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Article published In: Narratives as Social Practice in Organisational Contexts
Edited by Dorien Van De Mieroop, Jonathan Clifton and Stephanie Schnurr
[Narrative Inquiry 32:1] 2022
► pp. 196–217

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Catching identities in flight

Sharing stories of discriminatory experiences during workplace small talk

 | KU Leuven
 | KU Leuven
 | KU Leuven
Published online: 2 July 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.20025.jac
Abstract
We present a case study of a small talk sequence in a Belgian workplace between two female colleagues with a migration background, in which they share stories with each other on racial micro-aggressions they personally experienced. We draw on the social practice approach and focus on the narrators’ identity work in this interaction. We found that the narrators construct stories in which powerless and outgroup identities are projected upon them in the storyworld, but by means of which more empowered identities and an ingroup with the interlocutor are talked into being in the storytelling world. Interestingly, these findings can be linked to the rejection-identification dynamic. This social psychological model shows that individuals who experienced discrimination are able to buffer negative consequences to their psychological well-being by identifying with the group that is discriminated against. This article adds to this earlier research by showing the crucial role of language, in particular of storytelling and small talk, in this rejection-identification dynamic.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Method
  • Data
  • Analyses
    • The first story
    • The second story
    • The third story
    • Discussion from a positioning analysis perspective
  • Conclusions
  • Note
  • References
References (46)
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2023. Othering the expat majority: Qatari junior academics’ identity work at the interface of migration and institutional reform. Language and Intercultural Communication 23:2 ► pp. 167 ff. DOI logo
Al-Khulaifi, Afra & Dorien Van De Mieroop
2024. “Why not the thoub and the abaya?”An interactional sociolinguistic approach to the interplay between nationality, gender, and professional identity in the Qatari academic workplace. Journal of Arabic Sociolinguistics 2:1 ► pp. 94 ff. DOI logo
Jacobs, Catho, Dorien Van De Mieroop & Colette Van Laar
2022. Dual identities? Transnational identities? Psychological acculturation research in dialogue with discursive approaches to the identity work of individuals with a migration background. Language and Intercultural Communication 22:6 ► pp. 624 ff. DOI logo

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