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• Discourse analysis is a series of interdisciplinary approaches for exploring social domains in various studies.
• Discourse definition: a particular way of talking about and understanding the world
• Three approaches to social constructionist discourse: Discourse theory, Critical discourse & Discursive psychology

Discourse theory

• Investigation for change.
• Intertextuality: how an individual text draws on elements and discourse of other texts
• Analysis of intertextuality investigates both reproduction of discourse, where no new elements are introduced, and discursive change through new combinations of discourse.

Critical discourse

• Aims to carry critical research to investigate and analyze power relations in society, to formulate normative perspectives.
• Each perspective has its own particular understanding and critique of what is true

Discursive psychology

• Examines how changes to word use alter the way people discuss things, with the goal of eliciting emotional reactions.
• Analyzes how people use flexibility of available discourse in negotiating and creating representations of the world and identities in interaction.
• It is an approach to social psychology, exploring how people's thoughts and emotions are formed and transformed through social interactions.
• Individuals are both products and producers of discourse.
• Shared ideas of the three approaches: Ways of talking do not neutrally reflect the world but play a role in creating and changing it, sharing a key premise about the way language and the subject are understood.
• Discourse analysis can be used as a framework for analyzing national identity, also ways which expert knowledge is conveyed in the mass media and the implications of power and democracy.
• Power provides conditions possible for the social and is always bound up with knowledge and presupposes knowledge.
• Power is responsible for creating our social world and particular ways in which it's talked about, is both a productive and constraining force.
• Foucault's concept of power/knowledge means universal truth cannot be accessed since it is impossible to talk from a position outside discourse.
• "Truth effects" are created within discourse, and subjects are created within discourse where an individual becomes a medium for the culture and its language.
• Althusser's understanding of ideology: a system of representations that mask true relations to one another in society by constructing imaginary relations.
• All aspects of the social are controlled by ideology.
• Althusser argued that because a single ideology (capitalism) was dominant in society, there's no real scope for effective resistance, as the dominant ideology thesis suggests.
• It says that ideology distorts real social relations, suggesting that liberating ourselves from ideology provides the only way to gain access to the truth
• Interpellation is a process through which language constructs a social position for the individual.
• Scope of discourse questions whether discourses constitute the social completely or are partly constituted by other aspects of the social.
• Multiperspectival suggests that different perspectives provide different forms of knowledge about a phenomenon, producing a broader understanding together.
• Humans views and knowledge of the world are products of historically situated interchanges.
• Anti-foundationalist position opposes the foundationalist view that knowledge can be grounded on a solid metatheoretical base that transcends contingent human actions.

Social Constructionism

• Social Constructionism is defined as an umbrella term for discourse analysis
• Claims access to reality is always through language, thus people construct representations of reality rather than reflecting it.
• Language is a machine that both generates and constitutes the social world.
• Physical objects exist but only gain meaning through discourse and language.
• Meaning can be ascribed to an event like rise in water levels, ascribed meaning in terms of different perspectives or discourse.
• Meaning of individual signs is determined by their relation to other signs, citing that "dog" is part of a network of words from which it differs, like "cat".
• Saussure's theory of poststructuralism, state signs acquire their meaning by their difference from other signs.
• Language is a structure of language, a network of fixed signs while parole, on the other hand, is situated language use with signs used by people in specific situations, drawing largely from the language itself.
• Structuralist view sees language as stable, unchangeable, and a totalizing structure, drawing distinction between language and parole

Introduction to multimodal Analysis: David Manchin

• A magazine must be able to communicate its mood and style through visuals, which are effective when a magazine's effect gives the viewer a sense of fun.
• Designers/advertisers can create meaning if they know their target audience and the effect/reaction they want to achieve.
• Semiotics Semiotic approach breaks down visual communications into basic components and then understand how they relate to one another in order to create meaning
• The Multimodal Approach considers the use of signs in combination with symbols.
• Meaning of signs is treated as a potential rather than as fixed, not residing in the sign itself but rather in the context through combinations with other signs.
• Multimodality describes grammar of visual communication used by image designers, analyzing rules and principles that allow viewers to understand meaning relative to elements like placement, framing, salience, proximity, color, and styles
• Language-inspired model looks for communicative uses and how language creates moods and attitudes, as opposed to simply considering visual elements as connoting meanings.
• Semiotic systems: Serve as a means to negotiate social and power relationships
• Defining society as marketplace implies a trade and competition, and defining it as a biological organism highlights mutual dependency and support.
• Language and ideology structure society.
• Visuals can create a compelling sense of what's natural in societal reality.
• Access to media and dissemination of visual representations provide ideological power by influencing how societies and institutions are organized.
• Discourse is defined as socially constructed knowledge about reality and links signs to discourses.
• National war museums promote the idea of nation by promoting discourse about the nature of British society through the use of semiotic resources.
• Dominant discourse, once realized in different modes of communication, takes on a quality of truth.
• The discourse of society as a meritocracy means that inequality appears as common sense and is unquestioned since everyone is believed to have equal opportunity.
• Semiotic resources, using the right colors, poses, fonts, and so on, can connote particular values, behaviors, and therefore discourse.
• Ideational Metafunction - Ability of a semiotic system to represent ideas beyond its own system of signs, so language can represent connected objects.
• Interpersonal metafunction: a semiotic system must be able to create a relation between the producer and the receiver, determining whether the language used is giving information or making a demand.
• Textual metafunction is a system must be able to form coherent wholes and flows of information in a text

