MetaTOC stay on top of your field, easily

Going off-script and reframing the frame: The dialogic intertwining of the centripetal and centrifugal voices in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings

Discourse & Society

Published online on

Abstract

After the end of apartheid, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established to uncover the truth and, most importantly, unite a deeply divided nation. This overarching goal of reconciliation not only framed the TRC’s work, but also shaped each hearing so that it followed a somewhat predictable script. In this article, bringing together Goffman’s framing and Bakhtin’s dialogicality, I analyze two selected hearings to show how the testifiers and the TRC commissioners go off-script and thereby reframe participants’ relationships in terms of power and solidarity, the hearing as a social situation, and understandings of the past and the truth. Suggesting that the TRC officials represent centripetal (official) voices and the testifiers represent centrifugal (marginal) voices, I show how going off-script works to not only reframe and laminate frames in a highly organized institutional encounter, but also is a way of intertwining the centripetal and centrifugal voices, thus creating dialogicality.