Communication A Critical/Cultural Introduction
Deanna L. Fassett | John T. Warren | Keith Nainby
COMMUNICATION
A Critical/Cultural Introduction
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CHAPTER 8: LANGUAGE AND POWER IN OUR CULTURAL LIVES
Overview
• Define citationality and explore how it works in culture
• Identify and challenge myths of political correctness and explore how they work to sustain power through communication
• Identify various ways power is embedded in language and the implications that holds for culture
• Develop ethical practices of citation in written and spoken communication
What Is Citationality?
• Citationality helps us make shortcuts in our meaning making.
– Ex: Citing “political correctness” fails to account for how societies change. a way of arguing that someone whose perspective we don’t share is participating in a façade, a trendy and fake mirage of our times.
• The best resource in learning how to cite sources correctly is a current grammar and style reference.
– For citations to function as meaningful shortcuts, they need to bolster your credibility and help you affect meaningful change; be clear, consistent, and correct; speed a reader’s or listener’s understanding.
– The wrong sorts of errors in your citations may cast suspicion on your work, at best, and be career ending, at worst.
The Three Myths and Power in Relation to Culture
• It can be difficult to see power for what it is; often cloaked in niceness, power seems innocent and unintentional, but only by acknowledging our complicity with systems of power can we begin to
alter oppressive relationships.
Ethical Communication
• Academic Integrity
– Testimony: a first hand accounting of an experience.
– Cite reliable, unbiased sources to prove your point
– Avoid Tropes
• A figure of speech that stands in for or condenses meanings and assumptions without, in most cases, a very complicated understanding of them.
• Understand your audience’s needs, assumptions, and values well enough to effectively anticipate the sorts of sources they will find credible or moving.
The Myths of Culture
• The Three Myths of Culture
– Culture and Power are Separate
• Cultures, or the traditions and norms of people, are always
situated within power dynamics.
– Culture is Static
• Change happens whether we are aware or not, and we can not
inherently stop change even if we tried.
– Stereotypes are built on truth
• This creates a convenient way to create distinctions between
“speech” or “words” and the “reality” or “facts” of our
experiences.
• Self Fulfilling Prophecy
– Progress is Progress
• This excuses the struggles members of the non-dominant
culture face. It shifts the conversation from the point of view of
the person who’s subject to power back to the point of view of
the privileged person who already enjoys the benefits of social
systems working on his or her behalf.
• Color Blindness is Progress (Hint: It’s not)
READING REFLECTION CHAPTER 8
Instructions:
1.
2.
After reading chapter 8, write-up your responses to the prompts below.
Submit your reading reflection as a .pdf in Moodle.
Reflection questions:
What was the most meaningful, interesting, or significant thing you learned from this chapter?
Next, choose 3 out of the 4 questions to answer:
1. Are there some people who are culturally authorized to use some of “politically correct” terms and others who are not? Why or why not? What are the implications of specific groups using the terms?
2. When was a time that your language was challenged? What did you learn from being challenged?
3. In what ways have you used language that reproduced a system of power and privilege?
4. If you use the internet to get your news, do you consider the credibility of the websites you encounter? Have you ever encountered a news story that was covered by multiple sources/sites? Were the stories significantly different? How did you decide that one of the sources/sites was more or less credible than others?