Abstract
This chapter presents a critical psychological approach to the study of mindfulness as a situated social, cultural and historical practice. We combine discourse and conversation analysis of language use within mindfulness courses with attention to how subjectivity is collaboratively reconstructed moment-by-moment. Applying the concept of affective–discursive practice to the analysis allows attention to be paid to embodied meaning-making in terms of power, pattern and context. In particular, we aim to illustrate practices of ‘inquiry’ through which mindfulness teachers initiate specific inter-subjective procedures, especially reformulations of participant accounts of what they ‘noticed’ during meditation, which function to practically produce mindful subjects who can monitor, govern and take care of themselves. Mindful subjectivity is produced through the application of liberal power and negotiation of ideological dilemma within inquiry sequences, functioning as technologies of the self.
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Acknowledgments
Thank you to Rebecca Crane for initiating this project and making available the data. We would like to thank Sara Rees for feedback on this chapter and the mindfulness teachers and participants featured in the extracts. We are also grateful for funding from the Cardiff University Research Opportunity Placement scheme and support from Qualitative Research and Analysis Workshop participants.
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Appendix: Key for Transcription Notation (Based on a Simplified Jefferson-Style Transcription)
Appendix: Key for Transcription Notation (Based on a Simplified Jefferson-Style Transcription)
Notation | Example | Phenomenon |
|---|---|---|
Rounded brackets enclosing full stop | right (.) so that again is interesting | Pause |
Double rounded brackets enclosing text | ((lines omitted)) | Transcriber comments |
Square brackets | [it wanders [it does wander yes | Speaker overlap |
Less than followed by greater than signs | >“get back to what we’re doing”< | Quicker speech |
Double quotation marks | “what am I thinking that for” | Direct reported speech or private thoughts |
Hyphen | there’s some- is there a bit of judgement | Cut off or repair of word |
Comma | it’s getting easier, | Continuing intonation |
Question mark | does yours? | Questioning intonation |
Underlining | mm mm mm mmm | Emphasis |
Equals | is that right= =yes | Contiguous words |
Colon | so:: | Elongated sound |
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Stanley, S., Longden, C. (2016). Constructing the Mindful Subject: Reformulating Experience Through Affective–Discursive Practice in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction . In: Purser, R., Forbes, D., Burke, A. (eds) Handbook of Mindfulness. Mindfulness in Behavioral Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44019-4_20
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