About

Ideology and Cognition is a collection of responses to the major (and sometimes minor) works on ideological theory as it relates to the cognitive elements of ideology.  My name is Robert Clapperton and I am currently a PhD candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada).  My research is multidisciplinary and involves elements of Critical Discourse Analysis, Cognitive Rhetoric, and Cognitive Poetics in the investigation of the interface between the external natural and social world and the inner mental existence of the individual as it relates to the formation of ideology.  Ultimately, I want to develop a conceptual model for ideological formation in the minds of discourse participants. 

My research draws heavily on the work of Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier in the areas of mental spaces, conceptual blending and the mapping of thought and language.  I am equally influenced by Teun van Dijk’s work on context models and the sociocognitive nature of ideology.  Combining elements of the two sets of theories will produce a new model for ideological formation that should begin to throw some light on the way in which our minds latch onto the group beliefs that make up ideology.  I present a number of definitions for ideology in this collection of thoughts including those of Marx, Vološinov, Lukács, Althusser, Bourdieu, van Dijk, Eagleton, and a number of other modern and postmodern theorists.  Each theory contains an element or two that I believe can be incorporated into a conceptual model of the cognitive apprehension of ideology.  Concepts such as reification, subjectivity, habitus and social cognition view the question of ideological formation from a different perspectives and each viewpoint offers clues to the makeup of the interface that sits between the world and mind that allows one ideology to take hold while others are rejected. 

I plan on building this site into a resource for the study of ideology as a sociocognitive (to borrow Teun van Dijk’s term) phenomenon that can be conceptually mapped in order to uncover some of the why and how of ideological formation in the mind of the individual.

Bob Clapperton

University of Waterloo