Yes / This paper sets out to capture the missing voices of fathers in discussions around gender, parenting and work. Using Critical Discursive Psychology (CDP), a qualitative methodology that frames discourse, language and action as socially situated, the paper sets out to understand the complexities of involved fatherhood. Using data from two distinct research projects that considered managing tensions around parenting and paid work, alongside the move to ‘involved fatherhood’, we examine the ways in which different discourses are operating in order to construct stories around gender and parenting. We are particularly interested in the ways in which participants use language and, specifically, discourses of parenting, working and caring. Through the interview excerpts we analysed how simultaneously participants position themselves in the discourses and were also being positioned by the wider societal discourses. We consider how CDP can contribute rich insights into the ways in which fathers are arranging sharing parenting caregiving responsibilities, using these insights to inform the policy landscape. We finish the paper by suggesting that CDP methodology can be mobilised by researchers wanting to capture missing voices in shifting policy landscapes.

This thesis examines the political language and the ideological construction of the national past at the annual commemoration of the April 25 Revolution in the Portuguese parliament. The language of politics during these State commemorations is complex. The speakers of the ceremony are not expected to engage in the everyday politics but to celebrate and remember together the overthrow of the previous regime that occurred on April 25 1974. Nonetheless, behind apparent acts of unity and communion there is political controversy about the nature of the event and its celebration. Mostly this controversy cannot be expressed openly. In order to register the ideological and controversial aspects of these commemorations, the thesis looks at both the overt and the hidden language of the commemorative speeches from left and right political parties. Specifically, the official parliamentary transcripts of the commemorative speeches from left and right political party are analysed at different levels using different methodologies: broad quantitative content analyses of large numbers of speeches and fine critical discursive analysis of specific parts of particular speeches. A broad quantitative content analysis of wole speeches reveals the patterns of themes and terms mentioned in the speakers accounts of the past. By looking at the presence and absence of explicit themes and terms, the analysis suggests that accounts of the past in the parliamentary commemoration of the April Revolution differ along political and ideological lines. This is also apparent in the customary ways of greeting the audience right at the start of the speeches. This analysis combines a quantitative content analysis of the formal greetings over time with an analysis of the rhetorical meanings of particular terms. The analysis of greetings also shows the sexism of the customary and also the development of ritual forms. In order to examine the complexity of this sort of speech, it is necessary to move to in-depth qualitative analysis of parts of specific speeches. The analysis of the beginnings of two speeches given at the 2004 commemoration, namely, from the speaker of the far-right Democratic and Social Centre/Popular Party (CDS-PP) and from the far-left Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), shows that both speakers presented controversial versions of the past but did not do so in direct ways. The speaker from the CDS-PP uses a number of rhetorical devices including omissions and distortion in order to conceal his meanings, while appearing to celebrate a Revolution to which his party was ambivalent. On the other hand, the speaker from the PCP also uses manipulative devices but he does not do so in order to hide the ideology of his message but to make it clearer. The thesis argues for the importance of analysing hidden ideological messages as well as for distinguishing between a speaker manipulating the presentation of their ideology and a speaker manipulating the evidence in order to present their ideology clearer.

Using the theoretical approach of discursive psychology, this thesis examines the interactive uses of mental state talk, in particular the term want , in everyday family interaction. In mainstream cognitive psychology mental state terms are examined as words which signify internal referents. How individuals come to competently participate in social interaction is formulated as a problem of how individual, isolated minds come to understand the contents of other minds. This thesis challenges these individualistic notions and examines notions of wanting as interactionally managed participants concerns. The data are taken from two sources; a set of video recordings taken from a series of fly-on-the-wall documentary programmes which each focus on a particular family and videotapes of mealtimes recorded by three families. Recordings were initially transcribed verbatim and sections related to the emerging themes within the thesis were subsequently transcribed using the Jefferson notation system. These transcripts were then analysed, alongside repeated viewings of the video recordings. The thesis considers a range of analytic themes, which are interlinked via one of the primary research questions, which has been to examine how, and to what end, speakers routinely deploy notions of wanting in everyday talk-in-interaction. A major theme has been to highlight inherent problems with work in social cognition which uses experimental tasks to examine children s Theory of Mind and understanding of desires . I argue that the assumptions of this work are a gross simplification of the meaning wanting for both children and adults. A further theme has been to examine the sequential organisation of directives and requests in both adults and children s talk. Finally, I examine speakers practices for rejecting a proposal regarding their actions and for denying a formulation of their motivations by a co-interactant. The conclusions of the thesis show that expressions of wanting are practical expressions which work within a flow of interactional and deontic considerations and that making claims regarding one s own or others wants is entirely a social matter. I argue that rather than being examined for what they may reveal about the mind , mental state terms may be fruitfully examined as interactional matters.

