Derek Edwards

Death and Furniture: the rhetoric, politics and theology of bottom line arguments against relativism

and participants in the 15th Discourse and Reflexivity Workshop (University of Sheffield, September 1992) for making helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. In this version pages are counted according to the published numbers with breaks following the published version.

Discourse: Noun, verb or social practice?

This chapter comments on some of the different senses of the notion of discourse in the various relevant literatures and then overviews the basic features of a coherent discourse analytic programme in Psychology. Parker’s approach is criticized for (a) its tendency to reify discourses as objects, (b) its undeveloped notion of analytic practice and (c) its vulnerability to common sense assumptions. It ends by exploring the virtues of ‘interpretative repertoires’ over ‘discourses’ as an analytic/theoretical notion.

Social Representations and Discursive Psychology: From Cognition to Action

This article compares and contrasts the way a set of fundamental issues are treated in social representations theory and discursive psychology. These are: action, representation, communication, cognition, construction, epistemology and method. In each case we indicate arguments for the discursive psychological treatment. These arguments are then developed and illustrated through a discussion of Wagner, Duveen, Themel and Verma (1999) which highlights in particular the way the analysis fails to address the activitiesdone by people when they are producing representations, and the epistemological troublesthat arise from failing to address the role of the researcher’s own representations.

Moaning, whinging and laughing: the subjective side of complaints

Indirect complaint sequences are examined in a corpus of everyday domestic telephone conversations. The analysis focuses on how a speaker/complainer displays and manages their subjective investment in the complaint. Four features are picked out: (1) announcements, in which an upcoming complaint is projected in ways that signal the complainer’s stance or attitude; (2) laughter accompanying the complaint announcement, and its delivery and receipt; (3) displacement, where the speaker complains about something incidental to what would be expected to be the main offence; and (4) uses of lexical descriptions such as ‘moan’ and ‘whinge’ that formulate subjectivity, investment, and a disposition to complain, and are generally used to counter a complaint’s evidential basis or objectivity. Laughter and irony provide complaint recipients with response cues, and are used in ways that can strengthen as well as undermine a complaint’s factual basis and seriousness.

Joint remembering: Constructing an account of shared experience through conversational discourse

The object of study is the ways in which people construct a joint account, in conversational discourse, of a particular common experience. The data source is the recorded conversation of a group of eight people who are recalling together the substance and storyline of the feature film “E.T.,” which they had all recently seen. Conversational joint remembering is described in terms of three hierarchically related functions: (1) framing and orientation—the establishment of criteria for joint recall, and the ways in which individuals accordingly locate themselves vis‐a‐vis the unfolding account; (2) correspondence functions—including a “semantic function” through which experiences are put into words, and a “continuity function” which concerns the ordering of things recalled; and (3) validation function—a variety of means by which the joint account is constructed as a mnemonic consensus, jointly agreed. These three functions and their subcomponents are derived from a qualitative, content‐oriented treatment of ...

Discourse, cognition and social practices: the rich surface of language and social interaction

Discursive psychology (DP) approaches discourse not as the product or expression of thoughts or mental states lying behind or beneath it, but as a domain of public accountability in which psychological states are made relevant. DP draws heavily on conversation analysis in examining in close empirical detail how ostensibly psychological themes are handled and managed as part of talk’s everyday interactional business. A brief worked example is offered, in which the intentionality of a person’s actions is handled in the course of police interrogation, in ways that perform police work. Degrees of intentionality are partialled out with regard to specific actions or components of actions, and with regard to how actions are described in ways that map onto how crime categories are defined in law. Cognitive states are generally relevant in discourse in the same manner, as participants’ concerns with regard to action categories and accountability on and for the occasions they are invoked.

