Categories in Social Interaction
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; how to explore data in search of possible phenomena; how to form and develop collections of phenomena; how to use different types of evidence to analyze data; how to code and quantify interaction; and how to apply, publish, and communicate findings to those who stand to benefit from them. Each method is introduced clearly and systematically, and examples of CA in different languages and cultures are included, to show how it can be applied in multiple settings. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for researchers and advanced students in disciplines such as Linguistics, Sociology, Anthropology, Communication and Psychology.
Language can be considered as not simply playing a role in behavior change but as being foundational to how we understand people's behavior in itself. Focusing on the use of discursive categories in everyday social interaction, this paper examines how dispositional categories (such as food “likes”) become “sticky” through being invoked during one social action but treated as relatively stable over time and used to account for past and future behavior. Data are video recordings of children's eating practices taken from two large corpuses of family meals in Scotland and preschool lunches in Sweden. Discursive Psychology was used to explicate the ways in which categories of food likes and dislikes are implicated in social actions during mealtimes, such as offering food, encouraging children to eat, or responding to food already eaten. The analysis unpacks the central argument in three parts: (1) that discursive practices construct psychological categories, (2) that categories are embedded within social actions, and (3) that social actions may change, but the categories stick. The paper contributes to discursive and interactional work on the use of categories through shifting the analytical gaze to dispositional categories and examining mundane (as well as institutional) settings. The implications of this work extend to a much broader field of research on language and behavior change through illustrating the embedded resistance of certain discursive categories and their consequences for the possibilities for change.
This paper reports on the effects of foreign accents and names on the chance of receiving an apartment viewing in the city of Bremen in Germany. Almost 300 phone calls were placed in four different city districts with a Turkish, USAmerican and German name and accent and a Turkish name and Standard German. The analysis shows intra-urban differences: in the more prestigious neighbourhood, Turkish-accented callers had significantly lower chances of getting a viewing. In all but one city district, the Standard German callers received the most viewing appointments, and the American English-accented callers had more chances than the Turkish callers speaking Standard German. A discourse analysis of an excerpt from an apartment application conversation shows how power relations are reproduced at a discourse level. Overall, this study confirms that gatekeeping selection processes via linguistic profiling can lead to the maintenance of ethnolinguistic boundaries and segregation within the city.
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 methods and approaches. After summarizing how categories are typically theorized and studied, we describe the main features of a CA approach to categories, including how this differs from conventional psychology. We review the core domains of research in CA and how categories can be studied systematically in relation to the basic machinery of talk and other conduct in interaction. We illustrate these domains through examples from different settings of recorded naturally occurring social interaction. After considering the applications that have arisen from CA and MCA, we conclude by drawing together the implications of this work for psychological science.
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 interrogatives, describing a preference for “type-conforming” responses and its consequences. The second considers how this basic organization is shaped and simplified to accomplish institutionally specific goals in survey research, medical encounters, and courtroom cross-examinations, and what such manipulations reveal about these institutions. Together these findings deepen our understanding of how language is adapted to—and for—interaction, while providing analytic resources for a broad range of sociologists, whether they are engaged in the direct observation of human behavior, developing sociological theories of language, analyzing institutions and social organizations, or interested in the practical consequences of questioning in the myriad institutions that make use of this form.
It is widely acknowledged that broadcast programmes are produced to serve the public’s interest. Presenting the programmes in a neutral and objective fashion, and engaging the audience in forming opinions, are common ways of achieving this. However, studies have suggested that there is a departure from these practices when the object of broadcast becomes societal problems such as racism. This case study examines how a presenter responds to a caller’s abuse in two live radio shows, and how she sets out a programme - and a new conversation - using her personal experience of racism/xenophobia. Using conversation analysis and discursive psychology, we studied the situated use of language and the actions being brought about. We found that the presenter assesses the caller’s abuse by rudeness on the spot, formulating the call as disruptive to an ongoing conversation. On the following day, the presenter revisits, and topicalises, this call as xenophobia and racism. Our analysis revealed that the presenter’s shift in evaluating this call is grounded in, and licensed by, her drawing on and cultivating a sympathetic listenership, characterising the call as race-driven, and formulating her personal experience as of public’s concern. Our findings spotlight the presenter’s orientation to her moral accountability in talking about racism, and the potential of broadcast in leading conversations on anti-racism.
