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I will concentrate here on two sets of our interviews. One set are interviews with teenagers from what I will call “working-class families.” They all live in a post-industrial urban area in Massachusetts U.S. where traditional
working-class jobs are fast disappearing. The other set are interviews with teenagers from what I will call “upper- middle-class” families. These teens attend elite public schools in Massachusetts suburban communities and all have
parents one or both of whom are doctors, lawyers, or university professors.
I do not focus on two contrasting groups because I think any simple binary distinction exists here. There are clearly multiple and complex continua at play. None the less, this particular contrast is an important starting place in
today’s “new capitalist,” high-tech, global world Gee, Hull, and Lankshear 1996. Across much of the developed world, young people from traditional working-class communities face a future with a severe shortage of good
working-class jobs. They often attend troubled schools with limited resources, schools that engage in what, from the point of view of current school reform efforts, are less efficacious ways of teaching. On the other hand, many
students in wealthy suburbs and ex-urban “edge cities’’ Kaplan 1998 live in communities and attend schools that, unlike those available to less well-off urban students, often give them “cultural capital” for an information-driven
global world Bourdieu 1985, 1998.
It has been argued that our new global capitalism is fast turning these two groups into separate “cultures” composed of people who share little or no “co-citizenship” Reich 1992; Kaplan 1998; Kanter 1995. The wealthier group is
coming progressively to feel more affiliation with similar elites across the world and less responsibility for the less well-off in their own country Reich 1992. And, of course, such affiliations are both the product and cause of
shared cultural models, social languages, and Discourses. The same phenomenon is happening across much of the globe.
Our “social class” labels “working class” and “upper middle class” have no more import than what the last paragraph has tried to convey. In fact, discourse analysts often look at two contrasting groups not to set up a binary
contrast, but in order to get ideas about what the poles of a continuum may look like. We can get ideas that can then inform the collection of new data out of which emerges a much more nuanced and complex picture.
7.2 Co-constructing socioculturally-situated identities
I want to start with a consideration of the way socially-situated identities are mutually co-constructed co-built and what this has to do with situated meanings, social languages, cultural models, and Discourses. We will also see here
a connection between building socially-situated identities and building different socially-situated activities.
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Socially-situated identities are mutually co-constructed in interviews, just as much as they are in everyday conversations. For example, consider the following brief extracts from our interviews we looked at these extracts in
Chapter 4, as well, pp. 74–7. The first one is from a college academic an anthropologist who teaches at a prestigious college in the town where our working-class teens live. The other is from a middle-school teacher who
has had a number of our working-class teenagers in her classes. In these extracts, each numbered line is what I referred to in Chapter 6 as a “macro-line” p. 114. If one macro-line is interrupted by another one, I use a notation
like “2a” and “2b” to connect the two separated parts of the discontinuous macro-line.
College professor female
Interviewer: . . . How, do you see racism happening, in society, let’s put it that way.
Middle school teacher female
Interviewer: I’m just curious whether eighth graders will tie that [consideration of social issues in their social studies class, JPG] into their, or maybe you in like leading the class would you ever tie that into like present power
relations or just individual experiences of racism in their lives or something like that.
. . . 1.
uh I talk about housing, 2.
We talk about the [????] we talk about a lot of the low income things, 3.
I said “Hey wait a minute,” 4.
I said, “Do you think the city’s gonna take care of an area that you don’t take care of yourself?’’ [I: uh huh] 5.
I said, “How [many of] you [have] been up Danbury Street?” 6.
They raise their hands, 7.
I say “How about Washington Ave.,” 8.
That’s where those gigantic houses are, 9.
I said, “How many pieces of furniture are sitting in the front yard?” [I: mm hm] “Well, none.” 1 Um, well, I could answer on, on a variety of different levels. [I: uh huh]
2aUm, at the most macro level, um, I think that there’s um, um, 3 I don’t want to say this in a way that sounds like a conspiracy, [I: mm hm]
2bBut I think um, that um, basically that the lives of people of color are are, are irrelevant to the society anymore.
[I: mm hm] 4 Um, they’re not needed for the economy because we have the third world to run away into for cheap labor, [I: uh
huh]
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10. I said “How much trash is lying around? None.”
