(Re)thinking irony in ‘ethical’ discourse

Description

This paper aims to rethink the character of ethical discourse through a discussion of its irony. It focuses on socially exclusionary discourse in a classroom discussion at a Swedish University, which was, ironically, voiced by a racially marked international participant with a traumatic past. Engaging debates of social justice, diversity, and inclusion, the paper questions the perceived limits of teacher, student, and researcher responsibility towards others, pointing towards the fundamental irony of ethical interaction. Drawing from a linguistic ethnographic study of a highly diverse postgraduate social sciences course, this paper explores teacher, peer, and

researcher responses that both speak to and silence sociolinguistic difference and trauma (McNamara, 2020). It uses audio recordings, interviews, and fieldnotes to exemplify the perceived and real challenges that appear to prevent actors from taking responsibility in response to others’ troubling discourse. As a characteristic of contemporary sociality, as opposed to a rhetorical method (see Colebrook, 2004), irony is here reimagined in such a way that disrupts the metaphysics of presence that grounds our field’s quotidian understanding of ethics. The paper suggests that irony not only characterises the divide between institutional discourses on and experiences of diversity (Urciuoli, 2018); irony also creates the necessary space for considering the unknown trajectories on which the words and bodies of others are flowing. I conclude by suggesting that without an irony greater than Socrates’, researchers and teachers can neither move beyond the Eurocentric ethical traditions in which we work, nor come to terms with ethical interaction with (international) others.

Period	23 May 2025
Held at	University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Degree of Recognition	International