Storytelling as a resource for pursuing understanding and agreement in doctoral research supervision meetings

Abstract

This paper examines the function of storytelling in securing agreement in doctoral supervision from the perspectives of conversation analysis (CA), which views storytelling as an interactional resource for achieving various social actions. The function of storytelling in managing disagreement has been explored in previous CA research (Georgakopoulou, 2001; Goodwin, 1982, 1990; Kjaerbeck, 2008). However, a question left unanswered is whether storytelling works to accomplish disagreement or to resolve disagreement. This paper addresses this question by examining storytelling data taken from a research project on doctoral supervision. The data corpus consists of approximately 25 h of video-recorded interactions in an Australian university between doctoral students and their supervisors. In the transcribed data, analysis shows that storytelling works to establish a shared knowledge domain that serves to secure agreement rather than construct disagreement. In addition, through their responses, the students display their orientation to storytelling as pursuing understanding rather than securing affiliation of affective stance. The findings point to the interactive relationship between knowledge and agreement.