Dialectical Theory Research Articles

Exploring restorative justice: dialectics of theory and practice

This article presents an overview and extension of research into one form of diversionary justice, the Youth Justice Conferencing programme in New South Wales, Australia. Conferences are formal procedures organised by a Convenor and typically involving a young offender, their victim or victim’s representative, support persons, the arresting police officer, a police liaison officer and additional community members. After a recount of the offence, its ramifications are discussed and an appropriate community service outcome plan agreed upon. The research explored this restorative justice programme from the perspectives of functional linguistics and performance studies, combining close textual analysis with ethnographic research methodologies. We focus on the dialectic of theory and practice enacted in this research, highlighting some of the results of our enquiries and reflecting on the ways it stimulated development of our theory, descriptions and representations. This work is then extended in relation to the negotiation of an apology by the young offender to their victim in conference interaction.

Neoliberalism and social work identity

ABSTRACTThis article considers the relationship between the identity of social work and the neoliberal political project. Reference is made to a small but carefully structured quantitative research study in Auckland, New Zealand which examined the knowledge applied and produced in the practice of social work. This study found evidence consistent with Philp’s [(1979). Notes on the form of knowledge in social work. Sociological Review, 27(1), 83–111] theorisation of a specific ‘form of knowledge’ for social work which is produced and reproduced as a function of relational engagement between social workers and those who are constructed as ‘clients’ in an unequal society. This discourse casts the ‘failing subject’ as socially located and inherently redeemable in direct contrast to populist neoliberal constructions of personal responsibility and moral deficit. With reference to dialectical theory it is suggested that this resilient discourse, embedded in ‘every-day’ practice, is inevitably a source of resistance to the imposition of neoliberal practice and policy design. This resistance provides hope for the progressive voice of social work in the current contest of ideas in relation to the future development of social work.

The Grim Reaper, Hounds of Hell, and Dr. Death: The Role of Storytelling for Palliative Care in Competing Medical Meaning Systems

ABSTRACTPalliative care (PC) is a medical specialty that strives to fulfill the physical, psychosocial, emotional, practical, and spiritual needs of individuals at end of life or in tandem with curative treatment. Although exponentially rising in use and beneficial to patient well-being at end of life, the purpose of PC is often misunderstood and those providing its services frequently report resistance from organizational members. Such resistance can be attributed to tensions between traditional biomedical models of medicine that privilege curative treatment and biosocial models of medicine that holistically care for patients. Thus, this study addresses what tensions PC providers experience in their institutions and what communicative strategies they use at the interpersonal level in managing those tensions. Using structuration theory in tandem with relational dialectics theory, we inductively analyzed semistructured interviews with 24 Circle of Life award-winning PC providers. Findings indicate two dialectics experienced by PC providers in their institutions: the living-dying dialectic and the practicing-advocating dialectic. We conclude that these interpersonal dialectics emerge through interaction in competing medical meaning systems and found that storytelling was a particularly salient form of communication that participants used for management.

Race against Revolution in Central and Eastern Europe

Racism and racial “science” emerged in Europe as an elite response to a worldwide wave of rural insurgencies that began in the era of the French and Haitian Revolutions and continues, in its own way, to this day. In his dialectic of lord and bondsman, g.w.f. Hegel formulated political, economic, and biopolitical ideas from the uprisings occurring in his world, creating a now long-standing dialogue between dialectical theory, including Marxism, and rural insurgency. Racism was part of a biopolitical counterrevolution that sought to maintain the power of elites over insurgent populations. Here Prussia played a central role, as its struggle against the autonomy of migrant agricultural labors took the form of campaigns against the “Polonization” of Prussia. The social scientist Max Weber theorized this struggle in a series of essays on race and rural labor that produced a racism based on culture rather than biology. This cultural racism, like the insurgent discourses it opposes, persists in many forms in Central Europe and around the world.

Exploring role dialectics in inter-service admission handoffs: a qualitative analysis of physician communication

ABSTRACTAdmission handoffs between emergency physicians (EPs) and internal medicine/hospitalist physicians (IMHPs), a frequently occurring form of patient transfer, remain understudied despite their importance to care continuity. Handoffs function as more than simple information transfer; they require a repertoire of interpersonal skills to accomplish tasks and develop professional relationships. Relational Dialectics Theory (RDT), a perspective that asserts social life consists of oppositional and unified discourses present in personal relationships, frames the current study. We use role dialectics to more fully understand the contradictions that emerge from the competing discourses of physician roles. Data were collected from six focus groups consisting of residents and attending physicians working at a large, urban, academic medical center in the Midwest United States. Using a grounded, constant-comparative approach, analysis of transcripts reveals that these physicians encounter two key role dialectics during handoffs: autonomy–collaboration and uncertainty–certainty. Interventions for physicians and hospital decision-makers are recommended.

