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"An immensely innovative, elegantly written, highly imaginative, and important contribution. Unsaid provides a wealth of examples and a methodological guide on how to identify what many might deem impossible to identify."—Joachim J. Savelsberg, author of Knowing about Genocide: Armenian Suffering and Epistemic Struggles
"A significant contribution to the literature on narrative and discourse analysis. Engagingly written and well thought through, Unsaid offers a compelling conceptual apparatus for considering the centrality of the unsaid, especially in relation to harm-doing and exclusionary, minoritizing practices."—Stephen Frosh, author of Those Who Come After: Postmemory, Acknowledgement and Forgiveness
List of contents
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Kept Quiet
2. Too Little or Too Much Said
3. Figurative Expression
4. Missing Subjects
5. The Social Construction of Absences
6. Concluding Remarks: Boundless Texts, Better Worlds
Appendix: A Word on Sampling
Glossary
Notes
References
Index
About the author
Lois Presser is Professor of Sociology and Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is a coeditor of Narrative Criminology: Understanding Stories of Crime and the author of Inside Story: How Narratives Drive Mass Harm, Been a Heavy Life: Stories of Violent Men, and Why We Harm.
Summary
Harm takes shape in and through what is suppressed, left out, or taken for granted. This book is a guide to understanding and uncovering what is left unsaid—whether concealed or silenced, presupposed or excluded. Drawing on a variety of real-world examples, narrative criminologist Lois Presser outlines how to determine what or who is excluded from textual materials. With strategies that can be added to the tool kits of social researchers and activists alike, Unsaid provides a richly layered approach to analyzing and dismantling the power structures that both create and arise from what goes without saying.
