Speaking for and about a spouse with dementia: A matter of inclusion or exclusion?
2018 (English)In: Discourse Studies, ISSN 1461-4456, E-ISSN 1461-7080, Vol. 20, no 6, p. 770-791Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
This study analyses sequences where people with dementia are positioned as third parties in stories about their own lives. Previous research emphasises how people with dementia are frequently excluded from social encounters, and how others tend to speak for or about them in their co-presence. Drawing on conversation analytic methods when analysing 15 video recorded interviews with Swedish couples living with dementia, we argue that telling stories in which a spouse with dementia is positioned as a third party in his or her co-presence does not have to be an activity of exclusion. Rather, among couples, third-party positioning is a multifaceted activity where couples employ different practices to organise participation frameworks and manage both inclusion and exclusion in talk-in-interaction. Furthermore, we show how participants display joint speakership and counteract actions of exclusion by making use of various communicative resources such as gaze, touch and bodily orientation.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Sage Publications, 2018. Vol. 20, no 6, p. 770-791
Keywords [en]
Conversation analysis, couples, dementia, inclusion, multimodal analysis, pronouns, we-ness
National Category
Other Social Sciences not elsewhere specified
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-147757DOI: 10.1177/1461445618770482ISI: 000446683900004OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-147757DiVA, id: diva2:1205173
Note
Funding agencies: Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation as part of the programme Dementia: Agency, Personhood and Everyday life [M10-0187:1]
2018-05-112018-05-112020-01-21Bibliographically approved