Mommy Groups as Sites for Deliberation in Everyday Speech

Abstract

This study advances our knowledge of the role of metaphor in deliberation in everyday speech (with an emphasis on the role of competition, cooperation, and connection metaphors), which up to now has not been studied as an important discursive strategy in deliberation. Furthermore, the study contributes to our understanding of the discursive practices that happen during deliberation, as opposed to measuring, for example, deliberation's effects. After all, scholars, more and more, are writing about deliberative communication as a means to understand how communities can improve the quality of their communication and decision-making to work through problems. Language strategies, such as metaphor, help deliberators resolve what scholars have referred to as "wicked problems" or problems that are negotiated across time and are latent with competing values and social identities. One example of a citizen-led, localized context, where community members work to address a "wicked problem" is the Salem Kids Group. In this paper, we argue that in the Salem Kids Group's online and face-to-face discussions, three dominant family metaphors, competition, cooperation, and connection, work to structure and define parameters for the group's everyday talk and hold important implications for everyday speech in deliberation.

Deliberative Quality and Expertise: Uses of Evidence in Citizens’ Juries on Wind Farms

“…The rhetorical analysis of deliberation frequently 'focus [es] on the connections among communication, democracy, knowledge and power', and offers insights to how argument impacts 'prudence, practical wisdom and judgment' (Carcasson, Black & Sink 2010: 4-5). Using this methodology, scholars have studied the argumentation of public deliberation in a variety of formal and informal communication settings, including policy and legislative debates, school boards, community public forums, classrooms and online message boards (Adams 2014;Asen 2015;Asen et al 2011;Bates & Lawrence 2014;Drury et al 2016;Levasseur & Carlin 2001).…”

“…To determine how the different content areas functioned within participants' argumentation, the transcript text was analysed closely to track the development of claims, the use of evidence and subsequent conclusions reached. The analysis was discussed within the research team as a whole, in a process common in collaborative, interpretive analysis (Asen et al 2013;Bates & Lawrence 2014). Compared with DQI, which treats deliberation as static (Maia et al 2020), rhetorical analysis of argumentation enables the consideration of particular interactional exchanges between participants, as well as trends within each jury and across the three juries.…”

Practical Wisdom Reasoning through Deliberative Pedagogy

“…Rather, constructive rhetorical analysis positions rhetoric as a site where citizens are able to develop agency (Zarefsky, 2014). In this method, the interplay between text and context is fluid (Lawrence & Bates, 2014). Rhetorical acts are understood in the contexts of the discursive norms that inform political discourse sites but are also contextualized by the exigencies that are created by previous speaking turns.…”

Assessing Deliberative Pedagogy: Using a Learning Outcomes Rubric to Assess Tradeoffs and Tensions

“…One avenue for classroom assessment could be student selfreporting measures to understand some aspects of deliberation's impacts; however, when determining whether deliberation is an effective tool for increasing the quality of deliberation in students about a range of issues, another avenue is assessing what is said in deliberations. More recently, rhetorical scholars have begun to utilize critical-interpretive methods to analyze the qualities and features of deliberation (Asen, 2015;Asen et al, 2011;Asen et al, 2013;Lawrence & Bates, 2014;Levasseur & Carlin, 2001;Steffensmeier & Schenck-Hamlin, 2008). This suggests an opening for utilizing such rhetorical methods to determine the quality of discourse around key principles of deliberative practice.…”