Your task for this essay is to complete a ‘nexus analysis’ and report on your findings. You will need to go through the following steps. 1. Choose a nexus of practice that you believe is important. This nexus of practice will provide the focus for your nexus analysis. It could be a practice that happens in a physical place or it could be one that happens online. You might like to choose a practice that you are very familiar with and somehow involved in and you can consider public practices (like advertising or health communication for example) or more private practices. 2. In this nexus of practice identify a site of engagement (i.e. a context of situation at a particular moment in time), consisting of discourses in place, an interaction order, historical bodies. You could include an image of the nexus of practice in your essay. 3. For this site of engagement, you should answer the questions: ‘What action is going on here?’ and ‘How does discourse play a role in that action?’ Remember that discourse does not only have to be limited to the words people use but can include other modes as well. 4. Collect ‘data’ about what is going on, including especially discursive tools (see below). This can include: field notes of observations that you make, online texts and interactions with transcriptions if appropriate, news reports, commentaries, discussions from online forums (e.g., Facebook groups) where people talk about this nexus of practice. 5. Analyze your data and present your findings in the form of an analytical essay that pays attention to the following issues in order to answer the key questions ‘what action is going on here?’ and ‘how does discourse play a role in that action?’: a. Explain why you have chosen this particular nexus of practice and site of engagement; b. Describe the site in terms of discourses in place, interaction order and historical bodies; c. What are the kinds of social actions that are going on in this site of engagement? d. What role does discourse play in those actions? What role is played by other tools? e. Select a discursive tool (e.g. video speech, brochure, social media post) and analyze the discourse used. What kind of language is used? Why? What other kinds of semiotic modes are used? Why? What kinds of social actions are achieved with this discursive tool? What kinds of Discourses does this discursive tool connect to (e.g. legal, medical, commercial, cultural)? f. What does your analysis say about communication? What does it say about power relations? Your analytical essay should combine evidence from data sources with your descriptions and analysis. Where you comment on data, the data should be presented as figures in the text. For more details, please refer to the files I uploaded
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