Polyphony in the pediatric clinic: Parents reporting teachers’ talk as a resource for building deontic and epistemic (dis)alliances among caregivers

Abstract

Alliances between families and children’s institutional caregivers are considered crucial in granting children a healthy upbringing. This article reports the preliminary findings of a study on the interactional construction of epistemic and deontic alliances among present and evoked children’s caregivers. Adopting a discourse analysis approach to a corpus of 54 video-recorded pediatric visits, we analyze examples of complaint sequences where parents ‘ventriloquize’ the teachers’ voices and pursue an alliance with the pediatrician against the school’s practices or stance. We illustrate the local ratification of the pediatrician’s deontic authority over the teacher’s and the interactional accomplishment of (dis)alliances among the institutionally sanctioned caregivers. In the conclusion, we argue that this local system of deontic and epistemic (dis)alliances indexes the contemporary shift toward an individualized (or individualistic?) model of care and education, deaf to the collective demands and the need for relatively routinized practices that are at stake in any community.