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Navigating academic writing, the waters of academic life, should be a sustainable practice, which supports the learning and personal development of writers. However, cultures of writing differ in their sustainability. The sustainability of writing cultures relies heavily on whether writing is a solitary or social practice and whether it is process- or product-oriented. This paper compares metaphors of independent and social academic writing and considers what the metaphors convey about the culture of writing. We facilitated social writing sessions and collected metaphors from writers during focus group interviews. The metaphors were analyzed using Sword’s (2019. Snowflakes, splinters and cobblestones: Metaphors for writing. In S. Farquhar & E. Fitzpatrick (Eds.), Innovations in narrative and metaphor: Methodologies and practices (pp. 39–56). Springer Singapore Pte. Limited) DEEPER-framework. The metaphors mostly conveyed a sustainable approach to writing, though more fleeting encounters with both independent and social writing were described. Only rarely were non-sustainable approaches described. As competition and comparison can impede benefiting from social writing, we propose drawing attention to writers’ learning and professional development in each social writing session. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The integration of mental health rehabilitees into the labour market is an important policy objective everywhere in the world. The international Clubhouse organization is a thirdsector actor that offers community-based psychosocial rehabilitation and supports and promotes rehabilitees' state of acting and exerting power over their lives, including their (re)employment. In this article, we adopt the perspective of discursive psychology and ask how mental health rehabilitees' agency is constructed and ideally also promoted in the Clubhouse-based Transitional Employment (TE) programme. Methods: The data consisted of 26 video-recorded TE meetings in which staff and rehabilitees of one Finnish Clubhouse discussed ways to further their contacts with potential employers. The analysis was informed by discursive psychology, which has been heavily influenced by conversation analysis. Results: The analysis demonstrated how rehabilitees adopt agentic positions in respect to TErelated future activities, and how Clubhouse staff promote and encourage but also discourage and invalidate these agentic positionings. The analysis demonstrated the multifaceted nature of agency and agency promotion in the TE programme. Conclusions: Although ideally, Clubhouse activities are based on equal opportunities, in everyday interaction practices, the staff exercise significant power over the question whose agency is promoted and validated in the TE programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using both statistical methods and conversation analysis, we examined how support workers in a mental health rehabilitation community encourage clients to participate in joint decision-making processes. Drawing on video-recordings of 29 community meetings as data, we considered support workers' proposals (N = 449) and clients' responsiveness to them. Support workers' proposals were coded for their linguistic and other features and clients' responsiveness was assessed by three independent raters. Multiple linear regression (MLR) analysis was carried out. A significant regression equation with seven predictor variables accounted for 24% of the variance in the data. Four variables predicted a higher level of client responsiveness: the use of explicit recipient address term, "quasi-open" proposal form, support worker's long work experience, and the average level of client participation during a session. Three variables predicted a lower level of client responsiveness: grammatical complexity of proposal form, modal declarative proposal form, and the presence of only one support worker in a session. The qualitative conversation-analytic investigation highlighted the advantages of the careful fine-tuning of openness vs. closedness of proposal form, the reflexive awareness of which, we argue, may help mental health professionals to encourage clients' responsiveness in joint decision-making processes and thereby their participation in communal life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Dementia is associated with an ongoing decline in language function, involving both language production and comprehension. Maintaining a conversation with persons with dementia may be challenging. In this study, we investigate how the contributions of professional caregivers affect the linguistic contributions of the speaker with dementia. Methods: This is a conversation analytic case study of one individual with dementia. The data are drawn from a five-hour video corpus collected at a Swedish speaking care facility in Finland. Results: In comparing self-directed speech and dialogue, the results show how professional caregivers can induce change in the linguistic and interactional behaviors of a person with dementia. Conclusions: Introducing an interactional perspective to self-directed speech and dialogue, this study provides new insights into the notion of a "good conversation" in dementia care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a conversation analytic study of how one elderly person with dementia and her interlocutors interact in a care home setting. Participation is studied in the form of responsive action of the person with dementia, focusing on the Swedish response token ‘jaså,’ which has not previously been analysed in detail. The central claim is that even though the sequential placement of the response token indicates interactional competence, other factors reveal limited competence and communication impairment. First, the person with dementia’s use of gaze is reduced, and she seems to rely on the auditory but not on the visual channel. Second, the interlocutors do not in all situations treat her as a ratified participant in spite of her attempts to contribute to the interaction. This study contributes both to the study of participation in the context of communication impairment and to the study of response tokens in Swedish. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Persons with dementia sometimes confabulate (that is, utter statements unaware of their falsity). This threatens the shared world that is normally presumed as the basis for communication. Coparticipants then have to choose between acquiescing in the confabulation, being noncommittal, or indeed correcting the speaker. In this conversation analytical case study of one individual with vascular dementia, I investigate how health-care personnel and volunteers deal with the problem. The data were extracted from a 30-hour video corpus of interactions between one confabulating person and, in total, eight other elderly individuals, three professional caregivers, and a volunteer at a Swedish-speaking day care center for the elderly in Finland. We see how care providers react to confabulations with a range of response practices along the continuum of acquiescence and noncommitment (but not into the more challenging area of correction). Data are in Finland-Swedish with English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]