A Critical Discursive Approach to Identity 169movement). Often, critical analyses of this type are too top-down, treating
identity as an ideological effect of some pre-established extra-discursive
norm, discourse, or speech-style, or cultural locale which tends to reify the
extra-discursive realm and marginalize the nitty gritty of actual local social
interactions. The result is a false-dichotomy where there are the external
cultural/social realms and then there are the internal participant discursive
orientations and/or attitudes towards them. The societal or extra-discursive
realm is not out there, so to speak, independent of participant’s
orientations, but are fluid resources that speakers create and work-up, use
and re-use, and as a result constantly re-fashion for use in future contexts
(Korobov, 2010). An ethno-DP approach advocates an immanentist
account of discursive meaning-making (see Davies & Harré 1990; Harré &
van Langenhove, 1999) where identities are immanent within (and not
transcendent to) communicative activity and an account of occasionedness
or indexicality—that is, a micro-discursive emphasis on demonstrating
how people use talk to index (or draw-up into a kind of communicative
space) identities. As such, an ethno-DP perspective has a decidedly
bottom-up point-of-departure.
CENTRAL COMPONENTS OF A CRITICAL DISCURSIVE
APPROACH TO IDENTITY
The critical approach to identity presented here is motivated by a least
three key streams of thought. First are the theoretical developments in
social constructionism (see Gergen, 1994, 1999). Over the last several
decades, social constructionism has emerged as a compendium of
poststructural, postempiricist, and hermeneutic philosophical thought
aimed at emancipating contemporary psychology from its ties to
foundationalist assumptions regarding mind, identity, language, and
thought. Social constructionism has become an invaluable as a clearing
space for a non-mimetic view of communication which, in turn, has
invigorated a discursive turn towards studying identities as