Styles of Political Expressions: What Are People 'Doing with Words' when They Talk Politics?

Nina Eliasoph is interested in civic and political organizations in a diverse society, ranging from grassroots civic associations and activist groups to nonprofits and NGOs. While being sure to analyze the “big” picture from all sorts of methodological approaches, she is especially interested in interpretive approaches that take the structures of ambiguity into account. For articles, see her website (http://dornsife.usc.edu/nina-eliasoph/). Her first book, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life, and the articles that came from it, describe how participants of various small civic groups talked–or did not talk–about politics, both within their groups and in their encounters with government, media and corporate authorities. Making Volunteers: Civic Life After Welfare’s End, and the articles that draw on it, portray and theorize a newly prevalent kind of organizational form that aims to cultivate the grassroots from the top down: She calls them “empowerment projects.” These nonprofits and NGOs have paid staffs and have to justify their existences, to many funders, with many missions: to promote civic engagement, to cultivate deep appreciation of unique cultures, to get diverse people to mix and get out of their “comfort zones,” to help raise up disadvantaged people, and more. The missions look nice on paper, but often don’t match in everyday practice, especially when all require constant assessment. The Politics of Volunteering, compares volunteering and political activism, and aims to put these kinds of organizations in a broader historical and comparative perspective. She has also taught and lectured abroad, and enjoy collaborating on cross-national ethnographic projects. Her sociological subfields include: political sociology and communication, cultural sociology, ethnography, sociolinguistics, social theory, emotions, organizations, and nonprofits/NGOs.

The basic idea will be that to understand what a “research subject” means by their expression of a political position, the researcher should try to figure out what the speaker imagines the performance to be. We should implicitly ask WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, HOW, AND WHY? (this list of questions is a standard phrase for journalists to keep in mind when presenting their stories):

WHO the speaker imagines that they are speaking as (“I speak as a worker,” “I speak as a religious minority,” “I speak as a resident of x neighborhood,” “a woman”);

WHAT they are saying (this is the usual thing to study when doing research on political opinion, so I don’t need to explain it),

WHEN they imagine they are speaking—what is the larger historical backdrop that they assume to be in play when they create unspoken expectations about how their speech matters: Do I expect to be taken seriously as a full citizen in a democracy? Do I expect to risk arrest by speaking out?

WHERE (to WHOM) they imagine they are speaking—this is “the AUDIENCE to whom they imagine that they are speaking?” (“to demonstrators at a protest,” “to the national public,” “to politicians,” “to future generations” who will look back and see that at least some people resisted current horrors?” “to an elite university professor in an interview,” “to fellow Muslims, workers, youth, whatever, in a focus group made up of people like me,” etc.

WHY are they speaking? To change general opinion? To get something they want from a politician and then go home if they get it? To bring a specific group of people together over the long haul? To express their feelings, regardless of the outcome?

And HOW the speaker is conveying the message (serious testimonial? Confession? Poetry? Presentation of data? ironic joking? using direct action such as constructing community gardens and other wordless possibly political acts? Etc.)

In sum, the researcher should imagine that whatever the speaker says includes an imagined audience and other elements of a theatrical performance. This all is an adaptation of Erving Goffman’s colleague’s Kenneth Burke’s idea of “the pentad” for analyzing political speech. In his version, the five elements interact with each other (he didn’t include “the audience” in his analysis of meaning-making. So I’ve added this sixth element).