Framing selves in interactional practice

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the mutual constitution of frames and selves in interactional practice. We consider two examples, one taken from an Israeli radio call-in program and the other an American tutoring session. Both interactions follow a similar pattern with the caller and student encountering what appears to be a negative construal of their self, to which both respond with unusual interactional moves. In the radio call-in, during a discussion of the corruption of the government, the caller turns the conversation to the notion of buying a wife. In the tutoring session, during the tutor's mini-lecture on the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the student takes out her mathematics notebook and starts working on math problems. In the discussion of these peculiar interactional moves, we consider the motivations, justifications, and consequences of these interactional moves. In so doing, we suggest how a theory of discursive and interactional framing could augment theories about the social construction of self, including face-work theory. In addition, we describe how a theory of power and agency in interaction rely on and constitute moral worlds. In a recent contribution to Galanes and Leed-Hurwitz' 2009 book Socially Constructing Communication, Bartesaghi and Castor describe a program for the study of communication as social construction (Bartesaghi & Castor, 2009). In their essay, they note that many foundational approaches to social construction (e.g., Berger & Luckmann, 1966) have approached social construction as an epistemological concern that pits social construction and reality as opposing terms such that the social construction of reality seems to suggest that reality is somehow less than it otherwise was. This move has led social constructionism to get bogged down in what has been called the realism-relativism debate. This debate turns on questions such as whether social constructionism can account for the fact that is a really real or, as some like to say, that there is

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