Discourse Communities and the Discourse of Experience

Discourse communities are groups of people who share common ideologies, and common ways of speaking about things. They can be sharply or loosely defined. We are each members of multiple discourse communities. Discourse can colonize the members of discourse communities, taking over domains of thought by means of ideology. The development of new discourse communities can serve positive ends, but discourse communities create risks as well. In our own work on the narratives of people with interests in health care, for example, we find that patients speak of their illness experiences as victims of circumstance; policy makers construct adverse experiences and challenges as opportunities to be taken; health care workers speak from a mixed perspective, seeing themselves as both victims and opportunists depending on context. To be trapped within the discourse of a particular community is to put at risk the ability to communicate across discourses. Membership of a discourse community can impair the habit of critique, and deny opportunities for heteroglossic discourse. Privileging critique as a mode of discourse perhaps might define the ethical community, suggesting that ethical community may be an antidote to the constraining effects of conventional discourse community.

[1]  J. Bruner.  Acts of meaning , 1990 .

[2]  Satinder P. Singh,et al.  Introduction , 2002, British Journal of Ophthalmology.

[3]  Marcio Goldman,et al.  A passage to anthropology: between experience and theory , 2000 .

[4]  A. Robertson.  Biotechnology, Political Rationality and Discourses on Health Risk , 2001 .

[5]  L. Ross,et al.  Barriers to conflict resolution , 1995 .

[6]  J. Scott.  The Evidence of Experience , 1991, Critical Inquiry.

[7]  A. J. Mckay.  Moral Status: Obligations to Persons and Other Living Things , 1998 .

[8]  M. Little,et al.  Survivorship and discourses of identity , 2002, Psycho-oncology.

[9]  Chris Sidoti,et al.  Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission , 2000 .

[10]  F Lortie,et al.  Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: the Narrative Structure of Experience , 1999, BMJ.

[11]  Joseph Campbell,et al.  The Hero with a Thousand Faces , 1949 .

[12]  K. Montgomery,et al.  Discourse in different voices: reconciling N = 1 and N = many. , 2002, Social science & medicine.

[13]  C. Jordens,et al.  Liminality: a major category of the experience of cancer illness. , 1998, Social science & medicine.

[14]  Helen King,et al.  Introduction: what is health? , 2005 .

[15]  M. Little,et al.  Approval and Disapproval in the Narratives of Colorectal Cancer Patients and Their Carers , 1999 .

[16]  S. Dawson.  Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society , 1976 .

[17]  Ivan Illich,et al.  Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health , 1977 .

[18]  Kenneth R. Hammond,et al.  Human Judgment and Social Policy: Irreducible Uncertainty, Inevitable Error, Unavoidable Injustice , 2000 .

[19]  A. Vincent.  Humane Medicine , 1983 .

[20]  M. Little,et al.  Face, Honor and Dignity in the Context of Colon Cancer , 2000 .

[21]  C. Freytag.  The Wounded Storyteller: Body Illness, and Ethics , 1996, Nature Medicine.

[22]  Ralph Crawshaw,et al.  Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health , 1976 .

[23]  H. L. Nelson.  Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair , 2001 .

[24]  E. Annandale.  The Sociology of Health and Medicine: A Critical Introduction , 1998 .

[25]  M. Little,et al.  Vulnerability in the Narratives of Patients and their Carers: Studies of Colorectal Cancer , 2000 .

[26]  J. Habermas.  The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity , 1985 .

[27]  C. Jordens,et al.  Life disruption and generic complexity: a social linguistic analysis of narratives of cancer illness. , 2001, Social science & medicine.