However, in terms of my personal narrative, my identity as an ‘adoptee’, both documents are relevant. Documents produce specific realities and the realities they produce have effects.
So I can and do describe myself in a multitude of ways and others can and do describe me in different ways. I am a son, a partner, an academic, a researcher, an employee, a seminar leader, a patient, and so on. The point is to focus on which description, or to put it more technically, which identity, membership category or subject position, among the many, is relevant, the ‘work’ that it does, and how that is tied to specific contexts and connects to broader culture.
Some thoughts on origins
There is no simple creation story about the birth and development of the study of discourse. Rather than see it as a single, unitary, approach to the study of language-in-use, we could see it as a field of research, a collection of vaguely related practices and related theories for analyzing talk and texts, which emerge from a diverse range of sources. It is often seen to emerge, in part, from the tradition of social constructionism. Vivian Burr (2015) offers four ideas that social constructionists often work with:
1 A critical stance towards taken-for-granted knowledge and understanding.
2 That our knowledge of the world is both historically and culturally specific.
3 That this knowledge is created, sustained and renewed by social processes.
4 That our knowledge and actions are intimately related and reflexively inform each other.
Put simply, our understanding of things, concepts or ideas that we might take for granted like ‘sexuality’, ‘madness’ or ‘instincts’ is not somehow natural or pregiven, but rather is the product of human actions and interactions, human history, society and culture. For example, why should childcare responsibilities be something that is tied to specific divisions of society – most often women? Is being a parent a set of practices, skills or resources that are somehow just innate to some divisions of society and similar throughout the globe, or is it culturally and historically specific? Is being a parent somehow only a product of genetics, biology or blood, or is it a set of social knowledges and actions that are practised, that we do parenting? Is our knowledge of being a parent something that all people just know or is this knowledge learned and generated in and through our interactions with others?
So social constructionism asks questions about everything we might take for granted – our identities, practices, knowledges and understandings. Such discussions do not necessarily have to lead us into debates about what is ‘real’ and what is not ‘real’. As Rose notes, ‘The realities that are fabricated, out of words, texts, devices, techniques, practices, subjects, objects and entities are no less real because they are constructed, for what else could they be?’ (1998, p. 168). It offers us a direction of research, one in which we take seriously how parenting (or gender, sexuality, ethnicity, facts, truth, and so on) is produced and negotiated, the practical, active, knowledge and action that is engaged in as part of our everyday lives, and take seriously the historical, social and cultural specificity of these knowledges and actions.
The study of discourse has also been influenced by other related theories and ideas emerging from such sources as linguistics, critical psychology, deconstructionism, phenomenology, poststructuralism, postmodernism, pragmatism, and writers such as Austin, Foucault, Goffman, Garfinkel, Sacks, Schutz and Wittgenstein (to name but a few). You also have a confusing array of contemporary research traditions that focus on, at some points, the analysis of language-in-use in talk and/or texts; this includes researchers undertaking:
Actor network theory.
Conversation analysis (which is seen by some as a ‘child’ of ethnomethodology).
Ethnomethodology.
Ethnography of communication (often connected to anthropology).
Critical discourse analysis (often connected to linguistics).
Critical psychology.
Discursive psychology (which used to be referred to as ‘discourse analysis’).
Foucauldian research (which also used to be referred to as ‘discourse analysis’).
Interactional sociolinguistics.
Membership categorization analysis (which is related to both conversation analysis and ethnomethodology).
Sociology of scientific knowledge (which is sometimes referred to as science and technology studies or social studies of science and technology).
Each tradition has its own assumptions about what counts as ‘appropriate data’ or ‘materials’ to do this type of work with and just how this type of work should be done. Also each tradition has its own terminology. For example, some people talk about ‘discourses’ whereas others refer to ‘interpretive repertoires’; similarly some talk about ‘identities’, others ‘subject positions’, and others ‘categories’ or even ‘membership categories’.
However you conceive of its origins, the best way to get a sense of understanding what the study of discourse is about is to go and read other people’s work. And unfortunately, there are no hard-and-fast rules or methods that are easily translatable into something that may look like ‘a set of hard-and-fast rules or methods’. One writer describes such work as ‘a craft skill, more like sexing a chicken than following a recipe for a mild chicken rogan josh’ (Potter, 2011, p. 189).
Some thoughts on what is to come
This book is designed to offer you access to ‘the craft skill’ of collecting and working with discourse from a range of contexts and a range of perspectives. The next chapter discusses how to generate your research archive – the ‘dataset’ that you will find yourself working with on a day-to-day basis. I offer you a brief tour of the massive range of researchable materials that are potentially available to you. I also provide some examples of how I and other researchers found, collected and analyzed various materials. Chapter 3 then shifts to a discussion of ethics and confidentiality. I outline some general principles you should consider as well as some more detailed guidelines that may help you think about your specific research project. Thinking about the ethical implications of your research is never just a bureaucratic or organizational requirement or hurdle. It is essential that anyone who wants to conduct research has respect for those people they are researching, and demonstrates this with their actions throughout the life of the project.
The next two chapters focus on the generation and transcription of audio and video recordings. Chapter 4 outlines the types of recording devices that are currently available. It then goes on to discuss how to recruit participants, generate research questions and record field encounters. Each of these three issues is discussed in relation to both so-called ‘researcher-prompted data’ – focus group or interview-based research – and so-called ‘naturally occurring data’ – audio- or video-based ethnographies of action and interaction. Chapter 5 then outlines different ways that you can transcribe the recordings that you generate. I use some materials that I have collected – a recording of people preparing a meal – to demonstrate some of the different ways that you can transcribe the same recording.
In Chapter 6, I then focus on how you can study talk and conversations. I show how people, mainly from the research traditions of conversation analysis and discursive psychology, work with audiotapes and videotapes of talk and interaction. Through a discussion of a range of transcripts of talk, I outline some of the key features of talk that people