This study applied conversation analysis for the first time to episodes in which children express pain and bodily sensations in the everyday setting of family mealtimes. It focuses on the components of children s expressions, the character of parents responses, and how the sequence is resolved. Three families who had a child with a long term health condition were recruited through voluntary support groups and agreed to film 15-17 mealtimes. In total 47 mealtimes were recorded totalling 23 hours of data. Each family had two children aged 15 months to nine years and included a heterosexual married couple. This data was supplemented by archives in the Discourse and Rhetoric Group: a further nine hours of mealtime recordings by two families each with two children aged three to seven years. The analysis describes four key components of children s expressions of bodily sensation and pain: lexical formulations; prosodic features; pain cries and embodied actions, revealing the way in which they can be built together to display different aspects of the experience. The results highlight the nature of these expressions as initiating actions designed in and for interaction. An examination of the sequence that follows demonstrates the negotiated character of pain. Descriptions of the nature of the child s pain and its authenticity are produced, amended, resisted or accepted in the turns that follow. During these sequences participant orientations reveal the pervasive relevance of eating related tasks that characterises mealtime interaction. The discussion concludes by describing the unique insights into the negotiated rather than private nature of a child s pain demonstrated by this study, and the way in which pain can be understood as produced and dealt with as part of the colourful tapestry of everyday family life in which everyday tasks are achieved, knowledge and authority is claimed and participants are positioned in terms of their relationship to one another.

This thesis analyses the fabled public exchange of letters that occurred between political theorist Hannah Arendt and historian of Jewish religion Gershom Scholem in 1964 following the historic trial of Adolf Eichmann and Arendt's subsequent publication of her report of the event, Eichmann in Jerusalem. The thesis covers the historical issues that form the contextual background to the exchange. It involves the introduction of the two participants as defining Jewish intellectuals of the past century, the course of the trial itself and the political and ideological problems it entailed as well as the turbulent history of the reception of Arendt's book. It is down to these four factors that guaranteed the eminence of the exchange of letters analysed in the thesis. Oft-quoted as the exchange is, there has been no proper analysis of it to this date. To accomplish this task, the thesis adopts the theoretical-methodological framework of discourse analysis in general, and the version of rhetorically oriented discursive psychology, proposed mainly in the publications of Potter and Wetherell (1987) and Billig (1996), in particular. This approach allows the thesis to provide a fine-grained analysis of the various ways of textual construction. Firstly, the ways examined concern the significance, worth and value of the debate itself, as formulated by both of the participants. Secondly, they involve the construction of the attempt to establish definite versions of the content of the book. Thirdly, they cover the textual acts of accounting for that content, or the practice of misinterpretation of that content, respectively. What all these three aspects have in common is the positioning of the problems touched upon in a moral and political context, and ultimately approaching them in terms of the identities of the participants. In this sense, versions of the events and ways of accounting for it will not only aim at producing accurate descriptions of events but in the forms of an implied morality or politics an implied "action-plan" for the future as well. The construction of Arendt and Scholem is, hence, analysed in terms of its argumentative organisation in order to undermine the other's counterversion and to establish its own as the definite one. While, structurally, there are many similarities in the two letters, what distinguishes them is that they conceive of their objects (i.e. the text), subject positions, and political or moral values according to which they should be assessed in quite diametrically opposite ways. This thesis not only registers the various rhetorical ways the participants fashion their versions as definite ones, but also accounts for the differences in their contents.

