«Je gardais la clé de mes voisins quand ils partaient en vacances » ["I used to keep my neighbours' keys when they went on holiday]. Detainee alternative self representation
«Je gardais la clé de mes voisins quand ils partaient en vacances ». Représentation de soi alternative du détenu
Résumé
As part of a discourse analysis research project on the representation of prison life as
discursively constructed by prisoners (ex VRP project, led by F. Pugnière Saavedra, UBS), they
were interviewed within semi structured interviews in prisons. Those interviews were
structured around four themes: their experience as an individual in the prison organization ,
their reception of judicial activity, their relations with the other actors in prison life (fellow
prisoners, guards, etc.) and finally, their emotional experience in jail.
Twenty three interviews were thus conducted (i.e. a recording duration of 15 hours and 48
minutes), which included, on numerous occasions, the introduction by the prisoners of
"small stories" (Georgakopoulou, 2006; Bamberg, Georgakopo ulou, 2008) which aim to draw
an alternative representation of one self outside the prison experience. In this paper , we
propose to analyse the implementation of this storytelling by insisting on the mechanisms of
integration of these narratives into the interviews (introduction and closure) by relying on
lexical, syntactic and macro syntactic clues, and on the pragmatic aim of these insertions into
the talk in interaction, episodes that were not foreseen but authorised by the research
protocol.