11. I said, “How many houses are spray painted? How many of them have doors kicked in, you know have
broken down cars in front of them?” Throughout her interview, the professor treats actors, events, activities, practices, and Discourses in terms of
economic and nation-state level politics. She treats “racial problems” as transcending her city and as a global affair, despite the fact that she could well point to specific instances in her city. However, this ‘‘global voice” is co-
constructed with the interviewer who very often couches both her main questions which concern the same basic topics in each interview and her follow up questions in much more “theoretical,” “abstract,” and “global” terms
than she does those to the middle-school teacher.
Though the middle-school teacher is interviewed by the same interviewer, the interviewer and teacher co-construct a very different, much more local sort of socially-situated identity and voice for the teacher. In fact, researchers and
teachers alike usually assume that school teachers, unlike college academics, have only a “local voice.” Rarely are teachers invited to speak in more global and national ways about racial, literacy, or schooling issues.
Even these short extracts can lead us to some hypotheses about different cultural models being used by the middle- school teacher and the university academic. The professor seems to apply a widespread academic cultural model in
terms of which actual behavior “the appearances” follow from larger, deeper, more general, underlying, and hidden causes. The teacher seems to apply a widespread cultural model in terms of which people’s problems flow
from their own behaviors as individuals, not from larger institutional, political, and social relationships among groups.
Any close inspection of the college professor’s language and the middle-school teacher’s would show that they are using different linguistic resources to enact two different social languages. The college professor uses more
academic-like lexical items e.g. “variety,” “levels,” “macro,” “conspiracy,” “people of color,” “irrelevant,” “the economy,” “the third world,” “cheap labor” and more complex syntax e.g. “At the most macro level, I think
there’s . . .” or “They’re not needed for the economy because we have the third world to run away into for cheap labor”, as well as a clear argumentative structure, to speak in a global and abstract way that distances her from
individuals and local realities.
The middle-school teacher uses less academic-like lexical items e.g. “the low income things,” “gigantic houses,” “trash,” “broken down cars” and somewhat less complex syntax e.g. there are no instances of syntactic
subordination between clauses in the above extract, save for the relative clause in macro-line 4, together with enacting dialogues in which she plays both the teacher and student parts. She speaks in a way that is dramatic,
personal, and directly situated in her local experience.
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We can see here, then, the ways in which the middle-school teacher and the college professor each use a distinctive social language and a distinctive set of cultural models to situate the meanings of their words within two different
and distinctive Discourses. The middle-school teacher speaks out of “teacher Discourse,” inflected, of course, with the concrete realities of her school and community. The college academic, on the other hand, speaks out of a
recognizable academic Discourse, again, of course, inflected by her own discipline and institution note, by the way, how I have here myself constructed a more global identity for the academic by talking about “disciplines” and
“institutions’’ and a more local one for the teacher by talking about “school” and “community”.
Let me just quickly mention here something about activity building in regard to the aforementioned extracts. If one looks at the whole interviews, I believe there is evidence that the interviewer–interviewees are involved in somewhat
different social activities in their respective interviews. In the interview with the college professor, the interviewer an advanced doctoral student from another university in the same city, interested in society and culture and
interviewee share a good deal of situated meanings and cultural models. Their interview is akin to a collaborative discussion, in which they readily enact their mutual affiliation in their language. In the interview with the middle-
school teacher, the interviewer appears much more to be extracting “esoteric” information from the interviewee from an “outside” perspective. I only suggest this difference in how the interviews are built as distinctive social
activities as a hypothesis for which we would need to gather more evidence from the whole interviews.
If we did find substantive evidence for this hypothesis and, if I had more space, I believe I could lay out such evidence, we would have to conclude that the “data” from the university academic may very well “mean”
something quite different than the “data” from the middle-school teacher. There is a sense, perhaps, in which in the interview with the college professor, the interviewer and interviewee are using a social language in which they are
both quite fluent. On the other hand, the middle-school teacher is often speaking in a social language in which she, but not the interviewer, is fluent, however much the interviewer may aid and abet her in using this social language.
For example, the tactic of enacting both parts of a teacher–student dialogue is one that I have often heard and recorded from school teachers in this teacher’s city. I have never heard the interviewer or any college teacher use
this tactic, though we college professors all teach in classrooms. And, in fact, no instance of a such a speech tactic occurs in our interviews with college professors in this city.
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7.3 Building socially-situated identities and building different worlds
