Syncretic expertise in TED Talks
Insights into environmental discourse
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jalpp.20367Keywords:
environmental knowledge, TED Talks, environmental discourse, expertise, genre analysisAbstract
This paper focuses on the popularization of information related to environmental issues in media texts, with a particular focus on TED Talks. TED talks are a distinctive genre with has considerable social implications, especially when the presentations concern themes such as the environment, the understanding of which is a key determinant in the full realization of specific environmental policies. In this respect, this study suggests a critical need to go beyond the purely technical analysis of environmental issues by framing them within a wider discourse, which is more likely to influence the public at large. The paper explores a corpus of popular talks which deal with environmental issues and analyzes their macro-structural components. Methodologically, traditional genre analysis is integrated with a critical stimulus in order to unveil the strategies employed to overcome the technophilic/technophobic dichotomy which often typifies environmental discourse. The findings show the flexible and dynamic nature of TED Talks. Their communicative success lies specifically in the ability of the presenters to attract the audience’s attention by making use of different communicative strategies and drawing on different forms of expertise, within the specific structural constraints imposed by this genre.
References
Anderson, Chris (2016) TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking. London: Headline.
Anesa, Patrizia (2018) The popularization of environmental rights in TED Talks. Pólemos 12 (1): 203–219. https://doi.org/10.1515/pol-2018-0012
Berkenkotter, Carol and Thomas Huckin (1995) Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/Culture/Power. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. https://doi.org/10.2307/358302
Bhatia, Vijay K. (2010) Interdiscursivity in professional communication. Discourse & Communication 21 (1): 32–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481309351208
Bhatia, Vijay K. (2015) Critical genre analysis: Theoretical preliminaries. Hermes – Journal of Language and Communication in Business 27 (54): 9–20. https://doi.org/10.7146/hjlcb.v27i54.22944
Bhatia, Vijay K. (2017) Critical Genre Analysis: Investigating Interdiscursive Performance in Professional Practice. London: Routledge.
Biber, Douglas, Ulla Connor and Thomas Upton (2007) Discourse on the Move: Using Corpus Analysis to Describe Discourse Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.28
Bratton, Benjamin (2013) We need to talk about TED. The Guardian, 30 December. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-need-to-talk-about-ted
Candlin, Christopher N. (2006) Accounting for interdiscursivity: Challenges to professional expertise. In Maurizio Gotti and Davide S. Giannoni (eds) New Trends in Specialized Discourse Analysis, 21–45. Bern: Peter Lang.
Candlin, Christopher N. and Sally Candlin (2002) Discourse, expertise, and the management of risk in health care settings. Research on Language and Social Interaction 35 (2): 115–137. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327973RLSI3502_1
Candlin, Christopher N. and Yon Maley (1997) Intertextuality and interdiscursivity in the discourse of alternative dispute resolution. In Britt-Louise Gunnarsson, Per Linell and Berndt Nordberg (eds) The Construction of Professional Discourse, 201–222. London: Longman.
Carolan, Michael S. (2006) Science, expertise, and the democratization of the decision-making process. Society and Natural Resources 19 (7): 661–668. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920600742443
Chang, Yu-jung and Hung-Tzu Huang (2015) Exploring TED Talks as a pedagogical resource for oral presentations. English Teaching and Learning 39 (4): 29–62.
d’Avanzo, Stefania (2015) Speaker identity vs. speaker diversity: The case of TED Talks Corpus. In Giuseppe Balirano and Maria Christina Nisco (eds) Language Diversity: Identities, Genres, Discourses, 262–278. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Dubois, Betty (1980) Genre and structure of biomedical speeches. Forum Linguisticum 5: 140–168.
Gotti, Maurizio (2013) The analysis of popularization discourse: Conceptual changes and methodological evolutions. In Susan Kermas and Thomas Christiansen (eds) The Popularization of Specialized Discourse and Knowledge across Communities and Cultures, 9–13. Bari: Edipuglia.
