Positioning the interviewer: Strategic uses of embedded orientation in interview narratives (original) (raw)
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Being a former Second World War partisan: reported speech and the expression of local identity
This paper presents a qualitative analysis of narrative sequences extracted from a sample of semistructured interviews to a group of former Second World War partisans living in the Camonica valley (in the province of Brescia), for a total of roughly 15 hours of recordings. The analysis combines the interpretative frameworks of conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics with the study of reported speech and of the strategies of voice representation in dialogic and narrative texts. Special attention is devoted to the use of code-switching as a 'contextualisation cue' in order to mark portions of reported speech and set them off from the surrounding talk or from the main flow of a narrative episode, even in the absence of explicit recourse to verba dicendi or other quotation devices. Our findings show that code-switching may serve as a quotative marker, whereby speakers index the beginning of the reported utterances and shape the characters alternating in a dialogic sequence by drawing on the various linguistic resources at their disposal.
Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2009
This article involves a study of the narrative of a Second World War Resistance member by means of an interview in which the interviewer explicitly inserts the historical context by selecting the topics for discussion and asking critical questions. The interview deals with three periods: the Wartime period, the First Wave of Reprisals and the Second Wave of Reprisals. The analyses show that the interviewee's first and second level positionings shift along with changes in historical period and that they mirror the general historical image of the Resistance. These different positionings are highly consistent in themselves and this consistency is also present on the third level of positioning, because of the interviewee's fairly muted style of narrating, by which blatant inconsistencies are avoided and a general, 'good' identity is constructed. So the general historical context was explicitly brought into the data and this was clearly reflected in the interviewee's positionings.
Interviews as sites of ideological work
This paper maintains that the interview, understood as an interactionally achieved social practice, can be a locus for ideological work. It shows how a differentiated understanding of stance, alignment and the discourse identities that the participants assume and leave in interaction, can bring into focus aspects of ideology that would be difficult to capture otherwise. Specifically, the paper shows how mis-and realigning actions with respect to the stances conveyed by the interview participants relative to a given subject or from a given discourse identity can lead to the construction of ideology, encouraging (or not) movement along a given interview trajectory. The ideological work observed is contingent on how the participants locate themselves and others in the interview where tensions between legitimised linguistic views and discourse identity adoption, as well as contradictions with regard to other circulating discourses emerge. The paper thus suggests that (language ideological) analyses of interview data can and should be focused on the social dynamics of the participants and how their ideological presuppositions play out in the situated interaction of the interview.
Reflexive subjects: Exploring the narrative habitus of self-aware interviewees
Fabula. Zeitschrift für Erzählforschung / Journal of Folktale Studies / Revue d’Etudes sur le Conte Populaire, 2018
The notion of 'self-aware intervieweesʼ contains two features that emerged when studying early career professionals in the United Nations headquarters in Geneva and Vienna. First, it entails considerations on the researcherʼs positionality vis-à-vis the 'reflexive subjectsʼ encountered in the field. It also considers the benefit of 'para-ethnographic sensibilitiesʼ and the related re-negotiation of the relationship informant-ethnographer. Second, it addresses the narrative habitus encountered among UN neophytes. This paper ultimately states that analyzing the self-aware intervieweesʼ (auto-)narrations implies reflections on power relations in a particular research setting. Zusammenfassung: In diesem Beitrag verbinde ich den Ausdruck von ‚selbst-bewussten' oder ‚sich selbst bewussten' Interviewpartnerinnen und-partnern mit zwei Besonderheiten: Zum einen untersuche ich Par a-et hnog r aphi sc he S ensi bi li tät en von Berufseinsteigerinnen und-einsteigern bei den Vereinten Nationen (UNO) in Genf und Wien sowie das damit verbundene Aushandeln der Beziehung zwischen Interviewten und Ethnographin. Zum anderen gehe ich der Frage nach, was bei den UNO-Newcomern den spezifischen narrativen Habitus ausmacht. Die Analyse der (Selbst-)Erzählungen von selbstbewussten und sich selbst bewussten Informantinnen und Informanten impliziert dezidierte Über-legungen zu Machtverhältnissen in einem spezifischen Forschungskontext.
2020
When undertaking oral history research with any group defining itself as a community the researcher's relationship to this 'community' must be considered. Intersubjectivity's central role in the oral history interview is widely acknowledged. However, there is little work investigating how being an 'insider' or 'outsider' amongst those whom we interview impacts on the interview encounter. This paper will draw on my experience of conducting two very different sets of interviews in order to assess this impact. Firstly, I examine the ramifications, positive and negative, of being an out lesbian interviewing other lesbian women. I then compare this with being an 'outsider interviewer', amongst survivors of the Bethnal Green tube disaster, where interviewees were bonded together in a community of trauma.