This article investigates moments in social interaction where tacit processes of gender attribution become visible because they are temporarily disrupted and exposed through misgendering. Our data consist of publicly available audio and video-recorded cases of misgendering, mostly from UK and US contexts. Practices of misgendering embody assumptions that map people’s current gender onto their self-presentations and gender histories. Organisational features of social interaction facilitate the reproduction of these assumptions as taken-for-granted criteria for gender attribution. In the current climate of ‘gender panics’, the rise of a norm whereby people’s self-defined gender should be respected clashes against enduring assumptions that uphold a gender order grounded in cisgenderism. The exposure of gender assumptions in moments of misgendering presents a potential for social change, but this potential is also limited by practices that reproduce (rather than challenge) the dominant gender order.
Linguistics and discourse studies have recently started treating fictional interactions as data worth analyzing in their own right, rather than incomplete representations of naturally occurring conversations. Aligning with advances in research on the use of language in fiction, this study addresses the functions of characters’ conversational practices in fictional works from an interactional perspective. By applying conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis to a sitcom series, this study explores how characters’ repair operation, membership categorization, and attribute ascription contribute to the construction and revelation ofthose characters (i.e., fictional characterization). Three patterns are illustrated: (1) a character engages in implicit categorization to account for trouble after operating repair; (2) a character’s changes of turn design in multiple repair operations show the character’s orientation toward an attribute of the other char- acter; and (3) a character gives up repair operation and shows an orientation toward other characters’ attributes through implying negative assessment of them. The findings suggest that conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis are beneficial for research on fictional characterization. This study also discusses the reflexive and mutually constitutive relationship between the interactional partici- pants’ characters and their conversational practices.
How do persons negotiate the relevance of historic racial injustice for contemporary concerns? In this paper, I show that persons could develop and use racial categorizations in association with family relations to make salient (or not) the relevance of past racial injustice for contemporary concerns. I examined how people construct and orient to racial group membership as implying historical oppression, and its relevance for contemporary interracial relations in the form of supporting or opposing Critical Race Theory (CRT) teaching in the United States public school system. I examined debates and discussions on CRT televised in the American news media using discursive psychological approaches. Findings show that race categories were developed and used in relation to one's ancestors: parents, aunts and uncles, and distant generations. This was done to raise the salience of past racial injustice, which otherwise would involve offering historic or other social structural arguments. The use of family derived race categories at once personalized and enhanced the credibility of the speaker, and countered possible implications for taking responsibility for past actions. These family-derived race categories were then a resource speakers could use to negotiate their position on CRT. These findings are discussed in relation to the relevance of time for negotiating racism. Further arguments are developed in relation to how an ethnomethodological approach can illuminate critical arguments on race and racism.
Distributing opportunities to participate in talk-in-interaction during whole-class mathematics discussions is an important equity issue, with multiple studies reporting pervasive inequitable participation patterns in mathematics classrooms. Less attention, however, has been given to the underlying interactional practices that can initiate and support minoritized students’ participation. This article examines how and what kinds of opportunities for participation are interactionally generated for minoritized students in whole-class mathematics discussions in two US high school classrooms. Through the lenses of turn-taking organizations and epistemic dimensions from conversation analysis, this study details the interactional features of turn-taking by three Black students in predominantly White classrooms. The analysis shows the importance of establishing epistemic congruence about the nature of students’ knowledge before inviting them to take up the conversational floor. The findings imply that locally achieved, mutual understanding of what minoritized students know in the moment-by-moment classroom interaction is an important interactional feature for making minoritized students’ brilliance more visible during whole-class discussions.
