The article “examines a meeting between family members and a high-school co-director […] for a returning student-mother.” (p. 247)
The article seems to be directed to counseling students or professionals.
The key topic is the conflicting positioning of the girl as a young mother, as a teenager with friends, and as a schoolgirl with homework.
Discourse analysis in this context considers school and family as part of a dialogical, discursive construction, which is consistent with the increasingly blurred boundaries between these two social institutions. These boundaries may be considered as a discursive object themselves.
The author points the attention to the lexical choice of the participants (for example, the use of indexical terms, or the ambiguous referencing to a situation or emotional state).
It looks like the discourse is extremely conditioned by the setting (school), the positioning of the participants (hierarchical, or at least asymmetrical), and by the different goals of the two parts. The dominating goal seems to be the one of the family: everybody in this group tends to minimize the problems, underlining the fact that the overall situation is slowly, but constantly, improving.
One of the techniques used by the co-director as a “call to discursive action” is the “candidate problem plus query” approach.
If I had to quote a phrase of this article, I would probably choose this one:
“How Johnny was positioned through the talk-in-interaction seemed more compelling than Johnny’s positionings.”
I see it as a crucial point of the article, because it draws the attention from the “static presence” to the “constructive evolution” through the discourse.
Along this path, the “meaning” of the discussed topics is not “frozen”, but it is rather set up by talk-in-interaction, which also helps to mark the unmarked silences and references, directing the flow of the discourse. This “control of direction” could be considered as the privileged field of intervention in a counseling process, as opposed to predetermined states or behaviors.
One of those “a-ha” moments regards the elaboration of the problem in a discursive way, as opposed to a clash of positions, or even a negotiation. Personally, as I am becoming more aware of the function(s) of DA, I am starting to see it as an ontologically superior process that overshadows the bare concept of “negotiation” (a term I have always disliked).
I think it would have been very useful to have a more detailed, parallel, “non-verbal” transcription of the meeting. For example, it would have been interesting to know where the brother is looking at when he speaks about Johnny, if the participants are nervous, stressed, tired, etc. The analysis of proxemics would also be very helpful, as a coexisting layer of understanding.
I would have also enjoyed a more concise style by the author, who tends, in my opinion, to quote to many parts of the discourse (see p. 256): the risk of such an approach is to bury under a veil of words the meaningful parts of the discourse and the sought-after “so what” questions (and answers).
Would definitely be interesting to see a video of this session. The role of video in adding a layer of meaning through the analysis of nonverbals is a contested one. Goodwin is doing good work in this area.
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