Seminar with Prof. Andrea Mayr
Aula P, Palazzo Wollemborg - via del Santo 26, Padua
16.06.2023
@ 10.30 AM - 12:30 PM
Scientific coordinator: Francesca Helm, University of Padua
In thisseminar we discuss theincreasing orientation of Higher Education towards a neo-liberal managerial model of universities,which compete for student numbers and places in league tables by ‘selling’knowledge and education. This isresulting in major institutional and discursivechanges manifested most clearly in business-related vocabulary and visuals. The rhetoric of the market is now so firmly embedded in the discursive repertoireof academic leaders that it informs university policy documents onteaching and learning and influencesrelations between university management and staff. In thediscursive hegemony of the market, teachers are constructed as self-motivated and‘enterprising’ individuals, where teaching becomes more aligned with outcomes and tests than with knowledge as an objective in itself. Education has moved from being related to citizenship and personal developmentto amodel where knowledge becomes amere commodity for ‘customers’ who must be kept happy (Ledin & Machin,2021).Looking at several case studies, we will explore the topic through a multimodaldiscourse-analytical approach (Machin &Mayr, 2023).
Ledin, P. & Machin, D. (2018) DoingVisual Analysis. From Theory to Practice. London: SAGE.
Machin, D.& Mayr, A. (2023) How to do Critical Discourse Analysis: A MultimodalIntroduction. London: Sage
Andrea Mayr is Lecturer in Media and Communication at Zayed University, UAE, where sheworks in the fields of Critical Discourse Analysis and Multimodality with a particular interest in (digital) media activism, crime and deviance and ideologies in institutionaldiscourses. Her publications include Language andPower (2008; 2019) and How to Do Critical DiscourseAnalysis: A Multimodal Introduction (2023).
