Abstract
Bio-experts’ portrayals of laypeople are considered problematic. Two discursive action method workshops with 17 participants were organized to discover whether plant experts can engage in reflexive problematization of their own talk about and in front of laypeople and whether plant experts’ analyses may offer insights with regard to the hegemony of technical-scientific expertise. Participants discussed the interactional effects of real-life expert talk. Plant experts’ discussions indicate that they can problematize how their talk-in-interaction helps reproduce the supremacy of technical-scientific expertise. Results also suggest that plant experts may offer complementary insights to social scientists’ analyses of plant experts’ talk.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 26-50 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | Science Communication |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Feb 2016 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
Based on Jeffersonian transcription ( Jefferson, 2004 ): .hhh A hearable in breath, the number of h’s signals the length (x.x) Pause of x.x seconds (.) Micro-pause, less than 0.2 seconds ↑word, ↓word Onset of noticeable pitch rises or fall Word Emphasized WORD Speaker is talking louder ((text)) Transcriber’s remarks = No hearable pause between words or turns (q) text (q) Constructed speech or reported dialogue Authors’ Note The research reported in this article is part of the successfully completed PhD project, “The Discursive Other: Dynamics in Plant Scientists’ Talk With Experts and the Public.” Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: We like to thank the CSG Centre for Society and the Life Sciences, a part of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), for the grant they provided. 1. Lay is as a relative category: People tend to be treated as either lay or expert depending on the subject under discussion and the company they keep. In this article, the term laypeople refers to both interested citizens and prospective users of science and technology developed by plant experts. 2. Kerr et al. (2007) do not provide an explicit definition of reflexive problematization. However, it can be derived from their article what reflexive problematization of talk-in-interaction entails. 3. Additionally, a workshop with citizens was planned; because we fell one citizen participant short the workshop with citizens was cancelled. 4. These are the so-named Jeffersonian transcript conventions, as is the norm in DP and DAM ( Jefferson, 2004 ). 5. Fragment 2 is the first fragment that workshop participants analyzed. As some of the quotes indicate, WPs occasionally used cognitive language. Cognitive language may indicate that WPs see words as expressions of thoughts or it simply signals unreflexive use of language. Given the duration of the workshops, we did not expect WPs to master aspects of DP perfectly. 6. The Dutch diminutive eiwitje is used, here translated as little protein . 7. What sociologist and conversation analyst Heritage (1984) calls the double duty of talk.
Keywords
- discursive action method
- discursive psychology
- experts’ discourse
- follow-up study
- reflexive problematization
- technical-scientific expertise