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Publication

Epistemic competitions over Jewish Holocaust survivors’ stories in interviews

Journal Contribution - Journal Article

In this article, we scrutinise epistemic competitions in interviews about World War II. In particular, we analyse how the interlocutors draw on their epistemic authority concerning WWII to construct their interactional telling rights. On the one hand, the analyses illustrate how the interviewers rely on their historical expert status – as evidenced through their specialist knowledge and ventriloquisation of vicarious WWII narratives – in order to topicalise certain master narratives and thereby attempt to project particular identities upon the interviewees. On the other hand, the interviewees derive their epistemic authority from their first-hand experience as Jewish Holocaust survivors, on which they draw in order to counter these story projections, whilst constructing a more distinct self-positioning to protect their nuanced personal identity work. Overall, these epistemic competitions not only shaped the interviewees’ identity work, but they also made the link between storytelling and the social context more tangible as they brought – typically rather elusive – master narratives to the surface.
Journal: Discourse and Society
ISSN: 0957-9265
Issue: 6
Volume: 32
Pages: 728 - 745
Publication year:2021
BOF-keylabel:yes
IOF-keylabel:yes
BOF-publication weight:1
CSS-citation score:1
Authors from:Higher Education
Accessibility:Open