‘Who decided this?’: Negotiating epistemic and deontic authority in systemic family therapy training

In this article we illustrate how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic authority within systemic family therapy training. Adult education principles and postmodern imperatives have challenged trainers’ and trainees’ asymmetries regarding knowledge (epistemics) and power (deontics), normatively implicated by the institutional training setting. Up-to-date, we lack insight into how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic rights in naturally occurring dialog within training. Drawing from discursive psychology and conversation analysis, we present an analysis of eight transcribed, videotaped training seminars from a systemic family therapy training program, featuring three trainers and eleven trainees. Our analysis highlights the dilemmatic ways in which participants resist and affirm the normatively implicated trainers’ deontic and epistemic authority. Trainers are shown as mitigating directives and trainees as resisting them, with both displaying (not)knowing, while attending to concerns about (a)symmetry. We discuss our findings’ implications for systemic family therapy training.

The epistemics of advice-giving sequences: Epistemic primacy and subordination in advice rejection

Although advice is routinely offered in ordinary conversation, commentators and analysts have treated it as a special or delicate type of action, noticing a number of challenges associated with both providing and receiving it. In this article, I first describe the most basic social-sequential context for giving advice and explicate how the formulations speakers use to offer advice are adapted to the distinct epistemic configurations (and other characteristics) that characterize that context. Drawing on Jefferson and Lee’s (1992) observations regarding ‘troubles tellings’, I argue that speakers typically offer advice when a co-participant reports an insoluble trouble or problem to one who (may or claims to) possess special knowledge about the domain of trouble. I show how this epistemic configuration constitutes a ‘home environment’ for advice-giving (i.e. a place where advice may be relevantly offered) and discuss how speakers vary the design of their advice (e.g. using different grammatical forms) to adapt to the sequential environments that entail different epistemic configurations. Finally, I consider how alternative, contrasting responses to advice manage (e.g. by ratifying or challenging) the epistemic framework set in motion by advice-giving.

Gestural repair in Mandarin conversation

Ever since Charles Goodwin’s seminal works on gaze, there has been a long-standing interest in Conversation Analysis in the interrelationship between talk and bodily conduct in the accomplishment of social action. Recently, a small but emerging body of research has explored the ways in which embodied conduct figures in the organization and operations of repair. In this article, I take up a similar theme and investigate the interaction between talk and iconic gestures in same-turn self-initiated repair in Mandarin conversation. The phenomenon I examine concerns the use of what I call “gestural repair.” The analysis focuses on how such repair can intertwine with talk in multi-stage operations in the progressivity and resolution of repair. The data are drawn from 50 hours of naturally-occurring conversations collected in China. Some unique features of such gestural repair observed in the Mandarin data are also discussed.