Student voice as risky praxis: democratising physical education teacher education

ABSTRACTBackground: Student voice agendas have been slow to permeate higher educational institutions. Curricula in universities, like those in primary and secondary education, are still usually made for students by teachers who, while they may have the best interests of the students in mind, rarely if ever engage students in curriculum decision-making. The need for more equitable, dialogic and democratic engagement by students is particularly relevant in the context of teacher education. It has been argued that pre-service teachers should experience democratic practices during their teacher education experiences in order to have the confidence, knowledge and skills to support democratic opportunities in schools.Purpose: Through the participatory action research project described in this paper we sought to position pre-service teachers as pedagogical consultants who would design feedback strategies, gather feedback with faculty and co-construct physical education teacher education (PETE) curricula. We saw this process as a democratic possibility that might create opportunities for pre-service teachers to critique and transform their own educational experiences. In this paper we detail the process we used to support dialogue about teaching and learning between students and faculty members and draw on the perspectives of the students, pedagogical consultant, lecturer and teaching and learning advocate involved in this project.Participants and setting: The project was undertaken with one cohort (77) of pre-service teachers during the final year of a four-year undergraduate PETE programme in an Irish university and focuses on the democratization of one PETE course.Data collection: Data were generated with and by the pre-service teachers, the pedagogical consultant, the lecturer and the regional teaching and learning advocate. The primary data collection methods were interviews and observation.Data analysis: The data were reviewed repeatedly looking for patterns, themes, regularities, paradoxes, variations, nuances in meaning and constraints [Rubin and Rubin 1995. Qualitative Interviewing. The art of Hearing Data. London: Sage]. The authors coded all data sets independently using constant comparison [Glaser 1965. “The Constant Comparative Method of Qualitative Analysis.” Social Problems 12 (4): 436–445] and then shared their processes and subsequent codes. Our analysis engages Greene’s [1988. The Dialectic of Freedom. New York: Teachers College Press] dialectical theory, to explore how naming and holding the tensions involved in this research and pedagogical enterprise was not stultifying but generative.Findings: Three key dialectics were constructed from the data: student–teacher, critical reflection–learning and responsibility–accountability. We speak to each of these themes from the perspectives of the students, the pedagogical consultant and the lecturer who participated in this project.Discussion and conclusion: Our discussion turns to the challenges and benefits associated with the pursuit and realization of democratic possibilities in PETE.

An Attempt to establish Dialectical Theory of Character Education - In the Direction of Enlightenment for Responsible Citizen - positive -

An Attempt to establish Dialectical Theory of Character Education - In the Direction of Enlightenment for Responsible Citizen - positive -

Mothers’ Continuing Bond With the Baby

The nature of the ongoing bond maintained by the bereaved with the deceased has attracted considerable attention, but studies have generally ignored postdeath relationships when loss occurs in utero. The goal of this research was to reach an interpretive understanding of the continuing bond experience among Israeli mothers who underwent feticide, examining the strategies they use in maintaining a postdeath relationship with a child they did not know, whose death they chose and witnessed, within a social context that ignores their loss and forces them to silence their grief. The results highlight two themes: (a) strategies for relinquishing connection with the baby and (b) strategies for maintaining a postdeath relationship. These processes partially correspond with two theoretical views that shed light on interpretation of the results: the dual process of coping with bereavement and relational dialectic theory. Implications of the results to the practice of health providers are outlined.

“He Was Supposed to be With Me for the Rest of My Life”: Meaning-Making in Bereaved Siblings’ Online Stories

ABSTRACTThe present study applied relational dialectics theory to explore the competing discourses that animate bereaved siblings’ online stories about their loss, as well as to understand how the interplay of these discourses constitutes meaning of sibling bereavement. Analysis of over 70 message board postings retrieved from online support groups revealed two main discursive struggles that characterize siblings’ experiences of grief and loss: grieving as deviant behavior versus grieving as a normal process and the deceased as gone forever versus the deceased as still present. These findings illuminate the challenges bereaved siblings face as they attempt to mourn their deceased brother or sister and make sense of their grief within a societal context that oftentimes forgets or overlooks how traumatic it can be to lose a sibling.

