Chaim Noy

Bar Ilan University | BIU · School of Communication

Combining ethnographic, semiotic, and performative approaches, this book examines texts and accompanying acts of writing of national commemoration. The commemorative visitor book is viewed as a mobilized stage, a communication medium, where visitors' public performances are presented, and where acts of participation are authored and composed. The s...

During the past two decades we have witnessed a rather impressive growth of theoretical innovations and conceptual revisions of epistemological and methodological approaches within constructivist-qualitative quarters of the social sciences. Methodological discussions have commonly addressed a variety of methods for collecting and analyzing empirica...

This article deals with visitor books as a dynamic medium of communication, and explores how material aspects of such a book*including its physical affordances and the spatial and institutional environment in which it is located*affect its capacity to create and mediate social meaning. In line with recent studies that set out to rematerialize commu...

This paper explores Israeli backpackers’ travel narratives, in which a profound self-change is recounted. These tourists are construed as narrators, whose identity stories, in which the powerful experience of self-change is constructed and communicated, are founded on, and rhetorically validated by the unique experiences of authenticity and adventu...

New media platforms offer diverse modes of mediation of every day and tourist places and communities. Spatial social media now augment older forms of mediation, partly by enabling contributions from ‘ordinary’ users, who create and share spatial discourses. This study examines the discursive construction of peripheral places, produced through user-...

This theoretical paper examines communicative spaces (cyber-spaces) in social networks and specifically TikTok. By bringing together theoretical insights from medium theory and from the study of online/offline communicative spaces – spaces and places produced in and through communication practices and technologies – the paper theorizes and conceptu...

This ethnography looks at the indexical function of several brief utterances, routinely employed by a Pales-tinian speechmaker, in the Sheikh Jarrah protest in East Jerusalem. Following Silverstein's contributions to the indexically based theory of (meta)pragmatics, "creative" and nonreferential utterances are examined at the utterance event level,...

Bakhtin famously argued that language-as-used is essentially dialogic. One pragmatic implication concerns how dialogicity is established in various contexts. In political discourse, polemic polyphony emerges from the juxtaposition of adversarial voices of political actors: a dialogue in which different voices index different ideological orientation...

This study focuses on users’ practices involved in creating and maintaining Facebook memorial Pages by adapting the theoretical perspective of the social capital approach. It examines 18 Pages in Israel, which are dedicated to ordinary people who died in nonordinary circumstances. We employ qualitative analysis based on a digital ethnography conduc...

This article theorises historical comment books and related travel-writing sources. It offers a conceptual framework for reading disparate sources produced by travellers and tourists during and as part of travel and visitation. An interdisciplinary framework is promoted, conjoining travel and tourism studies, medium theory, communication sensibilit...

This discussion note is inspired by, and in turn expands on, a few themes and threads laid out in Judith Bridges’s “Explaining ‘-splain’ in digital discourse”. The note stresses the focus and contribution linguistic anthropologists have made to understanding various types of indexical meaning-making practices, and the order of indexicality. This di...

Backpacker tourism is a form of modern tourism characterized by a combination of travel practices and discourses. These include lengthy travel duration (typically longer than annual holidays); flexible and individually planned itineraries; budget accommodation (with a preference for youth hostels and YMCAs); budget transportation (with a preference...

This article analyses a recent ideological shift in the visual management of Jerusalem. Through two case studies in the real estate and tourism industries we show how mobile technologies are shaping both actual settings in, and visual consumption of, Jerusalem. The analysis points at the creation of a "tunnel vision" for consumers and visitors, whi...

This article focuses on a recent turning point in the history of gazes in and of Jerusalem. For decades, the Muslim structure of the Dome of the Rock and the Jewish Western Wall served as a primary (dual) image for Jerusalem. Yet since the 1990s, there has been a transition towards framing the city as exclusively Jewish, with a focus on the Tower o...

This article offers a conceptual framework of Facebook's sub-platforms: Profiles, Groups, and Pages. We demonstrate the crucially different affordances that these sub-platforms possess, and the various resulting social practices and dynamics that they enable. With mourning and memorialization as a case study, our findings point at emergent practice...

Museum scholars and professionals agree that audiences’ texts are under-researched and are often approached anecdotally. This state limits the ability to advance effective theorizing of, and interventions in, audience participation and engagement with museums. The article addresses this lacuna by promoting a contextual media-centered conceptualizat...

Museums offer rich material environments for studying narration as jointly accomplished by institutions and audiences. Following the narrative and participatory turns museums have taken, the research explores the narrative actions audiences' texts perform vis-à-vis museums' narrations. It examines audience participation in two history museums, as e...

Museums are familiar public institutions whose primary mode of mediation is narration. They are geared toward narrating collective stories that are authoritative, linear, and grand in scope. Yet with the historical turn museums have recently taken from collection-centered to audience-centered institutions-coupled with a participatory mode of mediat...

