“I’ll just make sure we’re all on the same page”: Talking fictional worlds into being

This poster will present emerging results from a study of material and discursive information practices in tabletop roleplaying games. The focus will be on the ways in which players collaboratively construct and interact with the fictional worlds of play. A “big and small story” approach, influenced by the ethnomethodological methods of conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis, will be used to analyze the players’ talk as they intersubjectively create and sustain a fictional space of play.

‘I’m calling in regard to my son’: Entitlement, obligation, and opportunity to seek help for others

© 2020 The British Psychological Society From mundane acts like lending a hand to high-stakes incidents like calling an ambulance, help is a ubiquitous part of the human experience. Social relations shape who we help and how. This paper presents a discursive psychology study of an understudied form of help – seeking help for others. Drawing on a corpus of recorded calls to a victim support helpline, I analysed how social relations were demonstrably relevant when callers sought help for others. I used membership categorization analysis and sequential conversation analysis to document how participants used categories to build and interpret requests for help on behalf of others. Categorical relationships between help-seekers, help-recipients, and potential help-providers were consequential in determining whether callers’ requests were justified and if help could be provided. The findings show that different categorical relationships configured seeking help for others as a matter of entitlement, obligation, or opportunity. Analysing the categories participants use in naturally occurring social interaction provides an emic perspective on seeking help for others. This kind of help-seeking offers a fruitful area for discursive psychology to develop new conceptualizations of help and social relations.

‘I’m calling in regard to my son’: Entitlement, obligation, and opportunity to seek help for others

© 2020 The British Psychological Society From mundane acts like lending a hand to high-stakes incidents like calling an ambulance, help is a ubiquitous part of the human experience. Social relations shape who we help and how. This paper presents a discursive psychology study of an understudied form of help – seeking help for others. Drawing on a corpus of recorded calls to a victim support helpline, I analysed how social relations were demonstrably relevant when callers sought help for others. I used membership categorization analysis and sequential conversation analysis to document how participants used categories to build and interpret requests for help on behalf of others. Categorical relationships between help-seekers, help-recipients, and potential help-providers were consequential in determining whether callers’ requests were justified and if help could be provided. The findings show that different categorical relationships configured seeking help for others as a matter of entitlement, obligation, or opportunity. Analysing the categories participants use in naturally occurring social interaction provides an emic perspective on seeking help for others. This kind of help-seeking offers a fruitful area for discursive psychology to develop new conceptualizations of help and social relations.

From abused to abuser, inevitably?: Female inmates accounting for identity categorizations to distance themselves from violence

Female inmates have encountered a great deal of violence during their life course, in most cases starting from abuse in the childhood home. In this study, I examine the accounts given by seven Finnish female inmates who have a two-fold relationship with violence: they have both experienced and perpetrated it. Thus, they have fractured the culturally dominant categorization of woman as nurturing and peaceful. They have an ambivalent relationship with culturally dominant discourses that narrowly depict violent women as either victims or perpetrators. By applying membership categorization analysis, I examine the kinds of identities that participants construct for themselves as both abused and abusers. The women mobilised interrelated yet non-linear and complex categorizations of abused child, substance user, object of intimate violence, perpetrator of violence and inmate. They accounted for their membership in the abused child, substance user and object of intimate violence categorizations, and thus constructed narrative accounts about why they were drawn into the ‘deviant’ category memberships of perpetrator of violence and inmate. By emphasising the category memberships or by resisting them, the participants distanced their identities from violence and were able to establish themselves as moral subjects.

Membership categorization analysis of racism in an online discussion among neighbors

This article addresses relationships between micro and macro aspects of language use through analyzing online interactions among neighbors discussing racism in their neighborhood. Membership categorization analysis supplemented with critical theory highlights how the ways neighbors name, characterize, and position categories orients to their rhetorical and identity goals (to construct reasonable stances, to seem not racist), which in turn motivates alignment with critical, folk, or colorblind ideologies of racism. Thus, ideologies do not determine interactional choices participants make, but rather are constituted by those choices. Findings also illustrate how discursive strategies such as reported speech, absurdity, three-part lists, and metadiscourse support ways that neighbors organize categories and achieve their aims. Additional contributions to this study include demonstrating the utility of membership categorization analysis for analyzing discourses of racism and providing practical insight into how racially diverse groups can have productive conversations about racism. (Racism, ideology, membership categorization analysis)*

Working with gender in psychotherapy: A discursive analysis of psychotherapy sessions with women suffering from bulimia

Sociocultural factors are recognized as among the causes of eating disorders (EDs) in general and bulimia in particular. The social constructions of gender constitute a key factor among these causes and bulimia can then be construed as a response to a failure to meet the social (dominant and normative) expectations of what it means to be a woman, as females remain the majority of people suffering from EDs. This article – informed by a critical feminist perspective – uses the micro-analytic frameworks of conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis to qualitatively examine relevant extracts of three psychotherapy sessions with women suffering from bulimia. The audio-recorded sessions represent systemic and social constructionist therapies and were originally conducted in Polish and Italian. The analysis focuses on how gender and gendered propositions are invoked by the therapist and/or the patient and further worked with in the subsequent turns. The contents of gendered propositions will be identified as well as whether, and if so how, they are interactionally deconstructed in the local context of the interaction. The analysis demonstrates how the female patients rely on categorization work around gender in addressing their own issues. The findings call for therapists’ greater awareness and reflexivity as to their interactional handling of gender in view of patients’ individual experiences.

Dissonant roles: the experience of Maori in cancer care.

© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. Indigenous peoples have poorer health outcomes than their non-indigenous counterparts and this applies to cancer outcomes for Maori in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Differential access to and quality of healthcare contributes to poorer survival rates for Maori. This research provides insight into some of the mechanisms that hinder and facilitate care access. Thirty four people who had undergone cancer treatment (19Maori and 15 non-Maori) were interviewed by two Maori researchers. The analysis of the interview transcripts was informed by membership categorization analysis. This form of analysis attends to the categories that are used and the activities and characteristics associated with those categories. From this analysis it is argued that the classical patient role, or sick role, inadequately captures the kind of role that some Maori take in relation to their healthcare. Maori can also have culturally specific family (whanau) influences and a greater draw towards alternative approaches to healthcare. Dissonant roles contribute to a different experience for Maori. A better understanding of the categories and roles that are relevant to those who have cancer provides opportunities to attenuate the monocultural impacts of healthcare.

Dissonant roles: the experience of Maori in cancer care.

© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. Indigenous peoples have poorer health outcomes than their non-indigenous counterparts and this applies to cancer outcomes for Maori in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Differential access to and quality of healthcare contributes to poorer survival rates for Maori. This research provides insight into some of the mechanisms that hinder and facilitate care access. Thirty four people who had undergone cancer treatment (19Maori and 15 non-Maori) were interviewed by two Maori researchers. The analysis of the interview transcripts was informed by membership categorization analysis. This form of analysis attends to the categories that are used and the activities and characteristics associated with those categories. From this analysis it is argued that the classical patient role, or sick role, inadequately captures the kind of role that some Maori take in relation to their healthcare. Maori can also have culturally specific family (whanau) influences and a greater draw towards alternative approaches to healthcare. Dissonant roles contribute to a different experience for Maori. A better understanding of the categories and roles that are relevant to those who have cancer provides opportunities to attenuate the monocultural impacts of healthcare.