Socialisation and power in language: Normalising discourse and the (re)production of collective identities in educational institutions

Abstract

This work explores the discursive construction of collective identities in the context of educational spaces, drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse and a poststructuralist approach to language able to deconstruct mechanisms of the transmission of knowledge in spatiotemporally situated interactions. The foci on specific chronotopes in social action are complementary to the connection between discourse as reality-constituting entity and the capacitation of the individual with their symbolically powerful language in negotiating discourse. Through methods of ethnographic participant observation, this work examines how teachers as authorised speakers and students/children as ratified participants discursively and collaboratively (re)create collective identities via linguistic interaction, aligning or distancing themselves from school as institution. The analysis relies on an ensemble of discourse fragments inherent to the construction and negotiation of (1) national identities and belonging, (2) social roles, and (3) polarising religious-traditional values, in the reality of two educational contexts in Northern Italy. The polyphonic constellation of the interactions in which discourse emerges gives rise to a critical and sociolinguistic view on language, where 'sociolinguistic' is understood as a meeting point between social practices, structures and actors that fuse with the force of language, by determining it and being determined through the latter. The aim is to unmask the selection of different discourses in Italian institutions that condition communication, question them, and investigate how we can gain a more conscious view on the process of building and (re)creating reality.