures. Drawing upon insightful analysis of conversational data collected over a period of 12 years from both ‘marginalised’ and ‘mainstream’ participants, it reveals innovative ways of imagining social structure. Clark proposes a view of the social world as in an embodied relationship with embodied selves.

• social problems
• social structure
• Critical Discourse Analysis
• postmodern theory
• embodied selves
• bibliography
• project

• Department of English, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, United Kingdom

  Jodie Clark

Jodie Clark is Senior Lecturer in English Language at Sheffield Hallam University, and Course Leader for the BA (honours) English degree. She is the author of Language, Sex and Social Structure (2012, Palgrave). She hosts an accessible podcast about her research ideas at www.structuredvisions.wordpress.com.

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