What Makes You Think That You Are a Health Expert? The Effect of Objective Knowledge and Cognitive Structuring on Self-Epistemic Authority

Ethnomethodology research has systematically investigated discursive practices of categorisation, looking at the various ways by which social actors ascribe both themselves and others to identity categories to accomplish various kinds of social actions. Drawing on a data corpus of oncological visits collected in an Italian hospital, involving both native and non-native patients, the present work analyses how participants in these intercultural medical encounters invoke and make relevant social identity categories by the marking of collective pronouns in their talk. Our results showed that whilst institutional identities (e.g. those of the doctors, the local hospital or the Tumour Board) prevailed, categorial formulations related to cultural or linguistic identities were rarely displayed in interactions with non-native patients. Conversational participants made very little of their linguistical or cultural background and when they did so, their cultural and linguistic identities were deployed for rhetorical and pragmatical aims, such as testing and negotiating common knowledge and epistemic authority. This study shows how even speakers’ minimal lexical choices, such as marked pronouns, impact the negotiation of meanings and activities in life-saving sites such as oncological visits.

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Auras of Detection: Power and Knowledge in Drug Prohibition

Contemporary Drug Problems ◽

10.1177/00914509211035487 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 009145092110354

Author(s):

Jennifer J. Carroll

Keyword(s):

Law Enforcement ◽

Knowledge Production ◽

Illicit Drug ◽

Drug Market ◽

Epistemic Authority ◽

People Who Use Drugs ◽

Drug Supply ◽

Political Implications ◽

Starting Point ◽

Drug Checking

Drug checking is an evidence-based strategy for overdose prevention that continues to operate (where it operates) in a legal “gray zone” due to the legal classification of some drug checking tools as drug paraphernalia—the purview of law enforcement, not public health. This article takes the emergence of fentanyl in the U.S. drug supply as a starting point for examining two closely related questions about drug checking and drug market expertise. First, how is the epistemic authority of law enforcement over the material realities of the drug market produced? Second, in the context of that authority, what are the socio-political implications of technologically advanced drug checking instruments in the hands of people who use drugs? The expertise that people who use drugs maintain about the nature of illicit drug market and how to navigate the illicit drug supply has long been discounted as untrustworthy, irrational, or otherwise invalid. Yet, increased access to drug checking tools has the potential to afford the knowledge produced by people who use drugs a technological validity it has never before enjoyed. In this article, I engage with theories of knowledge production and ontological standpoint from the field of science, technology, and society studies to examine how law enforcement produces and maintains epistemic authority over the illicit drug market and to explore how drug checking technologies enable new forms of knowledge production. I argue that drug checking be viewed as a form of social resistance against law enforcement’s epistemological authority and as a refuge against the harms produced by drug criminalization.

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Fieldwork on epistemic authority markers: What we can learn from different types of data

Folia Linguistica ◽

10.1515/flin-2020-2046 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 54 (2) ◽

pp. 405-445 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Karolina Grzech

Keyword(s):

Data Collection ◽

Discourse Markers ◽

Epistemic Modality ◽

Linguistic Meaning ◽

Epistemic Authority ◽

Data Collection And Analysis ◽

The Right To Know ◽

Cognitive Study ◽

The Right

AbstractEpistemicity in language encompasses various kinds of constructions and expressions that have to do with knowledge-related aspects of linguistic meaning (cf. Grzech, Karolina, Eva Schultze-Berndt and Henrik Bergqvist. 2020c. Knowing in interaction: an introduction. Folia Linguistica [this issue]). It includes some well-established categories, such as evidentiality and epistemic modality (Boye, Kasper. 2012. Epistemic meaning: A crosslinguistic and functional-cognitive study. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton), but also categories that have been less well described to-date. In this paper, I focus on one such category: the marking of epistemic authority, i.e. the encoding of “the right to know or claim” (Stivers, Tanya, Lorenza Mondada & Jakob Steensig. 2011b. Knowledge, morality and affiliation in social interaction. In Stivers et al. 2011a). I explore how the marking of epistemic authority can be documented and analysed in the context of linguistic fieldwork. The discussion is based on a case study of Upper Napo Kichwa, a Quechuan language spoken in the Ecuadorian Amazon that exhibits a rich paradigm of epistemic discourse markers, encoding meanings related to epistemic authority and distribution of knowledge between discourse participants. I describe and appraise the methodology for epistemic fieldwork used in the Upper Napo Kichwa documentation and description project. I give a detailed account of the different tools and methods of data collection, showing their strengths and weaknesses. I also discuss the decisions made at the different stages of the project and their implications for data collection and analysis. In discussing these issues, I extrapolate from the case study, proposing practical solutions for fieldwork-based research on epistemic markers.

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The Lawyer and the Mental Health Expert in the Courtroom

Family Process ◽

10.1111/j.1545-5300.1982.379_1.x ◽

1982 ◽

Vol 21 (3) ◽

pp. 379-380

Author(s):

ISRAELA MEYERSTEIN

Keyword(s):

Mental Health ◽

Health Expert ◽

Mental Health Expert

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Epistemic competitions over Jewish Holocaust survivors’ stories in interviews

Discourse & Society ◽

10.1177/0957926521992148 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 095792652199214

Author(s):

Kim Schoofs ◽

Dorien Van De Mieroop

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Holocaust Survivors ◽

Identity Work ◽

Epistemic Authority ◽

World War ◽

Master Narratives ◽

The Social ◽

Specialist Knowledge ◽

Expert Status ◽

The One

In this article, we scrutinise epistemic competitions in interviews about World War II. In particular, we analyse how the interlocutors draw on their epistemic authority concerning WWII to construct their interactional telling rights. On the one hand, the analyses illustrate how the interviewers rely on their historical expert status – as evidenced through their specialist knowledge and ventriloquisation of vicarious WWII narratives – in order to topicalise certain master narratives and thereby attempt to project particular identities upon the interviewees. On the other hand, the interviewees derive their epistemic authority from their first-hand experience as Jewish Holocaust survivors, on which they draw in order to counter these story projections, whilst constructing a more distinct self-positioning to protect their nuanced personal identity work. Overall, these epistemic competitions not only shaped the interviewees’ identity work, but they also made the link between storytelling and the social context more tangible as they brought – typically rather elusive – master narratives to the surface.

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