Drawing on naturally occurring, multiparty interactional data involving parents, children, and third parties (e.g. friends and relatives), this conversation analytic study investigates how the status of ‘parent’ is co-constructed on a moment-by-moment basis in the course of everyday interaction. The analysis focuses on participant orientation to parents’ rights to act on behalf of their children and third parties, through which parental entitlements, responsibilities, and authority are invoked. Specifically, interaction participants orient to parents as having primary rights to know about their children, determine their courses of action, and take primary responsibilities for their behaviors. Parents also confirm and ratify these category ascriptions by acting on behalf of their children and third parties, demonstrating with actions that they are capable of carrying out their rights and responsibilities as parents. The findings shed light on how the practical relevance of the ‘parent’ membership shapes the sequential unfolding of multiparty interaction.
Qualitative transdisciplinary research has contributed to the development of a dynamic scientific area that is best suited to analyze real-life data from real people. To determine how ethnicity and gender intersect to shape the social worlds of the participants in a Serb business discussion forum, I apply two theoretical orientations based on ethnomethodology: Conversation Analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA). I analyze 15 videos with predominantly female Serb discussants. My findings from this project reveal a significant presence of stigma in the perceptions of Serb ethnicity in Croatia. I argue that due to patriarchal values as a type of cultural cache, Serb women experience demeaning gender categories in various areas of their lives. To improve this situation, it is suggested that there is a need for feminist ethics of care and a coalition with men.
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 when two parties persistently pursue alternative courses of action, producing a stalemate in which neither progress in, nor exit from, either course of action appears viable. They are routinely resolved by officers (re)casting civilians’ pursuit of one course of action as constituting resistance to the officers’ proposed course of action, and thus as warranting officers’ use of coercive violence to resolve the stalemate. In some cases, however, officers resolve standoffs cooperatively using sequentially accommodative methods. We consider how these findings advance approaches to communicative dilemmas in policing, and their broader significance for scholars of social interaction, and of the interactional organization of conflicts.
The purpose of the study is to investigate the features of the vocabulary of COVID-19 in English, which is an international language of borrowings. The secondary objective is to obtain new data on the emergence of a new vocabulary during the global problem of the COVID-19 pandemic. The method of lexical semantics analysis was used; 77 lexical units within the framework of the socio-political discourse have been considered in the course of the discursive text analysis. The most relevant categories of neologisms associated with COVID-19 were identified, and their word-formation models were analyzed. The active borrowing of COVID-19 vocabulary began from the English language. Based on the changes in the lifestyle, daily routine, and statuses of citizens, five categories and four groups of neologisms have been identified. The results of this study can be used for further analysis of the vocabulary of the COVID-19 period as new lexical units constantly appear and require their consideration within the framework of the linguistic potential and vocabulary of the languages found in the world. The study is important for replenishing the theoretical and practical base in the field of lexicology (processes of neologization, lexical borrowings, semantic features of new lexical units and their functions), media linguistics, journalism, and sociology as it takes into account socio-political factors.
This paper presents an analysis of how the particular categories of children and youth are used within the instructional work of learning to drive. Using Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) and multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA) of a collection of cases drawn from 85 video-recorded driving lessons, we demonstrate how the participants treat children and youth as a category of traffic users whose main category predicate appears to be their expected unpredictability and carelessness, placing particularly high demands on drivers’ awareness and caution. This is evident in in-event and post-event interactions about traffic encounters with children and youth, as well as in traffic contexts where they have not (yet) been spotted but their sudden appearance is anticipated. The results suggest that the institutional constructions of children and youth as a potential source of trouble prepare trainee drivers for unforeseen events and contingencies and shape their social stock of knowledge as future motorists.
Analyzing a thread of online interaction, I apply conversation analysis and discursive psychology methods to explicate how experiences of racism are reported and contested by participants in interaction. The person reporting their experience of racism (the reporter) applies commonsense knowledge to assess the perpetrator's racist intent. Recipients of the report contest the reporter's rights to assess the perpetrator's intent while managing their lack of independent access to the reported encounter. In milder contestations, they cast doubt while avoiding assessing the situation themselves, which leads to negotiations over the accusation without contesting the correctness of the reporter's assessment. In aggravated contestations, recipients explicitly contest the reporter's assessment of the perpetrator, which leads to interactional breakdowns where moral culpabilities of both sides are implicated. Implications for understanding the moral difficulties involved in accusing racism, the interactional contingencies involved in responding to and contesting such accusations, and members’ understandings of racism are discussed.
