How do Immigrant Family Members Successfully Negotiate Cultural Identities in Family Therapy: A Discursive Analysis

Abstract

One of Canada’s trademarks is the cultural diversity of its people, and how different ways of life are integrated to Canadian society a current and important issue. Often, unresolved dilemmas surface as attempts to negotiate and recognize different cultural identities in ways that reflect both immigrants and Canadian preferences. Therapy conversations can become spaces in which immigrant family members, together with therapists, collaborate in recognizing each other according to cultural memberships that are preferred by them. In this study, I focus on how immigrant family members relationally recognize and co-articulate with each other their preferred cultural memberships. I also explore what immigrant family members consider therapists’ helpful conversational moves in helping them negotiate preferred cultural identities. Informed by discursive psychology, I offer my analysis of five immigrant families’ therapy conversations. I describe three practices (resisting recognition, foregrounding cultural identities, and recognizing preferred cultural identities) in which immigrant family members engaged, together with their therapists, in successfully negotiating preferred cultural identities. This preference-animated research can be useful for family therapists who work with immigrant families, to help them foreground relational patterns of dis-preferred cultural identity ascriptions (i.e., misrecognition), to find relational patterns that suit them better as a family.