Abstract

This paper delineates a postmodern discourse analysis that is positioned within a semiotic theory of language. This theory of language foregrounds the performative aspects of language usage and provides the theoretical space from which to theorize the interrelationship between social organizations or structure and social agents or individuals. Our version of discourse analysis contends that social structure is enacted (production and reproduction) through the employment of various vocabularies: social structure is not something outside of, behind, or underneath these performances, and we argue that social organization is not produced by external structures operating upon or causing people to adopt certain behaviours. Rather, social structure is an effect of taking up practices and reproducing and modifying them. From this perspective, individuals are constituted by being recruited into and reproducing discursive practices. Hence, by looking at the actual employment of language – its tactical, practice dimensions – one can avoid the usual binary of seeing the person as either the autonomous origin of his or her experience or the ideological pawn of social determination. This methodology calls into question how the narratives or stories that individuals recount are imbricated within relational plays of power, and concomitantly, how subjects reauthorize their own positions. We assert that the methodological challenges of research addressing social injustice cannot be reduced to either: (i) interpersonal relationships between researcher and participants, or (ii) relegated to ‘social structures’ acting upon or outside of individuals.