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Qualitative Studies Of Silence The Unsaid As Social
Action 1st Edition Amy Jo Murray Digital Instant
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Author(s): Amy Jo Murray, Kevin Durrheim
ISBN(s): 9781108345552, 1108345557
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 2.52 MB
Year: 2019
Language: english
Qualitative Studies of Silence
Qualitative Studies of Silence brings together influential qualitative
researchers from across the social sciences and humanities who have
sought to understand the power of what remains unsaid, both psycho-
logically and socially. Each chapter identifies one or more signs of silence
and explains how these can form the basis of a rigorous qualitative
investigation. The authors also demonstrate how silences operate in
our private and collective lives by fulfilling psychological, relational,
institutional, and ideological functions. The book contains multiple
disciplinary perspectives and presents analyses of wide-ranging topics,
such as medical consultations, whistleblowers, silence in court,
omission-as-propaganda, trauma survivors, the silence of war museums,
racism in the Americas, gendered silences, paid domestic labour, the
undocumented student movement, and the Nazi past. This collection
shows how such qualitative studies can reveal and contribute to under-
standing the unsaid as social action.
Amy Jo Murray is a researcher based in the psychology department at
the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She is exploring crea-
tive ways of understanding social justice and inequality through quali-
tative research.
Kevin Durrheim is Professor of Psychology at the University of
KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, where he runs a research lab and teaches
social psychology and research methods.
Qualitative Studies of Silence
The Unsaid as Social Action
Edited by
Amy Jo Murray
University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Kevin Durrheim
University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
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Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.
It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108421379
DOI: 10.1017/9781108345552
© Cambridge University Press 2019
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2019
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-108-42137-9 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
For all children, who should be seen and heard
Contents
List of Figures page ix
List of Contributors x
Acknowledgments xiv
Introduction: A Turn to Silence 1
amy jo murray and kevin durrheim
1 Literal and Metaphorical Silences in Rhetoric: Examples
from the Celebration of the 1974 Revolution in the
Portuguese Parliament 21
michael billig and cristina marinho
2 Seeing Silenced Agendas in Medical Interaction:
A Conversation Analytic Case Study 38
merran toerien and clare jackson
3 Listening to the Sound of Silence: Methodological
Reflections on Studying the Unsaid 59
eviatar zerubavel
4 Social Silences: Conducting Ethnographic Research on
Racism in the Americas 71
christina a. sue and mary robertson
5 Intimate Silences and Inequality: Noticing the Unsaid
through Triangulation 89
amy jo murray and nicole lambert
6 Silence in the Court: Moral Exclusion at the Intersection
of Disability, Race, Sexuality, and Methodology 107
susan opotow, emese ilyes, and michelle fine
7 Silencing Self and Other through Autobiographical
Narratives 126
robyn fivush and monisha pasupathi
vii
viii Contents
8 Gendering the Unsaid and the Unsayable 147
gregory coles and cheryl glenn
9 The Language Ideology of Silence and Silencing in Public
Discourse: Claims to Silencing as Metadiscursive Moves
in German Anti-Political Correctness Discourse 165
melani schrö ter
10 Propaganda by Omission: The Case of Topical Silence 186
tom huckin
11 Silencing Whistleblowers 206
c. fred alford
12 Between Sound and Silence: The Inaudible and the
Unsayable in the History of the First World War 223
jay winter
13 Affect and the Unsaid: Silences, Impasses, and
Testimonies to Trauma 236
michael richardson and kyla allison
14 The Unsaid and the Unheard: Acknowledgement,
Accountability, and Recognition in the Face of Silence 254
stephen frosh
15 Conclusion: Topographies of the Said and Unsaid 270
kevin durrheim and amy jo murray
Index 293
Figures
12.1 Fosse, or dugout, representing trenches in the First
World War. page 226
12.2 The end of the war: A seismograph of the cessation
of artillery fire on 11 November 1918. 232
15.1 Topographical map of the said and unsaid. 275
15.2a Trail system on a university campus. 283
15.2b Stigmertic simulation of a trail system. 284
ix
Contributors
c. fred alford is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland,
College Park. He is the author of more than fifteen books on moral
psychology, including Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational
Power and Trauma, Culture, and PTSD.
kyla allison is a PhD candidate in the School of the Arts and Media at
the University of New South Wales. Her research interests include
affect and gender theory, with a particular focus on sexual abuse in
politics, media, literature, and culture.
michael billig retired in 2017. He previously worked at Loughborough
University in the Department of Social Sciences. He has published
books on a variety of subjects, including fascism, nationalism, psycho-
analysis, and the overuse of technical language. His latest book, written
with Cristina Marinho, is The Politics and Rhetoric of Commemoration.
