In 2016 the UK held a divisive referendum on its membership of the European Union. In the aftermath, difference and division were rife in politics and in everyday life. This article explores how such difference and division play out in and through interaction through examining a citizen ‘picking a fight’ with a politician over how Brexit has been handled. Drawing on membership categorisation analysis we show how antagonism is interactionally accomplished. The analysis focuses on three categorial strategies which interlocutors use to achieve antagonism: establishing omnirelevant devices, categories and their predicates; explicitly challenging category membership; and partitioning a population. Beyond offering insights into moments of social life that are not easily captured, the findings contribute to an empirical conceptualisation of antagonism and illustrate how membership categorisation analysis can shed light on its interactional achievement.
This paper reports on a longitudinal study in the North of England with 13 educators in schools, colleges and universities during two lockdowns. The project was designed to 'unlock' education by providing spaces to co-create new ways of thinking about education in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. Focus groups were conducted with school and college teachers as well as university staff at the end of the first and second English lockdowns, in summer 2020 and spring 2021. An initial analysis identified issues with expectations and communication between educators and executive management as well as a lack of agency of educators, and how participants framed them as impacting on their identity as educators. Therefore, the framework of tactics of intersubjectivity was adopted to explore how educators discursively positioned themselves and others through constructions of similarity and difference, realness and power, and how their professional identities were affected by the experience of working through the pandemic and by those around them. Whilst educators took opportunities to authenticate their identity and reimagine education, their agency was undermined by top-down governing involving little successful communication, leading to denaturalising and illegitimising experiences for educators. Executive management were perceived as lacking engagement with staff and understanding of the implications of their decisions on them. The
Expatriate blogs are personal websites in which individuals share their experiences of relocation and life in a different country, not solely for the benefit of their readers but also for their own benefit. As such, they constitute sites of identity construction in phases of personal transition, afforded by the linear nature of blogging. This paper illustrates how expatriate bloggers discursively authenticate identity. Drawing on tactics of intersubjectivity, the analysis explores twelve personal blogs by Anglophone foreign nationals who have moved to England. Authentication is achieved, firstly, through displaying expertise pertaining to life abroad. This at the same time legitimizes expatriates’ sharing of the everyday experiences, and indeed they portray themselves as providing deep insights and unadorned accounts. Additionally, identity is authenticated through discourses of personal fulfillment. The authentication of expatriate identity is thus closely linked to bloggers’ legitimizing of their own contributions. These findings add to research on discursive identity construction in personal negotiations of relatively privileged migration. They further make a theoretical contribution to the tactics of intersubjectivity as well as more generally to explorations of identity and authentication in online environments.
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