My avatar is an initial, modest physical representation of a word cloud. Why a word cloud? First, words have been my forever companions, so it is only natural that this is how I would represent myself. Second, my keyword is discourse, and I want to consider discourse from a variety of perspectives, particularly as it is used in communication and linguistics as well as in the Foucaldian sense.

My “word cloud” is composed of different words related to discourse, but I want to especially point out tertulia, which comes from my native language, Spanish. Historically, tertulias were get-togethers in the Spanish Caribbean in which prominent colonial subjects and later citizens discussed or debated the key civic issues of the day.

As tertulia suggests, discourse entails a living “conversation” in which several people, a community, participate. Thus, discourse is not bidirectional but, to paraphrase Whitman, contains multitudes.