Discourse In and Through the media: Recontextualizing and reconceptualizing expert discourse

Recontextualizing and reconceptualizing expert discourse has become increasingly important in modern society. Yet although Knowledge Dissemination (KD) is now receiving increasing attention, the discursive strategies and the pragmatics of KD in and through the media have yet to receive serious consideration. Knowledge dissemination can be seen as a form of ‘asymmetric’ communication between experts and lay-people, or ‘mediation’ of knowledge and intercultural and ‘inter-discourse communication’ (Scollon & Scollon 1995) between members of different cultures, discourse communities and communities of practice. This amounts to re-contextualization (Calsamiglia & Van Dijk 2004) and inclusion of types of ‘intralinguistic’ translations, whereby simplification, explicitation, reformulation (Mauranen 2006), reconceptualization of terms in the subject field ‘translate’ exclusive expertise into ‘comprehensible’ knowledge, suitable to the background of the addressee. In this connection, knowledge dissemination (Engberg 2014: knowledge mediation) is seen as a three-fold intra-linguistic and cross-cultural process that combines representation, construction and communication of knowledge intended for specific addressees (Kastberg 2010; Ditlevsen 2011). The main point of this chapter is to consider and discuss research on the recontextualization and reconceptualization of knowledge in and through the media, across genres and knowledge domains. Second, it gives an overview of the chapters included in the volume, thus addressing the tensions embedded in internal and external scholarly communication, KD in corporate communication and from institutions to lay audience, and audience empowerment in traditional and new media. The main emphasis lies on cross-generic and cross-disciplinary investigations, in an attempt to advocate integrated approaches to the study of media discourse with a view to both theoretical background and practical applications, and to foster debate on a variety of aspects related to the representation of specialized discourse in and through the media, e.g. voice and point of view, argumentative practices, knowledge construction, multimodality, re-contextualization and re-conceptualization of knowledge (hence, knowledge transmission), opinion formation and peer-to-peer communication within web genres aimed at knowledge dissemination and popularization in and through traditional, digital and social media.