Practicing deliberation in challenging speech cultures: the role of metadiscourse

Abstract

Abstract This qualitative research draws on language and social interaction (LSI) approaches to consider how speech culture shapes the practice of deliberation in a country presumed to be a challenging environment for deliberative practices: Israel. Our analysis examines structured deliberative forums conducted by communication students in Israel, to demonstrate how participants reference, use, and orient to both deliberative democracy discourse and Israeli speech culture in ways that enable them to overcome cultural challenges to doing deliberation. We found that participants utilize metadiscourse to take stances that frame cultural challenges of deliberation, negotiate the tensions between deliberative principles and local speech culture, and creatively integrate local speech norms with deliberation. This research contributes to LSI and Political Communication scholarship, by enhancing practical theory of deliberative democracy. The explication of the role of metadiscourse reframes the relationship between culture and deliberation thereby providing new directions for scholars, practitioners, and educators of deliberative democracy.