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This thesis used fifty hours of naturally occurring video and audio taped data from the ‘weigh-in' section of four commercial weight management groups in the East Midlands of England. This thesis is a discursive psychological and conversation analytic investigation of the turn-taking organization of the talk, examining what the group leaders and members make relevant in their talk about food and dieting. The data was transcribed using the Jeffersonian method. Group members attend the group weekly, and are weighed - their weight gain, loss or maintenance is recorded on a membership card. The analytic chapters follow the format of the ‘weigh-in' section of the meeting exploring firstly how the group leaders and members manage the practices of getting ready to be weighed; then how the ‘news' of weight gain, loss or maintenance is told and receipted; before exploring how ‘advice-giving' is constructed and the final analytic chapter deals with the issues of morality and accountability in the leaders' and members' talk. Analysis shows that the ‘pre-weigh in practices' involved before the group members are weighed consists of two robust patterns, 1) the practice of getting undressed is not oriented to by either the group members or group leaders and the group leaders avoided direct eye contact and concerned themselves with other business or 2) when no undressing practices took place, the group leaders were much more comfortable with direct eye contact. These sequences show how the body and its practices are constructed in particular ways within, and as part of the practices of getting ready to be weighed. Analysis showed the telling and receipting of weight news gets done differently depending on whether the group members have gained, lost or maintained weight. When the news concerned weight gain, the sequence included a ‘pre-announcement' and the news TCU was punctuated with marked trouble. When the news concerned weight loss, only the group members produced a pre-account and the news TCU contained no marked trouble. Finally, when the group members had maintained weight, the news TCU was delivered bluntly, and there was no evidence of trouble. In relation to advice-giving, analysis showed that group members repeatedly worked to assert their epistemic priority to avoid having to acknowledge the advice and the advice was receipted minimally. Finally, analysis showed that group members produced accounts with reference to a moral evaluation, such as blame or culpability. Sometimes an account was produced to circumvent being held publicly accountable for the event or action. It became apparent that both the group leaders and group members could not orient to themselves, their behaviour or food without it being constructed within a moral or accountable framework. Therefore, the thesis is an exploration of how group leaders and members manage the ‘dieting-practices' involved in getting weighed in a commercial weight management group and how using DP and CA can show the intricate turn by turn organization of such practices.

This thesis examines interactions between professionals and children who have been identified as having social, emotional, and behavioural difficulties (SEBD). More specifically, this thesis examines video-recorded interactions that take place during the delivery of two interventions: one-to-one pastoral care within a primary school, and group coaching for children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Using conversation analysis (CA) and discursive psychology (DP) these data were analysed to identify the ways in which professionals package and deliver their support, and manage psychological notions to do with the self, or what I call self-work - moments within the interactions when children are supported to talk about their emotions, feelings, and behaviour in order to help them make sense of the difficulties they are experiencing; and moments within the interaction when children are given the skills and knowledge they need to manage, change, or overcome those difficulties. The main findings from this thesis are that support and self-work are not taken-for-granted outcomes simply achieved because children attend intervention programmes. Instead, support and self-work are packaged and delivered through ordinary conversational practices. Chapter 4 shows how encouraging self-assessment supports a child s agency and participation to construct a more positive version of their self. Chapter 5 respecifies reassurance as an interactional practice to show how it works to prevent the emotional affect of a child s personal troubles becoming internalised and self-imposed. Chapter 6 shows how questions promote the collaborative building of knowledge, and how person references normalise and unpathologise emotions often bound to ADHD constructs. The findings from this thesis demonstrate applicability to both research and practice by offering a unique insight into the interactional environments of pastoral care and coaching. Firstly, by examining the interactional landscapes of these two interventions Chapter 3 provides a rich overview of pastoral care and coaching activities to show how these interventions are accomplished as real life activities. Secondly, by examining the conversational practices through which pastoral care and coaching are delivered this thesis respecifies everyday notions of support and self-work as members situated actions, and in so doing furthers our knowledge and understanding of these somewhat abstract notions. Such findings are valuable because interventions are informed by theoretical guidelines that recommend children experiencing difficulty can be helped if they are supported to understand their difficulties and to develop a more positive sense of self. However, such guidelines offer little in terms of how such recommendations should be put into practice by the professionals working with children. This research uncovers some of the ways in which theoretical recommendations are delivered via interactional practices, to make visible members methods for delivering support and managing self-work . The need for this work to be done is that support and self-work are performed as much through the ways in which professionals deliver their interventions, as it is through the content of those interventions.