The study examines the communicative functions that handwriting (mode) and paper (medium) have come to serve in increasingly digital and intermedial environments. The study begins in museums, where handwritten documents are profusely on display nowadays, and where the display affordances and communicative functions of handwriting are productively e...

The realization of subjectivity through language use is a key concern of sociolinguistic research. We argue for examining it by juxtaposing Goffman's participation framework and Du Bois’ stance triangle. We focus on museums’ commenting platforms as ‘stance-rich’ media (Du Bois 2007:151) by examining the communicative affordances of a visitor book a...

Ethnography of communication (EC) is a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to the study of language and communication as actions that transpire in naturally occurring, everyday situations and interactions. The approach was conceived by Dell Hymes and colleagues in the 1960s and 1970s; it combines on the one hand, a richly descriptive ethno...

This study joins a prolific line of critical research on collective memory in relation to museums as ‘sites of memory’. It takes the political relations between museums and memory as the background against which audience production of discourses of remembering is analyzed. Collective memory is approached not as a passive ‘retainer’ of information,...

Talk’s YouTub link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkquZtRPb8A

Recent studies of moral discourse and argumentation highlight the pervasiveness of morality in everyday life, and how the public sphere is shaped by moral ‘stuff’: speech acts, narratives, accounts and the like. By taking a discourse analytic orientation, this article joins this line of research, and delineates the situated and interactional nature...

The omnipresence of screens in contemporary life presents an unprecedented variety of ways of displaying as well as ways of seeing, reacting to and consuming images. This paper focuses on commercial and mediatised leisure spaces in the shape of theme parks and on on-site procedures of production and display of images of roller-coaster riders. Conte...

This article examines public discourse that visitors produce as part of their visit to a heritage museum. With the turn to the “new museum” of the 21st century, with its extensive reliance on new media, mediation, and an interactive-participatory agenda, museums are community generators that invite and display public participation. The article inqu...

The move from ?old? to ?new? media centrally involves a shift in participatory possibilities, through which individuals and communities differentially access and populate the public sphere, assume voice, and partake in open discussion and debate. This paper offers a rich ethnographic case study of new participatory media in the shape of commenting...

I share observations from two ethnographic studies conducted during the last eight years in Jewish heritage museums, where collective Jewish identity is displayed and performed, visualized and textualized. I show the visual pervasiveness of texts (historical and contemporary) at these museums, and that these texts indeed amount to the most popular...

This research explores narratives of personal experience narrated by young Israeli travelers upon returning to their homeland from an extended backpacking journey. By reflecting on the interaction that took place during the interview conversations between the backpackers and the researcher, the means by which the stories come to implicate and act u...

This research explores narratives of personal experience narrated by young Israeli travelers upon returning to their homeland from an extended backpacking journey. By reflecting on the interaction that took place during the interview conversations between the backpackers and the researcher, the means by which the stories come to implicate and act u...

This interdisciplinary study brings together research on audiences’ participation in the media, and an up-close exploration of communicative entitlement of and for such participation. Viewing visitor books as situated, public media, the study asks two related questions: how museums and institutions that employ this medium frame participation of ‘or...

No Abstract: Encyclopedia entry. Backpacking is a form of modern tourism characterized by a particular combination of travel practices and discourses. These include relatively lengthy travel duration, typically longer than annual holidays; use of inexpensive ▶ accommodation and ▶ transportation, with preference for youth hostels, YMCAs, and other l...

This article analyses a recent ideological shift in the visual management of Jerusalem. Through two case studies in the real estate and tourism industries we show how mobile technologies are shaping both actual settings in, and visual consumption of, Jerusalem. The analysis points at the creation of a “tunnel vision” for consumers and visitors, whi...

The study takes a situated and material approach to texts and writing practices and examines writing ethnographically as it transpires and displayed in museums. The ethnography highlights the richness and sociality embodied in writing practices as well as the ideological, communal, and ritualistic functions that writing and texts serve in cultural...

Teaching qualitative research methods on the one hand, and Martial Arts, on the other, seem to have only little in common: one is academic, and one is not; one is essentially somatic and kinesthetic, and the one is not. Yet during two decades of teaching and practicing both I repeatedly noticed a fruitful interaction between these ‘arts’, which I e...

http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/539

Inspired by recent advances in the field of automobility, this article explores how families inhabit cars, and how daily automobilized family routines are accomplished interactionally in and through cars' uniquely structured inner space(s). Following Urry's (2006) notion of the "socially inhabited car," the article assumes sociological and ethnomet...

The author offers a reflexive recount of an ethnography conducted at a tourist heritage site. Inspired by critical writings on the aesthetics of (social) scientific practices and texts, the author examines ethnographic practices that take place in the conjoined coercive contexts of tourism and national commemoration. A number of affinities between...

This article examines and conceptualizes discourse and space as these are ideologically enmeshed in and through visitors’ entries, which are inscribed in a highly symbolic, commemorative visitor book. Building on recent theorizing in discourse and space-related fields, a re-materialization and a re-spatialization of discourse and discursive practic...

