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Article published In: Language as Action
Edited by Maurice Nevile and Johanna Rendle-Short
[Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 30:3] 2007
► pp. 36.1–36.13

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Resisting categorisation

An ordinary mother

 | Griffith University
 | University of Queensland
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 1 January 2007
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https://doi.org/10.2104/aral0736
In this paper we use membership category analysis to examine the way an interviewee utilises category work in order to resist the possible accusation of being a bad mother and instead posit her mothering as ordinary. Through our analysis we explore the interactional work of ascribing and resisting categorisation organised through claims and counter-claims making procedures routinely grounded in descriptions and accounts, and embedded in shifts between individual and categorial actions.
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2022. “He’s not Aussie Aussie”: Membership Categorisation in Storytelling Among Family Members and Peers. In Storytelling Practices in Home and Educational Contexts, ► pp. 375 ff. DOI logo
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2021. Introduction to Discursive Psychology and Disability: Working at the Intersection of Discursive Psychology and Disability. In Discursive Psychology and Disability, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Devlin, Niall
2015. The Ethical Demand in an Impossible Profession. In Critical Educational Psychology, ► pp. 88 ff. DOI logo
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Cobb-Moore, Charlotte
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Stelmach, Bonnie L. & Stuart D. Von Wolff
2011. A Challenge to Metrics as Evidence of Scholarity. European Educational Research Journal 10:1 ► pp. 64 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 6 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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