State of Talk

This episode was recorded as part of the "Life in CA" plenary at the Digital Meeting on Conversation Analysis in November 2022. During the plenary session, our guests: Bogdana Huma, Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, and Chase Raymond answered audience questions put to them via the conference 'Whova' platform. Saul Albert (the host) introduces each guest during the episode, but their biographies (from the DMCA website) are included below for the sake of completeness. Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen held the position of professor for English linguistics at the University of Konstanz from 1995-2002 and at the University of Potsdam from 2003-2009. From 2009-2013 she was Finland Distinguished Professor for Interactional Linguistics at the University of Helsinki. She is now located in Berlin, Germany. Her recent publications are devoted to the study of prosody and grammar in Interaction, and include monographs and edited volumes such as Interactional Linguistics (co-authored with Margret Selting); Requesting in Social Interaction (co-edited with Paul Drew), and Imperative Turns at Talk (co-edited with Marja-Leena Sorjonen & Liisa Raevaara); as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. Chase Raymond Chase Wesley Raymond holds PhDs in Hispanic Linguistics (2014) and Sociology (2016), both from UCLA, and is currently Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research interests lie at the intersection of language and (different facets of) social identity and normativity, in both ordinary and institutional interaction, with a particular emphasis on grammar. His research has appeared in journal outlets across the fields of Linguistics, Sociology, Psychology, Communication Studies, and Medicine, and he is author (with Luis Manuel Olguín) of Análisis de la Conversación: Fundamentos, Metodología y Alcances (Routledge 2022). Bogdana Huma Bogdana Huma is an Assistant Professor in the department of Language, Literature, and Communication at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Originally, her background was in psychology and sociology, which she studied at the University of Bucharest in Romania. She discovered conversation analysis (CA) and discursive psychology (DP) quite late, while she was doing her PhD in sociology, and she was captivated by the originality of these new approaches that could make sense of apparently ‘messy’ everyday interaction. So far, her research has used CA, DP and, on occasion, ethnomethodology and membership categorisation analysis to examine commercial encounters, gender inequalities, and, more recently, healthcare interactions. If you have ideas or want to participate in the ISCA newsletter or our podcasts and other projects, please go to https://conversationanalysis.org and reach out to us. We would love your input in what we are building, which we hope is a truly international connection amongst our EM and CA communities. Our theme music is “Ethnomethodology” by Peter Daniel off of the album Convulsive Listening (Spotify, Apple Music)

In this episode, Elliott Hoey interviews Leelo Keevallik, Professor of Language, Culture, and Interaction at Linköping University, and also associate editor for one of premiere journals in CA, Research on Language and Social Interaction. Leelo works in the field of interactional linguistics, and has published on the interactional use of particles in different languages, as well as core features of grammar for interaction, such as projection and clause combining. In more current work, she investigates with a team of researchers non-lexical vocalizations. In this interview, we asked Leelo to talk to us about her path into CA, about some of her current research what has inspired her over the years. We are pleased to bring you this interview, which was conducted asynchronously, meaning we sent Leelo questions and she recorded her responses. If you have ideas or want to participate in the ISCA newsletter or our podcasts and other projects, please go to https://conversationanalysis.org and reach out to us. We would love your input in what we are building, which we hope is a truly international connection amongst our EM and CA communities. Our theme music is “Ethnomethodology” by Peter Daniel off of the album Convulsive Listening (Spotify, Apple Music)

In this episode you’ll hear an interview with Melisa Stevanovic, assistant professor of social psychology at Tampere university in Finland. Melisa’s research spans an impressive range of topics, notably featuring a series of papers on power and authority in interaction, or deontics as it has come to be known, in studies of things like proposals and joint decision making in a range of contexts. She’s also published on emotion, affiliation, empathy and participation in interaction, along with a number of collaborators. She is one of the editors of the volume Joint Decision Making in Mental Health, and has also edited special issues on epistemics and deontics in in directives, and on CA and sociological theory. In this interview, we asked Melisa to talk to us about her path into CA, about some of her current research what has inspired her over the years.

In this episode, Saul Albert introduces a feature interview with Doug Maynard and Jason Turowetz, co-authors of an exciting new book entitled Autistic Intelligence, published in summer 2022 by the University of Chicago Press.  Doug Maynard is Emeritus Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His ethnomethodological and conversation analytic work has explored fundamental structures of everyday topical talk and news delivery, alongside his foundational applied research on institutional forms of talk such as, e.g., plea bargaining in legal settings, and on the use of research instruments such as surveys, diagnostic interviews.  Jason Turowetz is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Siegen. His research addresses questions of meaning, interaction, and identity in social theory, communication, and cultural sociology, specifically focusing on the experiences of people in socially marginal identities, and on themes of power, resistance and moral decision making in interaction. His groundbreaking work at the Garfinkel Archive has been uncovering new lineages within and connections between ethnomethodology, philosophy, and social theory.  A great deal more could be said about each of their individual research, but in this interview the focus is on their new book - Autistic Intelligence, and on their collaboration. Alongside their methodological contributions connecting ethnomethodology, social theory, and phenomenology, they have collaborated on a rich collection of applied EM/CA publications focusing on the interactional practices associated with autism spectrum disorder and the sociology of diagnosis, including explorations of sequential, narrative, and categorical structures, diagnostic processes, and the social production of medical records.

