Article published In:
Journal of Language Aggression and ConflictVol. 2:1 (2014) ► pp.36–73
Identities in conflict
Examining the co-construction of impoliteness and identity in classroom interaction
As im/politeness scholars increasingly explore the intersections of identity and im/politeness, they reveal a growing need for empirical research that examines these intersections in a variety of discourses. This paper investigates the linkages between participants’ co-constructions of identity and impoliteness in naturally occurring classroom discourse. The data come from a corpus of conflictive interactions observed in seven hours of whole-class discussions and twelve hours of small-group discussions in four eighth-grade classrooms. I apply an analytic framework that combines a genre-approach (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2010, 2013) to impoliteness with a socio-constructivist approach (Bucholtz and Hall 2005) to identity, and I categorize identity according to Zimmerman’s (1998) three broad identity types: discourse identity, (genre)situated identity, and transportable identity. In co-constitutive processes (Miller 2013), participants co-construct impoliteness and identity, strategically initiating and assessing potential impoliteness acts to assert and reject identity claims.
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