AbstrAct In this article I rematerialize discourse that is articulated in the shape of commemorative visitor book entries, in a national-military com-memoration site in Jerusalem, Israel. The materiality and communi-cative affordances of the commemorative visitor book, the physical environment in which it is situated and which grants it meaning, an...

Official ‘travel warnings’ are recurrently published by the Counter-Terrorism Bureau in Israeli media, with the aim of informing potential tourists about the dangers of terrorism aimed at Israelis who travel abroad. These travel warnings, which juxtapose menacing warnings with tranquil visual representations of touristic vacationscapes, have recent...

This paper describes a guided walking tour of a formerly Palestinian neighbourhood in Jerusalem and an important battlefield in the 1948 Arab—Israeli War.The paper assumes a critical performance approach to guided tours in examining how through performative guiding, identities, histories and places are (re)constituted. We conceive of performative g...

The article examines how practices of inscription and structures of addressivity (Goffman) at a symbolic site provide implicit indexical means for establishing subjectivities and agencies. By examining a visitor book located in a national commemoration site in Jerusalem, Israel, the article first argues that inscribing practices themselves can func...

This paper offers a multifaceted appreciation of the political roles played by authenticity in modern tourism. The study, located at a national heritage and commemoration site in Jerusalem, Israel, traces authentic occurrences—manifestations and representations—that culminate in an ideological ecology of authenticity. Through this depiction, the ac...

This article joins recent ethnographies of written documents which shed light on embedded practices and codes in and through which writing is produced and consumed. The article explores the linguistic ideology of writing through examining inscriptions made in a visitor book in a war commemoration museum in Jerusalem, Israel. These settings supply a...

This article offers a contribution to the fields of tourist performance and language. By exploring a visitor book located at a heritage site in Jerusalem, Israel, it argues that texts produced by tourists can assume the semiotic status of performances. Consequently, tourists’ texts should not be viewed merely as instances of “discourse” or “languag...

This article explores travel narratives of Israeli female backpackers, depicting their participation in a tourist rite-of-passage. The exploration addresses the meeting of narratives of the masculine, adventurous male hero, on both local (Israeli culture) and global-Western (backpacking) spheres, with regard to which the travelers position themselv...

This paper is an autoethnographic exploration of a tourist’s experience. Through interpreting qualitative material, in the form of a poem I wrote in 1994 about a short familial excursion to an Israeli seaside resort city (Eilat), the research seeks to sensitively describe the intricacies of travel experience. The research explores the advantages of...

This book seeks to advance feminist and gender tourism studies with its focus on embodiment. Broad themes include: the construction of narratives; how discourses of desire, sensuality and sexuality pervade the tourism experience; the use of the body to represent femininity, masculinity and sensuality; and how travel and tourism allow for empowermen...

Backpacking, or Tarmila'ut, has been a time-honored rite of passage for young Israelis for decades. Shortly after completing their mandatory military service, young people set off on extensive backpacking trips to "exotic" and "authentic" destinations in so-called Third World regions in India, Nepal, and Thailand in Asia, and also Colombia, Ecuador...

The relationship between language, discourse and identity has always been a major area of sociolinguistic investigation. In more recent times, the field has been revolutionized as previous models - which assumed our identities to be based on stable relationships between linguistic and social variables - have been challenged by pioneering new approa...

This article explores empirical and theoretical aspects concerning the heightened state of institutionalization of backpacking tourism. The exploration is accomplished through examining the evolution of Israeli backpacking in Asia and America over the past four decades, and the effects of institutionalization on the tourist experience. From a theor...

Examines the backpacking trip usually taken by Israeli youth following military service. In the period after their military service, Jewish Israeli youth customarily embark on a unique touristic practice: the backpacking trip. Combining sociological, anthropological, and psychological research-based on innovative fieldwork conducted with Israeli ba...

This article explores how identity is constituted through narrative performance. It contends that in an interpersonal context of narration, a profound experience of self-change is achieved intersubjectively, in-between narrators and audiences. Performatively, the narrators' adventurous travel-narrations, which are generated by a particular type of...

In this essay I explore, reflect upon and theorize my experiences as a doctoral student writing a dissertation in the field of narrative studies. The inquiry concentrates on the problematic tensions that are unique to academic writing in qualitative disciplines, tensions with which I dealt and grappled extensively during my work. I wish to reflect,...

This research explores narratives of personal experience narrated by young Israeli travelers upon returning to their homeland from an extended backpacking journey. By reflecting on the interaction that took place during the interview conversations between the backpackers and the researcher, the means by which the stories come to implicate and act u...

This research investigates the use of stories that are found through vicarious experience and told in a life narrative in order to communicate the meaning of the personal past. Through the interpretation of the life narratives of Holocaust survivors, we argue that stories outside of direct experience, collected stories, form the background of perso...