Abstract
Discourse communities are groups of people who share common ideologies, and common ways of speaking about things. They can be sharply or loosely defined. We are each members of multiple discourse communities. Discourse can colonize the members of discourse communities, taking over domains of thought by means of ideology. The development of new discourse communities can serve positive ends, but discourse communities create risks as well. In our own work on the narratives of people with interests in health care, for example, we find that patients speak of their illness experiences as victims of circumstance; policy makers construct adverse experiences and challenges as opportunities to be taken; health care workers speak from a mixed perspective, seeing themselves as both victims and opportunists depending on context. To be trapped within the discourse of a particular community is to put at risk the ability to communicate across discourses. Membership of a discourse community can impair the habit of critique, and deny opportunities for heteroglossic discourse. Privileging critique as a mode of discourse perhaps might define the ethical community, suggesting that ethical community may be an antidote to the constraining effects of conventional discourse community.
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Acknowledgements
We are particularly grateful to the readers of earlier versions of this article for their patience and constructive criticism. Their attention to detail and their capacity to make helpful suggestions seem to us to have been beyond the call of duty.
This work has been supported by grants from the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, Strathfield Private Hospital, the Thyne Reid Trust No. 1 (Education), Mrs Caroline Simpson and the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Sydney.
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Miles Little, Christopher F.C. Jordens & Emma-Jane Sayers, Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine Vol 7(1): pp. 73–86, https://doi.org/10.1177/1363459303007001619, copyright © 2003 Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications, Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications
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Little, M., Jordens, C.F.C. & Sayers, EJ. Discourse Communities and the Discourse of Experience. Bioethical Inquiry 19, 61–69 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-022-10176-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-022-10176-w