Towards Critical Voices: Taking Socio-discursive Discoveries to the Community

Abstract

As part of the course EN2324 Critical Discourse Analysis, students work in groups to investigate social issues and topics from a discursive perspective (e.g. public discourse on immigration, gender representations in advertising, and media reporting on race-related issues). This TDG project aims to take the students' socio-discursive findings beyond the walls of the classroom to the wider CityU community, but also to the Hong Kong public and beyond. This is done through the setting up of a website titled 'Towards Critical Voices' as a curatorial platform for the student discoveries, as well as through other offline promotional methods to publicize the online portal. In the process, students think strategically and creatively about conveying academic knowledge and research to a larger non-specialist audience, sharpening and adapting their own language use and communicative practices for, among other things, an interactive web-based environment. The project not only gives students a greater stake in knowledge discovery and in their society, but also provides an important platform for curating knowledge and disseminating CityU student research on socio-discursive issues.