Inya | Self and Other Identity Claims in Health Advice Stories on Twitter Naija
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 15/05/2023

Onwu Inya | Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria

Storytelling is a fundamental human discursive practice that occurs in different contexts and for different discursive-social functions, such as advising. It is also a site for constructing identities. This paper investigates self and other identity claims – ascriptions, assessments and categorizations – that occur in Twitter stories told by Nigerian doctors and that emerge in the second stories told by their followers. The data for this paper comprise a corpus of 150 story tweets retrieved from the timelines of four Nigerian doctors that give health-related advice on Twitter and replies from their followers and other advice recipients. The paper draws analytical insights from positioning theory. Following positioning theory’s three-level analysis of identity work, the paper investigates the identity claims that storytellers ascribe to the characters in their taleworld, the claims that storytellers negotiate in the telling, interactional level, and the links between these immediate, local identity claims and macro, ideological, socio-historico-cultural and bio-medical discourses about the (un)healthy self. Key findings related to how the identity claims made by the discourse participants are intimately linked with the context and interactional goals of the discourse, namely giving, seeking, receiving and rejecting advice. Moreover, participants resort to their ethnolinguistic repertoires (Nigerian Pidgin, Nigerian English and major indigenous Nigerian languages, prominently Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo languages, respectively) in evaluating and negotiating identity claims, thereby laying claims to a Naija identity. Furthermore, identity claims are mostly based on experiential and or epistemic primacies by which participants (co)-construct the credibility, authenticity and authority to proffer, receive or reject advice indicated in the stories. Therefore, storytelling, especially involving personal experiences or emanating from the expertise of the doctors, allows for complex presentations of the self relative to being, doing (un)healthy.

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