Geoffrey T Raymond

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of California, Santa Barbara

Conversation Analysis (CA) is one of the predominant methods for the detailed study of human social interaction. Bringing together thirty-four chapters written by a team of world-renowned experts, this Handbook represents the first comprehensive overview of conversation-analytic methods. Topics include how to collect, manage, and transcribe data; h...

This article reviews two related approaches—conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA)—to sketch a systematic framework for exposing how categories and categorial phenomena are (re)produced in naturally occurring social interaction. In so doing, we argue that CA and MCA address recent concerns about psychological method...

"In this report, we examine calls to an emergency service call center in South Africa, showing how participants’ orientations to material circumstances – and the issues of trust that may arise from the ways that emergency services are constrained by them – become evident in their conduct in the calls. Specifically, we consider some practices deploy...

In this introductory article to the special issue on Resistance in Talk-in-Interaction, we review the vast body of research that has respecified resistance by investigating it as and when it occurs in real-life encounters. Using methodological approaches such as ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and discursive psychology, studies of resistan...

Research on interactions involving police officers foregrounds the importance of their communicative practices for fostering civilians’ perceptions of police legitimacy. Building on this research, we describe a pattern of conduct that is a recurrent source of trouble in such encounters, which we call sequential standoffs. These standoffs emerge whe...

Harold Garfinkel's Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) was published a little more than 50 years ago. Since then, there has been a substantial—although often subterranean—growth in ethnomethodological work and influence. Studies in and appreciation of ethnomethodological work continue to grow, but the breadth and penetration of his insights and insp...

Harold Garfinkel's Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) was published a little more than 50 years ago. Since then, there has been a substantial—although often subterranean—growth in ethnomethodological work and influence. Studies in and appreciation of ethnomethodological work continue to grow, but the breadth and penetration of his insights and insp...

In this article, we show how routine policing is conscripted into the project of maintaining and reproducing spatial racism in urban settings through an intersecting set of macro-level processes and micro-interactional practices. Our analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted with over 40 police officers during 20 ride-alongs in the Western Unit...

This article addresses a vital concern in current society by showing what participants themselves may treat as ways to transcend their differences. Actors’ shared understanding has been of longstanding interest across the social sciences. Conversation analysis (CA) treats the procedural infrastructure of interaction as the basis for participants to...

A central aim of experts, officials, and citizens meeting in the context of policymaking is to organize their encounters in ways that enable them to learn about the other's perspectives – that is, to engage in “dialogue”. However, what is less understood are the interactional trajectories over which these transformative engagements are pursued. Usi...

This report examines interactional troubles that find their source, not in talk, but in manual action. First, we introduce the intertwined character of two fundamental features of most, if not all emergent human conduct: The ongoing structural projection of an action-in-progress along with its continuing progressive realization. We then identify tw...

A recurrent feature of Garfinkel’s famous breaching experiments in which student confederates were instructed to engage an unsuspecting subject in conversation and subsequently insist that they “clarify the sense of (their) commonplace remarks” is the student experimenter’s use, in attempting to realize such “insistence,” of a turn composed of “wha...

Background: A large body of research has produced vast quantities of empirical data on risk factors for violence in a range of countries and community contexts. Despite the unquestionable successes of this research in cataloguing these risk factors, relatively little is known about the situational factors and mechanisms that translate risks for vio...

Objectives: The objective of this report was to consider some ways in which a range of phenomena commonly treated as “risk factors” for violence (including social asymmetries based on factors such as gender, race, and class and drug or alcohol intoxication) become observable in violent (or potentially violent) interactions. In doing so, we contribu...

In a Special Issue of Discourse Studies (2016) titled ‘The Epistemics of Epistemics’, contributing authors criticize Heritage’s research on participants’ orientations to, and management of, the distribution of (rights to) knowledge in conversation. These authors claim (a) that the analytic framework Heritage (and I) developed for analyzing epistemi...

This collection offers a multifaceted view of the life, research and impact of Emanuel A. Schegloff, the co-originator, with Harvey Sacks and Gail Jefferson, of Conversation Analysis (or CA), and its leading contemporary authority. The first section introduces Schegloff’s life and work, and, using a series of interviews with him, provides a concise...

This collection offers a multifaceted view of the life, research and impact of Emanuel A. Schegloff, the co-originator, with Harvey Sacks and Gail Jefferson, of Conversation Analysis (or CA), and its leading contemporary authority. The first section introduces Schegloff’s life and work, and, using a series of interviews with him, provides a concise...

Body behavior can be both observable and recognizable as realizing a particular action in interaction with others. In addition, participants have a range of ways to conspicuously adjust their actions to coordinate or synchronize their actions with others. For instance, there are methods to suspend or abandon handing off an object to another and met...