“You Can Be Anything But You Can’t Have It All”: Discursive Struggles Of Career Ambition During Doctoral Candidacy

Guided by Relational Dialectics Theory, the goal in this study was to understand how one group of women—married doctoral candidates—talk about and position their career ambition in light of the relational and cultural discourses they encounter. Data consisted of 30 in-depth interviews with married female doctoral candidates. With discourse highlighting the double bind of “you can be anything” and “you can’t have it all,” participants faced conflicting messages suggesting that their career ambition was simultaneously admirable and selfish. Analysis of participants’ talk about their career and relational identities revealed varied attempts to challenge, resist, and transform the restrictive gendered discourses they encountered.

Expert by experience involvement in Intellectual Disability Services: Token inclusion versus protective refusal

Health and Social Care Services have begun to realise the importance of user involvement over recent years. It is argued that this has already borne significant benefits, and given power to users who have unique insights about how services should be delivered. Nevertheless, developing and implementing effective user involvement systems is not always easy. This article explores such challenges within Intellectual Disability Services. It is proposed that consideration of Dialectical Theory can help elucidate the challenges and aid practical solutions.

Enactments at the Edge: Transformational Moments in Psychoanalytically Influenced Couple Therapy

Enactments in psychoanalytic theory and practice have been well described as a dynamic that is co-created between analyst and patient. This article explores this concept in analytic couple therapy, focusing particularly on how it is played out in the context of the three-person dynamics of the couple–therapist system. The author considers that only couple interactions that involve mutually coercive projective identification can be truly described as enactments. By invoking dialectical theory and the notion of the dialectical edge, the author attempts to provide an understanding of the psychic mechanisms involved in the transformational moments relating to enactments that occur at times of heightened tension and ambiguity.

A Novel Framework for Argumentation

In this inspiring book Harald Wohlrapp sets out to provide a foundational account of argumentation, richly supported with examples, case studies, and not without a polemical attitude to much of mainstream argumentation theory. It is a philosophical analysis, rather than a discourse-analytic approach, offering a more parsimonious way of theory construction than is common to much of the research on argumentation, often resorting to typologies (e.g., fallacies, dialogue types), and building on the speech-act theories of Grice and Searle (e.g., pragma-dialectics). In his dialectic and pragmatic theory ‘‘the goal of any argumentation is testing validity claims’’ (p. 235), and Wohlrapp treats knowledge not as static but as coming-to-be and passing away. His pragmatic concept of ‘‘theory’’ is used to construct a minimal theory of argumentation, based on three basic operations (asserting, justifying, and criticizing, pp. 134–161). His study of validity comes with a dichotomy between epistemic and thetic theories (the latter referring to theses where justification does not produce knowledge), and a detailed discussion of various forms of relativism and universalism, touching on themes that have long been discussed in science education. The book also includes a compact but detailed guide to argument analysis (pp. 321–323), and some of the analyzed case studies span dozens of pages. The theory utilizes an abstract concept of ‘‘frames’’ and delineates four ways of handling heterogeneity and overcoming frame differences. Frame criticism raises an objection presupposing an external perspective, frame hierarchization subsumes a divergent frame to another, frame harmonization makes two frames compatible, and frame synthesis provides a superseding higher frame. The successive moves of an argumentative exchange are played out in dialogue events:

Experiencing Couple Relationships in the Line of Fire.

The study aims to explore the way civilians living in the line of fire experience the impact of exposure to warfare on their couple relationships. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 14 couples living on the Israeli side of the border with the Gaza Strip. Four themes emerged: Overall perception of the security situation's impact on the dyadic relationships, dyadic intimacy, role division and decision-making, and Couple's emotional coping: partnership versus separateness. The findings were organized along a continuum between impacted and not-impacted relationships. Couple's position on this continuum was not fixed and could change as a result of to the security situation or marital therapy. The findings were framed in concepts from Dialectic Theory and from the Family Adaptation Models. Implications for couple therapy in these situations were specified.

Meaning matters: a short history of systemic functional linguistics

This paper presents a brief history of systemic functional linguistics (hereafter SFL), taking Halliday's 1961 WORD paper, ‘Categories of the theory of grammar’, as point of departure. It outlines the key strands of thought which have informed the development of SFL, focusing on (i) why it is referred to as systemic, as functional and as systemic functional, (ii) how it developed this orientation with reference to phonology, lexicogrammar and discourse semantics and (iii) how it has extended this perspective to models of context (register and genre) and multimodality (taking into consideration modalities of communication beyond language). The paper ends with a brief note on recent developments and a comment on the dialectic of theory and practice through which SFL positions itself as an appliable linguistics.

