CRITERIOS DE SELECCIÓN

Davies and Harré (1990, p.48) use discursive positioning as a means to analyse the production of discursive selves, arguing that:

'In telling a fragment of his or her autobiography, a speaker assigns parts and characters in the episodes described, both to themselves and to other people, including those taking part in the conversation. [...] By giving people parts in the story, whether it be explicit or implicit, a speaker makes available a subject position which the other speaker in the normal course of events would take up.'

Discursive positioning theory emphasises the fleeting and fluid relationships between the speaker and his/her immediate interlocutors, and between him/her and the other characters who appear in the speaker's talk. The fragment of a storyline that is invoked in an act of positioning conjures up the rest of the narrative of which it is a part, and it is through the comprehension of the storyline that a particular type

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of speech act is understood to have taken place from the speech action at that point in the conversation.

The poststructuralist paradigm that Davies and Harré (1990) draw on asserts that discourse has constitutive force but also that individuals are able to exert some choice in their discursive practice. Davies and Harré (1990, p.46), for instance, note that:

'discourse [...] is that in terms of which phenomena are made determinate'

with

'many and contradictory discursive practices that each person could engage in.'

Therefore, the way in which Davies and Harré describe and use the idea of a

storyline is as a narrative resource in which there are recognisable events, characters and moral dilemmas. It is from a particular storyline as a culturally recognisable and socially useable resource, in which particular categories and relationships are

understood (of how one should help a sick person, for example, a storyline

developed by Davies and Harré in their paper), that specific 'rights, obligations and expectations' (p.52) can be interpreted for the various subject positions being allocated by the speaker. Davies and Harré note that the understanding of such rights, obligations and expectations are developed from a person's subjective history and his/her understanding of 'social structure and the roles that are recognisably allocated to people within those structures', which have some coercive force 'to the extent that to be recognisably and acceptably a person we must operate within their terms' (p.52) . Although Davies and Harré note that the second speaker may take up

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the subject position in the storyline offered by the first speaker, there is also a possibility that s/he will not, due for instance to not understanding or being blind to the storyline being used, or because s/he wants to resist such positioning and/or to offer a new positioning within a different storyline.

There are a number of useful features about this theory as a way of developing my data. Firstly, their theoretical framework allows for my own participant observer involvement in the research by using discursive positioning theory's emphasis on the relationship between the speaker, those within the story being narrated and the interlocutors to whom the story is being told. There is furthermore, some

correspondence between Davies and Harré's theory and Bakhtin's theory of dialogic discourse: between the other characters in these storylines and Bakhtin's idea of addressees (Bakhtin, 1986) which shape the individual's (anticipatory and

responsive) utterances; and with both authors having similar conceptualisations of the communicative process in which discursive meaning-making is a shared activity in a local and situated dialogic encounter (Bakhtin, 1981).37

Davies and Harré are quite clear that their paper is intended to 'contribute to the understanding of personhood' (1990, p.46) and 'the multiplicities of selfhood' (p.47) or subject positions. However, I am using their ideas for a different focus in this thesis. The importance of discursive positioning here is in what is being proposed as consequential to the act of positioning in terms of the accompanying 'attendant rights, obligations and expectations'. It is not so much the construction of

37 _{See also Larrain and Haye (2012b) and their use of positioning in their elaboration of Bakhtin's}

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personhood per se but the required action that results from it - the constructed

requirement, or advisability, or benefit of staying silent - that I emphasise.38

To summarise then, in the accounts that I analyse for this research I am positioned within the conversation. Thus, it is my own reflexive understanding of the

positioning work being done by the speaker, my resisting or conforming to the positions being offered to me, the positioning of the cast of other characters and voices, and the storylines that are being drawn on, through which my interpretation of the form and function of silence is developed. Silence became developed as a relational product that was given form and function both within the social interaction in which the account was being constructed, as well as within the social interaction which was being narrated. Some of the analytic work relied on hunches (Coffey and Atkinson, 1996) and an embodied responsiveness to the dialogue (Shotter, 2008) developed from my fieldnote data about my emotions and feelings of being in that social situation: my suspicions, my feelings of discomfort, concern or enjoyment of the conversation, and so on. By examining the various acts of positioning in the data, I pieced together the particular types of relationships, rights, obligations and expectations that are used to make the idea of silence relevant. Through analysing the variations in discursive positioning over the lifecycle of the project, I pieced together the temporally specific fragments of storylines over the six months, and how the practice might be expected to change over time. In this way, I developed the idea of storylines of silence, using the terminology of a storyline to capture the temporal variability of discursive practices over the duration of the project.

38 _{It is also for this reason that I did not develop this thesis in terms of identity work (see for}

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From the patterning in the data, three different ways of talking about silence seemed to emerge, in which three distinct types of relationship were implicated with

associated phrases and terminology, and in which silence was given some social significance through being associated with the fulfilment (or not) of particular social rights, obligations or duties. Appendix E, Figure 2, gives an example of the

modelling of codes and concepts that led to the current three storylines.