Anna De Fina

Analysing narratives as practices

Departing from a critique of the conventional paradigm of narrative analysis, inspired by Labov and the narrative turn in social sciences, we propose an alternative framework, recommending combining a focus on the local occasioning of narratives in interaction with the analysis of their participation in a variety of macro-processes, through mobilizing the notions of social practice, genre and community of practice.

Discourse and Identity Construction

We describe and discuss discursive approaches emerging over the last 50 years that in one way or another have contributed to identity studies. Approaching identities as constructed in and through discourse, we start by differentiating between two competing views of construction: one that moves progressively from existing “capital-D” social discourses to the domain of identity and sense of self and the other working its way up from “small-d” discursive practices to identities and sense of self as emerging in interaction. We take this tension as our point of departure for a discussion of different theoretical and analytical lenses, focusing on how they have emerged as productive tools for theorizing the construction of identity and for doing empirical work. Three dimensions of identity construction are distinguished and highlighted as dilemmatic but deserving prominence in the discursive construction of identity: (a) the navigation of agency in terms of a person-to-world versus a world-to-person directionality; (b) the differentiation between self and other as a way to navigate between uniqueness and a communal sense of belonging and being the same as others; and (c) the navigation of sameness and change across one’s biography or parts thereof. The navigation of these three identity dilemmas is exemplified in the analysis of a stretch of conversational data, in which we bring together different analytic lenses (such as narrative, performative, conversation analytic, and positioning analysis), before concluding this chapter with a brief discussion of some of the merits and potential shortcomings of discursive approaches to identity construction.

Code-switching and the construction of ethnic identity in a community of practice

In the past twenty years the existence of a sense of ethnic belonging among immigrant groups of European ancestry in the United States has become the focus of frequent debates and polemics. This article argues that ethnicity cannot be understood if it is abstracted from concrete social practices, and that analyses of this construct need to be based on ethnographic observation and on the study of actual talk in interaction. This interactionally oriented perspective is taken to present an analysis of how Italian ethnicity is constructed as a central element in the collective identity of an all-male card playing club. Linguistic strategies, particularly code-switching, are central in this construction, but their role becomes apparent only when language use is analyzed within significant practices in the life of the club. Code-switching into Italian is used as an important index of ethnic affiliation in socialization practices related to the game and in official discourse addressed by the president to club members through the association of the language with central domains of activity. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor of this journal, Barbara Johnstone, for their insightful suggestions, which have substantially contributed to the shaping of this article.

Introduction: Interviews vs. ‘natural’ contexts: A false dilemma

The popularity of interviewing as a method of data collection in the social sciences is a recognized fact. In their survey of qualitative research paradigms and methods, Denzin and Lincoln (2004:353) declare that “the interview is the favorite methodological tool of the qualitative researcher.” And, describing data-collection techniques in sociolinguistics and dialectology, Fuller (2000:388) argues that “much of the data in the field comes from interviews.” These assertions are hardly surprising given the central role that interviews have assumed as an essential part of the toolkit of the qualitative researcher since the early decades of the twentieth century (Fontana & Frei 2004). Interviews are the most common cross-disciplinary research instruments since they are widely used by investigators in fields as diverse as education, anthropology, sociology, social psychology, and social history, where they serve as vital research methods alone or in combination with other techniques such as participant observation. Given the centrality of interpretive and qualitative research paradigms in sociolinguistics, ethnography, linguistic anthropology, and narrative studies, the interview has acquired an even more prominent place for investigation in these disciplines. However, this research method and tool for collecting data has been the object of extremes of confidence and criticism. On one side there are those who try to erase the interactional context of the interview, believing that it is both possible and desirable to make participants forget about the event so that interviewers can access their “natural” behavior. On the opposite side there are those who argue that interviews are “inauthentic” and “artificial” contexts for data collection and therefore it is best to avoid them completely. In both extremes, the interview ends up being a problem to overcome. One unfortunate result of these attitudes has been that the interview as a real communicative event has been understudied. Our objective with this special issue is to contribute to redressing this tendency by drawing attention to the need for, and advantages of, the research interview as a legitimate interactional encounter, and taking narrative as our focus. In doing this we build on a small but significant cross-disciplinary body of mostly recent scholarship that has analyzed a variety of issues related to the use of semi-structured and open-ended interviews in qualitative research, and that has recognized the crucial importance of placing interview data in context.

Orientation in Immigrant Narratives: The Role of Ethnicity in the Identification of Characters

Every year, thousands of undocumented Mexican workers enter the United States. Their presence, together with the settlement of undocumented and legal immigrants from many other countries, constitut...

Language problem or language conflict? Narratives of immigrant women's experiences in the US

This article investigates how Latin American women who migrate to the US frame their language experiences through narratives told in sociolinguistic interviews. As narratives reflect and shape social realities and relationships, narrative analysis can illuminate how individuals position themselves relative to language obstacles and ideologies, thus providing insights into processes that are central to the migration experiences of millions of individuals. We found that women related two types of stories: language conflict narratives, in which language was presented as part of a broader ethnic or social conflict, and language difficulty narratives, which focused on individual, personal problems with language experienced by protagonists. Our analysis illustrates how interviewers’ questions, and the interviewees’ language conflict narratives in particular, confirm, reproduce, but also contest central language ideologies and dominant discourses about migration in the US.

