Discursive Research Research Articles

Democracy, Development, and Women in Asia

Democracy, Development, and Women in <scp>A</scp>sia

When the light turns blue: journeying into disability studies guided by the work of Ellen Brantlinger

Ellen Brantlinger's research and activism created opportunities for scholars who seek to locate and interrupt the social processes that shape educational inequities. In this essay, we reflect on Ellen's contributions by identifying three key signposts – lessons from Ellen's work that guided our own journeys and shaped the field of disability studies in education. These signposts include the assertions that (1) qualitative research is essential to understanding the contextual factors that shape the identification, location and response to difference as social phenomena, (2) inclusion and exclusion are political and ideological processes shaped by discursive practices and (3) research is a form of (in)activism. We conclude the essay with a consideration of the questions that Ellen's work positions us to ask as we move forward.

Affect and discourse – What’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice

The recent ‘turn to affect’ in social and cultural research has been built on the notion of affect as a kind of excess. Affect is contrasted with the discursive and the cognitive, and distinguished from ‘domesticated’ emotion. The focus is on the presumed direct hit of events on bodies and on what is sensed rather than known. This formulation in combination with the need for new methods has disconnected discourse studies from research on affect. In common with other recent critics, I argue that the formulation of affect as an excess is unsustainable. I focus here, however, on the methodological consequences. The objective of affect research is to produce textured, lively analyses of multiple modes of engagement and to understand the working of power through patterns of assemblage. Intriguingly, fine-grain studies of discursive practice might realize these aims more effectively than some new, ‘non-representational’ methodological approaches. I contrast one example of non-representational empirical investigation with an example of discursive research on normative episodic sequences. My general aim is to build a more productive dialogue between rich traditions in discourse studies and new lines of research on affect and emotion.

Evaluation of (im)politeness

This study explores the evaluation of (im)politeness, which is made by a hearer (or a beneficiary). Although discursive researchers advocate the importance of the evaluation of (im)politeness made by a hearer in politeness research, empirical studies on the evaluation of (im)politeness are still limited. The non-linguistic aspect has not been much researched in previous politeness studies. This study tries to fill these gaps in politeness research, by focusing on evaluation of (im)politeness from the non-linguistic perspective. Among many other things, the evaluation of attentiveness (demonstrator’s preemptive response to a beneficiary’s verbal/non-verbal cues or situations surrounding a beneficiary and a demonstrator, which takes the form of offering) is focused on in this study, making cross-cultural (Japanese and American) and cross-generational (university students and their parents’ age groups) comparisons. The data were collected through a questionnaire, which consisted of six situations, and interviews. 298 people (Japanese university students, Japanese parents and American university students) served as the participants. The results of the questionnaire data show that there were significant differences among the participants in the evaluation of attentiveness in two situations, those of the interview data revealing that most participants evaluated attentiveness positively, except in two situations. This study contributes to further understanding of (im)politeness from the perspective of attentiveness with cross-cultural and cross-generational differences as well as similarities.

Systematically reviewing and synthesizing evidence from conversation analytic and related discursive research to inform healthcare communication practice and policy: an illustrated guide

BackgroundHealthcare delivery is largely accomplished in and through conversations between people, and healthcare quality and effectiveness depend enormously upon the communication practices employed within these conversations. An important body of evidence about these practices has been generated by conversation analysis and related discourse analytic approaches, but there has been very little systematic reviewing of this evidence.MethodsWe developed an approach to reviewing evidence from conversation analytic and related discursive research through the following procedures:• reviewing existing systematic review methods and our own prior experience of applying these• clarifying distinctive features of conversation analytic and related discursive work which must be taken into account when reviewing• holding discussions within a review advisory team that included members with expertise in healthcare research, conversation analytic research, and systematic reviewing• attempting and then refining procedures through conducting an actual review which examined evidence about how people talk about difficult future issues including illness progression and dyingResultsWe produced a step-by-step guide which we describe here in terms of eight stages, and which we illustrate from our ‘Review of Future Talk’. The guide incorporates both established procedures for systematic reviewing, and new techniques designed for working with conversation analytic evidence.ConclusionsThe guide is designed to inform systematic reviews of conversation analytic and related discursive evidence on specific domains and topics. Whilst we designed it for reviews that aim at informing healthcare practice and policy, it is flexible and could be used for reviews with other aims, for instance those aiming to underpin research programmes and projects. We advocate systematically reviewing conversation analytic and related discursive findings using this approach in order to translate them into a form that is credible and useful to healthcare practitioners, educators and policy-makers.

