*** Everyone Welcome! No need to
book in advance***
Date: Thursday 24th January 2019
Time: 16:00-17:00
Room: Building 9, BG09A
Professor Carla Willig (City University)
Date: Thursday 24th January 2019
Time: 16:00-17:00
Room: Building 9, BG09A
Professor Carla Willig (City University)
Title: The Use of Dual Focus Methodology in the Study of the
Phenomenological Repercussions of Cancer Discourse
Abstract:
Both
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and Foucauldian Discourse
Analysis (FDA) are widely used in qualitative psychology. IPA is primarily concerned
with accessing the meaning and texture of experience whilst FDA focuses on
mapping the discursive resources available to people as they talk about their
experiences.
This talk is concerned with the possibility
of combining Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) and Interpretative
Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) in a dual focus methodology. It will develop
the argument that such a methodology provides us with the tools to examine the phenomenological
repercussions of being positioned within dominant discourses. By integrating
elements from phenomenology and discourse analysis, dual focus methodology
allows the researcher to examine the interplay between language, culture and
experience, and to situate subjective experiences within their socio-cultural
contexts.
This talk will illustrate the application of
dual focus methodology with reference to research conducted into the
phenomenological repercussions of being positioned within dominant cancer
discourses. One of the many challenges of being diagnosed with cancer is that
it requires a person to make sense of their changed circumstances and to find
meaning in an unwanted experience. The discursive resources for doing so are
available within the surrounding culture and shape the way in which the person
can experience themselves as someone with cancer. Taking up a position within
cancer discourse can have a powerful emotional impact and it can prescribe (and
proscribe) responses to the situation. This talk will demonstrate how dual
focus methodology can help us trace the social and psychological effects of
dominant cancer discourse by honouring subjective experience and its lived
reality whilst acknowledging the role of language in making sense of, and
thereby constructing, versions of experience.
Biography:
Carla Willig is Professor of Psychology at City,
University of London, as well as a Counselling Psychologist in private
practice. She has a long-standing interest in qualitative research methods and
their usage in psychology, starting in the late 1980s when such approaches
were still very much at the fringes within the discipline.She has used a
variety of qualitative research methods in her own research, including grounded
theory methodology (for her doctoral research in the 1980s), discourse analysis
(throughout the 1990s), phenomenological methods (2000 onwards), and more
recently qualitative metasynthesis (2016 onwards). She is currently looking at
ways of researching the relationship between discourse and experience.
Carla's most recent publications include Qualitative
Interpretation and Analysis in Psychology (McGraw Hill, 2012), Introducing Qualitative
Research in Psychology (McGraw Hill, 3rd edition 2013), and The
SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology (with Wendy Stainton
Rogers; Sage Publications, 2nd edition 2017).
