‘Positioning’ in the conversation analytic approach

Abstract

From the perspective of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA), the concept of positioning may offer a compellingly rich metaphor for understanding identity and relations. There appears, however, to be no such analytical concept in EM/CA. Instead, the EM/CA approach offers concepts such as alignment-affiliation, identities and membership categories — all of them based on actional resources on the micro-level of talk. The aim of this article is to inquire if EM/CA tools for the analysis of identities and relations in talk might be considered interesting from the perspective of positioning theory. To do so, we offer EM/CA analyses of narrative and non-narrative data in which the in situ negotiation of identities and relations plays a major role.

Agency in illness narratives

“…Davies and Harre defined positioning as a discursive practice "whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and intersubjectively coherent participants in jointly produced story lines" (2002 [1990], p. 48). The process of positioning has been characterized as taking place on three levels: 1) within the narrative (i.e., how the characters are positioned in relation to one another within the reported events), 2) in relation to the narrator's audience (i.e., the interviewer), and 3) in the wider institutional roles with which those connect, showing how the narrator positions his/her self/identity in relation to a dominant discourse (Bamberg, 1997;Day & Kjaerbeck, 2013).…”

“…Because narratives take multiple forms and have multiple purposes, links between chronic illness, identity, and agency are not as unproblematic as much of the scholarship on illness narrative analysis might suggest. Building on the work of scholars that argue the analysis of identities needs to be sensitive to positioning in interaction as well as to structure (Bamberg, 1997;De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012;Deppermann, 2013), in this essay I suggest that a pluralistic analysis (Frost, 2009) can help scholars better understand how institutional and social forces interact with the individual experience of people living with illness in supporting and constraining agency. As Frost argued, combining different analytical approaches builds layers of understanding "enriched by systematic exploration of the text until a new story emerges" (2009, p. 9).…”

A comparison of heritage language ideologies in interaction

“…Within local interactions, people describe themselves as being either inside or outside of spaces, or in the middle or at the edges of them, by a practice known as positioning (cf. Bamberg ; Day and Kjaerbeck ). How much space migrants can actually claim discursively for their HL, however, can be influenced firstly by dominant national or societal language ideologies regarding multilingualism and HL maintenance, but also by each individual's agency (Miller ).…”

The Handbook of Narrative Analysis

“…Kitzinger and Wilkinson (2003) identify a conversation analytic approach to positioning with membership categorization analysis. While it is beyond doubt that explicit categorization and ascription of actions and properties are basic and pervasive positioning maneuvers, membership categorization does not exhaust practices of positioning ; see also Day and Kjaerbeck 2013).…”