Microethnographic Approaches to the Critical Study of Learning in Social Movements: The Case for Discursive Psychology

• In Event: Methods for Studying Learning in Social Movements: Consequences for the Movements and the Field

Abstract

Background and Context
Language and discourse are key objects of change in learning (Gutiérrez et al., 1995; Palincsar, 1998). Learning can therefore be theorized as becoming conversant in the (linguistic) cultures of a domain (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). I work with Chroma (pseudonym), a community-based LGBTQ+ youth group for youth ages 12-20 in the Midwest USA. Chroma’s Teaching Committee (TC) engages in educative experiences such as training teachers on working effectively with LGBTQ+ youth. This study was based on 31 Powerpoint presentations TC youth created for trainings from November 2015 to May 2019 to ask: how is discourse in the TC’s educational work organized to accomplish their goals of being taken seriously by adult audience members?

Methodology and Method
In operationalizing a view of discourse and language, I take up the tenets of discursive psychology (DP) (Edwards & Potter, 1992), a methodological and theoretical framework for understanding discourse. It focuses on the way that traditionally psychologized concepts, like attitudes, preferences, and cognition, are constructed, made relevant, and deployed in talk and text. Following Wetherell (1998) and Edley (2001), I used DP with a critical lens to the circumstances in which youth’s discourse was situated, which was understood as an ageist, heterosexist, and genderist language culture.

Findings
Analysis indicated that youths’ discourse on the slides was constructed in a number of ways to support their epistemic rights , to position themselves as experts, and to minimize audience resistance. Those ways included claiming experiential expertise, refuting anticipated critique, and articulating limitations in advance. Consider this slide:

"Don't tell someone that their sexual orientation or gender identity is not valid because they are too young to know for sure."


The slide consists of just one sentence, which conveys the same content as the header and thus functions to emphasize through repetition. The slide does significant discursive work to position LGBTQ+ youth as knowledgeable. By surfacing the potential ageist critiques that youth face, the discourse minimizes opportunities for the audience to raise this argument. Furthermore, the ability to “know for sure” is presented and positions sexual orientation and gender identity as something that can be known unarguably. The slide articulates an epistemic injustice (Fricker, 1998) youth face - that they are assumed to be “too young” to be taken seriously -- and resists that injustice discursively.

Significance
Although DP has not seen wide use in the study of informal learning environments, its focus on how knowledge claims are constructed and used in talk offer helpful ways to articulate the discursive patterns in communities of practice and begin to articulate learning as discursive shifts. DP is consistent with common approaches to studying learning such as interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). Importantly, taking a critical perspective with discursive psychology can allow for overtly justice-oriented projects to surface the way that epistemic injustice can be resisted by social activists. In this way, such methodologies can also serve the movement by providing evidence-based conclusions about how messages and ideas can best be articulated to support movement goals.

Author

• Suraj Uttamchandani, Indiana University - Bloomington