gregory coles is a PhD graduate in English at the Pennsylvania State
University, where he teaches rhetoric, composition, and civic engage-
ment. His rhetorical scholarship has been published in College English
and Rhetorica.
kevin durrheim is Professor of Psychology at the University of KwaZulu-
Natal, where he teaches social psychology and research methods and
runs a research lab. He writes on topics related to racism, segregation,
and social change.
michelle fine is Distinguished Professor of Critical Psychology,
Women’s Studies, American Studies and Urban Education at the
Graduate Center, City University of New York. Fine is a university
teacher, educational activist, and researcher who works on social justice
projects with youth, women and men in prison, educators, and mem-
bers of social movements on the ground.
robyn fivush is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology at
Emory University. She is a fellow of both the American Psychological
x
List of Contributors xi
Association and the Association for Psychological Science. Her
research focuses on the social construction of autobiographical mem-
ory and the relations among memory, narrative, identity, trauma, and
coping.
stephen frosh is Professor in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at
Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of many books and
papers on psychosocial studies and on psychoanalysis. He is a fellow of
the Academy of Social Sciences, an academic associate of the British
Psychoanalytical Society, a founding member of the Association of
Psychosocial Studies, and an honorary member of the Institute of
Group Analysis.
cheryl glenn is Distinguished Professor of English at The
Pennsylvania State University, where she is Director of the
Program in Writing and Rhetoric. Her publications include
Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the
Renaissance; Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence; Silence and Listening as
Rhetorical Arts; Rhetoric and Writing Studies in the New Century:
Historiography, Pedagogy, and Politics; and Rhetorical Feminism and
This Thing Called Hope.
tom huckin is Professor Emeritus of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the
University of Utah, Salt Lake City. He specializes in critical discourse
analysis and the study of contemporary propaganda.
emese ilyes is a researcher, educator, and PhD candidate at
The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research is
focused on tracing the process of moral exclusion. She is committed to
lifting and envisioning radical possibilities where the incarceration of
people with intellectual disabilities is replaced by justice.
clare jackson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the
University of York, UK. She uses conversation analysis to study inter-
action in both ordinary and workplace settings, including family tele-
phone calls, maternity units, and neurology clinics. She is particularly
interested in applying conversation analysis to examine interactional
practices of joint decision making.
nicole lambert is Assistant Professor of Sociology at MassBay
Community College. She earned her PhD in sociology at the
University of Colorado, Boulder. Her current research project
takes an intersectional approach to understanding the experiences
of undocumented 1.5-generation Latinx immigrants in the United
States.
xii List of Contributors
cristina marinho is Teaching Fellow at The University of Edinburgh in
the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences. With
Professor Michael Billig, she has investigated political discourse at the
Parliamentary Commemoration of April Revolution. This collabora-
tive work resulted in the book The Politics and Rhetoric of
Commemoration.
amy jo murray is a researcher based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
She is exploring creative ways of understanding social justice and
inequality through qualitative research. She is studying how the unsaid
naturalizes and maintains the status quo within racialized relationships,
specifically within the context of paid domestic labor.
susan opotow is Professor of Sociology (John Jay College of Criminal
Justice) and Psychology (Graduate Center) of the City University of
New York and publishes on the psychology of justice, conflict, exclu-
sion, and inclusion.
monisha pasupathi is Professor of Psychology and Associate Dean of the
Honors College at the University of Utah. She studies the way that
storytelling shapes memory, self and self-regulation, and social devel-
opment across the lifespan, with a particular emphasis on adolescence
and early adulthood.
michael richardson is ARC DECRA Research Fellow and Senior
Lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of
New South Wales. He researches the intersection of affect and power
in media, literature, politics, and culture and is the author of Gestures of
Testimony: Torture, Trauma and Affect in Literature (2016).
mary robertson is Assistant Professor of Sociology at California
State University, San Marcos. She is the author of Growing Up
Queer: Kids and the Remaking of LGBTQ Identity (2019). Her areas
of teaching and research expertise include the sociology of sexua-
lities, sex and gender, feminist and queer theory, and qualitative
methods.
melani schrö ter is Associate Professor in German Linguistics at the
University of Reading, UK, author of Silence and Concealment in
Political Discourse (2013) and co-editor of Exploring Silence and
Absence in Discourse (2018). Research interests include political dis-
course, silence and absence in discourse, comparative discourse analy-
sis, discourses of resistance.