This study examines preference organization in adult second language classrooms in relation to possible -isms—utterances which are hearably racist, classist, (hetero)sexist, or otherwise exclusionary, although their exclusionary nature may be (re)negotiated in situ. A collection of sixty-one possible -isms from a corpus of fifty-five hours of video-recorded English second language classes was examined using conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis. The analysis shows that participants orient to solidarity by supporting -isms, progressivity by deleting -isms, and moral accountability by challenging -isms; however, participants prioritize solidarity, enacting it early, even in cases of deletion and challenges. I argue that this preference organization is rooted in the institutional roles and objectives of adult second language classrooms, where presumably competent members of diverse cultures aim to foster an environment for active participation. Findings underscore the importance of conducting microanalyses of talk-in-interaction to uncover structural constraints which facilitate the reproduction of systemic exclusion. (-isms, preference, conversation analysis, membership categorization analysis, classroom interaction, exclusion in interaction)
A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone: all minds are steeped in situated interaction. That social interaction matters is recognized by any experimentalist who seeks to exclude its influence by studying individuals in isolation. On this view, interaction complicates cognition. Here, we explore the more radical stance that interaction co‐constitutes cognition: that we benefit from looking beyond single minds toward cognition as a process involving interacting minds. All around the cognitive sciences, there are approaches that put interaction center stage. Their diverse and pluralistic origins may obscure the fact that collectively, they harbor insights and methods that can respecify foundational assumptions and fuel novel interdisciplinary work. What might the cognitive sciences gain from stronger interactional foundations? This represents, we believe, one of the key questions for the future. Writing as a transdisciplinary collective assembled from across the classic cognitive science hexagon and beyond, we highlight the opportunity for a figure‐ground reversal that puts interaction at the heart of cognition. The interactive stance is a way of seeing that deserves to be a key part of the conceptual toolkit of cognitive scientists.
Competence-questioning communication at work has been described as gender-linked (e.g., mansplaining) and as impacting the way women perceive and experience the workplace. Three studies were conducted to investigate how the specific communication behaviors of condescending explanation (i.e., mansplaining), voice nonrecognition, and interruption can be viewed as gender-biased in intention by receivers. The first study was a critical incident survey to describe these competence-questioning behaviors when enacted by men toward women in the workplace and how women react toward them. Studies 2 and 3 used experimental paradigms (in online and laboratory settings, respectively) to investigate how women and men perceive and react to these behaviors when enacted by different genders. Results demonstrated that when faced with condescending explanation, voice nonrecognition, or interruption, women reacted more negatively and were more likely to see the behavior as indicative of gender bias when the communicator was a man. Implications for improving workplace communications and addressing potential gender biases in communication in organizations are discussed.
Misgendering – moments where someone refers to, describes, or addresses a person as a gender different to the one they identify with – is a challenge that trans people can face in social interaction. Misgendering is an interactional phenomenon but has yet to be examined for how it unfolds in conversation. Utilizing conversation analysis, we focus on what we term designedly intentional misgendering. We show how speakers utilize turn-design features and sequential placement to mark a misgendering as intentional. We also document how such misgendering is mobilized for different actions in social interaction. Speakers can utilize designedly intentional misgendering to display negative interactional positions towards trans people and related matters. Trans people can respond to such misgendering by negatively characterizing another speaker and their conduct. Our work advances existing discussions around the intentionality of misgendering and trans people's interactional agency.
Researchers are increasingly interested in why people want to participate in qualitative interview studies, particularly what they hope to gain from participating. The present paper contributes to this research agenda by analysing the motivations of victims of interpersonal violence: a group that is considered ethically challenging to involve in research, given their history of being intruded upon. The analysis is based on 174 qualitative interviews from three separate studies: two on intimate partner violence and one on sexual assault. A key finding is that many victims welcome the opportunity to participate and often use the interviews for their own purposes. We identified three different ‘participant orientations’, or ways victims relate to the interview and the research, including ‘telling for oneself’, ‘telling for others’ and ‘telling for the researcher’. We discuss how these orientations imply different ethical contracts between the participant and researcher and their links to recruitment methods.
