While many studies investigate the mediation styles enacted during conflict resolution, relatively few of them discuss the communicative processes through which discursive structures are reproduced. This dissertation is a case study illustrating how the duality of structure operates. The purpose of this dissertation is (a) to reveal the discursive resources that community mediators use, (b) to demonstrate how mediators assemble their discursive resources to form a community of practice, and (c) to explore power relations between attorneys and mediators. To understand these issues, I conducted an ethnographic study at a community mediation center employing 25 volunteer mediators. Over 330 hours of participant observations and 41 interviews were completed. Results demonstrated that mediators relied on four interpretive repertoires during mediation: Cultural Competence, Volunteer Pride, Parenting Norms, and Business Professional(ism). They used these repertoires to navigate the tenuous and emotional mediation process. The repertoires provided the mediators with a degree of discursive flexibility in constructing and controlling the immediate situation, and the repertoires were enacted to serve multiple purposes. Further, the extemporaneous engagement of issues, emotions, and discursive resources was an essential skill that was cultivated only over time and with practice. Results also showed that the mediators assembled various repertoires in a number of ways including informal conversations, co-mediations, conference attendance, and organizational meetings. Analysis suggested that the institutional knowledge and discourses provided through formal learning was of secondary importance to developing personal repertoires by mediating as often as possible. In addition, because of the organizing practices of the mediators and the ad hoc nature of the organization, the organizational form of the mediation center was a community of practice. Finally, results found that the power struggles between attorneys and mediators centered on trying to define the mediation situation using different discursive resources. Establishing control of the environment and working the process were the two main goals of mediators, and the more they took ownership of these goals the more often the conflicts settled. This dissertation suggests that taking control of the mediation process is the first step to empowering the participants and achieving a workable mediated settlement.

No / Rhetorically contextualised against a history of poor outcomes and negative attitudes, New Labour’s mental health policy introduced recovery as a turn towards optimism, control and choice for those who provide and use mental health services. Recovery continues to occupy a key role within contemporary policy and practice. Despite such privilege recovery remains a contested concept, not least because it means different things to different people. This article reports empirical work conducted during 2010-11, and explores two interpretive repertoires (traditional and responsibilised-progressive) that mental health practitioners draw upon in their accounts of recovery. Grounded in constructionist theory, the findings suggest that practitioner accounts of recovery are diverse, and produce many different subject positions from which recovery may be experienced. Developing Webber and Joubert’s (2016) editorial comments on the challenge for Social Work, it is argued that professional Social Work must practice in a manner compatible with its own value-base and any model of recovery must be held up for scrutiny. A knowledgeable position for the practitioner is advocated, one that is capable of working multiple paradigms in order to better understand and meet service user need. / ESRC

This study set out to investigate how students construct their identities. Throughout their socialisation into academia, students are confronted with the paradox of learning as they negotiate the opposing discourses of enslavement and mastery that construct higher education. Utilising a critical discursive psychology approach this research aimed to examine the implications this paradox holds for the development of students’ identities. In-depth interviews with five master’s degree students allowed for an examination of the linguistic resources available for students to draw on in constructing their accounts of student-hood. Analysis of the interpretive repertoires and ideological dilemmas in the text revealed the uptake of contradictory subject positions in participants’ navigation of academic discourse. In order to address the inconsistencies associated with these conflicting ways of being a student, participants ‘worked’ a face in their interactions with academic discourse. Their face-work served to address the paradox by integrating the contradictory positions evident in their accounts. It is in the agency displayed in the integration of these disparate positions that the emancipating student is revealed. / Psychology / M.A. (Research Consultation)

This study set out to investigate how students construct their identities. Throughout their socialisation into academia, students are confronted with the paradox of learning as they negotiate the opposing discourses of enslavement and mastery that construct higher education. Utilising a critical discursive psychology approach this research aimed to examine the implications this paradox holds for the development of students’ identities. In-depth interviews with five master’s degree students allowed for an examination of the linguistic resources available for students to draw on in constructing their accounts of student-hood. Analysis of the interpretive repertoires and ideological dilemmas in the text revealed the uptake of contradictory subject positions in participants’ navigation of academic discourse. In order to address the inconsistencies associated with these conflicting ways of being a student, participants ‘worked’ a face in their interactions with academic discourse. Their face-work served to address the paradox by integrating the contradictory positions evident in their accounts. It is in the agency displayed in the integration of these disparate positions that the emancipating student is revealed. / Psychology / M.A. (Research Consultation)