Applied linguistic research in health provides a rich heritage to show how epistemological inequity is found and reproduced in clinical encounters. Marmot’s globally influential policy for health inequalities demonstrated the determinants of health sit outside it. He prioritised the early years and the education system – calling for schools, families and communities work to work in partnership to reduce the gradient in health, well-being and resilience of children and young people.
But interactions are also places where emotions can be regulated, trauma repaired, and self-esteem given a chance to grow. They are spaces for encounter.
Martin Buber (2023), a 20th century Austrian–Israeli philosopher, said that human existence is characterized by two fundamental modes of relating: the I-Thou relationship and the I-It relationship. An I-It relationship involves objectification where we experience the world and others as objects to be analyzed, used or categorized. In contrast, the I-Thou relationship is a reciprocal encounter in which individuals meet as whole beings, free from instrumental purposes. Buber states that we oscillate between the two modes (I-Thou, I-It), but if we approach in the subject-object mode (I-It) our learning from the observation is encapsulated in that mode, remaining an ‘it’ fixed for use in the purpose of the subject’s endeavour. According to Buber, ‘the improvement of the ability to experience and use generally involves a decrease in a man’s power to relate’ (2023, p. 92). The I-It mode is dominated by causality where ‘every event that is either perceivable by the senses and physical or discovered or found in introspection and psychological is considered to be of necessity caused and a cause’ (Buber, 2023). Conversely, the world through the I-Thou lens (Subject-Subject) is a world of relation in which ‘I’ and ‘You’ confront each other freely in reciprocity that is not involved in or tainted by causality.
In this series of talks I will share examples from family and workforce practices, which attended to micro moments of interaction. I conceive these interactions within a dialogic lens, looking beyond language as message coding and decoding system, seeking to explore the meaning of the interaction within the concepts that child, family or worker is going on inside of (Shotter, 2011). The examples are from early years with children/families with hearing impairment, mainstream school with neurodiverse children in the looked after system and workers in service leadership roles in the early years.
