Positioning Subjects, Framing Selves, Making Worlds (book chapter)

Journal of Politeness Research, 2013

This article draws on positioning theory and uses Bamberg's (2005) three-level analytic approach to analyze how identity construction and rela-tional work implicate the other and are co-constitutive processes in local interactions. To that end, it examines a sequence of excerpts taken from an interview involving the author and a Vietnamese woman and analyzes the co-constructed positioning of self and other that developed over the course of the interview conversation. The article focuses on how (non)delicate topics are introduced, responded to, modified and developed as the interviewee reports on past experience and adopts evaluative stances toward topics initiated by the interviewer. The study further highlights how normative ideologies are indexed and reconstituted in such talk, and points to their role in making particular identities relevant and in mobilizing relational work in local interactions.

Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 2000

This article examines how participants in an interview use different linguistic and social resources in order to construct multiple, complex self-representations. It discusses interviews from a critical discourse perspective. In particular, it suggests that interviews are sites of struggle where individuals strive to construct representations of themselves, where they choose among possibilities for stating a particular idea and align themselves with both certain ways of understanding the social world and the people who have historically understood the social world from that perspective. They identify themselves with certain subject positions, the notion of which is thought to capture the idea of social identity. Research questions include the following: what social and linguistic resources are available; how do interviewers delimit the ways in which these resources are used; how do specific instances of resource use function as acts of self-representation. While acknowledging there are some constraints imposed on individual knowledge and other circumstances, this article illustrates how individuals manage to construct multiple, complex, and dynamic representations of themselves within the confines of a highly ritualized form of talk. Fifteen references are included. (Author/KFT) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 44:1, DOI: 10.1111/jtsb.12029, 2014

In this article I develop tools for analyzing the identities that emerge in qualitative material. I approach identities as historically, socially and culturally produced subject positions, as processes that are in a constant state of becoming and that receive their temporary stability and meaning in concrete contexts and circumstances. I suggest that the identities and subject positions that materialize in qualitative material can be analyzed from four different perspectives. They can be approached by focusing on (1) classifications that define the boundary lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’, as (2) participant roles that refer to the temporal aspect of subject positions and outline their meaning for action, as (3) structures of viewpoint and focalization that frame meaning and order to opinions and experiences of the world, and as (4) interactive positions that articulate the roles and identities taken by the participants of communication.

Narrative Inquiry, 2000

Narrative Inquiry, in press *I would like to thank the National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation for their support of this research through a postdoctoral fellowship. I would also like to thank Dan who first inspired me to pursue this work on narrative and self and who has generously shared his expertise.

International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2014

Qualitative researchers must be aware of and explicit about their social background as well as political and ideological assumptions. To facilitate this awareness, we believe that researchers need to begin with their own story as they seek to understand the stories of others. Taking into account the vulnerable act of storytelling, it is salient to consider how to share personal narratives in an authentic way within academic settings. In this article, we share our process and reflections of engaging in reflexive and dialogical storytelling. The focus of the article is the re-storying of one researcher's experience as she and her research team explore her emotions and positionality prior to conducting research on First Nations men's narratives of identity. We integrate a series of methodological lessons concerning reflexivity throughout the re-storying.

Language in Society, 2011

In this paper, we analyze the mutual constitution of frames and selves in interactional practice. We consider two examples, one taken from an Israeli radio call-in program and the other an American tutoring session. Both interactions follow a similar pattern with the caller and student encountering what appears to be a negative construal of their self, to which both respond with unusual interactional moves. In the radio call-in, during a discussion of the corruption of the government, the caller turns the conversation to the notion of "buying a wife." In the tutoring session, during the tutor's mini-lecture on the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the student takes out her mathematics notebook and starts working on math problems. In the discussion of these peculiar interactional moves, we consider the motivations, justifications, and consequences of these interactional moves. In so doing, we suggest how a theory of discursive and interactional framing could augment theories about the social construction of self, including face-work theory. In addition, we describe how a theory of power and agency in interaction rely on and constitute moral worlds.

Qualitative Research, 2018

The article focuses on the opening sequences in qualitative research interviews and in particular examines the interactive work of achieving ‘topic talk’. Using the concepts of activity types, activity frames and contextualization cues, a close-up analysis of eight focus-group interviews and 12 semi-structured interviews was conducted. The findings show that the interviewees display familiarity with the interview as an activity type and how it is to be socially organized. However, to create a joint focus of attention, thereby getting off to an adequate start, the participants also need to agree upon an activity frame and a distribution of positions to achieve a frame switch, which here emerges through the interactional work of announcing, customizing and approving. Accordingly, by highlighting the communicative and practical circumstances of qualitative research interviewing, the opening sequences are considered to be a delicate interactive affair, however, where the interviewer has...

2009

This chapter provides a case-study example of narrative interviewing. It discusses the Biographical Narrative Interpretive Approach and ethical aspects of narrative interviews.

International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 2012

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