Author: Newsletter Team

Introduction and transcription by Enhua Guo, edited by Anita Pomerantz

The Rutgers University Conversation Analysis Lab has launched a series of online discussions with key figures in CA. On December 16, 2021, they interviewed Anita Pomerantz, Professor Emerita in the Department of Communication at the State University of New York at Albany. Anita’s talk, which is insightful and interesting as always, consists of two parts: (1) biography/history of her CA journey, and (2) art and science of CA. Below is only a transcription of the second part.

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By Luis Manuel Olguín, Department of Sociology at UCLA

Since its inception in American sociology over half a century ago, Conversation Analysis (CA) has consolidated as a robust interdisciplinary field and research method in the humanities and social sciences. CA research has expanded across the globe, showcasing work on a wide variety of languages and social settings as well as exciting methodological innovations and applications. With practitioners on virtually every continent, CA hubs and networks continue to emerge at institutional, regional and national levels, broadening and strengthening the CA global community.

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By Julia Katila, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Tampere University

Human beings are prone to showing affection through touch. For instance, caregivers gently touching their offspring is perhaps the most primordial way, among the human species, to express and experience love and affection. Something similar takes place in adulthood between romantic partners: when close to one another, “lovers cannot help themselves from weaving their bodies together in various forms of intertwinement and embrace”, to use Maclaren’s (2014: 96) words.

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By Reihaneh Afshari, PhD student at University of York

In social interaction, the address form has a lot to say about the speaker’s stance or the social action performed through a turn at talk (e.g., Butler, Danby, & Emmison, 2011; Clayman, 2010; Lerner, 2003; Rendle-Short, 2010). Jefferson (1973, p. 48) describes address forms as ‘relation-formulating’. In languages with a pronominal T-V (after tu and vos in Latin) distinction, this relation-building property is treated as so conventionalized that many sociolinguists dichotomize pronouns into “less formal T pronouns versus more formal V pronouns”, as Clyne et al. (2006, p. 284) report. Power, solidarity, and politeness are among factors reported to determine speaker’s selection of T versus V pronouns (Brown & Gilman, 1968; Brown & Levinson, 1987). Some recent studies question the theoretical assumptions underlying such dichotomies (see e.g., Clyne et al, 2006); nevertheless, to fill the gap, many of them still rely on similar macro-social constructs. For example, in her investigation of Persian, Nanbakhsh (2012) acknowledges that, contrary to the long-established belief, shomâ (second-person plural pronoun – V pronoun – in Persian) can be used to address an intimate coparticipant, but her findings are still based on macro constructs such as ‘power’ and ‘formality’.

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Hacettepe University Micro Analysis Network (HUMAN) – based in Hacettepe University, Turkey – was founded by Dr. Olcay Sert, Dr. Ufuk Balaman (current director), Dr. Nilüfer Can-Daşkın (current vice director), and Dr. Safinaz Büyükgüzel in 2015. Being the first conversation analytic community in Turkey, The HUMAN Research Centre aims to explore social interactions in various ordinary and institutional settings by (mainly) using conversation analytical framework. In addition to regular events such as the Reading Group and HUMANtalks, HUMAN members also hold weekly CA data sessions (in English or Turkish) every Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. for six years.

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This conference report is about the 3rd EnACE (Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Conference) that took place online between 13 – 15th October 2021 in Vitória, a city in the Brazilian State of Espírito Santo. Coordinated by Roberto Perobelli (Professor at Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, UFES), the  group named GLIE (Grupo Linguagem Interação e Etnometodologia)  was the responsible for the organization of the event.

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By Dr Marco Pino and Dr David Edmonds

Misgendering occurs when a person is addressed, referred to, or described with language that does not match their gender identity (Dolan et al., 2020). Misgendering affects transgender people (henceforth trans)—people whose gender is not the same as the sex that they were assigned at birth. Misgendering has repeatedly been cited as contributing to the social exclusion and oppression of trans people, and it can have negative impacts on their health (McLemore, 2015). Existing studies of the experiences and effects of misgendering have been based on survey or interview data. While the findings of such studies acknowledge that misgendering occurs in conversations (although not exclusively), to our knowledge, there is no research on how it actually unfolds in situ. Our project focuses on how misgendering happens and is addressed (or not) in social interaction.

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By Agnes Löfgren, PhD candidate at Linköping University

The 17th International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA 2021) took place online between 27 June – 2 july 2021. This is a report from the conference, from the perspective of a PhD candidate, with a focus on the general experience of the conference and some highlights of topics I found interesting. I’m Agnes Löfgren, a PhD candidate at Linköping University, Sweden, working with multimodal interaction analysis on depictions in opera rehearsals.

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By Enhua Guo

Data sessions are an essential means of doing being a member of the CA community, and more importantly, a means to increase the validity and reliability of the research findings. In China, only a very small number of universities and research institutes conduct in-person CA data sessions on a regular basis, including Shanxi University, Ocean University of China, Shandong University, etc. Unfortunately, the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 brought them all to an abrupt halt. However, the passion and need among Chinese CA scholars for data sessions persisted through Covid-19. It was this unstoppable academic zeal in the time of Covid that catalysed the birth of the CA webinar of Happy Data Session in China (HDS).

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By Virginia Calabria, PhD candidate at KU Leuven and University of Neuchâtel & Sophia Fiedler, PhD candidate at University of Neuchâtel and Hamburg

This paper analyzes CORE-ILCA (virtual community of early career researchers – ECRs – in Interactional Linguistics, Ethnomethodology & Conversation Analysis – ILEMCA) as a social phenomenon. On an international level, ECRs often do not have many opportunities to interact except for large conferences. These are often expensive and not easily attainable for everyone, let alone on a regular basis. In times of Covid-19, networking has become even harder and many ECRs lack intellectual exchange and social contact with their peers.

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