What’s the Big “D”? Contemporary Approaches to Discourse in Interpersonal and Family Communication Scholarship

Abstract

The term “discourse” is surrounded by an incredible amount of ambiguity in interpersonal and family communication (IFC) scholarship. As a result, IFC scholars often miss opportunities for dialogue and theory building. In an effort to demystify discourse, I first review ongoing conversations concerning discourse in IFC and organizational communication scholarship. Second, I analyze 205 IFC articles from communication journals through two intersecting continuums: discourse as instrumental/agentic and discourse as central/peripheral. Third, I frame these findings in a stage metaphor, where studies construct discourse in four ways, with discourse as a (a) set prop, (b) background actor, (c) personal prop, and (d) cast of actors. The results indicate that IFC scholarship retains an emphasis on the individual and the abstract. Finally, I advocate for a Latourian approach to discourse that decenters the individual and incorporates concrete, material considerations.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.