Mariaelena Bartesaghi

Conversation and psychotherapy: how questioning reveals institutional answers

By analyzing session exchanges and questionnaires administered to family therapy clients, this article examines questioning as conversational practice grounded in institutional goals that are therapist-directed and therapist-conceived. In their manifestation in talk and text, therapeutic questions function to replace client accounts with the nosological accounts of institutional psychiatry. The analysis illuminates three ways in which questioning works in the session and then locates these in therapys professional and institutional logic. A critical reflection on psychotherapys questioning practices in a social context concludes the article.

Metacommunication During Disaster Response: “Reporting” and the Constitution of Problems in Hurricane Katrina Teleconferences

“To anticipate and forestall disasters is to understand regularities in the ways small events can combine to have disproportionately large effects.” Taking Weick’s observation to heart, we examine teleconference calls between Louisiana local and state officials and federal officials as Hurricane Katrina gathered momentum by applying action-implicative discourse analysis (AIDA). AIDA highlights the linkages between communication dilemmas and communication practices. We analyze “reporting” as a metacommunicative speech act that implicated pragmatic communication dilemmas of how to act in the face of emerging disaster. We explicate how, during the Hurricane Katrina teleconferences, “reporting” shaped and constrained the formulation of problems and responses by creating a structure that facilitated order while inhibiting the identification of and “talking through” of confusion points, and the communicative sharing of local resources. As such, we identify how sensemaking is interconnected with interactional framing. Reporting thus constituted a “small event” that occurred with “regularity” during the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

Social Construction in Communication Re-Constituting the Conversation

In this chapter, we offer a response to Shotter and Gergen’s (1994) proposal in Communication Yearbook for social construction (SC) as a framework for communication by reconstituting its impact in our field. We provide an overview of SC research in the communication discipline to illustrate the ways in which scholars have developed specifically communication-oriented SC approaches. After wresting SC from the realm of epistemology and placing it into that of practical theory, we select three areas of research and praxis where social constructionist thinking about communication makes a dramatic difference in thinking and practice. These areas—gender, crisis, and therapy— allow us to move beyond the confines of an American academic forum and engage the concerns of an audience of practitioners in a more global exchange. Additionally, these three topics give us the opportunity to address relevant and still pressing critiques that we take to be consequential to both SC and communication: materiality, agency, and critical applications of practical theory that allow social construction scholars to speak politically on matters heretofore considered extradiscursive. A section on future directions for and challenges to social constructionism concludes our reflection.