The Left and Far Left in American Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis as a Subversive Discipline

This article explores the political commitments of the European-born émigré psychoanalysts and a group of American-born psychoanalysts who had a far left (Communist or fellow traveler) past. It describes the national and local struggle for power and ascendency in these two groups. Also, the article explores the impact that Marxism had on the theory and practice of what I call “American Communist Psychoanalytic Thought Collective,” in particular on pragmatic optimistic and dialectical theory. The downside was rigidity, a sense of certainty, and lack of tolerance of dissent and organizational authoritarian structures. The article ends with a plea to restore the balance between control and risk in order to restore the vitality of psychoanalysis and assure its growth. After years of repression, exclusion, and schism, we need to subvert entrenched power and advance the thesis of roles and the antithesis of insurgency.

Family “Bonds”: Making Meaning of Parent–Child Relationships in Estrangement Narratives

ABSTRACTFramed by relational dialectics theory, the present study takes a critical approach to the discursive navigation of the parent–child relationship. Specifically, this study explores the ways in which the parent–child relationship is constructed in 52 narrative interviews with adult children who are estranged from their parent(s). Contrapuntal analysis revealed that two discourses compete to illuminate meanings of the parent–child relationship. Three interrelated themes that emphasize biological connection, familial webs, and shared history constitute the Discourse of Relationship Endurance (DRE). Four interrelated themes that emphasize the need for relational maintenance, care/support, love, and individualism constitute the Discourse of Temporal Contingency and resist the DRE. The competition of these discourses, in the form of diachronic separation, synchronic interplay, and a discursive hybrid coalesce to making meaning of the parent–child relationship and hold implications for both theory and practice.

Mediação Escolar – Um Projecto De Intervenção Na UMUM Natureza, Função e Actores Implicados

With this communication, we intend to reflect on the specificity of academic mediation, based on dialectical theory / practice, identifying the actors involved and questioning the role that fits each one of them, in order to develop management options, consider alternatives to promote a positive relationship and attain a consensual agreement. We focus on the relevance of implementing a dynamic voluntary and collaborative nature, emphasizing the indispensability of the involvement of all parties involved. So se look up to bring up the value of mediation, i.e., considering it in a complementary way– method / process – resulting from the interaction of regulations with concrete and unexpected situations that force to act according to what is emerging, adapting rules and principles, offering alternative dispute resolution opportunities for conflict. Along with the intention behind the design, as conclusive reflection, it must be looked forward as an action program to implement in order to meet the needs that are being detected and the use of potentialities that are identified.

Money as Relational Struggle: Communicatively Negotiating Cultural Discourses in Romantic Relationships

Using the lens of Relational Dialectics Theory, this study sought to uncover how competing U.S. cultural financial discourses are negotiated in people’s everyday conversations with their romantic partner. The investigation uncovered that in multiple and varied ways, participants understood money to be a major source of tension in their romantic relationships. One overarching discursive struggle animated participants’ financial talk with their partners: “money is everything” versus “money isn’t everything.” Within this struggle, participants communicatively negotiated the cultural value of money in an attempt to marginalize its power and potential negative influences on relational and economic well-being. Although money is critical in helping people meet their basic needs, this study suggests that deemphasizing the importance of money as all-consuming and omnipotent has the potential to alter couples’ financial and relational well-being.

‘Everything Has a Fucking Value’: Negative Dialectics in the Work of Back to Back Theatre

Back to Back theatre is an Australian ensemble of actors perceived to have learning disabilities. Its international profile has advanced substantially in recent years following touring productions of small metal objects (2005), Food Court (2008) and Ganesh Versus the Third Reich (2011). This article considers each of these productions, along with surrounding discourses, within a reflection on the political significance and formal innovations of the work. Motivated by restless dialectical enquiry, Back to Back’s approach to devising and performing is situated within a post-Brechtian lineage that resonates with Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics. The analysis centres on a metatheatrical episode in Ganesh Versus the Third Reich in which the audience is accused of indulging in ‘freak porn’. Analyses of the production frequently highlight the inescapable tension of this moment, while overlooking the unresolved contradictions that underpin it. These contradictions unsettle the imaginary concepts of actor, spectator and learning disability which inform the work’s production and reception. Building on broader analyses of Food Court and small metal objects, and invoking Adorno’s notion of the constellation, I argue that Back to Back’s dialectical procedures pursue the formal (and ultimately frustrating) limits of theatre’s capacity to affirm the extra-ideological value of its objects.