Agency and Alignment
Pills, Life, Agency - HIV Treatment Decisions as Language in Social Context - Alison Moore
Alison Moore [+]
University of Wollongong
Alison Moore is an Associate Professor in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She has degrees in linguistics and public health and has previously held research and teaching positions at Macquarie University and the University of Sydney. Ongoing research interests include systemic functional linguistics, modelling register and context, health discourse, and the representation and treatment of animals. Across these concerns a unifying theme is the construal of agency and identity. Alison is currently the Vice-President of the Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association and an editorial board member for the Journal of Animal Studies.
Description
Chapter 6 presents a networked description of how doctors and patients represent each other semantically as social agents or potential agents. The network, which develops work by van Leeuwen (esp. 1995, 1996) and others, draws together the key textual resources HIV patients and their doctors in this corpus appear to mobilise for construing and enacting agency in decision-making. In the second part of the chapter this framework is used to explicate the dynamic negotiation of agency and of particular treatment choices in extended text extracts, focusing especially the divergence and convergence between speakers and their perspectives from moment to moment, and the cumulative result.