Читать книгу Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences - Katherine Bischoping - Страница 10

At some point in their careers, most researchers in the social sciences will find themselves working on a project that involves talk data, in which at least two parties interact, whether from interviews, from recording naturalistic talk in everyday or institutional settings, or from media, including television talk shows, political speeches, or newspaper articles that quote laypersons and experts. The popularity of talk data has burgeoned since World War II – not only because tape recorders became inexpensive, but also in response to social, political, and intellectual currents.

You will see that some of the strategies that this book presents carry forward the spirit of civil rights, feminist, queer, decolonization, and other movements and identity politics, all of which are concerned with ordinary people and their communities. Post World War II narrative analysts distinguish themselves here for their efforts to recuperate subjugated histories, and for their humanist emphasis. That is, they are particularly interested in individuals’ perceptions, experiences, and interpretations of their circumstances, with their quests for meaning, and with experiential, rather than expert, knowledge. In some circles of NA this ‘interpretive turn’ came in response to the limitations of research that emulated scientific models of inquiry.

Although many of today’s conversation analysts take up social problems, the founding insight of CA had nothing to do with social problems. Instead, it was to hail ordinary talk as the foundational site of shared meanings and the very basis of the social order. In so doing, CA set itself apart from earlier linguistics projects, which had looked askance at the messy spontaneities of ordinary talk, and treated such talk as an impure and inconsequential form of language. It also distinguished itself from earlier sociological work that took a top-down approach to questions of how social order is possible.

Discourse analysts, meanwhile, have always been concerned with power dynamics or material and social inequalities. As you will see, they are not humanist in their emphasis in the same way as narrative analysts and they do not see talk as solely foundational. They see talk as part of wider webs of meanings and practices – or discourses – that are implicated in producing social problems.

In this book, you will find that CA strategies always pay heed to what makes talk so distinctive. NA and DA strategies are less consistent about this, in that some literary-based NA strategies work equally well for spoken and written narratives, while DA strategies conceptualize talk as one of many forms of social text. Therefore, throughout our discussions of strategies, you may find us making reference to any or all of talk’s distinctive bundle of features:

1 We talk in ways that are socially available to us: we use language, an imperfect way to represent experience; we employ conversational mechanisms; and we draw upon discourses that may free or coerce us.

2 Talk is uttered by individuals who have agency (or seem to).

3 Talk emerges in the moment.

4 Although talk is ephemeral, vanishing with the passing moment in which it occurs, through research methods it becomes fixed in transcripts.

5 Talk is embodied, involving gesture, tones, rhythms, and more, although the social sciences struggle for a vocabulary through which to capture that.

6 In this embodied medium, speakers’ bodies can act as signifiers.

For each of NA, CA, and DA, you will see an entire chapter devoted to the site of talk that is the interview, one of the most common data collection methods and one of the best-theorized. Importantly, in each of the three strategies, rather than treating interviews and other data collection methods as neutral tools, the talk in research encounters has come to be recognized as socially constructed. Method, too, has become an object of study and is seen to play a role in the knowledge that analytic strategies produce.