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Since the mid-1990s, discourse analysis has become an increasingly established framework in environmental policy analysis. The field has diversified in terms of conceptual approaches, metho...

New materialism and related turns confront social research with serious criticisms for neglecting the role of things and materiality in its research. It proposes a new ontology and epistemology for such research linked to the promise of a better understanding of the worldly given and its processes. This paper acknowledges the need for some correction or complexification of social analysis and sociological research, but it rejects the harshness of the critique as well as its basic arguments. Against this it recalls the conception of objects and materiality established in interpretative sociology of knowledge and argues for a material sensitive sociological research in such a perspective, with a particular attention to discourse studies. Therefore it first presents core critical arguments against new materialism and related turns in sociology. In a second step it argues how questions of materiality can (and have been) dealt with in the sociology of knowledge. A third step will consider how materiality comes into play in sociology of knowledge-based discourse studies.

The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) is a discourse analysis approach suitable for research questions and agendas in sociology and related disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. It has developed a conceptual frame of its research object (discourses, discursive construction and transformation of realities, discursive conflicts), a methodology and a comprehensive range of conceptual tools in order to inquire into that object. It explores the social arenas and processes in which social actors involved in heterogeneous forms of meaning making compete for the symbolic and practical making and unmaking of the world, its objects, actors and practices. SKAD promotes the use of different kinds of empirical data and analytical strategies anchored in qualitative and interpretive social sciences. It points to the urgent need to focus discourse research on the core questions of power/knowledge regimes and the work they do in contemporary societies.

Straddling the late 2000s and the early 2010s, and following the dawn of the ‘shale gas revolution’ in North America, European governments have considered the possibility to repeat such an endeavor. However, the great disparity of energy mixes and histories across the continent has caused diverse responses to these plans. In this paper, we focus on three countries whose governments made markedly different choices with respect to the development of shale gas and to the application of its related extractive technology, hydraulic fracturing: France, Germany, and Poland. We analyze the discursive strategies employed by advocates of this resource/technology to turn them into a legitimate and desirable option for national energy supply. For our investigation, we mobilize a combination of theoretical frameworks and concepts originating from discourse analysis (the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse), and science & technology studies (the regime of technoscientific promises). In doing so, we focus on the press and the grey literature. Our tripartite analysis reveals that the reception of shale gas was significantly shaped by the ways in which proponents built horizons of expectations, and inflected them by adapting them to different national contexts: that was ultimately a matter of discursively structured politics of knowledge.

A discourse analysis of German left-wing media coverage of the Middle East conflict brought to light a phenomenon also seen in other political fields, but much stronger in quantity and quality: Much of the discourse was related to Germany’s National Socialist past. Vocabulary from that era was used and comparisons drawn. In one newspaper, Palestinian violence was reported on as the actions “of a mob”, aimed not at “taking back illegally expropriated soil” but at “exterminating Jewish existence” (Bartel and Ullrich 2008). Earlier statements by pro-Israeli autonomist activists had described the Palestinians as the “biggest anti-Semitic collective” and stated that the “Popular belief in Palestine” is “volkisch” (literally “folkish”, extremely nationalistic, an essential part of German Nazis’ self-description) and aims at a “pure-blood Palestine free of Jews” (Ullrich 2008). In a similar fashion, the well-known and at times politically active German poet Gunter Grass wrote a poem (“What has to be said”) about his fears of an Israeli attack on Iran, which in his view may “exterminate the Iranian people” — an allusion to the Nazi extermination of Jews. Some pro-Palestinian activists hailed this political statement as an act of bravery. The question arises as to why, despite having different political aims, politically active Germans — especially radical activists — debate the Middle East conflict in a discursive framework so strongly shaped by terms and patterns from the discourse of or about Germany’s National Socialist past. Or more generally, what shapes the discursive patterns of these movements?

The article presents the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD). SKAD, which has been in the process of development since the middle of the 1990s, is now a widely used framework among social scientists in discourse research in the German-speaking area. It links arguments from the social constructionist tradition, following Berger and Luckmann, with assumptions based in symbolic interactionism, hermeneutic sociology of knowledge, and the concepts of Michel Foucault. It argues thereby for a consistent theoretical and methodological grounding of a genuine social sciences perspective on discourse interested in the social production, circulation and transformation of knowledge, that is in social relations and politics of knowledge in the so-called ‘knowledge societies’. Distancing itself from Critical Discourse Analysis, Linguistics, Ethnomethodology inspired discourse analysis and the Analysis of Hegemonies, following Laclau and Mouffe, SKAD’s framework has been built up around research questions and concerns located in the social sciences, referring to public discourse and arenas as well as to more specific fields of (scientific, religious, etc.) discursive struggles and controversies around “problematizations” (Foucault).