Category: Newsletter

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 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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It is the middle of summer in the northern hemisphere, a time when many of us would normally pack our suitcases, travel the world, and present our research in a range of conference venues. Unfortunately, we have had to manage as a globally distributed community with events like the International Pragmatics Conference taking place online. And while not everyone is a fan of Zoom presentations, virtual lectures organised by Rutgers, Loughborough, York, and Mannheim are attracting hundreds of scholars from around the world – some getting up in the middle of the night! It seems that, if nothing else, Covid is bringing us together as a global community in new ways.

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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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By Dr Ariel Vázquez Carranza, lecturer at University of Guadalajara

Epistemic asymmetry may be considered as a defining characteristic of institutional talk (Drew 1991; Drew and Heritage 1992): it is common to find institutional contexts where one of the participants has (professional) expertise in the business at hand; and such organisation of knowledge between the participants (i.e., one knowing more, K+, than the other, K-) outlines the sequential and linguistic design of the interaction (Heritage and Raymond 2005; Heritage 2013; Drew 2018). For instance, this has been described for medical encounters (e.g., Strong 1979; Silverman 1987; Maynard 1991; Heath 1992, inter alia), courtroom interactions (e.g., Drew 1992; Komter 1995; inter alia), guided tours (Mondada 2013), service encounters (Lee 2016), etc. In the present analysis I look at instances of epistemic asymmetry in a 25-hour corpus of commercial interactions in a Mexican fruit and vegetable shop. I focus on how the epistemic congruence is maintained.

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By Maha Alayyash, Assistant Professor, English Department, Jeddah University

The Saudi society is based on strong family ties rather than patient autonomy (Aljubran, 2010). Therefore, the disclosure of cancer diagnosis is still related to the misconception of incurability (Khalil, 2013). To facilitate the misconception of cancer as a life-threatening illness, physicians tend to disclose cancer diagnosis to chaperones and conceal from, or even modify the unfavourable information given to the patients. Some patients have no right to know the reality of their illness nor to report on their illness. In short, epistemic asymmetry is conceptualised here as violating knowledge norms including the patient’s epistemic primacy (i.e. right to know) (Heritage, 2013). Therefore, the aim of this paper is to describe the epistemic resources that are used by the oncologist and chaperone to share epistemic access regarding the patient’s illness. Thus, this study attempts to answer the following research question:

How do the oncologist and the chaperone share epistemic access regarding the patient’s illness without involving the patient?

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By Marije van Braak on behalf of the ECCA 2020 Organizing Committee

There is always a first time for everything – and, well, ECCA 2020 surely was a conference of first times in many respects. A first European Conference of Conversation Analysis, a first junior CA-conference, and one of the first online EMCA-conferences. It was also a conference of firsts in terms of new connections, sharing of initial analyses, prerecorded presentations, password protected data, game time, asynchronized birthday singing… and much more.

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Happy New Year! And more importantly, welcome to the second year of the ISCA Newsletter. We have left a strange year behind us. With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, academic life has been turned upside down: research projects have been temporarily suspended, online teaching has become the norm, most have to work from home, and ICCA 2022 had to be postponed. And while there is light at the end of the tunnel, the immediate outlook is still pretty bleak, with many countries dealing with new and extended lockdown measures.

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By Verónica González Temer, UMCE; and Katherina Walper Gormáz, UACh.

The Permanent Seminar for Conversation Analysis (SPAC for its acronym in Spanish) was born in the middle of 2020 from the need to establish a community that brings together academics interested in working with Spanish interactions from a CA perspective. As part of their activities, they hold regular data sessions run entirely in Spanish.

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