Purpose
The purpose of this clinical focus article was to illustrate the potential of employing conversation analysis (CA) as a method for assessing social communication that is neurodiversity affirming.
Method
This clinical focus article will provide an overview of CA and explain how it offers a theoretically grounded means of analyzing autistic children's everyday social interactions. Our aim is not simply to add a new assessment instrument to the disciplinary toolbox but to use the occasion to spur a reconsideration of how social communicative competence is currently conceptualized in the field and how those assumptions are reified through assessment practices. We will present a case illustration of a bilingual autistic child and his family. We will discuss the implications of a CA-informed assessment for reconceptualizing autistic social communicative competence.
Results
The case study illustrates the contributions of CA for (a) shifting the focus of assessment from social communication as an individual skill to social communication as an interactional achievement and (b) surfacing social communicative competencies that may be dismissed as pathologies.
Conclusions
CA offers a relational understanding of autistic communication and sociality that is compatible with a critical stance on disability. Insights from CA problematize deeply entrenched notions of autism and social communication in speech-language pathology.
Trans-exclusionary radical feminists challenge transgender people (specifically women) from within a claimed feminist struggle. They exclude transgender women and instead claim they are men colonising women's spaces. I present a conversation analytic and analytical membership categorisation case study of a national radio interview in which the spokesperson for a trans-exclusionary feminist political group debates with the host on the nature of trans women and their exclusion from women's spaces. I show how the interviewee accomplishes trans exclusion in talk,, often without making explicit claims about trans women, by constructing both biologically essentialist and experiential distinctions between trans and cis women, constructing trans women as participants in patriarchal oppression, and by problematising a claimed redefinition of the category woman being enacted by trans women. This analysis highlights how transphobic (and specifically transmisogynistic) attitudes are accomplished in social interaction through sequential action and categorial inferences.
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; how to explore data in search of possible phenomena; how to form and develop collections of phenomena; how to use different types of evidence to analyze data; how to code and quantify interaction; and how to apply, publish, and communicate findings to those who stand to benefit from them. Each method is introduced clearly and systematically, and examples of CA in different languages and cultures are included, to show how it can be applied in multiple settings. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for researchers and advanced students in disciplines such as Linguistics, Sociology, Anthropology, Communication and Psychology.
Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) have become the latest disruptive digital technologies to breach the dividing lines between scientific endeavour and public consciousness. LLMs such as ChatGPT are platformed through commercial providers such as OpenAI, which provide a conduit through which interaction is realised, via a series of exchanges in the form of written natural language text called ‘prompt engineering’. In this paper, we use Membership Categorisation Analysis to interrogate a collection of prompt engineering examples gathered from the endogenous ranking of prompting guides hosted on emerging generative AI community and practitioner-relevant social media. We show how both formal and vernacular ideas surrounding ‘natural’ sociological concepts are mobilised in order to configure LLMs for useful generative output. In addition, we identify some of the interactional limitations and affordances of using role prompt engineering for generating interactional stances with generative AI chatbots and (potentially) other formats. We conclude by reflecting the consequences of these everyday social-technical routines and the rise of ‘ethno-programming’ for generative AI that is realised through natural language and everyday sociological competencies.
How do people negotiate blame for racism? In this article we focus on how participants manage the blameworthiness of racism—as a problem in society, and in relation to specific racist incidents—by scrutinising how sources of racism are formulated in broadcast media. This research develops our understanding of how racism is constructed in society as well as how blame functions to allocate responsibility to different parties. By examining racism as a conversational topic and blaming as a social action, our analysis develops important research into how racism is understood at this time in history and considers what the consequences might be of how blame is allocated for it.
This volume focuses on relations between the self and other individuals, the self and groups, and the self and context. Leading scholars in the field of positioning theory present the newest developments from this field on human social relations. The discussion is international, multidisciplinary, and multi-method, aiming to achieve a more dynamic and powerful account of human social relations, and to break disciplinary boundaries.
