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Article published In:
Spanish in Context
Vol. 15:1 (2018) ► pp.54–76

Interviews as sites of ideological work

| University of Surrey

This paper maintains that the interview, understood as an interactionally achieved social practice, can be a locus for ideological work. It shows how a differentiated understanding of stance, alignment and the discourse identities that the participants assume and leave in interaction, can bring into focus aspects of ideology that would be difficult to capture otherwise. Specifically, the paper shows how mis- and realigning actions with respect to the stances conveyed by the interview participants relative to a given subject or from a given discourse identity can lead to the construction of ideology, encouraging (or not) movement along a given interview trajectory. The ideological work observed is contingent on how the participants locate themselves and others in the interview where tensions between legitimised linguistic views and discourse identity adoption, as well as contradictions with regard to other circulating discourses emerge. The paper thus suggests that (language ideological) analyses of interview data can and should be focused on the social dynamics of the participants and how their ideological presuppositions play out in the situated interaction of the interview.

Keywords: stance, alignment, discourse identity, ideology, Latin American migrants
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Stance-taking and aligning actions in sociolinguistic interviews
  • 3.Background and methodology
  • 4.The interactional construction of ideology in interviews
    • 4.1The construction of ideology through misaligning actions
    • 4.2The construction of ideology through realigning actions
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 31 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.00003.mar
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