Social Construction

The Audible Anthropologist

The idea of social construction is scary. It implies you don’t own your own experience—it is determined by society/the system. We can never be fully in charge of defining who we are. For instance, most people define themselves in relation to what it is to be a mother—they have one and they might be one. But you never really own our experience of motherhood; it is rather structured in terms of discourses such as “working mum”, “soccer mum”, “super-mum”, “doting mum” etc.. All accounts of reality are marred or embedded in discourse. This implies that it is impossible to stand outside society and study it objectively. The most we can do, according to this concept is to try to unearth or dig out the underlying discourse of structure, in a process called “deconstruction”.
Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.