In this episode you’ll hear an interview with Hansun Zhang Waring, Professor of Linguistics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and founder of their distinguished Language and Social Interaction Working Group (LANSI). The interview itself was conducted by Saul Albert, a lecturer at Loughborough University. Professor Waring’s extensive and innovative conversation analytic work in applied linguistics has revealed how core conversational structures of reference, recipiency, accounts, assessments, and questioning are managed in, and constitutive of the classroom environment. Some of her key research findings from this work are collected in her 2016 book Theorizing Pedagogical Interaction: Insights from Conversation Analysis, and her broader methodological contributions include her 2018 book, both published with Routledge, entitled Discourse Analysis: The Questions Discourse Analysts Ask and How they Answer them. In this interview, we asked Hansun to talk to us about her route into CA, about how she came to set up LANSI, and heard about some of her current research including work exploring language socialisation from a conversation analytic perspective, and an edited collection of critical perspectives in CA that she is developing with Nadja Tadic. 

In this episode, Elliott Hoey (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) interviews Stuart Ekberg, associate professor of in the School of Psychology and Counseling at Queensland University of Technology, and Chief Investigator at QUT's Centre for Healthcare Transformation. The interview covers various aspects of professor Ekberg's research in healthcare communication: how he got wound up in that specialization, current work in palliative care, the publication process for rapid reviews, and emerging work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. If you have ideas or want to participate in the ISCA newsletter or our podcasts and other projects, please go to https://conversationanalysis.org and reach out to us. We would love your input in what we are building, which we hope is a truly international connection amongst our EM and CA communities. Our theme music is “Ethnomethodology” by Peter Daniel off of the album Convulsive Listening (Spotify, Apple Music)

In this episode, Saul Albert interviews Charles Antaki, Professor Emeritus of Language and Social Psychology at Loughborough University. Charles is a member of the venerable Discourse and Rhetoric Group, which, with his central involvement, has helped to shape the field of applied CA and discursive psychology. He is also editor of one of the premiere journals in our field - Research on Language and Social Interaction, and his research interests lie in understanding ordinary and institutional interaction through CA. Alongside his fundamental conversation analytic work on social identity, explanations and accounts, formulations, and his significant range of methodological contributions over the years, his extensive applied conversation analytic work in the field that’s come to be known as 'atypical communication' has involved applying conversation analysis to understand how adults with intellectual disabilities engage in interaction, and how conversational practices can promote discourses of agency for people with profound intellectual disabilities. His work on police interviews has explored questioning practices, and has extended his work on atypical communication to understand how vulnerable and disabled people manage questions of fault and blame around allegations of sexual assault.  His 2011 collection with palsgrave macmillan on applied conversation analysis synthesised a range of studies that demonstrate the power of CA for not only describing, but also shaping the institutional and mundane settings that constitute our experience of everyday social life. References Boas, E. V. E. (2017). Analyzing Agamemnon: conversation analysis and particles in Greek tragic dialogue. Classical Philology, 112(4), 411-434. Wootton, A. (1997). Interaction and the Development of Mind (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511519895 If you have ideas or want to participate in the ISCA newsletter or our podcasts and other projects, please go to https://conversationanalysis.org and reach out to us. We would love your input in what we are building, which we hope is a truly international connection amongst our EM and CA communities. Our theme music is “Ethnomethodology” by Peter Daniel off of the album Convulsive Listening (Spotify, Apple Music)

In this episode, Elliott Hoey (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) interviews Sara Goico and Natasha Shrikant about the group Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis for Racial Justice (EMCA4RJ). Dr. Goico is researcher in the sociology department at UCLA, and Professor Shrikant is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. Both scholars have been centrally involved in the group EMCA4RJ since its inception in the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, Derek Chauvin. The interview covers the genesis of the group, current projects, growth and future plans, as well as ways that you can participate. You can get involved with EMCA4RJ by contacting Sara or Natasha directly, or through the website: http://emca4rj.conversationanalysis.org/ If you have ideas or want to participate in the ISCA newsletter or our podcasts and other projects, please go to https://conversationanalysis.org/  and reach out to us. We would love your input in what we are building, which we hope is a truly international connection amongst our EM and CA communities. Our theme music is "Ethnomethodology" by Peter Daniel off of the album Convulsive Listening (Spotify, Apple Music)

In this episode, Elliott Hoey (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) interviews Lorenza Mondada, professor of linguistics at the University of Basel. Professor Mondada is now the world’s foremost authority on the analysis of video recorded social interactions, especially as regards the interplay of multimodal resources for the constitution of everyday and institutional activities. In recent work, she has examined in a series of papers the interpenetration of talk and ambulatory movement, she recently edited a volume on touch in social interaction, and coming out this summer is a monograph entitled Sensing in social interaction. Among many other sites, Lorenza has recorded in wine and cheese shops all over Europe, as well as bakeries and butcheries, in train depots and border crossing stations, art museums and garden tours, and documented activities from dumpster diving to fine dining. Given this truly remarkable breadth of fieldwork, she was the perfect person to talk to about data collection.

In this episode, Saul Albert (Loughborough University) does a data session and a short interview with Anita Pomerantz, Professor Emerita in the Department of Communication at the State University of New York at Albany.  Her conversation analytic work on agreeing and disagreeing, seeking and providing information and negotiating responsibility for blameworthy and praiseworthy deeds has been foundational for the field, opening up new areas of basic CA work, and has shaped the rich field of applied CA work - including her own - in medical and legal contexts.  She has served as Chair of the Language and Social Interaction Divisions of both the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association, and has recently completed a book with Oxford University Press entitled “Asking and Telling in Conversation" If you have ideas or want to participate in the ISCA newsletter or our podcasts and other projects, please go to https://conversationanalysis.org/  and reach out to us. We would love your input in what we are building, which we hope is a truly international connection amongst our EM and CA communities. References Pomerantz, A. (1978). Attributions of Responsibility: Blamings. Sociology, 12(1), 115-121. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42851957