Naming the problem: a membership categorization analysis study of family therapy

Discursive research has examined family therapy as a process of collaboratively negotiating a preferable account of the problem. The present study uses membership categorization analysis to examine how this process occurs in a sequence of family therapy sessions with the family of a 15-year-old boy diagnosed with high-functioning autism and experiencing conflict with his school. The analysis focuses on the deployment of the membership categorization device ‘disability’ in the construction of the problem and the use of the devices ‘family’ and ‘stages-of-life’ to construct a new, problem-dissolving account. Conclusions are drawn about the potential usefulness of recategorization via naturally occurring membership categorization devices in constructing solutions in family therapy. Practitioner points Therapy is the collaborative negotiation of an account of the family situation in which the problem does not exist. Naturally occurring groups of categories (MCDs) supply resources for such renegotiation. Where a problem has been constructed in the MCD ‘disability’ it can be ‘dis-solved’ using the MCDs ‘family’ and ‘stages-of-life’. More generally, the use of higher order and highly naturalized MCDs may be effective in displacing problem-generating constructions.

The Mutually Constitutive Relationship between Place and Identity: The Role of Place‐Identity in Discourse on Asylum Seekers and Refugees

ABSTRACTRecent discursive research has shown that constructions of place may function to regulate social relations and reinforce particular notions of belonging. However, extant discursive research on place‐identity has so far neglected the mutually constitutive relationships between constructions of place and identity in legitimising people's presence. To address this gap, this study, undertaken in Scotland, applies the notion of place‐identity to the discursive analysis of interviews with asylum seekers and refugees, people who work in organisations that support asylum seekers and refugees and locals who live in areas where asylum seekers and refugees tend to be housed. The analysis suggests that constructions of asylum seekers’ and refugees’ countries of origin as dangerous, and the host society as relatively problem‐free, function to constitute their identities as legitimate and to justify their presence in the host society. Moreover, constructions of place may work to portray refugees and asylum seekers as benefiting the local community and as belonging more than certain other locals. In contrast, constructing the host society as ‘full’ functions to oppose their presence through portraying them as not being able to belong. This demonstrates the mutually constitutive roles of place and identity in legitimising or resisting people's movement and belonging. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

As configurações genéricas e multimodais do videoclipe

Apesar da sua crescente circulação social e popularização nos meios de comunicação de massa (televisão, internet e variados dispositivos eletrônicos móveis, tais como tablets e celulares), o gênero videoclipe ainda não tem recebido a devida atenção das pesquisas linguísticas e discursivas. Norteado pelo intuito de sanar essa omissão e buscando adotar uma abordagem multidisciplinar para esse objeto, este trabalho lança mão de pressupostos da sociorretórica e dos estudos da multimodalidade textual com o propósito de estabelecer uma categorização das configurações genéricas dos clipes. Para tanto, utiliza-se como critério a saliência dos atributos observados na sua organização composicional, estilo, conteúdo temático e na sua dinâmica. Com isso, esta investigação procura empregar um parâmetro único, coerente e suficientemente amplo, aprimorando as classificações atuais, bastante inconsistentes e/ou demasiado rebuscadas. Outro diferencial da presente proposta tipológica consiste em associar a cada configuração uma potencial autoimagem construída pelo/a cantor/a no vídeo musical – algo que, até o momento, ainda não havia sido contemplado de forma sistemática pelos demais pesquisadores da área. Para o corpus analítico, foram selecionados os seguintes videoclipes da cantora norte-americana Madonna: Material girl (1985), Vogue – MTV’s 1990 Music Video Awards (1990), Bedtime story (1995) e Hollywood (2003). Como resultado da análise, é possível propor as seguintes configurações genéricas básicas para o estudo dos clipes: a) videoclipes com saliência na performatividade; b) videoclipes com saliência na ficcionalidade; e c) videoclipes com saliência na artisticidade.

