The dynamics of power and resistance in police interview discourse

This is a study of police interviewing using an integrated approach, drawing on CA, CDA and pragmatics. The study focuses on the balance of power and control, finding that in particular the institutional status of the participants, the discursive roles assigned to them by the context, and their relative knowledge, are significant factors affecting the dynamics of the discourse. Four discursive features are identified as particularly significant, and a detailed analysis of the complex interplay of these features shows that power and control are constantly under negotiation, and are always open to challenge and resistance. Further it is shown that discursive dominance is not necessarily advantageous to participants, due to the specific goals and purposes of the police interview context. A wider consideration of the context illustrates the contribution that linguistics can make to the use of police interview data as evidence in the UK criminal justice system

Reworking research: interactions in academic articles and blogs

The blog is an increasingly familiar newcomer to the panoply of academic genres, offering researchers the opportunity to disseminate their work to new and wider audiences of experts and interested lay people. This digital medium, however, also brings challenges to writers in the form of a relatively unpredictable readership and the potential for immediate, public and potentially hostile criticism. To understand how academics in the social sciences respond to this novel rhetorical situation, we explore how they discoursally recontextualise in blogs the scientific information they have recently published in journal articles. Based on two corpora of 30 blog posts and 30 journal articles with the same authors and topics, we examine the ways researchers carefully reconstruct a different writer persona and relationship with their readers using stance and engagement (Hyland, 2005). In addition to supporting the view that the academic blog is a hybrid genre situated between academic and journalistic writing, we show how writers’ rhetorical choices help define different rhetorical contexts

Nietzsche or Aristotle: The implications for social psychology

YesIn this article, I argue that there is a divide in social psychology between a mainstream paradigm for investigating the flow of power in a largely competitive social life (such as social cognition, social identity theory, and discourse analysis) and a fringe paradigm for investigating the experience of flourishing in conditions of social learning (such as ‘the community of practice metaphor’, ‘dialogical theory’, ‘phenomenological analysis’). Assumptions of power and flourishing demand different conceptions of the self and the social world (e.g. a strategic subject or motivated tactician in a social group versus a reflective learner/artist in a community of practice). The first goal of this article is to reveal the assumptions that lead to this new classification. The second goal is to draw dotted lines to the blind-spots within these paradigms that each reveals. These blind spots are: 1) internal goods could be useful to consider for the power paradigm and external goods for the flourishing paradigm; 2) communicative rationality is underplayed within the power paradigm; while instrumental rationality is underplayed for the flourishing paradigm; 3) judgements and skill are underplayed in the power paradigm; self-interested motivations are underplayed in the flourishing paradigm

Nietzsche or Aristotle: The implications for social psychology

YesIn this article, I argue that there is a divide in social psychology between a mainstream paradigm for investigating the flow of power in a largely competitive social life (such as social cognition, social identity theory, and discourse analysis) and a fringe paradigm for investigating the experience of flourishing in conditions of social learning (such as ‘the community of practice metaphor’, ‘dialogical theory’, ‘phenomenological analysis’). Assumptions of power and flourishing demand different conceptions of the self and the social world (e.g. a strategic subject or motivated tactician in a social group versus a reflective learner/artist in a community of practice). The first goal of this article is to reveal the assumptions that lead to this new classification. The second goal is to draw dotted lines to the blind-spots within these paradigms that each reveals. These blind spots are: 1) internal goods could be useful to consider for the power paradigm and external goods for the flourishing paradigm; 2) communicative rationality is underplayed within the power paradigm; while instrumental rationality is underplayed for the flourishing paradigm; 3) judgements and skill are underplayed in the power paradigm; self-interested motivations are underplayed in the flourishing paradigm

Translating and transforming care: people with brain injury and caregivers filling in a disability claim form

This article examines how the Disability Living Allowance claim form, used in the United Kingdom to allocate £13 billion of disability benefits, translates and transforms disability and care. Twenty-two people with acquired brain injury and their main informal caregivers (n = 44) were video-recorded filling in the disability claim form. Participants disagreed on 26% of the questions, revealing two types of problems. Translation problems arose as participants struggled to provide categorical responses to ambiguous questions and were unable to report contextual variability in care needs or divergences of perception. Transformation problems arose as participants resisted the way in which the form positioned them, forcing them to conceptualize their relationship in terms of dependency and burden. The disability claim form co-opts claimants to translate care and disability into bureaucratically predefined categories, and it transforms the care relationship that it purports to document

Mathematics teacher change in a collaborative environment: to what extent and how

This article reports on a study into how collaborative contexts influence the professional development of an early-career primary teacher, Julia. We describe the process of change by which Julia manages to make her planning to teach mathematics more flexible so as to adapt to student difficulties, and we analyse the role that joint reflection plays in promoting this change. In order to understand the how of this influence, we carried out an analysis of the interactions within the group from Julia’s point of view, following a dialogical approach to discourse. We believe that it is in and through the interactions that Julia constructs her interpretation of the opinions, critiques and suggestions expressed. This interpretation conditions the extent of her involvement and moulds the influence of the context on her professional development. The presence of skilled collaborators (Day, 1993) proved decisive in promoting this development

Exploring language as the “in-between”

Assuming a performative notion of language, this contribution addresses how language functions as a symbolic means and asks for its function for the dialogical self. In accordance with a non-individualistic notion, individuals are related to each other within and by virtue of an in-between. This in-between is called “spacetime of language”: a dynamic evolving across time, perceived as linguistic forms with their chronotopology and the positionings of the performers (self as-whom to other as-whom). With respect to the linguistic forms, the specificity of language functioning is described by Bühler’s term of displacement. The effect of displacement is to generate sharedness by inducing a movement the partners follow, going beyond their actual, sensitive contact. Symbolic displacement, expanding Bühler’s notion, is particularly interesting with regard to the dialogical self: it permits the social construction of several perspectives on self, other, and reality—positions and voices informing the self’s performances