List of Contributors xiii
christina a. sue is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of
Colorado, Boulder. Her research interests are in the areas of race and
ethnicity (particularly ideology, identities, and multiracialism) and
immigration, with a regional focus on the United States and Latin
America, as well as in qualitative methodology.
merran toerien is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the
University of York, UK. She primarily uses conversation analysis to
study interaction in workplace settings, including beauty salons,
Jobcentres, recruitment to medical trials, and neurology clinics. She
is particularly interested in joint decision making in institutional and
ordinary conversations.
jay winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale
University. He is the author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning:
The Great War in European Cultural History (1995). He holds honorary
doctorates from the University of Graz, the Katholik University of
Leuven, and the University of Paris.
eviatar zerubavel is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of
Sociology at Rutgers University. He is the author of twelve books,
including The Fine Line, Social Mindscapes, The Clockwork Muse,
The Elephant in the Room, Hidden in Plain Sight, and Taken for Granted.
Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to all of the contributors for participating in this
project and from whom we have learned so much about the field of silence
and about what it is to embody scholarly integrity. We would like to thank
the following people for their generous academic spirit by helping in the
conceptual crystallization of the book: Martha Augoustinos, Annette
Becker, Michael Billig, Brita Bjørkelo, Diane N. Bryen, Ronald Cohen,
Robert T. Craig, Jennifer L. Croissant, Heidi Kevoe Feldman, Scott
Frickel, Stephen Frosh, Susan Gal, Olga Gonzalez, Debra Gray, Azriel
Grysman, Rosalind Gill, Phil Hammack, Derek Hook, Klaus Humpert,
Alistair Nixon, Jane Parpart, Brian Rappert, John Richardson, Juliet
Rogers, Todd Schoepflin, Robin Sheriff, Paul Stenner, Cristian
Tileaga, Patricia Von Munchow, Margaret Wetherell, Kevin
Whitehead, and Deidre Wicks. We are appreciative of Cambridge
University Press for giving us the opportunity to publish the collection,
especially to Janka Romero and Emily Watton for their support and
patience. The support of the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in
Human Development toward this research/activity is hereby acknowl-
edged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at, are those of the
author and are not necessarily to be attributed to the Centre of Excellence
in Human Development.
Finally, we would like to thank our parents, friends, and colleagues for
their support, but especially our families: Adrian Murray (along with
Michaela Faith, Gabriella Lee, Genevieve Reese, Jesse Lewis, and
Ezekiel Elliot Murray) and Aleks Durrheim (along with Ružica
Jovanovic and Shea Blue Durrheim). To leave you unacknowledged
would truly be a case of significant absence!
xiv
Introduction: A Turn to Silence
Amy Jo Murray and Kevin Durrheim
Every society lives with silence and the tensions created by absence.
We choose to notice some aspects of our world, allowing others to fade
into the background. Then there are moments when we speak out about
what was once silent, bringing into social life topics that had been unspo-
ken or were unspeakable. The slogans of our time ring out to mark the
silences that have made us what we are: #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter,
#RhodesMustFall, and even #AmericaFirst. These slogans are self-
conscious unsilencings and can be powerful mobilizing devices.
Silences come to define the society that keeps them, and its future
depends on how these silences are identified, broken, or maintained.
This is nowhere more evident than in the transformation to democracy
in South Africa that both editors of this volume have lived through.
Apartheid was a state of silence, built upon geographic partition (Cell,
1982) that kept the pain and violence of what Fanon (1963) called the
“colonized sector” out of sight and out of mind of those living in the
“European sector.” Whites could live in relative ease, consumed by
ordinary concerns of day-to-day life while cultivating mundane and
even exceptional pleasures and aspirations. White privilege was hardly
viewed as privilege at all, but as justly earned success or as the product of
a natural order or an unfortunate history. Certainly, rumblings of dis-
content could be heard. Daily news broadcasted dehumanizing represen-
tations of black people in angry crowds, throwing stones amid the flames
of burning tires (Posel, 1990). But the topics of injustice, white privilege,
and state violence were routinely made absent from national public dis-
course by banning, censorship, imprisonment, and exile, on the one
hand, and by a cultivated and enacted sense of ordinariness, on the
other, naturalizing white privilege and silencing oppression and black
pain. These silences became the social action that maintained the apart-
heid regime, allowing it to continue in a business-as-usual fashion.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) played a central
role in the transition to democracy. It broke the silence between the
oppressed and the privileged by allowing victims of apartheid to tell the
1
2 Amy Jo Murray and Kevin Durrheim
truth about their experiences. All of those goings on that had been hidden
and silenced – in the townships, on the streets, in schools, in private
homes, in police cells, on the country’s borders, and in exile – were to
be spoken about. The silenced were given a platform that humanized the
suffering of apartheid and that called the perpetrators to account.