Welfare spaces of (non)ageing - a discourse perspective

The aim of this paper is to articulate an approach for discursive research on welfare cultures of ageing that responds to the challenges facing contemporary research on old age and ageism. It is ba ...

Almost 20 years after: Developments in research on language and mathematics. Review of J. N. Moschkovich (Ed.) (2010)Language and mathematics education: Multiple perspectives and directions for research

Knowledge is “a kind of discourse,” stated the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard more than three decades ago (Lyotard, 1979, p. 3). At that time, the conviction that knowing is tightly related to communication was already shared by many. Since then, talk and other forms of human interactions began occupying the center scene of educational research. These days, the word discourse seems to be as central to the study of learning as the term learning itself. The current educational research takes human communication as its focus even when the object of study seems to be something else—learning, identity building, or, indeed, any other human activity. In fact, similar claims appear to apply to any research in human sciences, not just to the study of learning. Clearly, communication has come to be seen as a key to understanding all things human. The appearance of Language and Mathematics Education: Multiple Perspectives and Directions for Research, commissioned by the Spencer Foundation with an explicit request to “help ground, define, and grow a future research agenda on issues of language as they relate to mathematics learning and teaching” (p. xiii), testifies to the topicality of the communication-centered line of study. I was happy to receive this timely book and willingly accepted the request for the review. As a “discursive” researcher myself, I have been waiting for a publication like this for some time now, hoping it would give me an opportunity for an intermediary stocktaking and help in further planning. More than 10 years have passed since my previous attempt to get a general sense of what had been going on in the discursive research in mathematics education. This former incident was occasioned by the appearance of Language and Communication in the Mathematics Classroom (Steinbring, Bartolini Bussi, & Sierpinska, 1998), which I was asked to review for ZDM (Sfard, 2001). The book was a state-of-the-art reflection of what had been done in Educ Stud Math DOI 10.1007/s10649-012-9446-2

‘They're more than animals’: Refugees' accounts of racially motivated violence

Previous discursive research has found that minority group members may deny or downplay the existence of discrimination. However, to date, little research has addressed the issue of violence against minority group members. This study therefore draws on interviews with asylum seekers and refugees in a Scottish city to analyse their reports of violence committed against them. One form of reporting violence was by way of a complaint available to any speaker, in making no reference to attributes of attackers or victim. When racism was alleged, it was presented as a tentative, reluctant or 'last resort' explanation. The descriptions offered by interviewees reflected the contributions made by the interviewer, highlighting the ways in which these reports are interactional co-productions. The results suggest that accounts from victims of seemingly racially motivated violence may function in similar ways to 'new racism' in making racism seem to 'disappear'. These findings point to the potential difficulties that arise in identifying and looking to challenge instances of 'new racism'.

Critical Comments on Experimental, Discursive, and General Social Psychology

The historical background of the contrasting traditions of experimental and discursive social psychologies is outlined, and two illustrative experimental and discursive studies are described in detail and critically scrutinised. Among the major weaknesses of the experimental approach is an increasing tendency towards an a‐social computer‐mediated procedure and a decontextualised setting. While experimental methods and results are clearly set out, the discursive research presents only small and highly selected fragments of masses of data. Hence the actual ways in which findings are arrived at remain largely obscure. Experimental, and to a lesser extent discursive social psychology, make implicit and unjustified claims for universality. The scientific pretensions of mainstream social psychology texts are also questioned in a brief discussion of the implications of these critiques for social psychology at large.

‘For me, the children come first’: A discursive psychological analysis of how mothers construct fathers’ roles in childrearing and childcare

Previous western studies have shown the division of domestic childcare work between fathers and mothers to be unequal but not always constructed as unfair. Following Dixon and Wetherell’s (2004) suggestion of applying a critical discursive psychology approach to the topic, I aimed to discover some of the discourses available to professional English women when constructing the contributions of the father at home. These included the ‘selfless mother’, the ‘shirking father’, ‘the father restores the “gender order”’ and the ‘high-status mother’. Findings suggest a possible application for discursive research, in raising women’s awareness of the potential for their discourses to perpetuate inequality.

