174 Neill Korobov
Wilkinson and Kitzinger (2008, p. 585), the study of how people engage in
identity work of this kind in various conversational contexts is one of the
“most vibrant areas” in the field of interactional studies.
Important to note, however, is that much of the ethnomethodological
work on identity became (in the field of conversation and discourse
analysis) a means to the larger end of examining social action. In other
words, identity ascriptions have been studied, as the moniker above states,
as a means of engaging with the larger project of examining the intricacies
of social action. Many conversation and discourse analysts pay attention to
participants’ identity work as means of studying the types of discursive
actions that such identity work accomplishes—i.e., patterns of turn-talking,
turn design, repair, sequence formulation, and action formation. With few
exceptions (see Stokoe, 2010), examining the social actions brought off
through categorical identity ascriptions has been a central way that
ethnomethodological insights about identity have been channeled into
critical interactional research.
Positioning: Indexing Identities through an Analysis
of Discursive Actions
For psychologists interested primarily in identity or, specifically, in a
critical ‘bottom up’ approach to identity, and not simply in identity as a
route to studying the architecture of discursive action, the
ethnomethodological approach (and some resultant conversation/discourse
analytic approaches) to identity may be limited. They may seem to too
quickly bypass an in-depth analysis of identities per se. A discursive
positioning approach is an attempt to remedy this problem. Like
ethnomethodology, and in keeping with the general spirit of the discursive
project, a discursive positioning approach is committed to an up-close
descriptively discursive vocabulary for the systematic and empirical
identification of discursive action. But it does more. To serve as a uniquely
qualitative discursive approach, a discursive positioning approach
additionally shows how discursive actions are, at times, ingredients in the