‘Do you want me to take over?’

Displaying epistemic primacy in medical emergencies

Authors

  • Polina Mesinioti University of York
  • Jo Angouri University of Warwick
  • Chris Turner University Hospital of Coventry and Warwickshire

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jalpp.21858

Keywords:

epistemic primacy, interactional sociolinguistics, leadership, multimodality, medical emergencies, questions

Abstract

This article is concerned with the in situ negotiation of epistemic primacy in the context of medical emergencies. It investigates the mobilisation of questions and positioning in the material space as mechanisms for claiming control and for co-constructing epistemic authority. We bring together two high-risk, high-pressure emergency contexts – obstetrics and major trauma – and show the patterns that emerged from a bottom-up interactional sociolinguistic analysis of the data. We draw on a corpus of approximately 400 questions from a sample of ten teams; we zoom in on the role of the institutionally defined team leader, while special attention is also paid to the ways in which institutional power asymmetries are negotiated across the team in leadership enactment.

We discuss the typology of questions that emerged from our data on a spectrum from a not knowing (K?) to a knowing (K+) status. Our analysis demonstrates consistent patterns in displays of epistemic primacy, with team leaders raising most of the questions indicating a K+ status across contexts. Further, we show that verbal claims of epistemic primacy are conditioned upon team leaders’ positioning at specific material zones of the emergency room as an integral part of doing their role.

Author Biographies

  • Polina Mesinioti, University of York

    Polina Mesinioti is a Research Fellow at the University of York and works on the Response Study, where she conducts multi-site ethnography in the National Health Service investigating the implementation of the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework. Her research is anchored in sociolinguistics and discourse studies, and focuses on healthcare interactions. Her PhD in Applied Linguistics (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, University of Warwick) and previous Research Assistant experience focused on teamwork and leadership in medical emergencies.

  • Jo Angouri, University of Warwick

    Jo Angouri is Professor in Sociolinguistics and Academic Director for Education and Internationalisation at the University of Warwick. She has published extensively on interactional sociolinguistics, identity, decision making and problem solving. She is the author of Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace (2018, Routledge) and has co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality (2021) and Negotiating Boundaries at Work (2017, Edinburgh University Press). She is a National Teaching Fellow, Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Subject Chair for Linguistics, Language, Communication and Media on the Scopus board. 

  • Chris Turner, University Hospital of Coventry and Warwickshire

    Chris Turner is a Consultant in emergency medicine at University Hospital of Coventry and Warwickshire. He has interests in the ethics of ‘doing the right thing’, the development of wisdom and the value of prosocial behaviours in the workplace. As a result of the latter, he set up Civility Saves Lives, a grassroots organisation dedicated to raising awareness of the impact of behaviour on performance in healthcare. As part of the wisdom work, he is a co-author of a number of papers that have come out of the Phronesis Group at Birmingham, Warwick and Nottingham universities.

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Published

2023-10-19

Issue

Vol. 17 No. 2 (2020)

Section

Articles

License

Equinox Publishing Ltd.

How to Cite

Mesinioti, P., Angouri, J., & Turner, C. (2023). ‘Do you want me to take over?’: Displaying epistemic primacy in medical emergencies. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice, 17(2), 161-187. https://doi.org/10.1558/jalpp.21858