Abstract
This article collection brings together one theoretical and six original research articles that mobilise, in different ways, the concept of media dialogical network. The latter is an empirically based, original conceptualisation of the fluid concept 'discourse' that provides a fresh view on contextualisation practices in a variety of media and represents mediated communication (through the network idea) in ways that foreground agency and social organisation in meaning-making processes.
This makes the concept relevant to specialists in ethnomethodology, discourse analysis, researchers in media and communications studies, as well as scholars addressing social problems in particular domains of life, such as those covered by the articles presented in this collection. The genesis of the collection goes back to a small panel at the 2019 Conference of the International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (IIEMCA) in Mannheim.
A larger panel was then organized in Prague at the Third International Conference on Sociolinguistics - planned for 2020, but postponed twice due to the COVID-19 pandemic and eventually held two years later (see Sieglov' a, 2023). Sociolinguistics is a broad church incorporating sociological and linguistic approaches (as implied by the phrase socio-linguistics), conversation analysis (and perhaps even ethnomethodology, see Gumperz and Hymes, 1972), and welcoming authors at home in communication, media and journalism studies, as well as those interested in rhetoric.
A broad theoretical and methodological spectrum characterised the Prague panel and is reflected in this collection too. Readers will therefore find that the articles, written by sociologists, linguists, anthropologists and specialists in communication and media studies, are sensitive to different aspects of communication and adopt slightly different working definitions of the dialogical network, depending on the authors' disciplinary backgrounds.
But since the concept is central to each and every text, we start by explaining in broad terms what it means and how it has been developed.