Qualitative Studies of Silence

The Unsaid as Social Action

Amy Jo Murray, Kevin Durrheim

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781108421379
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108383684
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Qualitative Studies of Silence brings together influential qualitative researchers from across the social sciences and humanities who have sought to understand the power of what remains unsaid, both psychologically and socially. Each chapter identifies one or more signs of silence and explains how these can form the basis of a rigorous qualitative investigation. The authors also demonstrate how silences operate in our private and collective lives by fulfilling psychological, relational, institutional, and ideological functions. The book contains multiple disciplinary perspectives and presents analyses of wide-ranging topics, such as medical consultations, whistleblowers, silence in court, omission-as-propaganda, trauma survivors, the silence of war museums, racism in the Americas, gendered silences, paid domestic labour, the undocumented student movement, and the Nazi past. This collection shows how such qualitative studies can reveal and contribute to understanding the unsaid as social action.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Turn to Silence
• 1 Literal and Metaphorical Silences in Rhetoric: Examples from the Celebration of the 1974 Revolution in the Portuguese Parliament
• 2 Seeing Silenced Agendas in Medical Interaction: A Conversation Analytic Case Study
• 3 Listening to the Sound of Silence: Methodological Reflections on Studying the Unsaid
• 4 Social Silences: Conducting Ethnographic Research on Racism in the Americas
• 5 Intimate Silences and Inequality: Noticing the Unsaid through Triangulation
• 6 Silence in the Court: Moral Exclusion at the Intersection of Disability, Race, Sexuality, and Methodology
• 7 Silencing Self and Other through Autobiographical Narratives
• 8 Gendering the Unsaid and the Unsayable
• 9 The Language Ideology of Silence and Silencing in Public Discourse: Claims to Silencing as Metadiscursive Moves in German Anti-Political Correctness Discourse
• 10 Propaganda by Omission: The Case of Topical Silence
• 11 Silencing Whistleblowers
• 12 Between Sound and Silence: The Inaudible and the Unsayable in the History of the First World War
• 13 Affect and the Unsaid: Silences, Impasses, and Testimonies to Trauma
• 14 The Unsaid and the Unheard: Acknowledgement, Accountability and Recognition in the Face of Silence
• 15 Conclusion: Topographies of the Said and Unsaid
• Index