Asymmetry

We talked briefly in conversation analysis last semester about what characterized "institutional" talk, as opposed to "ordinary" conversation, and the basic answer was: asymmetry. In an institutional setting, participants in an interaction fill asymmetrical roles, which affect the organization of talk at various levels: turn-taking (e.g. a teacher may self-select as next speaker but students need to be selected as next speaker by the teacher before they can take a turn); sequential organization (e.g. in a classroom setting, a common sequence is Question, Response, Evaluation, while in ordinary conversation, the evaluation step is typically absent); and overall structure of the talk (e.g. only the teacher can initiate closing of a given sequence or a class period). There is also asymmetrical access to knowledge: one person is often the "expert" who knows more about the topic under discussion or the action being undertaken than the other(s) -- for example, a psychiatrist is considered qualified to practice therapy only after years and years of gathering knowledge, and it is for access to that knowledge that people pay. Similarly doctors, teachers, waitresses, tech support people, etc. gain the right to fill their roles through specified knowledge.

And then there was a third, perhaps the most confusing, and we didn't dwell on it for more than a sentence or two because it wasn't that important: Asymmetry in rights to knowledge. That is, is it really how much the teacher knows that gives her the right to act, in terms of the conversational structure, as the teacher? Or is it that very role that gives her the right to have it assumed by all participants that she is more knowledgeable than the students? The example given in class was of a patient in a doctors office who, in this modern age, had been able to go onto webmd.com or something and extensively research her symptoms before going to the doctor. However much she may think she knows, chances are this knowledge will be dismissed in the interaction with the doctor, because she is not the one with the right to expert knowledge. This example reminded me of the worst doctor's appointment I ever had, from which I emerged crying, when, among other problematic things, the doctor responded to my statement that I had an infection on my thigh with a smirk and a "well, alleged infection -- we don't know what it is yet." Yes, I concede that he went to medical school and I didn't, but my mother did, and she had examined it; and the doctors who treated an identical-looking rash on my roommate did, and they had found it to be a staph infection; and I knew, through discussions with my mom and previous experiences with doctors, that the signs of infection are swelling, redness, and heat. So to have all of that background and knowledge dismissed with a smirk felt like a slap in the face. Definite asymmetry.

Well. Right now I'm sitting in a coffee shop near the classroom in which Adam is teaching the first of his three classes, and I've been moody and sulky for the past couple hours. Granted, this might have something to do with having gotten up at seven -- my body sure isn't happy with me -- but it also has to do with rights to knowledge, and that is why I felt the need to drag you through all that technical sludge up there. Because I spent two hours this morning, from eight to ten when I should have been sleeping, in the math clinic at which Adam had to work, trying to work on extracting pitch graphs from audio files but by and large failing since the ambient noise was too great to hear my headphones well. So instead I was mostly eavesdropping on people working through algebra and calculus problems with Adam or the other clinician. And there was I, knowing at least as much algebra and calculus than any of the graduate student clinicians, Adam included...and no one asked me anything. Even Adam seemed slightly confused and/or irritated when I tried to peer at the problems he was working on and offer suggestions. I was sitting right across from him, and the other clinician would be busy working with another student, and still Adam would interrupt him, "Hey Dan, could you look at this one? What do you think?"

I'm not angry with Adam and I'm certainly not angry with any of the other people there, who had no reason to even suspect that I was qualified to answer calculus questions. Maybe Adam just didn't want to bother me and distract me from my work. Maybe he's just in the habit of appealing to his fellow clinicians there. Maybe he was acting on some conscious or subconscious sense of the institutional structure that barred me, in the eyes of the institution, from having the right to act as a math expert. This isn't a complaint against him, but it surprised me how much it bothered me, this mismatch between my self identity as an expert math clinician and my institutional role of random visitor with no right to expertise. I'm not sure what the moral is, except just to notice that it can be painful, and that institutional setting really does have power over how interaction is structured, and how it can make people feel. I suppose this is something to be conscious of, as a teacher, tutor, doctor, therapist...your role may give you power, but you have to be conscious of the consequent powerlessness of everyone else, and the identity and expertise that's robbed from them by the institution.

Or perhaps the moral is that I oughtn't get up at seven in the morning.