By analyzing session exchanges and questionnaires administered to family therapy clients, this article examines questioning as conversational practice grounded in institutional goals that are therapist-directed and therapist-conceived. In their manifestation in talk and text, therapeutic questions function to replace client accounts with the nosological accounts of institutional psychiatry. The analysis illuminates three ways in which questioning works in the session and then locates these in therapy's professional and institutional logic. A critical reflection on psychotherapy's questioning practices in a social context (...) concludes the article. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Constructivism as a Key Towards Further Understanding of Communication, Culture and Society” by Raivo Palmaru. Upshot: In my response to Palmaru, I press for a reflexive, accountable and, most of all, practical construction of radical constructivism as participatory communication.

Open peer commentary on the target article “From Objects to Processes: A Proposal to Rewrite Radical Constructivism” by Siegfried J. Schmidt. Upshot: Schmidt’s “philosophical argumentation” in favor of an action orientation for communication rewrites constructivism in terms of process. Though in support of his proposal, a philosophical argumentation about process works best for illuminating the writer’s own process and orienting readers to his own argument. I propose that arguments about the communication of social actors should make visible the social processes (...) about which they argue. (shrink)

In this discourse analysis of how memory acquires and is acquired in interview exchanges, we investigate remembering as a category-bound activity, both a tensional and collaborative process of moral ratification of `survivor' as membership category. We propose the term re-membering to mean piecing together possible versions of survivor experiences in talk; these versions, offered by respondents and elicited by interviewers through questioning strategies, are epistemic claims to acquire the Holocaust as memory, or institutional History. We explore the accounting dynamic of (...) interviewer and respondent, the relationship of ownership between survivors and memory, and the duties and moral obligations of the category `Holocaust survivor' that can be shown through the interviews of survivors and their adult daughters. (shrink)