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Giving and Taking Voice: Metapragmatic Dismissals of Parents in Child Welfare Court Cases

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2023

Jessica López-Espino Open the ORCID record for Jessica López-Espino [Opens in a new window]
Jessica López-Espino*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Email: lejessicaphd@gmail.com.
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Abstract

Applying tools of linguistic anthropology to ethnographic research conducted in a California child welfare court, this article analyzes how commentary by attorneys and judges about the language practices of parents and other communicative practices normalized the dismissal of the voices of marginalized lay actors throughout their cases. This commentary is an example of what linguistic anthropologists describe as “metapragmatic discourse,” or the use of language to foreground language itself and what language can accomplish in social exchanges. I introduce the concept of “metapragmatic dismissals” to describe how attorneys and judges in the child welfare context positioned parents’ language practices and overall personhood as suspect, often before parents even entered the courtroom. I identify practices of silencing, voicing figures of disbelief, and the use of metapragmatic labels of “lies” and “excuses” as common forms of metapragmatic dismissals that are supported by norms of court procedure, standards of evidence, and institutionalized discretion. This concept provides new insights into legal experiences in child welfare courts and, more generally, offers a valuable analytical framework for scholars who study the intersection of law, language, and power.

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Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , August 2024 , pp. 1453 - 1478
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

She is a legal and linguistic anthropologist with a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from New York University. This article is based on research approved by the New York University Institutional Review Board and funded by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program grant number DGE1342536. Support from the American Bar Foundation Law and Inequality Fellowship and UC President’s Postdoctoral fellowship program provided valuable time to refine the research findings.

I am grateful to the parents, judges, and attorneys that agreed to participate in my study and allowed me to observe their time in court. I would also like to thank the doctoral fellows at the American Bar Foundation between 2019 and 2021 and the participants at the UC Irvine Center in Law, Society and Culture Socio-Legal Workshop, the UC San Diego Critical Anthropology Workshop, and the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting in July 2022 for their productive engagement with this scholarship. I received insightful feedback on this material from Sally Merry, Jonathan Rosa, Susan Coutin, Nancy Postero, Kaaryn Gustafson, Swethaa Ballakrishnen, Elizabeth Mertz, Charquia Wright, Mary Ellen Stitt, and Nancy Donald. Nancy Postero generously offered the phrase “socio-legal ecology” that I have used in this article in her discussant comments on this work at the UC San Diego Critical Anthropology workshop in April 2022. The reviewers provided important reflections that significantly aided the clarity and scope of this article. Many thanks to Breck Radulovic’s expert copyediting assistance. Any shortcomings of this article are mine alone.

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STATUTES CITED

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