Shadow Subjects: A Category of Analysis for Empathic Stancetaking

Abstract

This article analyzes conversational and material data collected during 12 months of fieldwork at a secondary school in southeast Spain. I focus on the cultivation of stance positions—particularly around gender equality—involving “shadow subjects”: imagined discursive figures that both prompt and constrain empathy for others whose rights have been violated. Within this multicultural context, Moroccan immigrant youth get positioned as defenders of outdated patriarchal mores. I argue that the semiotic burdening and elaboration of stance on behalf of shadow subjects makes this possible and points to inherent biases in operationalizing “universal” egalitarian values among ideologically and experientially diverse communities.

Stance-taking and participation framework in museum commenting platforms: On subjects, objects, authors, and principals

“…The engraved texts can also be viewed as supplying a convention for establishing ‘attributability of utterances’ (Du Bois 2007:146), which in turn underlies stance-taking and participation in the public sphere. From a Goffmanesque perspective, Du Bois’ attributability can be seen as closely associated with marking principalship, and thus the MCP emerges also as an institutional device whereby visitors are afforded the opportunity to ‘own’ what they write (see also Taha 2017). Furthermore, these texts also supply an illustration of the generic expectations of visitors’ discourse: short, optimistic, and signed/attributed morally suffused utterances.…”

“…As they echo the museum's original negative evaluation of the Holocaust, they align with it. From the perspective of production format, this may be understood as a form of shared principalship: in order to produce personally owned moral stances, museumgoers appropriate and echo previously articulated, institutionally mandated, stances (see Taha 2017, for a similar pattern in the case of school students’ stances in a social justice awareness educational program).…”

“…First, the burgeoning focus on stance as an object of study has sometimes resulted in under-specified and amorphous uses of the term. The delimitation of stance—the identification of constituting factors that distinguish stance-taking from other communicative actions and mark it as a specific and bounded category—is an analytic challenge (Taha 2017).…”

“…As Goffman (1981) demonstrates, in contrast to this popular (Western) understanding of subjectivity, the subject, or speaker, may be a bifurcated and multi-layered construct. For example, in a study of stance-taking in the context of social justice and awareness classes, Taha (2017) demonstrates how school students are called upon to express stances by evoking and performing the ‘shadow subjects’ of victims of social oppression. Thus, while students’ moral and affective stances are understood as expressions of their principalship, that is, their own personal learning and commitment, they are predicated on the performance of multiple imagined subjectivities of others.…”

Market Stance: Navigating Face‐Threatening Terrain in Indian Real Estate

“…Stance‐taking involves positioning a subject with respect to both objects of discourse and other subjects (including nonpresent ones, e.g., Taha ). As John Du Bois (, 169) writes, stance is a means “through which social actors simultaneously evaluate objects, position subjects (themselves and others), and align with other subjects with respect to any salient dimension of value in the sociocultural field.” This conceptualization is congruent with what Goffman (, 5) terms a “line”: “a pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts by which [a person] expresses his view of the situation and through this his evaluation of the participants, especially himself.” Such patterns of stances are further linked to what Goffman (, 5) calls “face,” which is the “positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact.” Both “line” and “face” are interactionally achieved and relational.…”