Sounds and environment

• Sounds at a given moment collectively have a cohesive sensibility inferred by the listener, resulting from a variety of environmental and cultural forces.
• Soundscapes hold particular meaning in ecology, such as church bells
• Soundscape had more to do with civilization--it is constantly under construction, undergoing change-civilization can be framed as threat to nature.
• Acoustic ecology measures and mediates the impact of sound on the environment.
• Soundwalks take place in urban, rural, and wilderness environments.
• Soundwalk artists exhibit attitudes based on sounds recorded, processes used, audience and interpretive pieces.
• Sound walking is the practice of listening while walking, which has a long history in philosophies of walking.
• The Songlines discuss oral walking narratives that the Australian aborigines linked to routes through landscape to orient themselves physically and spiritually through song.
• Invention of sound recording technology in 19th century opened up doing audio recordings during walks.
• The Fluxus movement incorporated scores for walks.
• The essay "Walking in the City," developed by philosopher and musicologist Augoyard, developed a rhetoric of walking and early reflective research methodology.
• Sound walk work uses the recordist perspective in the writing, recording their experience, what they are listening to, and how they move through space.
• Pre-disposition for Humans to focus on language that is understood excluding them from listing to other sounds.
• Westerkamp's sound walking radio- takes listeners to locations, not far from home and plays back sounds of these environments.
• The artist learns about the Canadian landscape with an immigrant's displaced ear, gaining a fresh perspective
• Francisco Lopez's research involves sound walking without seeing, blindfolded, and accompanied by a blind person.
• Critsitna Kubisch's electrical walks involve humans hearing electrical waves outside of their range.
• The individuals use headphones sound of parking meters neon signs are played while they walk around the city.
• Viv Corringham's shadow walking documents walks with audio recordings and accompanies them with objects she found, forming shadows and reflecting the links between songs and spoken words.
• An individual's environmental sounds and their relationships with shadows mirror links between songs, spoken words, and sounds individuals can understand.
• Janet Cardif and George Miller situated the audio walking in relation to museum and tourist tours.
• In audio walking, focus is not acoustic but the creation of a directed narrative using environmental sounds as ambient track, with audiences intimately invited to pay attention to visuals and location features.

Introduction to Aural Architecture By Barry Blesser

• Architecture concerns the design, arrangement, and manipulation of the physical properties of a space.
• People can hear passive objects, perceiving spatial geometry as the auditory cortex converts those physical attributes into perceptual cues, used to synthesize experience of the external world.
• The echo is the aural means to become aware of a wall and its properties, as the wall has audible manifestations.
• Acoustics of an open area can produce feelings of either freedom or insecurity.
• Aural architecture: social meaning linked to beauty, aesthetic, and symbolism in parallel with visual architecture
• Visual and aural meanings align and reinforce one another.
• Contribution made by listening varies greatly among individuals and cultures.
• Evaluating aural architecture in its cultural context requires understanding how acoustic attributes are perceived: by whom, under what conditions, for what purpose, and with what meanings.
• Accepting aural architecture acceptance of the cultural relativism for all sensory experiences.
• Aural architecture refers to the properties of a space that are experienced through listening.
• Acoustic architecture is the builder, engineer, or physical scientist who implements the aural attributes previously selected by an aural architecture, that manipulates physical objects and spatial geometry.
• Audio subcultures listeners may share similar relationships to some aspect of aural architecture.

