A Critical Discursive Approach to Identity 1731998). For example, speakers are said to directly or indirectly occasion (or
make relevant) an identity category. Such indexical invocations are
referred to as occasioning(s) that orient to an identity. Making relevant or
orienting to an identity or the features of an identity is brought off through
a range of discursive conversational structures (or discursive actions) that
include not only direct speech, but also paralinguistic cues. Interrogating
the identity constitutive work these conversational structures do, as well as
the attendant processes of occasioning, making relevant, and orienting-to,
in the process of creating sociality, is the focus and contribution of
ethnomethodology for the study of identity.
Ethnomethodology additionally stresses the importance of focusing on
how the participants themselves occasion identity-relevant categories and
use them to conduct social interaction. This is in stark contrast to the
prototypical psychological agenda of beginning with a priori researcher-
constructed identity categories (or features thereof), usually visible as
items on questionnaires or as parts of pre-established interview questions,
and testing to see whether and how people respond to such categories, as if
taking them up or not is an indication of whether one ‘has’ this or that
identity, which may in turn be associated/correlated with a range of
behaviors, feelings, and so on. The shift to treating identities as an endemic
participant resource (rather than analyst categories or predictive variables)
that people naturally use in everyday interactions, as well as the up-close
empirical investigation of such interactional work, is an additionally
significant contribution of ethnomethodology to the interactional study of
identity.
It is thus out of an ethnomethodological framework that the discursive
moniker ‘identities are for talking’ emerged (see Edwards 1991; Stokoe,
2010). Given the enormous variability and flexibility by which speakers
can categorize themselves and others in various interactions, analysts
attend to what is demonstrably relevant to speakers at specific discursive
junctures to see what identity ascriptions are designed to interactively
accomplish. The idea is that the demands of interpersonal engagement are
complex, requiring speakers to hone a certain level of discursive dexterity
when it comes to managing various identity alignments. According to