The Human Rights Violations Committee gathered a total of 21,296
statements, narrating a staggering 46,696 violations involving 28,750
victims (Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, vol. 3, chap. 1,
1998, pp. 2–3). There was much to be said and, as one survivor stated, the
TRC ensured that “we are no longer living under the tyranny of silence”
(cited in Krog, 1998, p. 145). The TRC catalogued events, moments,
and figures of the struggle through testimonies that spoke to the violence
of apartheid: burnings and bombings, shootings, torture, forced
removals, gendered violence, police custody, detention without trial,
exile, disappearances, and attempts to disrupt the status quo. These
stories needed – and still need – to be told and retold. Progress depended
on an ability to break the great silence that had held South Africa in its
grip.
However, as important as the TRC was for breaking silence, it also
preserved silence. Not all utterances in TRC hearings were heard and
accepted. For one, testimony fell on deaf ears when listeners refused to
engage with utterances that fell outside of the preferred discourses of the
TRC, discourses that focused on building the Rainbow Nation and were
based on Christian ideology (Statman, 2000; Verdoolaege, 2005). TRC
Commissioners redirected expressions of anger, calls for vengeance, and
outraged reactions toward moments of forgiveness and reconciliation
(Statman, 2000). Also, by focusing on discrete events and figures –
namely victims and perpetrators – the TRC hearings presented
a “reduction and flattening” (Wright, 2017, p. 175) of apartheid experi-
ences. This focus on the extremes of apartheid meant that the harrowing
effect of the daily grind – what Motsemme (2004, p. 922) calls the
“material and political lived conditions” – of apartheid was effectively
made absent. In choosing to say and hear some things, others were left
unsaid and unheard, constituting a form of social action.
These silences have reverberated into the new order, which remains
haunted by the past (cf. Frosh, 2012; Stevens, Duncan, & Hook,
2013). The TRC represented an important unsilencing moment in
South African history, but it “contained contradictions, ambiguities
and generated contestations and conflicts” (Robins, 2007, p. 126).
It even serves as a “reference point for leaving the past ‘behind’”
(Gobodo-Madikizela, 2012, p. 253), burying apartheid in history,
allowing the beneficiaries of apartheid – white South Africans – to
Introduction: A Turn to Silence 3
forget about the injustice upon which their ongoing privilege rests
(Gobodo-Madikizela, 2012). Yes, the “Rainbow Nation” still has its
silences, some of which originate in the unsilencing project of the
TRC. These silences have come to define the current order and
struggles, which have their own unsilencing slogans (e.g.,
#FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall), curse words (white privilege,
white monopoly capitalism), and political projects (e.g., decoloniza-
tion, Black First Land First). Yet, as was the case with the TRC, these
voicings and the social actions they inform cast a veil of silence that
will haunt future generations.
This book seeks to focus attention onto the silences and absences of our
social worlds. The chapters will show how the unsaid can become the
object of qualitative analyses in a wide range of contexts, and they will
demonstrate how the maintaining and breaking of silences can be treated
as social actions.
Qualitative Studies of Silence
The work of the South African TRC shows the centrality of discourse for the
setting up, securing, undoing, and at times maintaining of silence. No doubt,
the silences and invisibilities of apartheid were established by violence,
forced removals (Platzky & Walker, 1985), and imprisonments and torture
(Foster & Davis, 1978) and cemented in law (Horrell, 1978), economics
(Lipton, 1989), and the geography of partition (Christopher, 1994).
However, all these practices and structures were informed by a pervasive
discourse of apartheid (Norval, 1996). Consent for apartheid policies and
practice was entrenched by a discourse of control and normalization (Posel,
1987).
Qualitative methods of ethnographic and archival research as well as
discourse, narrative, and conversation analysis have been invaluable tools
for studying the legitimizing powers of discourse. Critical scholarship in
South Africa was part of a colossal global body of work that has been
inspired by the turn to language in the social sciences and humanities,
a turn that attempts to give voice to the oppressed and to tackle all manner
of inequality and injustice. This work pivoted on the idea that language
constructs reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). Critical qualitative stu-
dies straddled and cut through and across disciplinary boundaries: lin-
guistics, history, psychology, education, political studies, cultural studies,
feminism, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, and many others
(Denzin & Lincoln, 1994). Inspired by the crisis of representation and
legitimation, qualitative researchers showed how discursive routines and
conventions – including those in the social sciences – worked to legitimate
4 Amy Jo Murray and Kevin Durrheim
the status quo – patriarchy, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, sexism,
heterosexism, classism, and so on – and silence alternative possibilities.
