scholarly journals Challenging and destabilizing official discourses: irony as a resistance resource in institutional talk

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-32
Author(s):  
Malin Wieslander
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Sara Pittarello

Two medical encounters taking place in a Northern Italian hospital are analysed in this paper from a qualitative point of view, based on the author’s previous research. The aim is to reveal the strategies adopted by medical interpreters, in these two specific cases, to translate medical terminology and promote/exclude interlocutors’ active participation. This latter aspect is influenced by the way the interaction is socially and linguistically organised and, in particular, by how interlocutors’ utterances are translated. The prevalence of dyadic or triadic sequences and especially the shifts between such communication exchanges are pivotal in fostering or hindering interlocutors’ participation. Furthermore, medical interactions, as a form of institutional talk, enshrine specific expectations, which are mainly of a cognitive nature but may also be affective, as in the two encounters observed. By conveying such expectations and expressions of personal interest, interpreters have proved to contribute to the fair distribution of active participation among primary interlocutors. Hospital ethical approval and subjects’ written informed consent have been obtained.


2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-230
Author(s):  
Anne Elizabeth Clark White

ABSTRACTThis analysis focuses on the institutional talk of sea-kayak guides and their clients in order to understand how guides negotiate the interactional balance of giving orders to maintain a safe and timely excursion while facilitating a fun and recreational experience. Using a mixed-method analysis including Conversation Analysis, ethnography, and statistics, this study examines 576 instances of directives found in video recordings of twenty-five Alaskan kayaking ecotourism excursions and explores the practices guides use in their talk to maintain control of an excursion while not coming across as domineering. By systemically examining directives’ design, directives are found to reveal both their temporal urgency in addition to the precipitating events that necessitate them, such as client behaviors or environmental stimuli. This study's analysis contributes to our understanding of how interactants mitigate face-threatening actions and focuses attention on the interactional work that directives and their accounts achieve in an institutional setting currently underinvestigated (Directives, mixed-methods, Conversation Analysis, ethnography, ecotourism)*


Author(s):  
Susanne Kjaerbeck

AbstractThis article explores narratives as an interactional resource to manage disagreement. On the basis of a detailed analysis of parents' meetings with three educators, three conversational phenomena were found to be particularly relevant to manage disagreement in narratives. The first phenomenon is the participants' manner of negotiating meaning in the narrative. It is demonstrated that the teller (a professional) and not the recipient (the mother) is the one who initiates the display of understanding the told events. In this kind of informal institutional talk, it emphasizes the asymmetry of the encounter. The second phenomenon is the primary speaker's accounting for and providing evidence in an attempt to obtain mutual understanding and to establish professional accountability. However, alignment is not achieved, and therefore the teller's assessments are constructed in a dispreferred format. The third phenomenon is the recipient's responding actions, which are minimal or absent and are used as a strategy for communicating disagreement indirectly. Finally, the relationship between narrative description and sequential and institutional contexts is addressed, and narratives are considered as contextualized as well as contextualizing resources of communication.


Author(s):  
Alison Johnson

AbstractThis paper examines narratives told in police interviews through a case-study approach with three interviews from a small corpus of twenty. The interviews are conducted by different police interviewers in different parts of England. Narratives given by suspects in initial storytelling episodes are examined along with negotiating activity that develops from this start point. We see how lay narratives are transformed into institutionalized and evidential ones and how content is reshaped through negotiation that challenges and transforms narrative material. Negotiations over role, responsibility, resistance, participation, and assessment of evidential value of story elements occur. This activity sometimes recontextualizes (Sarangi 1998; Linell and Sarangi 1998; Iedema and Wodak 1999) and transforms the start-point narrative, giving it evidential value; that is, value in relation to institutional and generic goals of establishing the facts of an alleged crime, for use in any future trial. Transformation is therefore seen as a negotiated (re)construction and recontextualization of narrative detail, part of the (re)productive work of institutional talk that produces an altered reality and responsibility that orients to the institututional rather than individual perspective.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document