Abstract
While much of the work on language, policy, and religion has focused on how discourse is influenced by policy, this article presents a case study of how discourse is used to construct policy itself. These policy-making discourses tend to occur in institutional settings; however, non-institutional discourse may also be instrumental in the development and implementation of policy. The strict separation of institutional and non-institutional discourse is problematized as it fails to account for the ways in which both types of discourse are ideologically constructed and often co-occurring. The article analyzes how the non-institutional discourse model of ‘conversation’ was promoted in the institutional setting of The Baptist Conference on Sexuality and Covenant as a way to explicitly avoid policy-making. However, it is argued that the framing of a conversation did not ultimately circumvent the implications of policy-making but rather promoted a policy of inclusion over a policy of exclusion.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Mary Bucholtz and Mireille Miller-Young for their feedback and suggestions in writing this article. Thanks also to the participants at the 2013 New Directions in Sexuality Studies graduate workshop at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as the anonymous reviewers and the editors at Language Policy for their guidance through the revision process.
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Appendix: full conference program
Appendix: full conference program
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Warner-Garcia, S. Rejecting exclusion, embracing inclusion: conversation as policy-making at a US Baptist conference on sexuality and covenant. Lang Policy 15, 141–161 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-015-9365-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-015-9365-z