Public sector engagement with online identity management

The individual management of online identity, as part of a wider politics of personal information, privacy, and dataveillance, is an area where public policy is developing and where the public sector attempts to intervene. This paper attempts to understand the strategies and methods through which the UK government and public sector is engaging in online identity management. The analysis is framed by the analytics of government (Dean 2010) and governmentality (Miller and Rose 2008). This approach draws attention to the wide assemblage of public and private actors with shared regimes of practice and fields of visibility, as well as to the extent to which individual actors are made responsible for their own identity management. The paper also uses communication and discursive research to examine the potential failings of engagement efforts. Communication theory suggested that the assumption of individual responsibility, alongside linguistic distortions created by this way of understanding the problematic of identity management, complicate and fundamentally limit engagement activity.

Contemporary discursive psychology: Issues, prospects, and Corcoran's awkward ontology

This paper is both an overview of the status of contemporary discursive psychology and a response to Corcoran's critical article. The first part of the paper reports on the main traditions that make up contemporary discursive psychology and how they relate to one another. Then it responds to Corcoran's claims that much of contemporary discursive psychology: (a) is over concerned with epistemic issues at the expense of ontological issues; (b) is too concerned with data purity while failing reflexively to address its own practices; (c) fails to address ethical, applied, and political issues in the way that a reformed 'ontological' discursive psychology would be able to; (d) fails to provide an adequate and rich account of relationality (of the kind offered by thinkers such as Bakhtin, Shotter, and Chouliaraki). The limitations of each point are addressed in turn, highlighting errors and confusions. The broadly epistemic focus is appropriate for the subject matter of discursive psychology; discursive psychology is less concerned with data purity than with pursuing the radical and empirically progressive possibilities in studying records of people living their lives in everyday and institutional settings (a surprising oversight in a discipline focused on the actions of human beings) and it has a reflexive tradition going back two decades; it has a strong and distinctive focus on ethical, applied, and political issues; it has an account of relationality that is grounded in conversational materials. A single example from interaction on a child protection helpline is analysed to illustrate the way relationality, knowledge, and intersubjectivity have been made analytically tractable in contemporary discursive research.

Lokaal, nationaal of internationaal? Een eeuw intra- en internationale relaties in België (1850-1950)

This article focuses on intranational and international literary relations in Belgium between 1850 and 1950. It presents the outlines of the research project „Sire, y a-t-il des Belges?‟ (KULeuven 2006-2010) which adopts both a sociological and discursive research angle. After a presentation of the corpus material (literary periodicals) and the database interface, two case studies ( La Revue de Belgique and Lumiere ) are highlighted, before setting out the project‟s first conclusions. Both statistic data and discursive analyses show an evolution towards the recognition of intra-Belgian literary relations at the beginning of the 20th century, replacing the so-called „compromise‟ between Francophone and Flemish literature of the 19th century, i.c. the acception of a Belgian literature in French presenting Flemish cultural elements. On a more heuristic level, a plea is made in favour of a plurilingual and intercultural literary historiography for the specific Belgian „case‟.

Exploring Women’s Agency and Resistance in Health-related Contexts: Contributors’ Introduction

