Discourse analysis and the epidemiology of meaning

Abstract

This paper delineates a postmodern discourse analysis that is positioned within a semiotic theory of language. This theory of language foregrounds the performative aspects of language usage and provides the theoretical space from which to theorize the interrelationship between social organizations or structure and social agents or individuals. Our version of discourse analysis contends that social structure is enacted (production and reproduction) through the employment of various vocabularies: social structure is not something outside of, behind, or underneath these performances, and we argue that social organization is not produced by external structures operating upon or causing people to adopt certain behaviours. Rather, social structure is an effect of taking up practices and reproducing and modifying them. From this perspective, individuals are constituted by being recruited into and reproducing discursive practices. Hence, by looking at the actual employment of language – its tactical, practice dimensions – one can avoid the usual binary of seeing the person as either the autonomous origin of his or her experience or the ideological pawn of social determination. This methodology calls into question how the narratives or stories that individuals recount are imbricated within relational plays of power, and concomitantly, how subjects reauthorize their own positions. We assert that the methodological challenges of research addressing social injustice cannot be reduced to either: (i) interpersonal relationships between researcher and participants, or (ii) relegated to ‘social structures’ acting upon or outside of individuals.

Talking Whiteness: Representations of Social Justice in One School

“…The discursive strategy of ''Playing in the White World'' is a way of talking that exposes the vision as situated within a dominant model of whiteness. In other words, calling out this ''white world'' in the interview makes visible the significant barriers at BSA by voicing ways such resistances to this dominant model do not appear to be ''available'' to the school culture currently (Allen & Hardin, 2001). Despite a vision residing in ''peopleÕs hearts,'' as expressed by a ''WC'', the naming of and grapping with the effects of being a member of a racialized group was consistently identified by the individuals of color in this study, 16 whereas, being a white person was never raised as consequential or significant in any way by white participants.…”

“…(p. 172) These questions assisted me in identifying discursive strategies and techniques of multiple discourses as well as a provided a way of exposing patterns of language: in particular, how such patterns ''framed by whiteness 436 THE URBAN REVIEW constitute aspects of society and the people within it'' (Taylor, 2001, p. 9). By examining the ways discourses of whiteness circulate within the school together with the consequences (i.e., who is made abject or ''not normal'', what discourses are silenced), we can gain insight into how ''language and institutions are co-created'' (p. 164) and together sit within a socially constructed past (Allen & Hardin, 2001). My aim was to describe this schoolÕs attempts to start from ''a different place,'' as one participant described the purpose of the anti-bias vision.…”

Post-structural feminist interpretive interactionism

“…Post-structuralist ideas can, therefore, be harnessed for the benefit of midwifery research without sacrificing our commitment to improving people's lives by generating knowledge (Mitchell 1996, Heslop 1997, Walker 1997, Francis 2000, Allen and Harding 2001, Stajduhar et al 2001, Fahy 2002). …”

Willingness and Its Relevance to Nursing

“…For the most part, nurses have been passive recipients of other paradigms bestowed upon us by dominant ideologies. 3 Thankfully, nurses are now less receptive to, and more troubled by, our prescribed roles. Rather than passively internalizing our assigned roles, nurses are becoming critically aware of the personal cost to their own well-being.…”