Co-constructing the adolescent’s identity: agency and autonomy as interactional accomplishments

Drawing on recent linguistic anthropological reflections on identity and discursive psychologists’ theorizing on social positioning, the authors of this chapter examine the dynamic and multifaceted enactment and transformation of identity in social interaction. The work presentd in this chapter suggests that agency and autonomy, key dimensions of adolescent identity development, do not emerge solely from the individual but are co-constructed and transformed in interpersonal exchanges. These theoretical propositions are supported through the discourse analysis of two family cases, which reveals that the discursive co-construction of adolescent agency and autonomy is non-linear and continuously negotiated. Families oscillate between different interactional configurations, with individual family members claiming, declining, reclaiming certain roles and competencies vis-à-vis other members of the family. In addition to illustrating the value of bridging different disciplinary perspectives together in the work presented in this chapter, the authors demonstrate the analytic purchase that a micro-examination of social interaction offers to adolescence and developmental psychology research.