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Human language is entangled with the world we inhabit; through language we construct meaning and communicate about complex human endeavours, relationships and values. But what happens when life displaces people from these familiar meaning-making boundaries?

In this chapter, I describe my work with parents facing a child being diagnosed with Dravet Syndrome, a rare, chronic genetic disease that affects the development of the brain. Families faced with such a diagnosis are left confused and bewildered, unable to call upon familiar resources; even familiar words lose their meaning. ‘It is as if my life had been broken into a 1000 pieces and that from each piece the image had disappeared’, said one parent.

Working as an anthropological researcher, I used clean language interviews to gain deep insight into, and help make visible, these parents' experience. I explain how I stumbled over a number of difficulties in my use of clean language interviewing and how I learned to be creative in order to gain access to what had initially remained hidden in this overwhelming experience. In particular I highlight the value of allowing the interviewee to use me as a temporary ‘body map’ for feelings that appeared too difficult to hold in their own body.

This research enabled me to construct a model of how parents can navigate this experience and to create a facilitation program that is being used to support many such families.

To conclude this book, we take stock of the state of the field of clean language interviewing (CLI). The field has matured considerably in 20 years and yet is still young and emergent. Through articulating the principles of CLI and exploring its application in many fields of practice, we hope this book might come to be seen as a milestone on its path. From its informal beginnings and earliest applications, we believe we can claim with justification that clean language interviewing has developed into a well-specified, well-tested and well-appreciated method that can be used to access both explicitly- and tacitly-held knowledge in a wide range of research projects.

As editors of this volume, we have been gratified and humbled by the ways in which CLI has been used by the contributors. Part II has demonstrated the value of clean language interviewing in both academic and applied research. The applications presented illustrate that CLI has breadth – given the diverse fields in which it has been applied – as well as depth, due to the various levels at which it can be used.

Our aim in this chapter is to reflect on themes that have emerged from the contributions in Part II and the experience of compiling the book as a whole. We begin by reviewing the frameworks that we regard as essential to CLI, then discuss three issues of practice and theory that have emerged from Part II. We sum up the key benefits and limitations of CLI for interviewers and interviewees before indicating some possible directions for future research.

In this book the terms ‘clean language’ and ‘clean language interviewing’ are written using lower case, according to the convention of the American Psychological Association (sixth edition). ‘Clean language interviewing’ is sometimes abbreviated to CLI.