http://das.sagepub.com Discourse & Society RSS feed -- current issue January 2010 Discourse & Society 0957-9265 http://das.sagepub.com:80/icons/banner/title.gif http://das.sagepub.com http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/21/1/5?rss=1 This article examines how national and immigrant identities are discursively constructed through the use of oral histories, using a corpus of 15 oral-history interviews (25 hours of transcribed talk) collected from members of the Irish Association of Manitoba. Using a simplified discourse-historical approach, the analysis focuses on content, constructive strategies of assimilation and dissimilation, and the linguistic means by which those strategies are achieved, using Wodak et al.’s (1999) framework from an in-depth study of Austrian discourse and identity. While analysis of participants’ discourse about identity echoed much of the current theoretical knowledge available about identity — that it is a discursive construction revealed in narratives, that it is provisional and negotiated with others — the analysis also showed that for specific subgroups such as immigrants, identity construction is context-dependent, particularly for diasporic groups.

]]> Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:45:46 PST info:doi/10.1177/0957926509345066 1 21 25 2010-01-01 5 Articles http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/21/1/27?rss=1 In the academy and society at large, there remains an area of discourse largely deemed too marginal to analyze at any length: openly racist speech. It remains unexamined, in part, because much attention has been given to ‘covert’ racism. Recently, technology has allowed openly racist groups to shift strategies for creating and maintaining their own identity. Conventional wisdom would assume that these groups use referential or direct means of indexing identity. Using theories of discourse, this analysis demonstrates that even the most ‘traditional’ racists employ a complex pattern of voicing to indirectly index a ‘neo-traditional’ racist identity. These findings illustrate that within these communities, there is not only a sense of whiteness, but also a set of practices delineating ‘good’ and ‘bad’ white identity. Implications of these findings are discussed in the light of political and identity practices.

]]> Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:45:46 PST info:doi/10.1177/0957926509345071 1 21 39 2010-01-01 27 Articles http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/21/1/41?rss=1 Beggars are a group of people for whom making a successful speech is of paramount importance. Therefore, social and linguistic analysis of their speech seems to be a new and much needed line of inquiry that has not yet been elucidated. To this end, relying on Labov’s model of personal narrative, the present article is an attempt to examine linguistically how some beggars manage to publicly beg in mosques in Iran. Five stories told by different needy male speakers were transcribed and translated into English. Using Positioning Theory as a heuristic tool, the study also lends insights into how the beggars shape the formulation of the relations between self and others while recounting their specific experiences. In fact, the study indicated that the participants took advantage of narrative as a powerful cultural discourse through which they denied their identity while assuming and negotiating different positions.

]]> Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:45:46 PST info:doi/10.1177/0957926509345069 1 21 57 2010-01-01 41 Articles http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/21/1/59?rss=1 This article examines the way male suspects deny accusations of assaulting women in interrogations by police officers. It draws on a large corpus of British police interrogation materials, and uses conversation analysis to shed light on the location and design of, and responses to, suspects’ ‘category-based denials’ that they are not ‘the kind of men who hit women’. Two sections of analysis identify how, first, such denials routinely follow police officers’ direct questions about violent behaviour, and, second, how they become embedded in extended narratives that are not directly describing violence. In contrast to other discourse-analytic studies of men’s accounts of violence towards women, the article unpacks the component features that comprise what others might label grossly as the ‘discourse of gendered violence’. Rather than see how such ‘discourses’ operate in interview contexts, it shows how suspects construct, in a high-stakes setting for a particular purpose, different categories of men, claiming membership in one (who do not hit women) by recruiting the notion of the other (who do). Thus, in addition to its contribution to the study of gender and violence, the article takes new steps in the ongoing development of membership categorization and conversation analysis, showcasing a type of systematic sequential analysis that can be done with membership categories.

]]> Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:45:46 PST info:doi/10.1177/0957926509345072 1 21 82 2010-01-01 59 Articles http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/21/1/83?rss=1 Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:45:46 PST info:doi/10.1177/0957926509348443 1 21 86 2010-01-01 83 Articles http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/21/1/87?rss=1 Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:45:46 PST info:doi/10.1177/09579265100210010502 1 21 89 2010-01-01 87 Articles http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/21/1/89?rss=1 Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:45:46 PST info:doi/10.1177/09579265100210010503 1 21 92 2010-01-01 89 Articles