Unsettled Moments in Settled Discourse: Women Superintendents’ Experiences of Inequality

Abstract

In this article, the discourse of 12 women superintendents is examined with the expressed aim of determining if patterns in their talk about their superintendency experiences contain events or episodes of inequality. The study’s examination is guided by an adaptation of Swindler’s theory of “settled” and “unsettled” social periods. Qualitative inquiry and analysis methods are used to identify emerging themes or topics of talk. Five topics of talk emerge from the narrative data: power, silence, style, responsibility, and people. Each of these topics is examined for settled and unsettled properties and further analyzed using the lenses of Chase and Bell’s identified strategies to discover how the women treat their experiences of inequality in their discourse.