Who tells which story and why? Micro and macro contexts in narrative

This article focuses on the inter-relations between storytelling and micro and macro contexts. It explores how narrative activity is shaped by and shapes in unique ways the local context of interaction in a community of practice, an Italian American card-playing club, but also illustrates how the storytelling events that take place within this local community relate to wider social processes. The analysis centers on a number of topically linked narratives to argue that these texts have a variety of functions linked to the roles and relationships negotiated by individuals within the club and to the construction of a collective identity for the community. However, the narrative activities that occur within the club also articulate aspects of the wider social context. It is argued that, in the case analyzed here, local meaningmaking activities connect with macro social processes through the negotiation, within the constraints of local practices, of the position and roles of the ethnic group in the wider social space. In this sense, narrative activity can be seen as one of the many symbolic practices (Bourdieu 2002 [1977]) in which social groups engage to carry out struggles for legitimation and recognition in order to accumulate symbolic capital and greater social power.This article focuses on the inter-relations between storytelling and micro and macro contexts. It explores how narrative activity is shaped by and shapes in unique ways the local context of interaction in a community of practice, an Italian American card-playing club, but also illustrates how the storytelling events that take place within this local community relate to wider social processes. The analysis centers on a number of topically linked narratives to argue that these texts have a variety of functions linked to the roles and relationships negotiated by individuals within the club and to the construction of a collective identity for the community. However, the narrative activities that occur within the club also articulate aspects of the wider social context. It is argued that, in the case analyzed here, local meaningmaking activities connect with macro social processes through the negotiation, within the constraints of local practices, of the position and roles of the ethnic group in the wider social space. In this sense, narrative activity can be seen as one of the many symbolic practices (Bourdieu 2002 [1977]) in which social groups engage to carry out struggles for legitimation and recognition in order to accumulate symbolic capital and greater social power.

Researcher and informant roles in narrative interactions: Constructions of belonging and foreign-ness

In this article I focus on the influence of researcher/informant roles on the types of narratives that are produced and on the ways in which storytelling interactions are managed in research contexts. In particular, I show that storytelling activities and story types both reflect and shape relationships among participants based, among other factors, on their local management of situational and portable identities. I argue that one important methodological consequence of the analysis is the recognition of the fact that all data produced in interaction (including interviews) are irreducibly context-bound and that therefore an analytical separation between observer and observed is impossible. I also discuss how a treatment of the research event and of storytelling in it as a real interactional encounter can shed light on issues related to the insider-outsider status of the researcher and the Observers Paradox (Labov 1972b). (Narrative, interviews, interactional roles, immigrants, identities).

Introduction: Narrative analysis in the shift from texts to practices

The point of departure for this special issue is the recent shift within discourse and sociolinguistic narrative analysis from a long-standing conception of (oral, cf. natural, nonliterary) narrative as a well-defined and delineated genre with an identifiable structure toward the exploration of the multiplicity, fragmentation, and irreducible situatedness of its forms and functions in a wide range of social arenas. We can refer to this shift as a move away from narrative as text (i.e., defined on the basis of textual criteria and primarily studied for its textual make-up) to narrative as practice within social interaction. For a lot of the work here, context remains a key concept and although there is an undeniably long-standing tradition of contextualized studies of narrative (e.g., ethnography of communication in studies such as Bauman 1986 and Hymes 1981, among others) there are distinct elements in this latest shift that in our view qualify it as a ‘new’ turn to narrative: 1. An increasing acceptance of narrative as talk-in-social interaction informed by conversation analysis and ethnomethodology. This has had profound implications for the definition of narrative, its exigencies, and the analytical tools deemed appropriate for its investigation (e.g., De Fina and Georgakopoulou forthcoming; Georgakopoulou 2007; chapters in Quasthoff and Becker 2004; Schegloff 1997). 2. An emphasis, derived from recent theories of context and genre (e.g., Bauman 2001), not just on the contextualized but also on the contextualizing aspects of narrative. In this sense, narrative is being studied both for the ways in which its tellings are shaped by larger sociocultural processes at work and for how it provides organization for the interactive occasions on which it occurs. Furthermore, although the notion of context remains elusive, contested, and indeterminate, there is now consensus on the view of context not as a static surrounding frame but as a set of multiple and intersecting processes that are mutually feeding with talk. The move away from context as a pre-existing ‘setting’ toward dynamic notions of social spaces that may be conventionally associated with certain kinds of language use and norms, but also prone to heterogeneity and fragmentation, has been instrumental in looking at both narrative tellings in situ and at ways in which space is more or less subtly referred to, reworked, and constructed anew within narrative plots (see contributions in Baynham and De Fina 2005). 3. An increasing commitment to social theoretical concerns (mainly within the framework of cultural studies). This is particularly evident in proliferating work on narrative and identities (e.g., De Fina 2003; Georgakopoulou 2002, 2007; De Fina et al. 2006) that has variously problematized, de-essentialized, or added nuance to the widely held view that narrative is a privileged communication mode for making sense of the self. Research in this area has also blurred the boundaries between narrative analysis and narrative inquiry, thus shifting the emphasis of the former from narrative as an end to narrative as a means to an end.

An analysis of Spanish bien as a marker of classroom management in teacher-student interaction☆

Abstract This paper analyzes the function of the Spanish marker bien in classroom interaction. It is argued that bien has two main functions: a transitional and an evaluative one. Transitional bien is used to signal upcoming transitions between or within activities, while evaluative bien is used to signal a positive response by the teacher in the feedback move of an initiation/response/feedback cycle. Thus, transitional bien is essentially a contextualization cue since by signalling changes in classroom activities it leads to realignments and redefinitions of the situation by participants. The use of bien in classroom discourse is compared to its use in conversation and similarities and differences are discussed. It is argued that the study of markers within specific ‘language games’ can provide important elements to general analyses of the same markers since it allows an investigation of the situational variables that influence variations in their function and meaning.