The series of articles presented here addresses the problematic issues of women’s agency and resistance in the context of feminist discursive research conducted by members of the Feminism and Health Research Group, based at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, on the topics of women’s drinking, pro-anorexia, pregnancy, (hetero)sexual and romantic relationships and gender and risk in the workplace. A running theme within feminist research and theorizing has been the constraining and oppressive functions of women’s roles and constructions of femininity (e.g. Humm, 1992; Millett, 1971; Wetherell, 1995; White and Kowalski, 1994; Wittig, 1992). However, whilst the social must remain central in feminist analyses, critics have attacked deterministic explanations that obscure notions of agency (e.g. Morris, 1997). Foucauldian-influenced poststructuralism has enabled feminist work to explore women’s agency within various sites (see for example Currie, 2004 and Raisborough, 2006), with writers arguing that the subject can reflect upon the discourses and discursive relations that constitute her and that she has some leeway in choosing from the options available (e.g. Weedon, 1987). Further than this, it has been suggested that women have the potential to ‘rewrite’ ideologies of gender by subverting dominant discourses through the mobilization of ‘alternative’ or counter discourses that position them in more powerful ways (e.g. Eckermann, 1997). Here, discourse becomes a crucial site for active resistance to gender ideologies, which in turn opens up possibilities for positive action and social change (Burman and Parker, 1993; Gill, 1995; Wetherell, 1995). Women are not simply positioned by existing discourses but can position themselves within these, variably taking these up, resisting, negotiating and tailoring them to achieve a desired identity (Court and Court, 1998; Davies and Harre, 1990). However, at the same time, feminists have cautioned against neo-liberal, individualistic notions of agency and choice (e.g. Petchesky, 1986; Wray, 2004). The

The management of accusations of racism in Celebrity Big Brother

The 2007 UK series of Celebrity Big Brother drew considerable attention to Britain as a result of the alleged racist bullying of Bollywood film star Shilpa Shetty by four British celebrity housemates. At stake in these allegations was any perception that Britain as a country promotes inclusivity and discourages racism. In this article, we examine, through an analysis of the exit interviews conducted with the four housemates in question, how accusations of racism were made by the host of Big Brother, and how racism was almost made to disappear in the interviews. Specifically, we elaborate on how racism was constructed not simply as an individual aberration, but more precisely as a matter of perception. We then explore how the host of the interviews avoided making accusations of racism herself by implying that it was others who perceived the behaviours of the housemates as racist, and by using other words (such as ‘bullying’) rather than explicitly referring to racism. We conclude by outlining the implications of our findings for future discursive research on racism, and we emphasize the need to further explore how rhetorical strategies aimed at denying racism operate in the service of shoring up privileged identities.

Dealing with a traumatic past: the victim hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and their reconciliation discourse

In the final years of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, there has been a worldwide tendency to approach conflict resolution from a restorative rather than from a retributive perspective. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), with its principle of ‘amnesty for truth’ was a turning point. Based on my discursive research of the TRC victim hearings, I would argue that it was on a discursive level in particular that the Truth Commission has exerted/is still exerting a long-lasting impact on South African society. In this article, three of these features will be highlighted and illustrated: firstly, the TRC provided a discursive forum for thousands of ordinary citizens. Secondly, by means of testimonies from apartheid victims and perpetrators, the TRC composed an officially recognised archive of the apartheid past. Thirdly, the reconciliation discourse created at the TRC victim hearings formed a template for talking about a traumatic past, and it opened up the debate on reconciliation. By discussing these three features and their social impact, it will become clear that the way in which the apartheid past was remembered at the victim hearings seemed to have been determined, not so much by political concerns, but mainly by social needs.

Doing change and continuity: age identity and the micro–macro divide

ABSTRACTThis paper is a study of the discursive management of notions of change and continuity in interview talk. It presents selected short empirical examples from interviews with 22 Finnish baby-boomers, and discusses the methodological and theoretical issues that arise. Following a review of the major approaches to the study of age identity, the analytic intersection between qualitative gerontology and discursive psychology is explored. The analysis identifies how the frequent use of a ‘provisional continuity device’ enables speakers simultaneously both to acknowledge and to distance themselves from factual notions of physical or psychological lifespan change. The key methodological argument is that the discursive analysis of age-in-interaction cannot necessarily be achieved through the myopic micro-study of discursive strategies, but rather two suggestions are made. First, it is argued that analytically-anchored and rigorous discursive gerontology that both systematically draws on and contributes to the broad field of discursive research provides a means by which to test empirically post-modern conceptualisations of age identity. Second, it is suggested that analyses of age-talk in everyday and institutional settings provide an analytical and theoretical middle-ground between the macroversusmicro or ‘microfication’ debate in gerontology.