Gülich, Elizabeth (2003) Conversational techniques used in transferring knowledge between medical experts and non-experts. Discourse Studies 5 (2): 235–263. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445603005002005
Hilgartner, Stephen (1990) The dominant view of popularization: Conceptual problems, political uses. Social Studies of Science 20 (3): 519–539. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631290020003006
Ludewig, Julia (2017) TED Talks as an emergent genre. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 19 (1): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2946
Meza, Radu and Constantin Trofin (2015) Between science popularization and motivational infotainment: Visual production, discursive patterns and viewer perception of ted talks videos. Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai-Ephemerides 60 (2): 41–60.
Morozov, Evgeny (2013) To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. New York: Public Affairs.
Muniz, Albert and Thomas O’Guinn (2001) Brand community. Journal of Consumer Research 27 (4): 412–432. https://doi.org/10.1086/319618
Myers, Greg (2003) Discourse studies of scientific popularization: Questioning the boundaries. Discourse Studies 5 (2): 265–279. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445603005002006
Romanelli, Frank, Jeff Cain and Patrick McNamara (2014) Should TED Talks be teaching us something? American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 78 (6): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.5688/ajpe786113
Rousseau, Anthony, Paul Deléglise and Yannick Estève (2012) TED-LIUM: An automatic speech recognition dedicated corpus. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, 125–129. Istanbul: European Language Resources Association. Available online: http://lrec.elra.info/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/698_Paper.pdf
Rowley-Jolivet, Elizabeth and Shirley Carter-Thomas (2005) Scientific conference Englishes: Epistemic and language community variation. In Giuseppina Cortese and Anna Duszak (eds) Identity, Community, Discourse: English in Intercultural Settings, 295–320. Bern: Peter Lang.
Sarangi, Srikant (2001) On demarcating the space between ‘lay expertise’ and ‘expert laity’. Text 21 (1–2): 3–11. https://doi.org/10.1515/text.1.21.1-2.3
Sarangi, Srikant (2010) Healthcare interaction as an expert communicative system: An activity analysis perspective. In Jürgen Streeck (ed.) New Adventures in Language and Interaction, 167–198. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.196.08sar
Sarangi, Srikant (2018) Communicative expertise: The mutation of expertise and expert systems in contemporary professional practice. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice 13 (1–3): 371–392. https://doi.org/10.1558/japl.37507
Sarangi, Srikant and Angus Clarke (2002) Zones of expertise and the management of uncertainty in genetics risk communication. Research on Language and Social Interaction 35 (2): 139–171. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327973RLSI3502_2
Soranno, Patricia A., Kendra S. Cheruvelil, Kevin C. Elliott and Georgina M. Montgomery (2015) It’s good to share: Why environmental scientists’ ethics are out of date. Bioscience 65 (1): 69–73. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biu169
Sugimoto, Cassidy and Mike Thelwall (2013) Scholars on soap boxes: Science communication and dissemination via TED videos. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 64 (4): 663–674. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.22764
Sugimoto, Cassidy, Mike Thelwall, Vincent Larivière, Andrew Tsou, Philippe Mongeon and Benoit Macaluso (2013) Scientists popularizing science: Characteristics and impact of TED Talk presenters. PLoS ONE 8: Article e62403. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0062403
Swan, Jack, Harry Scarbrough and Maxine Robertson (2002) The construction of ‘Communities of Practice’ in the management of innovation. Management Learning 33 (4): 477–496. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507602334005
Thompson, Susan E. (1994) Frameworks and contexts: A genre-based approach to analysing lecture introductions. English for Specific Purposes 13 (2): 171–186. https://doi.org/10.1016/0889-4906(94)90014-0
Tsou, Andrew, Mike Thelwall, Philippe Mongeon and Cassidy Sugimoto (2014) A community of curious souls: An analysis of commenting behavior on TED Talks videos. PLoS ONE 9: Article e93609. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0093609
Wenger, Etienne (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511803932
Wenger, Etienne (2010) Communities of Practice and social learning systems: The career of a concept. In Chris Blackmore (ed.) Social Learning Systems and Communities of Practice, 179–198. London: Springer and the Open University. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-133-2_11
Published
Issue
Section
License
Equinox Publishing Ltd.