ABSTRACT
Discourse analysis beyond the speech event has been done with several kinds of data. The concepts and the methodological tools and techniques developed in Chapters 1 and 2 apply to all discourse, but analysts will use these somewhat differently when working with different types of data. In Chapters 3-5 we apply our approach to analyze three types: “ethnographic,” “archival” and “new media.” Ethnographic studies analyze living people and actions in context, typically at shorter timescales and across more limited spatial scales. Archival studies analyze historical processes, typically at longer timescales and broader spatial scales. Studies of new media analyze actions in mediated worlds, typically at shorter timescales and broader spatial scales. New media studies most often focus on highly interconnected messages that depend on each other for completion, whereas the documents, interviews and observations in ethnographic and archival studies are often less immediately interconnected. These three categories are ideal types, and many research projects will involve more than one of them. Analysts will nonetheless apply our concepts and methods somewhat differently when working with the three types of data, and it is useful to illustrate discourse analysis on each separately. This chapter applies discourse analysis beyond the speech event to ethnographic
data-face-to-face participant observation with living people in context. We use examples from ethnographic discourse analyses that the two of us have done. Wortham (2006) analyzes a pathway of speech events that took place in one high school classroom across an academic year. The analysis in this chapter picks up the example that opened Chapter 1, following one of Tyisha’s fellow students and illustrating how tools and techniques from Chapter 2 can be used to trace how he was positioned in increasingly uncomfortable ways across the academic year. Reyes (2013) also examines classroom data across a year, from the Asian American supplementary school introduced in Chapter 2. We use concepts from Chapter 1 and analytic tools from Chapter 2 to show how teachers and students in one classroom deployed nicknames in ways that accomplished social action. Both of these analyses draw on year-long ethnographic projects in individual
classrooms, in which the researcher was physically present with participants. As
Hammersley and Atkinson (1995) and many others describe, ethnography involves at least three data sources: field notes and/or recordings drawn from participant observation, interviews and documents. Ethnography is designed to understand people’s activities from their own point of view, uncovering the concepts and models that they use to make sense of experience. This does not mean that ethnographers never use outsider categories in their analyses. But they only do so if they have evidence that participants themselves tacitly presuppose these categories. Ethnographic research is an excellent complement to discourse analysis.
