Santa Clara University

The Sociology of Public Communication in El Salvador (INTL 196)

5 upper-division quarter units

Instructor: Antonio Canas, United Nations Development Program, El Salvador

Language of Instruction: Spanish

Title of the Course: Sociology of the Public Communication in El Salvador
Subtitle: The public speeches of power and the means of mass communication.

General Objective:

Present to the student the control between public speeches of power and the alternative speeches based on the principles of human dignity and the promotion of justice and social equality.

Specific Objectives:

1. Give the student the basis theoretical instruments to analyze the speeches and the linguistic resources of power in El Salvador.
2. To allow the student to exercise their analysis skills while examining the speech of power as well as the means of written communication.
3. Give the student the tools to identify daily communitarian speech, a communitarian sense of human dignity, aspirations of development and speech mechanism reinforcing solidarity.

Methodology, evaluation, and course evaluation:

The complete course, from the beginning, has been created as an exercise of analysis of the reality of speech in El Salvador. The instrumental theoretical exhibition will be discovered upon application to the informed production and editorial of main written mass media of the country between the months of August and November 2004.

The evaluation consists of the development and presentation of three investigative works about public speech in El Salvador, political material, both social and economic. The works will be based on the practical theoretical contents exposed in the exposed in personal experience and investigation derived from student’s coexistence with communities.

Thematic index of the course:

1. The means of communication in El Salvador.
2. Role of the means of communication en the armed conflict and during the peace process.
3. Structure of the political speech of the written press in El Salvador. The context:
a. The construction of social representations in the process of social political transformation. The mechanism of conservation of social inequality in El Salvador
b. The construction of the identity: the other forms of of being that include discrimination and violence.
4. The social reality of the construction of speech
5. The Epistemology of the congnitive subject to the Epistemology of the known subject.
6. The supposed advances of the interpretative paradigm. The centrality of language.
7. The categorization of vocabulary and the preached actions and atributes.
8. The definition and qualification of emissions. The metafores.
9. Language as a form of production and reprodcution of the social world. Interpretative models.

Basic Bibliography for Reference:

BAUDRILLARD, J.:"La ilusión del fin. La huelga de los acontecimientos", Anagrama, Barcelona, 1993CHILTON, P. y SCHÄFFNER, C.: "Discourse and politics", en Teun Van Dijk (ed.), Discourse as social interaction, Sage Publications, 1997.

ECA: Revista de Estudios Centroamericanos. (números varios)

FOUCAULT, M.:" Genealogía del racismo", Altamira, Buenos Aires, 1992

GRUBER, H.: "Evaluations devices in newspapers reports", Journal of Pragmatics. Volume 19, Nº 5, North-Holland, Amsterdam, May 1993.

HABERMAS, J.:" Teoría de la acción comunicativa", Madrid, Taurus, 1987.

TOURAINE, A.:"Crítica de la modernidad", F.C.E., Buenos Aires, 1994.

VASILACHIS de GIALDINO, I.:"La construcción de representaciones sociales: el discurso político y la prensa escrita", Gedisa, Barcelona, 1997.

VASILACHIS DE GIALDINO, I.:"Las acciones de privación de identidad en la representación social de los pobres. Un análisis sociológico y lingüístico ", Rev. Discurso y Sociedad, Vol.1 Nº1, Gedisa Editorial, 1999.