PhD Programme: Discourse and Contemporary Culture

The doctoral programme Discourse and Contemporary Culture at Aalborg University welcomes PhD students who are interested in the field of discourse as it is shaped in different cultural settings.

We understand culture as a broad concept embracing global, national, regional, organisational and individual constructions of culture. The concept discourse includes the many ways in which language is used, including for instance writing, speech, bodily gestures, music and silence. It also entails a socially constructed perspective, where social actors and their acts, relations and identities constitute and negotiate a nodal system of meaning.

Approaches to the study of discourse and contemporary culture are increasingly interdisciplinary and include critical discourse analysis, text linguistics, conversation analysis, genre analysis, ethnomethodology, sociolinguistics, etc. Research in the field explores the relations between language, social structures and action and may include literature, music, institutional genres and how culture may influence the meanings that can possibly be made within these areas.

Examples of topics of interest to doctoral students under this programme might be: Advertising, mass media discourse, racism and (hetero)sexism, environmental discourse, biotechnology discourse, political discourse, literary discourse, multimodal discourse, discourses of gender and career, as well as intercultural discourse, discourse in professional or institutional settings, music as discourse, language in contemporary society, etc.