Four features in this work are prominent. The book is culturally oriented and international. There is a push to move across disciplines, particularly across psychology and linguistics, and psychology and microsociology. There is a focus on language and social construction of the world through discourse. Finally, the book represents a multi-method approach that reflects discursive methods.
Trust in society is related to a perception of fairness and lack of bias. But bias has many faces. This article presents a conversation analytic study of the initial introduction of the debaters in so-called ‘presidential’ TV debates during the final stages of the general election campaigns in Denmark. The data represents a rare possibility to compare almost identical debate contexts: two different elections, but same TV channel, host, presidential debate setup and campaign contexts. The analyses show how male party leaders were given a chance to construct themselves as experienced, engaged, and hardworking politicians, while a female party leader was merely positioned with regard to her gender and age and as an underdog meeting a strong opponent. This allows us to explore how bias is not just about what is actually said and done but also about what could (based on the comparison) have been said and done.
This study examines invited reports of racism in broadcast interviews. Guided by discursive psychology (DP) and conversation analysis (CA), the investigation focuses on the interactional moments wherein the interviewee (is invited to) describe a racist incident. Expanding existing DP and CA research on complaints of racism, this analysis shows how reported speech is treated by speakers as an indispensable device in reproducing the incident and providing evidence for the racism reported. This investigation provides further evidence for how speakers treat reporting racism as a sensitive business. This is reflected in the interviewee's accounts as they begin by describing the circumstance of the incident, and the interviewer's collaboration in co‐constructing the interviewee's accounts and co‐managing the trajectory of the interview. Overall, the analysis spotlights how an auspicious environment for victims to talk about their experiences of racism is created and fostered at both institutional and interactional levels.
A decade ago, veganism was a fringe radical movement. It was also largely absent from the geographical discipline, despite a rich history of vegan scholarship being present in disciplines such as Sociology and Psychology. However, veganism has recently seen a surge in popularity, with more people than ever before becoming vegan for a mixture of animal welfare, environmental, and health‐based reasons. With this mainstreaming, veganism has become contentious and fiercely defended. As veganism has become a growing social and political force, geographers have started to take notice of this previously fringe movement, which is gaining economic, ecological, and cultural power as investment flows into ‘plant‐based’ products and new markets are emerging. In this commentary, we look at how veganism has recently been taken up in Geography via several distinct trends that all stake a claim in defining an emerging geographical sub‐discipline, vegan geographies. We note the importance of scholarly pluralism and attention to establishing geographical sub‐disciplines more broadly.
For over half a century, Stanley Milgram’s classic and controversial obedience experiments have been a touchstone in the social and behavioral sciences, introducing generations of students to the concept of destructive obedience to authority and the Holocaust. In the last decade, the interdisciplinary Milgram renaissance has led to widespread interest in rethinking and challenging the context and nature of his Obedience Experiment. In Morality in the Making of Sense and Self, Matthew M. Hollander and Jason Turowetz offer a new explanation of obedience and defiance in Milgram’s lab. Examining one of the largest collections of Milgram’s original audiotapes, they scrutinize participant behavior in not only the experiments themselves, but also recordings of the subsequent debriefing interviews in which participants were asked to reflect on their actions. Taking an interaction centered approach to the sociology of morality, they show that, contrary to traditional understandings of Milgram’s experiments that highlight obedience, virtually all subjects, both compliant and defiant, mobilized practices to resist the authority’s commands, such that all were obedient and disobedient to varying degrees. As Hollander and Turowetz show, whether participants explicitly defined the situation as a moral problem mattered greatly for the outcomes they achieved, shaping their response to the authority’s demands and ultimately whether they would be classified as “obedient” or “defiant.” By illuminating the relationship between concrete moral dilemmas and social interaction, Hollander and Turowetz tell a new, empirically-grounded story about Milgram: one about morality—and immorality—in the making of sense and self.
