The Discursive Characteristics of a Prosocial Self-Help: Re-visioning the Potential of Self-Help for Empowerment

Self-help activities tend to be conceptualized as a singular communicative mode, but one that is either empowering or oppressive. One alternative to rejecting self-help entirely is to redirect theorizing to identify, to articulate, and even to promote the ways self-help can manifest as a means of claiming and embodying agency within a society. I argue that self-help is provisionally a means of empowerment contingent on the discursive characteristics of the activities referenced. Empowerment appears to be cultivated in self-help activities when the communicative interaction is (a) embodied by self-help interactants who are part of a collective and who, as members of that collective, attempt to achieve social parity and (b) when the goal is to share knowledge gained from personal experience.