Lecturers

<< View list of lecturers

Nur Betül Çelik

Title of the presentation:
Interdisciplinary Foundations of Ideology and Discourse Analysis: A discussion on Laclau’s Discourse Theory

Short abstract of the presentation:
In the proposed workshop I aim to open a discussion on interdisciplinary foundations and methodological of ideology and discourse analysis with a special focus on Ernesto Laclau’s work. When he introduced his discourse theory in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy with Chantal Mouffe in 1985, it was obvious that some of their conceptions were withdrawn not only from different traditions of social and political thought but also from different disciplines such as psychoanalysis, critical literature, philosophy and linguistics. Since then although Laclau’s theory has undergone some changes, it has not lost its interdisciplinary character which I believe opens up new directions for discourse and ideology analysis. In the workshop paper, I will first try to explore the theoretical foundations of Laclau’s theory of discourse focusing on its theoretical shifts such as the change in his distinction between popular and democratic subject positions. Secondly, I will try to demonstrate on which foundations the theory’s interdisciplinary character should be placed. Thirdly, I will try to answer the question of what ways such an interdisciplinarity provides us to analyze a concept like ideology which has been the most defined but remained vague and ambiguous concept of social and political thought.

Short biography:
Nur Betül Çelik is an associate professor at Ankara University, Faculty of Communication. She completed her Ph.D. under the supervision of Aletta Norval and Ernesto Laclau at the Department of Government, University of Essex, UK in 1996. Her doctoral thesis is titled as Kemalist Hegemony: From its constitution to its dissolution. As the title suggests, the thesis problematises the Laclauian concept of hegemony within the context of Turkish political history, and analyses the conditions of the possibility of Kemalist hegemony. Her specialization area is social and political theory/philosophy in general and ideology and discourse theories in particular. She is the author of several articles on Kemalist hegemony and a book chapter titled “The Constitution and Dissolution of the Kemalist Imaginary”, in David Howarth, Aletta J. Norval and Yannis Stavrakakis (eds.), Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change, Manchester, New York: Manchester University Pres, 2000. Her most recent book is on Marx’s concept of ideology, and she is in the process of writing another book on the genealogy of ideology. She also recently translated Laclau’s On Populist Reason into Turkish. In the Faculty of Communication she teaches Introduction to Politics, Political Thought, and Philosophy of Social Sciences at the undergraduate level, and Theories and Analyses of Ideology, Discourse Theories and Political Analysis at the graduate level.