Using data from American emergency call centers, this article focuses on the coordination, and mutual relevance, of participants’ effort to manage two forms of unit completion – sequence closing (as a method for ‘project’ completion) and concluding the occasion in which the project was pursued. In doing so, we specify the import of sequence organiz...

This chapter investigates some of the ways participants use adjusting actions to produce a range of emergent relationships between distinct courses of action. It describes body-behaviorally realized practices for the management of two intersecting courses of action. We first show how the continuing realization of two courses of action can be preser...

Humans are imperfect, and problems of speaking, hearing and understanding are pervasive in ordinary interaction. This book examines the way we 'repair' and correct such problems as they arise in conversation and other forms of human interaction. The first book-length study of this topic, it brings together a team of scholars from the fields of anth...

This article examines treatment recommendations in orthopedic surgery consultations and shows how surgery is treated as "omni-relevant" within this activity, providing a context within which the broad range of treatment recommendations proposed by surgeons is offered. Using conversation analysis to analyse audiotaped encounters between orthopedic s...

This article draws on one citizen’s efforts to document daily life in his neighborhood. The authors describe the potential benefits of third-party video—videos that people who are not social scientists have recorded and preserved—to social science research. Excerpts from a collection of police-citizen interactions illustrate key points likely to co...

This paper examines how orthopaedic surgeons skilfully design treatment recommendations to display awareness of what individual patients are anticipating or seeking, and suggests limits to those efforts. It adds leverage to our parallel work by demonstrating that even when surgeons incorporate considerations of recipient design to 'fit' recommendat...

This paper examines occasions in which speakers initiate repair in the midst of, or at/after the possible completion of, a question, and by virtue of this come to pose “one question after another.” The data are drawn from ordinary and institutional contexts, though questions from the latter constitute the large majority of cases examined below. Unl...

Prosody is constitutive for spoken interaction. In more than 25 years, its study has grown into a full-fledged and very productive field with a sound catalogue of research methods and principles. This volume presents the state of the art, illustrates current research trends and uncovers potential directions for future research. It will therefore be...

This chapter, written by Geoffrey Raymond, explores two kinds of yes/no questions-yes/no declaratives (YNDs) and yes/no interrogatives (YNIs) -in interactions between health visitor nurses (HVs) and mothers who have recently given birth. According to Raymond, these two kinds of yes/ no questions differ in terms of the epistemic stance of the questi...

The view that questions are 'requests for missing information' is too simple when language use is considered. Formally, utterances are questions when they are syntactically marked as such, or by prosodic marking. Functionally, questions request that certain information is made available in the next conversational turn. But functional and formal que...

Harold Garfinkel introduced the term “ethnomethodology” (by analogy to “ethnoscience”) in the 1950s and 1960s and gave the approach its fullest explication in his widely influential Studies in ethnomethodology (1967). Ethnomethodology consists of the effort to discover and analyze generic practices – methods – found across different occasions by wh...

In this article, we examine a corpus of calls occasioned by a single event, the 1990 Mountain Glade Fire in a coastal community on the Pacific Coast, to consider (a) how the distribution of rights and responsibilities are displayed in the talk of callers to the emergency phone line (9-1-1) and call takers (CTs) who receive them and (b) how these ar...

Scholars have long understood that linkages between the identities of actors and the design of their actions in interaction constitute one of the central mechanisms by which social patterns are produced. Although a range of empirical approaches has successfully grounded claims regarding the significance of various forms or types of identity (ge...

Within the general framework of agreement on a state of affairs, the matter of the terms of agreement can remain: determining whose view is the more significant or more authoritative with respect to the matter at hand. In this paper we focus on this issue as it is played out in assessment sequences. We examine four practices through which a second...

Coordinating social action with others entails (and is reflected in) members' knowing where they are in a course of action, from whom an action is due, what action is due, and the like. Although methods of turn taking and sequence organization provide primary resources for establishing a joint understanding of actions and events in conversation, th...

Connections between grammar and social organization are examined via one of the most pervasive practices of speaking used in talk-in-interaction: yes/no type interrogatives and the turns speakers build in response to them. This investigation is composed of two parts. The first analyzes a basic organization set in motion by yes/no type interrogative...

Connections between grammar and social organization are examined via one of the most pervasive practices of speaking used in talk-in-interaction: yes/no type interrogatives and the turns speakers build in response to them. This investigation is composed of two parts. The first analyzes a basic organization set in motion by yes/no type interrogative...

Ever since language has been examined as a vehicle for action, scholars have been interested in its authorized use (Austin, 1962). Typically described under the rubric of `felicity conditions', the authorized use of language involves, among other conditions, the right or authority of a member to engage in, or deploy, some named action. This paper b...

We present Conditional Random Fields based approaches for detecting agree-ment/disagreement between speakers in English broadcast conversation shows. We develop annotation approaches for a variety of linguistic phenomena. Various lexical, structural, durational, and prosodic features are explored. We compare the performance when using features extr...