Public Spaces- unpacking nature/ social culture

• The intention of urban parks in the 19th century was to promote civilized behavior and encourage conformity to expected types of use, such as children playing in designated playgrounds.
• The original inhabitants of Central Park were ex-slaves, and were treated as squatters and evicted from the site.
• A reoccurring theme has been the need for managers of parks to control behavior and use of park
• There is Bias against teenagers that suggest they are disliked since adults consider them to cause trouble.
• Teens want to establish their self-identity and desire for territory of their own but feel lack opportunities for free and adventurous activity.
• Difficulty for teens to find places in the urban realm where they're tolerated.
• Maria Kaika defines Modernity that began in 17th century, characterized by a forward-looking world view and new social expectations.
• The Promethean project describes a major project of modernity that describes taming nature, fighting to emancipate humans through domination of nature.
• Western societies set out to purify world to study it better, separating nature from society.
• Environmental determinism in 20th century involved desiring to emancipate human beings by resolving the nature/society relationship in a scientific manner.
• Enlightenment thinkers saw capitalist production who developed technology, combining various processes into a social whole while sapping the resources of soil and labor through productive rationality
• The separation made between nature and society has only been created at a theoretical level; and this creates an ideological struggle that gets politicized.
• The author examines modernity's contradictory scripts of nature and city, investigating modern cities were infused by particular vision and ideologies about the "nature" of nature and the "nature" of cities.
• Argues that urbanization is a process of perpetual social and ecological change, and should consider ways both nature and city embody dialectics between good and evil
• Meanings of nature: something must be conquered or tamed, or it stands as an ideal order or inspiration.
• Also can stand for being uncivilized where dark, untamed wilderness requires control, but is perceived as inherently good and an embodiment of moral code.
• Meanings for city can suggest it being evil-the underbelly of modern society, or pinical of civilization and man's triumph over uncivilized times.
• Nature/society dialectic: at the center of efforts to create a better society and today, in modern cities pollutants are reduced where "greening"
• 1930s “Futurism” renounced anything to do with nature and the natural world as a thing of the past its only appeal being aesthetic.
• New society would draw inspiration from technology, the mechanical world.
• American Suburb advocated the right to land ownership for everybody, where function depended heavily on the automobile. Guarantee social harmony, ease tensions and class conflicts that characterized capitalistic cities- “brining humans close to nature"
• Chapter explores how modernity shaped relationship between nature and the city, challenging idea that they are separate entities, examining "Promethean Project" where modernity aimed to dominate and control nature through science, technology and urban planning
• It critiques this dualism, arguing that nature and cities are part of the same socio- ecological process, how historical examples illustrate industrialization, and environmental policies enforced the separation of nature and society.

Key Points

• Modernity's Promethean Project was inspired by the Greek myth of Prometheus where modernity looked to tame nature through technology and planning.
• Science, reason, and urbanization have been seen as tools to emancipate humanity from nature’s unpredictability.
• The separation of nature and society saw western thought as the artificial separation of the two for scientific study and urban planning.
• This separation influenced various ideologies like social Darwinism to environmental movements.
• The nature/city dualism is the tendency of cities to be viewed as symbols of both civilization, and moral decay and that nature is either feared as wild and untamed or romanticized as pure and harmonious.
• Urban planning reflected duality that led to contradictory policies that controlled and accepted nature
• The urban planning in the 19th and 20th combined and integrated nature but still viewed them as separate, with Garden City movement blending with suburban life, they ultimately reinforced it .
• Cities either were modernist or controlled through artificial planning, where the distinction between 'natural' and 'urban was lost.
• Urban processes have also been used for global impacts like pollution and environmental justice which reshape urban and rural landscapes.
• Conclusion describes that modern cities should not be seen in isolation and that all urban areas exist within ecological and cyclical systems.

Takeaway

• The myth that cities and nature are separate has been challenged and there needs to be intertwining of nature and societal change which involves the reconsideration of sustainability.

Study points

• Science and tech are seen to allow modern cities dominance through myth in the natural project
• There has been consistent and constant integration of nature through infrastructure with technology/ societal control
• The dual scripting of cities is a contradictory perception by society.
• Contradictory perceptions of nature must be needed and controlled.
• Le corbusier was a proponent of green spaces.
• Integrated planning would be the car culture

A city as a soci-eco Process

• Mutually dependent systems
• The idea that infrastructure merges nature in urban system
• Expanding cities effect rural cities
• There exists social harm from eco impacts
• Modern city, a network of interlinked resources
• City now exists and relies on outside resources

Visions of Modernization

• Key themes revolve around relationship of urban expansion and nature.
• The use of waters is seen as linked resource
• Early life events impact the view of social and environmental relations
• Infrastructure creates a relationship between environment and society
• The Promethean project creates a view of infrastructure creation that affects natural resources.
• Historical phases create negative impacts on environment where modernization creates conflicts

Decoding Environments

• Advertisements integrate with society to create objects with value
• Advertisements create objects which are simply commodities and then relate them to emotions.
• Successful companies create brands rather than ads
• Ads create desire rather than simply reflecting value
• Successful companies brand identity through a number of means to create social context

Modern branding shifts from a commodities based value to a social one.

• Mass production has been supplanted with commodities through creation of emotional/ societal connections.