Narrative Inquiry - Volume 23, Issue 1, 2013

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.

In this article I discuss the positive impact of the concept of positioning on identity studies, with particular reference to the analysis of narratives. I argue that the notion of positioning (particularly as developed in Bamberg’s 1997 three levels model), together with other constructs such as indexicality, has helped enormously in bridging the gap (particularly in interview based research) between interactionally-oriented and more traditionally oriented studies of narrative identities. I focus on level 3 positioning to argue that this construct allows for an approach to the construction of identity in discourse that occupies a middle ground between talk-in-interaction approaches that center exclusively on participant orientations at the local level and approaches that regard identity as basically determined by macro social processes and only manifested in discourse. To illustrate level 3 positioning I analyze a narrative taken from a corpus of stories of language conflict told by Latin American immigrant women to the US. I show that the narrator constructs her identity in relation to Discourses and ideologies about language and migration showing that interpretation of her positioning is based on close analysis of discourse at the local level, ethnographic data and understanding of macro social processes underlying power relations.

This article advocates an understanding of ‘positioning’ as a key to the analysis of identities in interaction within the methodological framework of conversation analysis. Building on research by Bamberg, Georgakopoulou and others, a performative, interaction-based approach to positioning is outlined and compared to membership categorization analysis. An interactional episode involving mock stories to reveal and reproach an inadequate identity-claim of a co-participant is analysed both in terms of practices of membership categorization and positioning. It is concluded that membership categorization is a core element of positioning. Still, positioning goes beyond membership categorization in a) revealing biographical dimensions accomplished by narration and b) by uncovering implicit performative claims of identity, which are not established by categorization or description.

The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the ongoing debate within interactional approaches to positioning in narrative regarding the ways in which we can analytically tap into aspects of teller’s self that can be seen as stable or continuous. Bamberg’s level 3 positioning which answers the question of ‘Who am I?” has inspired a lot of those discussion and it forms a productive point of departure here too. I attempt to systematize the exploration of Level 3 with a practice-based approach to narrative that: (a) affords ethnographically grounded understandings of who people are in specific contexts, (b) places narrative analysis within a multi-method that ensures access to the participants’ moments of reflexivity on themselves and their stories. I pose ways of telling, sites and tellers as the main constituent elements of such an approach and argue that iterativity is the key-element in the exploration of all three and ultimately in the uncovery of aspects of self that are presented as relatively stable. I base my discussion on data from a study of pupils in a London senior (sic high) school and single out breaking news about the participants’ new media engagements as a significant narrative activity for positioning.

The purpose of this article is to broaden and sharpen the use of positioning in social science inquiry. Historically, positioning has either been aligned with ethogenic and ontological constructionist views of discourse/identity or post-structural projects interested in positioning as means to uncovering how people’s minds work or how an ordered extant exterior world shapes and constitutes human action. Rather than looking through acts of positioning to minds or worlds, the present chapter offers an epistemic discursive psychological view of positioning as sets of local discursive processes whereby speakers elegantly exploit the features of ordinary talk so as to make relevant their own and/or other’s identities as part of some social business that has an interactional logic as well as here-and-now relational consequences. The discursive dexterity of positioning is illustrated through an analysis of the negotiation of gendered identity categories.

The contribution looks into the mechanisms of interactively establishing identities by managing memberships in the special case of telling a researcher about experiences and assessments with respect to public authorities. Drawing on the particular potential of these data, it is shown how the tasks of assigning memberships and ascribing appropriate category-bound activities are performed within evaluative practices and how general assessments and singular personal experiences are intertwined to position the teller in the ongoing interaction.

This paper contributes to post-crisis, social constructionist psychological literature addressing mainstream psychology’s failure to engage in a relevant way with people’s everyday experiences. We work with a narrative psychology paradigm, focussing specifically on the element of metaphor as a useful way to come to terms with how our ‘selves’ and our interactions with others are sociolinguistically fashioned. We discuss an article by Ian Parker, in which personal accounts illuminate the linguistic embeddedness of psyches. To illustrate the value of metaphor for locating, and potentially transforming, interpretations in daily encounters, we consider a text by Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harré.

This article examines the connection between grand narratives and the creative ways that individuals translate them into personal biographies through a case study of a boarding school for gifted disadvantaged youth in Israel. To test the state’s grand narrative, I performed a content analysis of minutes of governmental protocols as well as organizational reports at the time the boarding school was established. The state grand narrative stresses the rescue of Jews from Arab countries by the leaders of the state and the linear Oriental-to-Occidental cultural development that these Jews must undergo in order to survive in modern life. To examine the question of how the grand narrative is translated into personal biographies, sixty graduates of the boarding school and thirty-two siblings who did not attend the boarding school were interviewed. The findings demonstrate that the graduates of the boarding school translated the grand narrative into a special narrative configuration known as the alternative biography, a concept that addresses the lifeworlds that, in the subjects’ judgment, might have characterized their lives under different circumstances. Further, the structure of this narrative points to one explicit alternative biography, that of the sibling who did not attend the boarding school. The disscusion chapter explores the phenomenological meanings of this singular narrative configuration.

This article addresses the emergence of networked narration found in Facebook updates. Drawing on anthropological approaches to co-tellership (Ochs & Capps, 2001), we trace how storyworlds are co-constructed by multiple narrators via the communicative affordances which have developed in the Facebook status update: namely, the practices of commenting, liking, linking, tagging, photo-sharing, and marking geographical location. Our longitudinal analysis of 1800 updates elicited from 60 participants over a period of four years suggests that the rise of what we call a ‘networked narrative’ allows individuals to participate collectively in the construction of ‘shared stories’ (Georgakopoulou, 2007), and through this process for narrators to co-construct their social identities through their interactions with others. We argue that the distribution of storytelling as it takes place on Facebook may be found in other online and offline contexts, and challenges earlier, linear models of narrative form that have dominated discourse-analytic and literary-critical narratology.

This article draws upon the orientation ‘blog’ posts from a current PhD study focusing on identity formation in young people undertaking their final year of secondary schooling within the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE). It critically investigates how participants define the ‘purpose’ of their engagement with the study and the subjectivities they employ in those interactions. The online blogs designed for this study are intended to create a space in which participants are able to act a-synchronously and discuss their ‘day-to-day’ experiences of the VCE. A key focus of this paper is to explicate the nature of this activity as performative, that is, participants contributing to blogs actively consider the nature of their engagement and construct an implicit ‘Other’ — a relationship that is informed by the purpose for participating in the research. Utilising Deleuze’s concept of ‘becoming’ (1987) along with a narrative methods framework (Riessman, 2008), it investigates the concept of ‘Other’ and will trace the process of ‘becoming storyteller’ as an active performance in Blog participation.