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Conflicting community commitments: A dialogical analysis of a British woman's World War II diaries
Author(s) -
Gillespie Alex,
Cornish Flora,
Aveling EmmaLouise,
Zittoun Tania
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
journal of community psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.585
H-Index - 86
eISSN - 1520-6629
pISSN - 0090-4392
DOI - 10.1002/jcop.20215
Subject(s) - dialogical self , nomothetic and idiographic , sociology , epistemology , gender studies , social psychology , psychology , philosophy
Recent developments of the concept of “sense of community” have highlighted the multiplicity of people's senses of community. In this article, the authors introduce the theory of the dialogical self as a means of theorizing the conflicts that can arise between a person's commitments to multiple communities. They ask the question, “When faced with conflicting community commitments, how does a person decide where his or her allegiances lie?” The contribution of the theory of the dialogical self is illustrated through an idiographic analysis of diaries kept by one British woman living through World War II. Conflicting commitments to her home community and to the national community's war effort provoke troubling dilemmas and efforts to resolve them through internal dialogues. Contributions to theory, research, and practice are discussed. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.