This turn was itself thoroughly discursive. It drew on the language
of poststructuralism, ethnomethodology, and pragmatism, and it
made thunderous challenges to the positivist traditions of inquiry
and the traditional criteria for evaluating research (Denzin &
Lincoln, 1994), including its central adherence to “objectivity.”
The breaking of silence in qualitative research was a noisy and
political activity of debate and contestation that challenged and rees-
tablished the boundaries of legitimacy and attempted to give voice to
the voiceless. While an invigorated qualitative tradition sought to
challenge these layers of silence in scholarship and in society at
large, it did so by focusing on the said rather than the unsaid, and
on presences rather than absences.
This focus is built into the very definition of its terms. For example,
the concept of discourse was defined as social practices (Fairclough,
1992; Foucault, 1972) or a “group of statements” (Dreyfus &
Rabinow, 1982, p. 107); and the fecund concept of interpretive reper-
toires was defined as “a lexicon or register of terms and metaphors”
(Potter & Wetherell, 1987, p. 138) and as “building blocks . . . con-
stituted out of a restricted range of terms” (Wetherell & Potter, 1988,
p. 172). Qualitative research focused attention on what people were
saying and doing and on the representations that circulated in the
media, among elites, and in everyday discourse. Absences were seldom
treated as social actions.
Qualitative research was underpinned by the “authenticity of presence”
(Atkinson, 1988, p. 454) that was accomplished through techniques such
as thick description (Geertz, 1973) and literally transcribed conversation
(Hepburn & Bolden, 2013). This work presented social interactions and
routines for analysis and highlighted the expressive functions of language,
including its powers for constructing speaker identities and the subjects
and objects of talk. Silence was indicated (if it was) by audible gaps and
pauses in the spoken word, whereas the focus of analysis was on the
content and enactment of what was said and done instead of what was
left unsaid and undone.
Nonetheless, even as they focused on talk, action, and other presences,
qualitative researchers brushed up against the unsaid. They encountered
conspicuous absences that appeared to incite, constrain, and naturalize
forms of social action. The presence of the unsaid in the noisy world of
discourse became evident in three layers of silence: social exclusions,
traces of avoidance, and conversational expectations.
Introduction: A Turn to Silence 5
Social Exclusions
In a widely cited essay, Spivak (1988) posed the question, “Can the
subaltern speak?” to highlight the “epistemic violence” that prevents mar-
ginalized and oppressed peoples from representing themselves.
Poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist scholars had criticized the
way positivist social science presumed to speak for the people who were
the subjects of their investigations – often in the interests of governmen-
tality, colonial administration, and patriarchy. Being sensitive to the crisis
of representation and legitimation, critical scholars sought instead to create
a space for marginalized and oppressed peoples to speak for themselves
and to build an alliance politics rooted in the conditions of their own lives.
For Spivak, the problem with this impulse was the disjuncture between
the discourses and texts of liberation that were articulated by leftist
intellectuals in Europe and the United States and “on the other side of
the international division of labor, the subject of exploitation [who]
cannot know and speak the text of female exploitation, even if the
absurdity of the nonrepresenting intellectual making space for her to
speak is achieved” (1988, p. 288). The interview and other methods
were “flood[ed] . . . with social science agendas and categories” (Potter
& Hepburn, 2005, p. 291) that were alien to the people who were invited
to speak. Thus as qualitative research moved from the European/imperi-
alist center to the margins of the third world, researchers encountered the
“silent, silenced center” of humanity – “men and women among the
illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletar-
iat” (Spivak, 1988, p. 283) – who might have been given space to speak,
but who remained as “mute as ever.” The subaltern was silenced, and
even if they could speak, they could not be properly heard. Rather than
focus on speaking, Spivak recommends that we attend to silence, as we
seek to understand who does and does not speak, whose voice gets to be
represented, and how epistemic violence is exercised on the voice of the
marginal and oppressed.
There was a silence at the heart of the turn to language and discourse.
The texts of investigation were often the texts of the privileged and
powerful. True, these were subjected to a critical deconstruction and
analysis. But this work left in its wake a conspicuous absence, an absence
of the themes, topics, and concerns of the subaltern – in their own voice.
Traces of Avoidance
The second way in which absences became evident in qualitative studies
of texts and talk was when speakers could be seen as actively avoiding
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