This paper focuses on identity construction in family discourse, with the objective to investigate how identities of an adult daughter (the older sister/adult child at home) are made salient in and through family talk. Guided by Harvey Sacks's (1995) work on membership categorization combined with sequential analysis (Stokoe, 2012), the study examines 15 h of audio-recorded conversations between a mother and her two children in a Chinese-Australian family. Two specific identities of the adult daughter – a home educator and a child – are discussed in this paper where the findings reveal that such identities are invoked and negotiated by participants via their self- and other-categorization. The adult daughter's self-positioning becomes visible in interaction through her turn design and category-implicative social actions, which orient to a set of category-packaged rights, responsibilities, and attributes that index a particular category. However, the invoked memberships are not only accepted but also challenged by other family members in following turns, which reflects how the adult daughter is positioned by them during different family activities. By exploring an adult daughter's membership categorization in family talk, this study contributes to the under-researched topic of identity construction in Chinese-Australian/Chinese family discourse.
In this paper, I examine self-categorization practices as resources for the interactional organization of relative experiential entitlements. Locating the study in talk about child death, an explicitly moral domain of social life, this study utilizes 18 radio-based interactions from a South African talk-radio broadcaster. Using an ethnomethodological, conversation-analytic approach, I examine affective responses to reports of child deaths, demonstrating how these practices reproduce child death as a contemporary social and moral concern. My findings demonstrate how practices of, and variations in, self-reference and self-categorization are resources for managing relative rights and obligations, thereby reproducing common-sense knowledge about parents and children in contemporary South African society. This research contributes to advancing knowledge in the fields of membership categorization analysis and the social organization of experience.
This article focuses on various ethnographic procedures and findings in ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA), addressing the question of how EM and CA relate to ethnography. Given the obvious answer that EM includes ethnography, we also argue that CA does as well, though just how EM and CA do so needs to be qualified and specified. Ethnographic procedures have been used in EM for decades, although often in non-standard ways, and currently with some ambivalence. In CA, it is more common to disavow ethnography in favor of recorded and transcribed interactional exchanges. However, we argue that CA often makes use of ethnographic insights drawn from extended study of recordings, while also identifying “ethnographic” inquiries of a sort that take place within the organizational settings studied. Our aim is to identify the place of ethnography within EMCA by taking an inventory of ways “ethnography” has been used, invoked, produced, and/or disavowed in particular studies and to highlight what is distinctive about those various EMCA uses of ethnography in contrast with more conventional ethnography.
Racialized descriptions are a constant practice in our societies and a fundamental aspect of racial discourses. This paper uses conversation analytic tools within a Foucauldian perspective on discourse to investigate how discourses of race are (re)produced, and consequently navigated, in talk-in-interaction among speakers of Chinese. Four instances of racialized person description, taken from a larger corpus of 16 hours of casual conversation among Chinese migrants in Melbourne and their acquaintances, are explored in detail. The analysis identifies two interactional sequences, joking and accounting sequences, which allow participants to resist racialized descriptions while still orienting to the interactional preference for sociality in casual conversation. The paper argues that casual and friendly interaction may provide empirical evidence for how discourses of race are destabilized at the level of talk-in-interaction.
“Doing Gender,” Candance West and Don Zimmerman’s famous 1987 article, has become a folk concept—a trope or commonsense resource within the sociology of gender. Yet at the same time, most gender scholars overlook its ethnomethodological premise, visible in both poststructuralist misunderstandings of its argument outside the discipline of sociology and what I term a realist misunderstanding of it in the study of structures and identities within the discipline. Reading West and Zimmerman queerly while clarifying ethnomethodology’s ontology, I refocus attention for critical scholarship on ethnomethodology’s analytic sensibilities for research on gender, race, and sexuality, among other embodiments. Specifically, ethnomethodology reframes a vision of actors as relational, practical actors; repositions gender as accountable, jointly produced social relations, not individual identity; and foregrounds resistance in addition to conformity. Hence, my gender (race/class/sexuality) is not mine; it is ours. Ethnomethodology’s ontological shift in temporality to reality-in-production enables interpretive-materialism: a queer, anti-racist, intersectional sociology that is future-facing and in motion.