Writing for change: Negotiating regulation and proposing change
Yaegan Doran, Australian Catholic University
When pushing for change in the world, activists are constantly drawing on a wide range of language resources to organise people, ask them to do things, and to fight for a better society. This is most obvious in persuasive discourse, where people put forward argumentative speeches and writing that aim to convince people of different positions and to take action. But while this is the most public of activist discourse, it is a relatively small component of activist discourse in comparison the enormous range of administrative, bureaucratic and personal texts activists must read, write and speak. This form of language helps activists to organise others, keep to task, hold together the group (or shut out those who are not wanted), and help to realise the change that is being pushed for. This talk focuses on the latter of these tasks – proposing change to administrative documents that govern the lives of people. It focuses in particular on a proposal by a group of casual staff activists in the Australian university sector for changes to their working conditions. The proposal focuses on suggesting new clauses for a document known as an ‘Enterprise Bargaining Agreement’ that governs the working conditions that staff at one Australian university work under. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics, it considers how activists take general principles that aim to make the lives of casual staff better (who make up 75% of staff at this university) and turn them into specific clauses to be pushed for in bargaining with management. The talk will consider in particular a small set of clauses in the Enterprise Bargaining Agreement that govern under what conditions management may refuse an application for a casual staff member to be converted to an ongoing job – a major current issue in Australian industrial relations.
Yaegan J. Doran is Senior Lecturer in Education at the Australian Catholic University, Australia. His research focuses on language, semiosis and education from the perspectives of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory. His research has developed grammatical, discourse semantic, register and genre-based descriptions of mathematics, language (focusing on English and Sudanese), images and academic formalisms, as well as fine-grained analytical tools for understanding variations in knowledge practices. His most recent books include The Discourse of Physics (2018, Routledge) and the edited collections Teaching Science (2021, with Karl Maton and J. R. Martin, Routledge), Systemic Functional Language Description (2020, with J. R. Martin and Giacomo Figueredo) and Accessing Academic Discourse (2020, with J. R. Martin and Karl Maton).