Description: Key practitioners and researchers explore how people routinely and at particular sites are discursively constructed as deficient in ways that may affect their life chances. The book offers examples of how adopting multiple perspectives on research can provide a rich explanatory analysis of the construct of 'deficit' in a range of domains.
Review Quotes:
"This meticulously edited and highly organized collection of articles constitutes an authoritative, multi-perspectival, interdisciplinary, 'discourse-based' reference work. Its theoretical and methodological frameworks and detailed analyses illuminate institutional discursive processes in which deficits of various kinds often threaten the well-being of lay participants a timely book that occupies a qualitative scholarly niche, will nevertheless benefit researchers from various institutional settings seeking to explore communication in order to identify the implicit dimensions of processes and procedures, and effect change that will improve lay professional institutional communication." - Discourse & Communication