Identity negotiations in narrative accounts about poverty

Abstract

Focusing on three interviews with people who were in debt and participated in the collective debt mediation program of the Belgian social services, I study the way these interviewees negotiate their identities. In spite of the diversity of their stories, which were framed as accounts, all interviewees shift the blame for their current situation and put forward their membership of an alternative category, namely that of the responsible parent. As such, they -in co-construction with the interviewer -counter the theme of personal blame and construct an identity that is 'recipient designed' and acceptable both from a local and a global contextual point of view.

Identity as a resource to shape mediation in dialogic interaction

“…They also try to put constraints on the development of interaction by defining identities parties should acquire for this interaction, besides being clients. Of course, clients can promote their own identities that depict them in a more favorable way, as it is seen, for example, in the way interviewees complement their categorization as poor people with self-categorizations as caring and responsible mothers and interviewers participate in co-constructing these identities (Van de Mieroop 2011). While the findings of the current study are in agreement with the idea of identity as an interactional accomplishment, the focus was more on how mediators constructed disputants' identity to achieve an institutionally preferred outcome, thus adding to the previous research.…”

“…For example, an identity can be considered as a kind of affordance of discussion. As Van de Mieroop (2011) rightly put it, "the construction of identity emerges at the time of speaking and it is not some kind of pre-existing resource that is explicitly crafted beforehand" (567). Communicators, however, can project preferable identities for other interlocutors and focus on their construction.…”

Maneuvering between the individual and the social dimensions of narratives in a poor man’s discursive negotiation of stigma

“…However, she allowed topical deviations from these themes and further questioned additional topics raised by the interviewee. Furthermore, she took on an empathizing attitude towards the interviewee, as was also shown in Van De Mieroop (2011).…”

“…A small subset of this corpus consisted of interviews with poor people, 1 of which a few interviews were already discussed in Van De Mieroop (2011). This interview took place in 2009 in a village in Belgium.…”

“…Because of the centrality of this field in our current societies, it is quite logical that exclusion from it implies stigmatization. Since this field entails a number of dominant discourses and given the poors' stigmatized position in relation to this field, these narrators are quite prone to negotiate their position (for another example, see Van De Mieroop, 2011), which may either comply with or alternatively counter these socially shared discourses (Bamberg, 2006a, p. 145;De Fina et al, 2006, p. 7). As Bamberg demonstrates (see e.g.…”