CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Fred Erickson (Education, UCLA), February 11, 2000.

"Slippery footing and Whiffs of Racializing in Medical Discourse: Self and Other Presentation/Negotiation in a Case Report by an Intern to a Senior Physician in a Clinical Supervision Session."

When an intern physician discusses a patient with a supervising physician in a one-on-one "precepting session" the junior physician is not only managing the presentation of information on the medical case at hand but is also managing the presentation of self as a clinically competent physician, albeit a beginning one. Also in play are qualities of relations between the intern and preceptor--in some moments the senior treats the junior as a quasi colleague/equal and in other moments treats the junior primarily as a student/subordinate. (A linguistic medium within which these shifts in footing are signalled and constituted is the discourse style of the medical case report and its discussion, which is a distinct professional speech genre.) In the example to be presented the typical see-saw process of alternating between more and less collegial footing and discourse style seems to be further complicated by race. Both the patient and the intern are African-American young men in their late 20's, while the preceptor is a middle aged white man. For the most part during the precepting session the race of the intern does not seem to be relevant to the conduct of interaction with the preceptor. But during a few moments, brief stumbles in the otherwise smooth conduct of talk, the race of the intern--or something--seems to be relevant and then seems to recede back into the woodwork. Attributions in those moments by the intern may be those which Claude Steele calls "stereotype threat," and what the intern says then can be interpreted as a defense against such threat. Yet if racial identification is indeed being done within the interaction it is accomplished very implicitly, fleetingly, and ambiguously--as a whiff or trace rather than as an explicit self/other reference. How certain momentary actions can be demonstrated analytically as an allusive pointing to race in the encounter, and what alternative readings of what is going on in those moments might also be plausible, will be the focus of the presentation.