Food talk: a window into inequality among university students
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Yasmine Dominguez-Whitehead
Yasmine Dominguez-Whitehead is Lecturer in the Wits School of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research interests lie in sociology of education, diversity in education, student experiences and social issues within higher education, institutional transformation, and university management. Address for correspondence: Wits School of Education, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa 〈yasmine.dominguez whitehead@wits.ac.za 〉.
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Kevin A. Whitehead
Kevin A. Whitehead is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand. His research focuses on the development of an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to studying race and other categorical forms of social organization and inequality. In particular, he is interested in the ways in which racial and other social categories are used, resisted, and reproduced in talkininteraction. Address for correspondence: Department of Psychology, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa 〈kevin.whitehead@wits.ac.za 〉.
Abstract
Although initially related to the country's colonial and apartheid history, material inequality in South Africa has deepened, with recent research suggesting that South Africa now has the highest levels of inequality in the world. In this paper, we examine the interactional reproduction of inequality by paying particular attention to the discursive and interactional practices employed in students' talk about food. Specifically, we examine foodrelated troubles talk and foodrelated jokes and humor, showing how students who described foodrelated troubles produced these troubles as shared and systemic, while students who produced foodrelated jokes displayed that they take for granted the material resources needed to have a range of food consumption choices available to them, while treating food consumption as a matter of individual choice. These orientations were collaboratively produced through a range of interactionally organized practices, including patterns of alignment and disalignment, pronoun use, laughter, and aspects of the formulation of utterances. While our analysis primarily focuses on these discursive and interactional practices, we also consider how discursive practices can be linked to the material conditions of participants' lives outside of the analyzed interactions.
About the authors
Yasmine Dominguez-Whitehead is Lecturer in the Wits School of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research interests lie in sociology of education, diversity in education, student experiences and social issues within higher education, institutional transformation, and university management. Address for correspondence: Wits School of Education, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa 〈yasmine.dominguez whitehead@wits.ac.za〉.
Kevin A. Whitehead is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand. His research focuses on the development of an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to studying race and other categorical forms of social organization and inequality. In particular, he is interested in the ways in which racial and other social categories are used, resisted, and reproduced in talkininteraction. Address for correspondence: Department of Psychology, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa 〈kevin.whitehead@wits.ac.za〉.
©[2014] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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- “So what's a year in a lifetime so.” Non-prefatory use of so in native and learner English
- Food talk: a window into inequality among university students
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Equivocation and doublespeak in far right-wing discourse: an analysis of Nick Griffin's performance on BBC's Question Time
- “So what's a year in a lifetime so.” Non-prefatory use of so in native and learner English
- Food talk: a window into inequality among university students
- Reported client–practitioner conversations as assessment in mental health practitioners' talk
- “Winning a battle, but losing the war”: contested identities, narratives, and interaction in asylum interviews