Social knowledge about food was investigated from a social contingency perspective (Guerin, 1994, 1998, 2004), a functional linguistic approach that considers language use having functions both to establish 'facts' in order to control listeners, and to maintain social relationships with words. In Study 1, whether people shared knowledge about food or not was examined. One hundred and fourteen New Zealand and 23 Japanese participants were asked to answer free format questionnaires asking the reasons they and others eat or do not eat particular food items. Those answers were categorised into 8 categories and 30 sub-categories of the knowledge about foods by qualitative content analysis. The results of a cluster analysis of those categories showed that participants used the categories homogeneously although there were some differences between New Zealand and Japanese participants, and that the participants selectively used different types of knowledge according to food items especially when explaining why people do or do not eat some foods. In Study 2, rhetorical features about foods were investigated: (1) numerical quantification rhetoric; (2) narrative use rhetoric; and (3) enumeration rhetoric. Factual statements from a corpus of 118 New Zealand TV commercials and 249 Japanese TV commercials were coded by the categories generated in Study 1. The results showed that the categories of factual statements were selectively used on TV commercials depending on the food types, and related closely to the results of Study 1. The rhetorical strategies appeared in commercials according to the categories of factual statements. When more than one factual statement was presented in a commercial, the relations of the factual statements were usually of a conjunctive form such as quotfact A however fact Bquot or quotfact A moreover fact Bquot, or else the factual statements were presented independently rather than the one statement logically warranting the other. These results suggest that those rhetoric uses and the arrangements of the factual statements were selectively used according to the effectiveness against counter arguments using shared knowledge. Study 3 and Study 4 analysed the functions of shared knowledge about food for maintaining social relationships through investigating the cases in which knowledge about foods presented as the form of 'collaborative talk', which occurs when one speaker completes the preceding saying by another speaker. In Study 3, the collaborative talk as sentence completions of knowledge about food was qualitatively analysed from conversations of 30 to 45 minutes produced by four groups consisting of four or five Japanese participants who were friends. From a social contingency view, the analysis focused on the following conversational properties: (1) who the listener was; (2) the degree of sharing of the information between the speakers; (3) the degree of sharing of the information between the 2nd speaker and the listener; and (4) the disagreement between the 2nd speaker and the listener. The results of Study 3 suggested some possible functions of sentence completions of knowledge about food: (1) the function when the first speaker is the listener may be enhancement of the relationship between the first and the second speakers through showing the second speaker's attention and understanding to the first speaker's utterance, because those sentence completions were often followed by the affirmation or negation by the first speaker; (2) when a third person is the listener, and the first and the second speaker refuted the third person using sentence completion, the function seems to be just establishing 'facts'; and (3) in the cases of 'assisted explaining' (Lerner Takagi, 1999) , the function may be not only establishing 'facts' but also enhancement the relationship between the listener and the speakers, because the constructed 'facts' may work as a kind of conversational 'gift'. In Study 4, five Japanese groups consisting of four participants who were friends were asked to talk about four topics about foods that all participants either agreed or disagreed ('All agree' condition) and four food topics for which there was disagreement about it between participants ('Some agree' condition). When the listeners could not be identified, and the second speakers did not used the utterance-final element such as 'yo ne' that is regarded as having a function of showing agreement between the speakers, the participants used sentence completions more frequently in 'All agree' conditions. The results suggested that the function of this type of sentence completion is not merely establishing 'facts' but also enhancing the relationship between the speakers through showing agreement about the relevant things to the topic. In conclusion, the results of the present studies suggest some possible social contingencies involved both when people get knowledge about food and when they use it.

<p>This is an empirical study of how the mathematical talk of adult learners constructs/reconstructs different mathematical discourses. The study is to be regarded as an attempt to develop a discursive approach within the field of mathematics education and to complicate the status of mathematics in education and in society in general. My theoretical underpinnings consist of three possible mathematical discourses – coercive, regulative and emancipative mathematics. From a discursive psychology perspective, I let these discourses function as analytical interpretive repertoires in relation to the adult learners’ rhetorical use of mathematics and their claiming of mathematical subject-positions, named the coerced, the self-regulating and the responsible mathematician. The conclusions are concentrated around a discussion about the rhetorical turn of adult mathematics in which I focus on mathematics and its relation to the becoming of the self-regulating subject. I continue by arguing that a focus on how the participants deal with mathematics, rather than how they learn mathematics, can generate new perspectives on the teaching praxis of mathematics education.</p>