Facts, norms and dispositions: practical uses of the modal verb would in police interrogations

Two uses of the modal verb would in police interrogation are examined. First, suspects use it to claim a disposition to act in ways inconsistent with whatever offence they are accused of. Second, police officers use it in challenging the suspect’s testimony, asking why a witness would lie. Both uses deploy a form of practical inferential reasoning from norms to facts, in the face of disputed testimony. The value of would is that its semantics provide for a sense of back-dated predictability with regard to the actions in question. Further, although police officers provide minimal acknowledgement of suspects’ uses of the term, suspects tend to provide a response when police officers use it. This difference is explained by the different actions being done in each case - normative self assessments by suspects, and challenges by police officers - and their interactional and institutional relevance in and for police pursuit of factual testimony.

Discursive psychology, focus group interviews and participants' categories

We welcome this opportunity to discuss the application of discourse analytical approaches to the concerns of the British Journal of Developmental Psychology and its readership. Our remarks are directed (by editorial invitation) at one specific article (Korobov & Bamberg, 2004), but are designed to have a more general relevance to the relationships between data and analysis in discursive psychology (DP). It is important at this point, before critically engaging with the article, to emphasize that we endorse and encourage the kind of work that it represents. We aim to use this discussion as a basis for general remarks on how to apply DP to everyday language and social interaction, including interactions with children and adolescents, and to raise some problems with the use of interview and focus group materials. We examine in turn: (1) the article’s overall framework of theory and method, and (2) the nature of the data (focus group discussions) and its analysis in terms of ‘maturity’. Discursive developmental psychology, to the extent that such an enterprise has already begun, is not the study of how child discourse develops. It might overlap with that, but it has a much wider remit. Any study of mental life, or of the psychological characteristics of persons, has to be based on public materials and procedures, whether those of the psychological laboratory or of everyday life. This applies as much to the contents of consciousness as to the workings of memory, moral reasoning or gendered identities. In DP, however, this is not conceived as a matter of making private things public, nor internal events externally available. Rather, we approach the assumption of an inner–outer relationship (e.g. between thought and word) in an inverted manner. We begin with discourse practices – with observable, recordable, collections of everyday talk – and examine the ways in which psychological matters including thoughts, beliefs and attitudes, are topicalized, handled or implied, in that talk. It is not an attempt to deny the existence of thoughts and feelings. Rather, it is an approach to language and social interaction that refuses to treat talk as the overt expression or manifestation of a life within. 1 The nature and workings of a ‘life within’ are the kinds of

Bill and Monica: Memory, emotion and normativity in Clinton's Grand Jury testimony

We examine links between factual recall, emotion and constructions of normativity in narrative accounts, using as an empirical case President Clintons descriptions of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. We analyse those accounts in the sequences of talk in which they occurred, under Grand Jury cross-examination. Clintons accounts of Lewinsky were part of how he attended to issues alive in court concerning himself, including his possible exploitation and abuse of power in an asymmetrical relationship; his motives, sincerity, credibility and intentions; and, indirectly, his fitness for office as President. Analysis focuses on how Clintons portrayal of Lewinsky accomplished a reflexive portrayal of himself, not as mendacious and exploitative, but as caring, responsible, sincere, rational and consistent, while reducing the scope and implications of their admitted sexual relationship. This study is linked to a broader discursive psychology of factual description, memory, mental and emotional states, and their relevance to the larger business of institutional settings.

Reconstructing context: The conventionalization of classroom knowledge

Extracts of classroom discourse involving teachers and groups of 9‐year‐olds are analyzed in terms of what they reveal about the establishment of shared knowledge between teacher and pupils. This shared knowledge is identified with the “context” of the discourse as this develops through time, context being defined as “intermental,” in Vygotskys (1978) terms, that is to say, as existing intersubjectively for the participants rather than objectively for the investigators. The analysis focuses upon a specific aspect of the process: the way in which classroom events are recalled and reconstructed (after Bartlett, 1932). These reconstructions serve as the shared conceptions and understandings that are then the context for further teaching and learning. The notion of education as an inculcation of pupils into an established culture of educated thought and practice is offered as a necessary synthesis of the usually opposed child‐oriented and transmissional approaches to education.