Submitted by tomski on 5 January, 2020 - 15:30.
WA Friday Lunch Talks are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. Each talk is of 45 minutes (+15 minutes for discussion). We welcome all to a talk "Definitions of suicide. A discourse analysis" by prof. dr hab. Dariusz Galasiński (Friday, Jan 10, 13:15-14:15, Sala Górna, Coll. Heliodori).
prof. Dariusz Galasiński
Department of Sociolinguistics and Discourse Studies
Definitions of suicide. A discourse analysis
Mainstream suicidology has for years been criticised for failing to engage with contextual, social and individual aspects of suicide. Such critique has usually focused on the positivist, quantitative paradigm of dominant suicidological research. In this paper I suggest a new dimension of such critiques by focusing on dominant suicidological discourse – dominant definitions of suicide. My argument is three-fold. First, I argue that, in the definitions, suicide is constructed either by its result (death) or as an event which happens outside any agency or any spatial, temporal or social context. Second, that those who kill themselves are systematically backgrounded in the definitions. Finally, I contextualise my findings by juxtaposing them with representations of suicide in genuine suicide notes, which, in contrast, constructed suicide as primarily social.
