Augsburg / KPP - How does communicative discursive action relate to social structures and developments? How do they influence each other? And especially: how, and to what extent, is reality (only) only created through the process of being formulated, shaped, and made palpable or even manipulated by language and communicative discourse? For the fourth time, on March 21st and 22nd, 2019, the conference "The Discursive Construction of Reality", which takes place every two years at the University of Augsburg, will be dealing with these core issues of socio-scientific discourse research. It is an event held in high regard on a national and international level and represents an important opportunity for an exchange of ideas for the University of Augsburg's recently established Institute of Social Sciences. 

Organised by Prof. Dr. Reiner Keller (Chair of Sociology) together with Dr. Saša Bosančić, the conference provides a forum for some 130 academics from all over Germany and from abroad to discuss the perspectives of sociological discourse research from different professional perspectives. This year's programme includes more than thirty contributions to sociological discourse analysis and to adjacent perspectives of discourse research. "Our concern," says Keller, "is explicitly interdisciplinary and supra-disciplinary discussion and reflection on current and completed research, as well as questions of theory, methodology and methods." 

Theory and method questions, and especially the problems of the methodological implementation of empirical studies and the relationship between visualisation and discourse, mark the first focal point on this year's agenda; the second deals with the issue of health and disease in discourse as well as the relationships between discourse and technology / materiality and space. In each case, several contributions are devoted to knowledge production and politics, subjectivisation in general, and especially their manifestations in political discourse and, finally, discourse in the media. 

Two evening lectures 

The entire conference is open to the public. However, there are two evening lectures that are intended in particular for a general audience: on March 21st, the Tübingen media scientist Prof. Dr. Tanja Thomas will give a presentation entitled "Doing memory as discursive practice" on resonance and ignorance in public spheres in the media (beginning at 18.45) in Lecture Hall 2001 of the Faculty of Law (Building H, Universitätsstraße 24). Conference organiser Keller will talk about "Discourse and violence" in the same lecture hall on March 22nd, starting at 18.30. 
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Conference home page with further information and detailed programme for download: 
http://www.diskurswissenschaft.de