It is a bit of a momentous occasion. We started this newsletter right before much of the world closed down to combat the covid-19 pandemic. After two years though, it seems that lives are returning to something resembling what we could consider normal. Many of us are able to go back to our office, teaching once again takes place in classrooms at the university, and we can once again see our colleagues at conferences. This bodes well for the International Conference on Conversation Analysis, which was delayed because of the pandemic, and will now take place in Brisbane in 2023. Abstract submission is now open, and we look forward to seeing many people next year.
In this edition, we have two fascinating new articles. Luis Manuel Olguín (UCLA) reflects on the work and challenges involved in writing an introduction book (co-authored with Chase Raymond) on Conversation Analysis for Spanish speaking communities. Enhua Guo (Ocean University of China) has generously taken the time to transcribe a recent interview by the Rutgers CA Lab with Anita Pomerantz, which was hosted on Zoom in December last year. Finally, we are pleased to announce a new episode in the State of Talk podcast series: Elliott Hoey interviewed Stuart Ekberg about his career in healthcare research.
We are also happy to share two Calls for Papers for special issues. One is on Law-in-(inter)action and is led by Fabio Ferraz-de-Almeida or Camila Alves Borges Oliveira. Abstracts can be submitted until 17th of June. The other focuses on Question Use in Clinical Contexts with Children and Youth and is led by Jessica Nina Lester, Francesa Williamson, and Michelle O’Reilly. Abstracts with short bios can be submitted until August 25th.
While we are glad to be able to share all these fascinating new publications, we are keenly aware that the war in Ukraine is affecting many people in our community. Our thoughts are with the victims of this war, the thousands who have died and the millions of the people who have been forced to flee the devastation, as well as their friends and family. We also want to acknowledge our colleagues in Russia whose (academic) freedom has been severely affected by the war. Various universities are offering positions for Ukrainian researchers. If you are aware of any opportunities like these, please send us an email and we will share these through our social media channels.
Intercultural Matters
Earlier this year, Chase Raymond (University of Colorado) and Luis Manuel Olguín (UCLA) published a textbook on Conversation Analysis in Spanish: Análisis de la Conversación
Fundamentos, metodología y alcances. Writing such a book has been challenging in a lot of way. CA arose in English-speaking academia, and it is inherently shaped by the language of English academia. In this article, Luis Manuel reflects on the process of writing this textbook and how he and Chase dealt with the various problems. While their focus is on Spanish, many CA scholars from non-English speaking backgrounds will recognize these challenges for their own work.
You can read the full article here: Intercultural Reflections on Publishing a CA Textbook in Spanish
Conversation Analysts in Conversation
As part of the Rutgers CA Lab series of Conversation Analysts in Conversation, they interviewed one of CA’s most established and prominent researchers: Anita Pomerantz. While the interview took place over Zoom, it would still have been difficult for many people to attend. Fortunately, Enhua Guo (Ocean University of China) made a transcription of the interview, which Anita herself kindly edited. The result is a lovely discussion, which could serve as an Aristotelian work in its own right. It will undoubtedly give much food for thought on issues such as naming practices, preference organization, and the relation between epistemics and assessments.
You can read the full article here: Conversation Analysts in Conversation: Anita Pomerantz
Podcast
In the latest 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.
Announcements
Please send any announcements you’d like listed on the EMCAwiki to announce@emcawiki.net and cc pubs@conversationanalysis.org if you’d like it to go out with the next newsletter.
Call for Papers ICCA-2023
The International Conference on Conversation Analysis 2023 is inviting abstracts for individual presentations and contributions to accepted panels. This edition will be held in Brisbane (Meanjin), Australia from June 26th to July 2nd 2023. A list of accepted panels is available on the ICCA-2023 website. Abstracts need to be submitted before June 30th 2022, and should be no more than one-page A4 in 12-point font in Microsoft Word. Notifications of acceptance or otherwise will be sent out in August 2022.
Call for Papers Special Issue Law-in-(inter)action: communicative practices in legal settings
This call for papers stems from our desire to promote empirical research in language and law that focuses on examining interactional and discursive practices which are constitutive of law-in- (inter)action. We welcome submissions from those working with audio/video recordings or official transcripts of legal or quasi-legal speech events (e.g. courtroom interactions, police interrogations/interviews, mediation encounters, etc), and employing methodologies from the social sciences and linguistics (e.g. conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology). In this way, we hope to bring together those studying interactional and discursive practices in legal contexts, who also situate their research findings in broader debates on language and law and/or socio-legal studies.
Interested authors should submit their manuscripts online, via the journal system.
The submission deadline to be considered for this special issue is 17 June 2022, for a tentative publication date of December 2022.
For any queries regarding this call, please contact the special issue editors: Fabio Ferraz-de-Almeida or Camila Alves Borges Oliveira.
Call for Papers Special Issue Examining Question Use in Clinical Contexts with Children and Youth
This co-edited special journal issue will focus on bringing together state-of-the-art scholarship on the interactional function(s) of questions in clinical contexts involving children and adult participants. While there is a sizeable body of scholarship around question design generally and in clinical contexts specifically, far less attention has been given to question-response sequences in clinical contexts that involve both children and adults — contexts wherein the negotiation and navigation of children’s membership rights, epistemic status, and competence occurs.
The special issue’s targeted publication outlet will be a clinically oriented journal (e.g., Patient Education and Counseling). As such, we strongly encourage clinicians and/or interdisciplinary research teams with a track record of writing for clinical audiences to submit an abstract for consideration.
If interested, please submit a 500-word abstract and 100-word author biography to Jessica Nina Lester, Francesca Williamson, and Michelle O’Reilly by August 25, 2022. The editorial team will review abstracts and invite selected authors by September 30, 2022. Full manuscripts will not be due until mid-2023.
Summer School on Advancing Multimodal Conversation Analysis
The “Advancing Multimodal Conversation Analysis” Summer School will be held at the University of Basel from June 21-24, 2022, aiming at developing training, analytic experiences, and discussions about Multimodal Conversation Analysis. Workshops will be given by Sara Merlino (Roma, IT), Florence Oloff (Mannheim, D), and Burak Tekin (Ankara, TR). Remote workshops and talks on conceptual topics such as action formation, sequentiality, accountability, embodiment and sensoriality will be given by Anita Pomerantz (Albany, US), John Heritage (UCLA, US), Aug Nishizaka (Chiba, JP), and Jeffrey Robinson (Portland, US). See https://www.amemca.ch/ for more details.